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for this man’s army,” I struggled to maintain a straight and slightly dis- appointed face.)
Once I told the Columbia Placement Office that I was likely to be reclassified 1-A, even though I also said that I might have some possibil- ity of a medical deferment, they essentially shut the door and told me, first, that they wouldn’t help me until my classification was such that I would not get drafted and, second, that that was because a good number of firms would take the same position when it came to hiring. They may well have been right about the firms, but, in my view, I still could have used some guidance. After all, times change. I was so angry at the tone and substance of the brush-off that, as I implied earlier, I decided then and there that I would never show Columbia the same generosity that Amherst would receive from me. (What a principled guy!)
The strategy that I finally put in place that summer was to call the Department of Investigation, where I hoped that the two Deputy Com- missioners, James Hughes and James Rayhill, who had come out of Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy (yes, that McCloy), and Dewey Bal- lantine Bushby Palmer & Wood, respectively, and who acted as if they liked me, might somehow be helpful. They were very obliging, and at a time during which I was writing blind to countless firms and getting either no response at all or a rejection letter, they managed to get me in the door.
And then came my parents, who, I thought, had zero connections to anything in the world of law—or in the world at all, for that matter. It turns out that I was almost right, but the fact that I had taught them bridge when I was back in high school actually led to my third inter- view opportunity: at Rosenman Colin Kaye Petschek Freund & Emil, which seemed to be an egregiously long name, but it was not much longer than the names of the firms that Hughes and Rayhill were con- nected to. I will forever refer to RCKPF&E, in all of its incarnations, as “Rosenman.” Before Emil happened upon the scene, the name was shorter by one-sixth and definitely easier to remember. Judge Simon H. Rifkind, of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (now, plain old Paul Weiss), who had famously reported the disappearance of Judge
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