A Dying Breed Liberal, dogged, and abrasive, George Barrett presses on - 4/19/2001

By Matt Pulle

Last month, when Philip Workman faced the death penalty despite widespread doubt that he actually shot the man he was convicted of killing, a wily old lawyer steeped in six decades of liberal activism came to his aid. With time running out on Workman's legal options--and hence his life--attorney George Barrett filed a well-publicized federal lawsuit on behalf of the condemned man.

Ultimately, the Tennessee Supreme Court stayed the execution--literally, only moments before Workman was to be injected with a deadly chemical concoction. But Barrett's suit addled the state with yet another legal hurdle. It was a characteristic gesture from a man who has a marvelous capacity for irritating friends and foes alike. And it was yet one more accomplishment in a distinguished career spent helping, as he puts it, "the little man."

Since the early 1950s, Barrett has frustrated, antagonized, and usually defeated various appendages of the establishment--from hulking corporations to arrogant state officials. He's helped overturn a congressional primary, revamp a system of higher education, and make a hospital pay for mistakes it made decades earlier. He's also thrown himself into politics, working on behalf of former Mayor Dick Fulton and former U.S. Sen. Jim Sasser.

"He is an excellent lawyer and has a brilliant mind," says attorney Bill Willis, who has known Barrett since the 1950s. "His whole career reveals a fight for the underdog."

Of course, Barrett is not a simple hero. A graduate of Vanderbilt Law School and a past supporter of the Irish-Catholic cause in Northern Ireland, Barrett is an elaborately complex man who offends his friends almost as much as he does his enemies. Whether it is with the state of Tennessee or a lifelong pal, George Barrett savors confrontation.

"He is a very loyal friend," says Fulton, who grew up a few blocks from Barrett in East Nashville. "But he never is reluctant to air his beliefs, and in doing so, he's alienated more than a few people. He can be very abrasive and confrontational."

Just ask former Tennessean luminary John Seigenthaler, who graduated from Father Ryan High School with Barrett in 1945. Not long ago, Barrett was set to receive the Dismas Award for his long-time work on behalf of the underprivileged. Seigenthaler, the editor of The Tennessean during its heyday in the 1960s, offered up a warm introduction for his friend and former ally on all sorts of progressive crusades. But when Barrett accepted his award, he proceeded to ridicule the man who just saluted him. By Barrett's own account, he told the audience that he didn't need the recognition of others for affirmation, while Seigenthaler most desperately did.

"It is a matter of intellectual arrogance to stand up at a social function and piss all over the leg of a guy who just put a halo over your head," Seigenthaler says.

Told that Seigenthaler still might be smarting over the episode, Barrett laughed for nearly a minute. "It was said in a jocular fashion," Barrett says. "But he didn't take it that way."

To his credit, Seigenthaler, like nearly all of Barrett's friends, puts the veteran attorney's rather challenging persona in perspective. "If George disagrees with you even on the most minor subject, the word 'haughty' is almost written on his forehead," he says. "But that's part of being his friend, having to deal with that intellectual arrogance."

That "intellectual arrogance"--a phrase that comes up within minutes of any conversation about Barrett--is ultimately a handy tool, given the kinds of cases the lawyer has taken on. In 1962, Barrett permanently seized the public eye when he represented Fulton in an outrageous voting scandal. Days before a hotly contested primary between Fulton and the incumbent Carlton Loser, The Tennessean reported that there were an inordinately high number of absentee ballots coming out of a relatively poor precinct south of downtown. On the day of the election, Barrett shrewdly obtained a temporary injunction preventing the absentee ballots from being counted. Ultimately, those ballots were counted, and Loser appeared to pull off a razor-thin victory. But under considerable public pressure fostered in part by The Tennessean's relentless reporting, Fulton was allowed to run in the general election against Loser. He won handily.

It was a Nashville Council member, Gene "Little Evil" Jacobs, who was caught stuffing the ballot boxes for Loser. A redneck politician distinguished by a straw hat and drooping gut, Jacobs epitomized a good-ol'-boy political culture that frequently featured fixed elections and unseemly backroom deals. When newspaper photographs and television cameras caught a young Barrett going nose to nose with Jacobs, a crusty part of Nashville began to die and a more progressive one started to emerge.

In the '60s, Barrett fought in the various crusades of the civil rights movement. He helped register African Americans to vote and served as president of a statewide human rights council that fought to break up entrenched mantles of segregation. Practicing what he preached, Barrett also made his law firm one of the first integrated ones in the South.

"It was an exciting time," Barrett recalls. "Great social change was taking place, and you were taking part in it."

In 1968, Barrett filed an historic federal lawsuit against the state of Tennessee protesting the elements of segregation that still flourished in the state's public colleges and universities. Under orders from a federal judge, the state was forced to integrate its administration, faculty, and classrooms. The order mandated a merger between the mostly white University of Tennessee-Nashville with the largely black Tennessee State University.

Remarkably, a good part of Barrett's lawsuit remained pending for another 30 years. Then on Jan. 4, 2001, the parties reached a hefty settlement that will help upgrade TSU's downtown campus. It might also facilitate a merger between the Nashville School of Law and TSU.

Despite a number of well-publicized forays into civil rights law, Barrett is most known for his work on behalf of labor. He represented the local united rubber workers' union when it opened a southern office in Nashville nearly 40 years ago. In 1994, he sued the Pirelli Armstrong Tire Co. after the company announced plans to eliminate health benefits for its retired employees. The retirees had belonged to the rubber workers' union. The company hired a New York law firm to represent it, but Barrett ultimately helped win the case. Looking back with no small degree of modesty, Barrett says that case marked one of his greatest triumphs. "Now, 700,000 people have health benefits because of that litigation," he says. "That's what you call helping people."

Despite an inclination to boast, even courtroom adversaries respect Barrett.

Bill Ozier, an attorney at Bass Berry & Sims, typically represents management interests. For nearly 25 years, Ozier has opposed Barrett in court, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. "George is a very capable lawyer, very ethical," he says. "I look at him the way I hope people look at me. Like you're going into a tough fight, but a fair fight."

Of course, that's not to say Barrett's courtroom persona is more restrained than his public one. "Like a lot of us who are competitive, he does have a temper," Ozier says. "You can get him off his game, but it's hard to do."

Over the years, Barrett has won or helped win a number of high-profile cases. Three years ago, he helped obtain a settlement in a class-action suit for patients who received radioactive isotopes from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It happened--without their consent--during experiments conducted in the 1940s. Oddly enough, he also successfully represented the Ku Klux Klan when the infamous white supremacist organization was denied a parade permit to march in downtown Pulaski, Tenn.

Like any prolific lawyer, Barrett has lost his share of cases as well. In the 1980s, he represented a Vanderbilt English professor who was denied tenure. The university, represented by Ozier, ultimately won in a rather contentious case, and the professor is now teaching elsewhere. Last summer, Barrett was one of the attorneys representing media organizations, including the Scene, in a doomed lawsuit against the state over the Legislature's time-honored practice of meeting in secret.

Unlike many attorneys who can jump from case to case without regard to ideological consistency, Barrett almost exclusively represents the underdog. It was a role he was quite literally born to play (and as his peers point out, a role that he's been remunerated well for over the years.) Barrett, after all, grew up in a fiercely pro-union household, and his mentor, Matt Lynch, was himself a labor leader and activist. "I don't represent corporate America," Barrett says. "I went to law school to represent working people."

Others note that Barrett's inclination to represent the underdog is so entrenched that he couldn't defend the establishment if such a gig were forced on him. "There are some lawyers who can represent any client with the same degree of passion," Seigenthaler says. "Jim Neal was a great prosecutor and now is one of the top five premier defense lawyers in the country. I don't think George Barrett could ever prosecute a criminal case if he tried."

He adds, "In fact, if you got inside Barrett's head, he probably thinks we should close down the jails and let everyone out."

Now well past the retirement age at a time when many of his contemporaries are either enjoying endless rounds of golf or, at the very least, a tempered work schedule, Barrett still labors six days a week, and as much as 10 hours a day. His peers suggest he knows little beyond the law.

"I do a lot of different things," says former Watergate prosecutor Jim Neal, a law school classmate of Barrett's. "I used to snow ski. I scuba dive, play golf, gamble. George, as far as I know, never had many diversions. If George doesn't work, what the hell does he do?"

And when he does stop working, the legal community will have lost one of its most distinguished characters. Once an arena for gambling minds and soaring orators, the legal profession is becoming less rough-and-tumble and more sanitized, both in Nashville and throughout the country. Barrett's brand of law, one that is as political as it is inflammatory, is starting to fade.

"We're a dying breed," says Cecil Branstetter, who helped write the Metro Charter and, like Barrett, has been an effective labor attorney for decades. "The legal profession has changed, and now the consideration is the bottom line. You just don't see many lawyers like him play active roles in the community. Young lawyers today get swallowed up into corporate structures."

Of course, even if he came of age today, it's unlikely Barrett ever would have been "swallowed up." In 1954, at the tail end of the McCarthy era, Sen. Estes Kefauver was in the midst of a tough race against Pat Sutton, a Tennessee congressman. Sutton, a right-wing segregationist and rabid anti-Communist, seized on Kefauver's liberal tendencies, going so far as to call the respected senator a "pinko." Bankrolled by a Texas oilman, Sutton would often speak before live television audiences that he called "talkathons." Attorney Bill Willis, who worked in Kefauver's campaign, went to one to rattle the candidate with tough questions. But another young man in the audience already was asking the "meanest questions you had ever heard," Willis recalls. "I asked someone, 'Who is that guy?' and he said, 'It's George Barrett.' "