Herbert W. Vaughan: A Tribute

On November 28, 2011, Herbert W. "Wiley" Vaughan, a truly eminent man of the law, died at the age of 91. This past Saturday, I had the honor of giving a eulogy at his memorial service:

Tribute to Herbert W. Vaughan

Robert P. George

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Wellesley, Massachusetts

January 14, 2011

If I were to begin this tribute to our beloved friend, and my revered mentor in law and life, by listing Wiley’s important contributions and accomplishments as a lawyer, a philanthropist, a conservationist, and an engaged citizen, I would not even have completed the list when my five minutes elapsed.  So instead of doing that, I will focus my reflection on what mattered most to Wiley himself, and what made his numerous and remarkable achievements possible, namely, the excellence of his character.

Now I would be the last person to claim that worldly success is necessarily evidence of good character, or that the lack of worldly accomplishments reveals a want of integrity or other moral virtues.  You can take it on the authority of the Bible (though such weighty authority is scarcely needed for so evident a truth) that all-too-often the wicked prosper and the virtuous must rest content with virtue as its own reward.  But in Wiley’s case, a virtuous man prospered, and his prospering was the fruit not only of intelligence, determination, and a willingness to work hard to achieve goals, but also of honesty, steadfastness, integrity, public spiritedness, and other moral virtues.  The transparent excellence of Wiley’s character won him trust and admiration.  His purity of heart helped to ferment the raw must of intelligence into the precious wine of wisdom.  People turned to Wiley, in every field of his interest and endeavor, because they knew him to be a supremely honorable man as well as an impressively able one.  Not only was he was a person whose counsel was worth having and heeding, he was someone who could be completely trusted and relied upon.

The lovely tribute to Wiley that was posted on the Wilmer Hale website after his death recalls the days of the great commercial real estate boom that transformed the Boston skyline, and notes Wiley’s central role in it.  “During that time,” the author writes, “Herbert W. Vaughan was the go-to lawyer for developers and lenders involved in Boston’s most complex and prominent projects because of his reputation for wisdom and sound judgment, meticulous drafting, tenacious negotiating and consummate deal-making skills.”  Of course, that is 100% true.  But let’s pause for a second over that reference to Wiley’s “consummate deal making skills.”  Someone reading those words who didn’t know Wiley personally might conjure up an image of a wheeler-dealer type, a Steve Wynn or a Donald Trump.  Of course, Wiley’s personality and manner was nothing like that.  He was, indeed, tenacious in protecting and advancing the interests of his clients, but what made him a great negotiator was that everybody around the table knew that he was impeccably fair-minded and honest.  This is not to suggest that the wheeler-dealer types are necessarily dishonest; I’m sure many are not.  It is only to say that Wiley’s self-evident integrity—a feature of his personality that no one who was with him for more than an hour could miss—made it clear to those with whom, as well as those for whom, he was negotiating that he was not a manipulator or a deception artist. He was a straight shooter.  If he made a representation or commitment, you could take it to the bank.  He was as good as his word and his word was always his bond.  And in this case the virtue of honesty, though, to be sure, its own reward, brought other rewards as well—massive professional and financial success, redounding to him and to the firm he loved and served so devotedly—and, ultimately, to the benefit of the educational, conservationist, medical, and other charitable enterprises he supported.

Anyone who knew Wiley, whether though his work at Hale & Dorr or his leadership in education, conservation, and the like, knew that he deeply, and passionately believed in high standards.  He held himself to the highest standards in his personal as well as his professional life, and he demanded high standards from those with whom he worked and of the enterprises he supported.  He did not hold financial success and worldly recognition in disdain; but, in the true spirit of professionalism, he regarded them as secondary in importance to excellence.  For Wiley, excellence is what mattered above all.  And he encouraged, promoted, supported, and honored it wherever he could find it—whether it was at Wilmer Hale, at Harvard Law School or Princeton University, at the Roxbury Latin School, the Trustees of Reservations, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Abstract Club, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Johnson and Chesterton Club.

No one here today is unaware that Wiley was disappointed by, and deeply concerned about, the erosion of ethical, professional, and intellectual standards in so many sectors of our culture today.  But he was never a scold.  To be sure, he would not hesitate to express an opinion where appropriate, even if the opinion were a critical or negative one; he was not shy about stating his views; but Wiley’s principal method of promoting excellence and high standards of thought and conduct was by exemplifying them in his own life.  In this respect, though in his humility he would scoff at the comparison, he resembled no one so much as the father of our country, George Washington.  And like President Washington, the excellence of character and his devotion to high standards caused others, even among the great, to treat him as the bearer of a special dignity and as someone who commanded an unusually high degree of respect.  It took a long time, even after Wiley and I had become close friends, for me to bring myself finally to address him as “Wiley,” rather than “Mr. Vaughan.”  I suspect I am not alone among us gathered here in having had that experience.

Now, about that friendship:  It began as inauspiciously as possible.  I was a summer associate, working for the guy, who was working for the guy, who was working for Wiley.  I had a graduate school application in to Oxford, and was at the same time angling for an offer of full-time employment at Hale & Dorr.  Since the fate of my Oxford application was uncertain, getting the law firm offer was pretty important to me—especially since I really enjoyed working there and palling around with young superstar lawyers like Bill Lee, Jim Quarles, and John Burgess.  Well, in connection with a Back Bay real estate development matter we were handling, I was instructed to prepare a memo on riparian rights to be directed to Mr. Vaughan.  (As it happens, the law of riparian rights was one of Wiley’s own areas of interest and expertise.)  I knew I had to hit this one out of the park, so I worked diligently and produced an analysis that I was rather pleased with.  I sent it upstairs, and in due course had a phone call from Wiley’s secretary asking me to come to his office to discuss the issues in the memo with Mr. Vaughan.  Now I had not at that point met him.  But I had viewed him from afar, as it were, and observed the awe in which he was held, even by the senior partners in the firm.  I was eager to make a good impression—I wanted that job offer.  So up to Olympus I went.  I will never forget the first words spoken to me by this great and formidable figure who would become my dear friend.  Those words, seared into my memory, were, verbatim, “Mr. George, please note the spelling of my last name.”  To his evident consternation, I had deprived Wiley of the second “a” in “Vaughan.”  I was horrified and traumatized. I don’t think I really heard another word he said, at least I don’t recall another word.  When I got back to my apartment that evening, I called across town to the girl who a couple of years later would become my bride, and said, “I had better get in to Oxford, because there is no way I’m getting an offer at Hale and Dorr.”

But despite my faux pas, an offer came; and when I declined it to pursue a doctorate at Oxford and an academic career, Wiley called me to his office again—this time to say that he was sorry that I had declined the firm’s offer, but that he was glad to know I was going to Oxford.  It was a place that he and his beloved wife Ann had visited, and for which he had great respect.  He knew it to be a place that retained high standards of academic excellence.  A couple of years later, Wiley called me in Oxford to say that he was taking a sabbatical from the firm and wondered whether he could obtain some sort of special student status at Oxford.  When I approached Harvey McGregor, the Warden of New College, about it, and when he learned who Wiley was, he invited him to become a Visiting Senior Fellow of the College.  He and dear Ann joined us in Oxford for a wonderful term, and from that point forward—for twenty-seven years—a week did not pass without the two of us being in touch with each other.

Although we were both conservative by conviction, he was conservative by temperament as well, and I am not.  He tended to an almost Calvinistic pessimism about human nature and human affairs; I am an inveterate optimist (though I prefer to characterize myself as filled with hope).  He was reserved in his manner—in a becomingly old Bostonian way.  I am, um, how shall I put it?  A bit outgoing.  These differences of personality, coupled with the great distance in years between us, made us rather an odd pair of friends, but we grew ever closer.  He advised, guided, and supported me at every stage of my career, and my friends and family became his friends and family.  He and Ann became like a third set of grandparents to my children.  In 2000, he helped me to found the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, and it gratified me immensely that he took so much pride and pleasure in its success.  As centers and institutes devoted to constitutional law and political thought modeled on the Madison Program sprang up around the country he was delighted.  True to form, he would, however, express a concern:  These programs must never, he said, be permitted to degenerate into partisanship and what he called pamphleteering.  They must be centers of true scholarship—dedicated to the very highest intellectual standards.

Wiley remains, and will remain, with us in spirit and memory.  We who were privileged to be his friends will, I have no doubt, continue to be inspired, as we were inspired when he dwelt among us, by the example of his life.  Let us lead our own lives with the integrity of which his life was a model, and devote ourselves and our institutions to intellectual, professional, and moral excellence.  In that way, we will honor, in the way he would have wished, the great man whose life we gather today to celebrate.