Bobby Lee Cook

BOBBY LEE COOK

If you can railroad a bad man to prison, you can railroad a good one.

Bobby Lee Cook

When I was a young lawyer, I spent a fair amount of time at the Fulton County Law Library. Most of the lawyers were young associates looking up cases in support of or in opposition to some issue in a case that was being tried by a partner on another floor. There was an older fellow though, who always seemed to be rushing in or out. He had a goatee and looked like a Confederate soldier. He was doing the research himself for a case he was trying. He was Bobby Lee Cook.

Bobby Lee Cook was a hard man. Things were not easy in the mountains of Summerville in North Georgia where he was from. He spent some time in military school because his hard working parents were afraid he was turning into a no-count as they say up there.

He lied about his age to get into WWII where he served as a medical corpsman on a destroyer in the Pacific theater. He once told me about seeing bodies in the water during firefights. After that, the paper bullets in the law courts held no fear for him.

He was a great proponent of the Bill of Rights. He told a story about defending a particularly onerous defendant in the Summerville area. He got up early and usually met a group of friends at the local coffee shop. They were giving him what for because he took the case. He lectured them about the need for everyone to have a defense, the tyranny of government and the requirement of the rule of law in a civilized society. They hooted him down until he said, “ He also gave me a $250,000 retainer.”

One said, “Oh. Why didn’t you say so.”

He was a strange combination of idealism, rectitude and opportunism. He did many cases pro bono, but he was not going to die a poor man. He was in the habit of driving up to the courtroom in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. Bobby Lee was a shrewd observer of human nature and realized that jurors did not expect trial lawyers to be just like them. They respected trial lawyers who dominated, succeeded and had magical qualities. Being rich and displaying it by driving around in a Rolls Royce was a counter-intuitive but effective means of fulfilling those expectations.

He kept his firm small and his overhead low as well. His strategy was to pick out up and coming lawyers and to affiliate them on his cases. They did the mule work and he provided the showmanship. He could be generous though. I tried a defamation case with him involving the Public Service Commissioner, Mac Barber. When a witness was on the stand, he would say to me, “You take this one.” Then he would say , “No I will take it,” Then he would say, “No you take it.” and so on, but I would usually take the witness.

I think that being a trial lawyer made him more sympathetic to marginalized people. To defend a criminal defendant you have to have the ability to see their point of view. How did this person who started life as an innocent get to this place? Once you can do that, you are necessarily less judgmental and more skeptical of those who judge others.

He had a mean streak which benefited him in trials. Jurors expected a war and with him they got one. If a witness was slippery or loose with the truth, he did not like that and was expert in taking the witness down in a highly embarrassing manner. He also knew a lot of people. That helped him enormously because some cases he won were because of evidence provided to him by anonymous sources. There was something about being involved in a Bobby Lee case that was irresistible.

Judges were also receptive to Bobby Lee. His antics were proven and even expected. Judges, like everyone, are also influenced by fame and celebrity. I could see the respect they had for him and the jury could see it too. He was a learned man despite the cornpone. His earliest influence was a City Judge in Summerville, Judge Clovis Rivers, who was proficient in Greek and Latin - essential subjects in a classical education of that day. Small town gentry might scoff at Yankees but in those days, every small town it seems, had someone that went north to college - often an Ivy League school. Judge Rivers was a mentor to Bobby Lee.

Bobby Lee was regularly up at 5:30 studying advance sheets and scholarly articles even though he put on no airs. He went to Vanderbilt, then and now, a bastion for highly ambitious and privileged students ( though once he passed the Georgia Bar, he dropped out and did not graduate). He was extremely knowledgeable about the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. He was not just a gunslinger and the deep knowledge he had of the law was a great asset to him. Opponents who expected all flash, charisma and celebrity were rudely awakened.

He never wavered from support of the Democratic Party. After the Civil Rights Act, numerous prominent lawyers in Georgia became Republicans. Never Bobby Lee. This goateed, rough looking mountain man judged all people on their character and he was plenty shrewd in discerning who did and did not have much of it. He did not care what color or religion or sex that you were. After representing some truly heinous people, he was tolerant of the dark failings of human nature and knew that no person was inherently superior because of their race, faith or gender.

He was funny. When his portrait was hung in the Georgia Supreme Court, he famously said, “ I would rather be hung in the Supreme Court than by it.” At heart though, he was a serious and committed man. That is the real secret of his success. He was a man you noticed in any room, but it was plain hard work that got him where he wanted to be. I had dinner at his house with some other colleagues. The phone rang five or six times an hour. He had employees who tended to the house and answered the phone, but he always took note of the call and told the caller he would call them the next day. I thought I could not live this way, but he relished it and could not live any other way.

Lagniappe

SELF CRITICISM

I read an interesting chapter in an interesting book by Dr. Adam Phillips. The book is called Unforbidden Pleasures; the chapter is called “Against Self Criticism.” I always thought that criticizing yourself was virtuous, the path to self-improvement.

“Not so,” says Dr. Phillips. His premise is that the superego is pedantic, humorless, relentless, unreasoning, flat in affect, a prig and a boor, something like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables. How did we get to such a state that this unwelcome visitor inhabits our being?

Dr. Phillips’ answer is that in our quest to be immortal, we are drowning in narcissism. We are actually on a quest to steal immortality from God, much like Prometheus who stole fire from Zeus to give to humans. Like Prometheus, we are punished by excessive superego which acts something like an eagle eating our liver every day of our life. Prometheus could not reason with the crazed Eagle any more than we can reason with the superego.

There are two possibilities here, I think. One is that God is punishing us through the superego for our arrogant belief that we can replace or supersede Him. There is another possibility. Perhaps our superego is our poor attempt at a substitute for God who has gone missing. God as superego, accuses and we are never acquitted. The Bible teaches that suffering on the cross is the means to redemption. Good boys and girls do take that to heart.

Phillips also writes about unforbidden pleasures. He meanders all around the subject, I suspect because he wants us to do some of the work, but he seems to be saying that in our obsession with immortality, we ignore what is right there for us as humans.

Prometheus not only brought us fire; he brought us mathematics, agriculture, science, literature and healing through herbs and medicine. The things that make us civilized are all there for us now.