In Memoriam

Brad Reynolds

Brad died on September 14, 2019. Here is his obituary as well as a tribute from the Center for Equal Opportunity and a remembrance by his roommate Gerry Shea.

• Obituary, Washington Post
• Tribute, Center for Equal Opportunity
• Remembrance by Gerry Shea '64

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Obituary

Washington Post

September 22, 2019

William Bradford Reynolds of Seabrook Island, SC, lost his battle with cancer and passed away Saturday, September 14, 2019 at age 77.

He was born on July 21, 1942 in Bridgeport, CT. Brad was a graduate of Yale University (B.A. 1964) and Vanderbilt University School of Law (J.D., 1967), where he graduated second in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Vanderbilt Law Review. He was admitted to practice in the State of New York (1968) and the District of Columbia (1973).

He is preceded in death by his father William Glasgow Reynolds, his mother Nancy DuPont Reynolds Cooch, and his sister Katedulwe Glasgow Reynolds. He was survived by his beloved wife, Barbara Lynne Reynolds, his sisters Polly McKeever(Stu), Cynthia Farris(Nelson), his four children by a previous marriage, Brad Jr. (Wendy), Melissa Reynolds, Kristina Muldoon (Tom) and Wendy Reynolds, and two step-daughters, Courtney Enright-Moschella and Brooke Netherton (Aaron) as well as many nieces and nephews. Together Brad and Barbara had 11 grandchildren, Canyon and Alia Reynolds, John Neidringhouse, Finnegan, Grace and Elle Muldoon, Max Barbakow, Cassidy Enright, Charlotte Moschella, Adalyn and Levi Netherton.

Brad started his legal career in 1967 with the New York City law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, where he practiced for three years before joining the U.S. Department of Justice in 1973 as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States.

In 1981, Brad was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, and from 1985 through 1988, he simultaneously held the position of Counselor to the Attorney General of the United States. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and effective members of the Reagan Administration, Brad tenaciously advanced the view that, as Brad put it, "discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society."

As Counselor to Attorney General Edwin Meese, Brad provided legal and policy advice on critical issues involving all aspects of the Justice Department's activities, and he played a key role in investigating and uncovering the facts that gave rise to the so-called Iran-Contra Affair.

After returning to private law practice, he spent the bulk of his career at the international law firm of Baker Botts, where he concentrated on antitrust and appellate litigation. Brad's distinguished career as an appellate specialist included 19 arguments before the United States Supreme Court and multiple appearances before all 13 federal courts of appeals.

Brad was an avid golfer and played as often as he could. He loved playing with his group "The Weekend Warriors." In his younger years, Brad was an outstanding tennis player as well as a runner, having run several Marine Corp marathons in Washington, DC.

A Celebration of Life will be held at The Club at Seabrook Island, 3771 Seabrook Island Road, Seabrook Island, SC on Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:30pm. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Roper St. Francis Cancer Care or the Hospice Cottage, 125 Doughty Street, Suite 790, Charleston, SC 29403 or online at www.rsfhfoundation.org. www.rsfhfoundation.org.

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Tribute

Making the Case for Colorblind Law

Center for Equal Opportunity
September 19, 2019

News came the other day that William Bradford Reynolds had passed away, from cancer. He was 77.

It was in the summer of 1981 that President Reagan named Reynolds to run the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He was a surprising choice. Reynolds was a stellar litigator but had little experience in civil rights law. In an interview years ago for a book I was writing on the Reagan presidency, Reynolds said he had been hoping to be appointed to head up the Civil Division.

Prior to Reynolds’s appointment, William French Smith, the Attorney General, had given a speech in which he said Justice would no longer seek hiring and promotion goals — basically quotas — as remedies for violations of Title VII, the anti-discrimination employment statute of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, the department would insist on make-whole relief for actual, identifiable victims of discrimination, including back pay. Smith thought the change in enforcement was possible since Title VII did not, as an original matter, require numerical goals. Indeed, there were strong arguments that Title VII proscribed them.

It fell to Reynolds to carry out the new enforcement policy, and over the years he did so in case after case. Guiding the effort was the principled idea that government should neither favor nor disfavor individuals on grounds of race. By the fall of 1981 Reynolds was making the case explicitly for color-blind law. Here he was ahead of the class, you might say, as few Reagan appointees to civil rights positions proved inclined to make the case for the “colorblind ideal of equal opportunity for all,” as Reynolds put it.

Reynolds duly enforced the laws in his charge, though not always to the satisfaction of liberal Democrats. In 1985 Reagan named Reynolds to be the associate attorney general, the third-ranking position in the department. Senate Democrats opposed him, as did several Republicans, enough to defeat his nomination in committee. The confirmation process was plainly unfair, effectively a trial, but Reynolds did not grow bitter and resign — not when there was so much he could do at the department.

Edwin Meese, appointed Attorney General in 1985, asked Reynolds to stay at the Civil Rights Division but also assume new duties when asked, which turned out to be often, an irritant to the civil rights liberals. This was how Reynolds became Meese’s and Reagan’s counselor on whom to appoint to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur. The process resulted in the selection first of Judge Antonin Scalia, in 1986, and then of Judge Robert Bork, in 1987. Scalia was confirmed, and Bork, hit by much the same assaultive politics that had greeted Reynolds two years earlier, was not.

Reynolds did not leave Justice until the end of the second Reagan term. Always, it seems, there was work for this tireless Reagan appointee, whose signal political achievement was to have helped strengthen the idea of colorblind law. May he rest in peace.

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Remembrance

by Gerry Shea '64

October 16, 2019

It is difficult to write about the loss of a cherished classmate, notably one you thought would live forever. Brad Reynolds and I roomed together for four years at Yale, the first at McClellan Hall, the second in Timothy Dwight College with Butch Hetherington and Jim Turchik, and the third and fourth in TD with, in addition, Peter Rice and the late Charlie Pulaski.

Brad had a warmth, a strength, a glow about him, that for those who knew him made any thought of death almost unimaginable. At Andover and Yale, what he called “the fun years,” it was friendship, laughter, and personal loyalty that interested him most. Learning was important too, but as a part of a greater human experience. I’m sure that experience remained important to him throughout his life, though he joined a profession that, particularly at its pinnacle, leaves little room for oneself.

This is particularly true when you are, as was Brad, editor-in-chief of the law review and second in your class at Vanderbilt, a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Assistant Attorney General, and at times (as a practical matter), acting Attorney General of the United States, and thereafter an accomplished corporate litigator and partner of preeminent law firms in Washington, D.C. No wonder Brad told a Washington Post reporter of a painful scene one morning at home in New York, when his three-year-old son came into the bathroom, looked up at his father, and asked, “Daddy, why do you only come home to shave?"

Brad was a political conservative, as most of us know, though not a politician. Throughout his life he remained faithful to his convictions. At Yale we disagreed on just about every major political issue, but the disagreements never affected our friendship. When I saw Brad, on occasion, in the years after graduation, we seldom talked about politics, not because we were afraid to, but because it was well explored territory and in the sphere of our personal relationship politics didn’t matter. As often happens today, time and change, and politics, do avail to sever friendships, but such a course, for me, was as unthinkable as that possibility of death.

I do not know Brad’s widow, Barbara, other than through our recent correspondence. I do know that they loved each other deeply. Thinking back to our days at Yale, I also remember Brad’s love for his first wife, Lynn Morgan. When she came up to New Haven from Sweet Briar for the first time, he introduced us to Lynn as if she were the loveliest of the most beautiful women in the western world — and she is certainly among them. He made innumerable weekend trips to Virginia to see her, driving all night each way, and clearly entertaining no idea of ever living without her. Lynn would come to New Haven often too, and of course to our Saturday celebrations at TD. She particularly remembers being shocked by the excessive drinking at a certain fraternity, though I’m sure her exceptional beauty could clear any number of cloudy eyes.

We could be wild at TD as well, though sometimes in more unusual ways. We roommates were discussing one warm afternoon during our sophomore year how thirsty Brad could be when he came back from varsity tennis practice. He would burst through the door and gulp down a jar of apple juice he kept in the small icebox in the living room. One of us suggested that we replace the apple juice with something that, if you’re in a rush, would look a lot like apple juice. So we emptied the jar and filled it to the same golden level.

Soon enough, at 5:30pm, Brad clamored through the door, darted across the room, flung open the fridge, and took an enormous gulp, I think the largest gulp we’d ever seen him take. He managed a mumbled scream as he spit it out on the rug and darted back out the door to the bathroom to wash out his mouth. He came back for paste and toothbrush, and returned to the bathroom for perhaps the longest single dental-hygiene session in Yale history. But he wasn’t angry, and when he finally got the taste out of his mouth the four of us laughed about it for days, as we have for decades.

On Mayday of our freshman year, Brad led a large number of our class — hundreds of us, as I recall — to the barricades. We were really celebrating no more than the arrival of spring, but a group at the law school somehow got us involved. Brad was the leader, and much of the old campus rallied to the cause. There were sheets for banners and a variety of placards. He showed the way as we marched into Woolsey Hall shouting imaginative slogans like “Liberty and freedom for all!” and “We want peace!” The headline in the Yale Daily News the next day (for a story written by our own Howard Gillette '64) proclaimed, “Students Descend on Woolsey to Participate in Freedom Rally.” There were speeches by Oliver Tambo of South Africa, Zbigniew Stypulkowski of Poland, Marian Wright of the law school, and others.

I had no idea what they were saying on stage (although I often had no idea what anyone was saying on stage). In any event, as I say most of us were more excited about the arrival of spring than anything else, and were happily led on a mission we knew virtually nothing about, by the valiant B-Rad, who in the course of the march to Woolsey was transformed into the male embodiment of Delacroix’s Liberty at the Barricades.

We gave the proposed speakers standing ovations at the beginning of the evening. As things dragged on, however, the general enthusiasm waned. I started to wonder whether the huge organ up there on the Woolsey stage was some sort of a symbol, like an altar, or a golden calf, or a statue of Millard Fillmore. We all walked back to the old campus and to bed, not sure of what we’d accomplished, but thrilled by those happy short-lived hours orchestrated by my charismatic roommate.

Brad was feeling lofty in the spring days of our sophomore year, in love with Lynn, enjoying tons of friends, taking interesting courses, and majoring in life. I was getting a little bored with my bursary job as a TD college aide. One of my more challenging responsibilities was managing the glass-enclosed bulletin board, which people would glance at as they passed into the dining hall. Every Monday I would unlock the glass door and rearrange the removable plastic letters of the previous week’s schedule to announce the coming week’s events — a Master’s tea, a new Chubb fellow, a lecture, Tom Bergin’s usual note in Italian urging us non caminare sul erbe, and the like. Then I’d lock it.

On one of those spring days, I entered, above the weekly schedule, the name of the winner of a new and exceptional prize for a student’s accomplishments in the course of the preceding seven days. It was called the “Flamer of the Week” award. The first, and as it turned out the only winner (ever) of the prize, there in black and white, was “W. B. Reynolds.” Brad walked into the dining room to applause and congratulations all around for his accomplishment. Some of us might have been a bit unsettled, but Brad smiled graciously to everyone who offered his compliments, shook many hands, and acted as if he’d just won an important election. The moment was hilarious and heartwarming — not the idea, but his playing along with it in such a joyous, magnetic way.

In our junior and senior years we roommates all lived in relative luxury. Brad’s mother, Nancy (du Pont) Reynolds came up from Wilmington (perhaps with a seamstress, I can’t remember, but with at least a measuring tape) and had the living rooms in our double suite entirely redone. We had framed prints on the walls, handsome rugs, fabulous curtains (curtains!), and a (powderless) ancient musket worthy of Miles Standish. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, a highly regarded sculptor, full of charm, deeply intelligent, and interested in each of us. I think we all dreamt about her. And though as far as I know we didn’t dream about him, Brad was his mother’s son.

His father, Scotty Reynolds, was from Tennessee, and (as has been written elsewhere) was somewhat of an outsider in Wilmington. His son was thus a mix of the American aristocrat and (without the fanfare) the common man. I recall that his father was not particularly pleased that Brad was rooming with a bunch of Catholics (Hetherington, Turchik, Shea), two of the faithful plus a heretic, but there it was, and Scotty could be charming. I doubt whether Nancy cared about our religion, though the du Ponts were originally a Huguenot (French Protestant) family.

But origins were important for posterity. For example, during our senior year Brad’s grandfather gave a fabulous bachelor dinner for him in a private dining room at the Brussels restaurant in New York. I couldn’t believe the French food, the silver, the service, the elegance of the Brussels. After the toasts, we were invited to toss our crystal glasses into the fireplace. Mine hit the side wall, but Butch Hetherington’s was dead center. For posterity, each of the convives (co-celebrants) was given a tray commemorating the evening and its purpose: the enterrement de vie de garçon (the burial of [Brad’s] bachelor life).

The name and hometown of each of the convives was embedded in glass on the face of the tray. At the top of the list, in all his splendor, was Brad’s grandfather, Eugène Eleuthère du Pont of Wilmington, Delaware. I am forever embedded in the tray as coming not from Salem but from “Boston” Massachusetts, and our classmate Stu Richardson grew up indelibly not on Staten Island but on “Long” Island. There may have been other relocations — I can’t recall — but I thought “Boston” had a nice ring to it.

At Sullivan & Cromwell Brad suffered the humbling experience one morning, shortly after his arrival at the firm, of being excoriated by Arthur Dean for not understanding the ways of the city he was living in. Dean was the presiding partner of the firm and, among his many other accomplishments, a principal negotiator of the 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty. He asked Brad to go out and get a couple of newspapers that had covered some major event of the previous day. Brad ran out to the nearest newsstand, got two papers, clipped out the articles, pasted them on more solid paper, wrote a paragraph or two to summarize, and was back at Dean’s door within the hour. Their talk went something like this —

“What’s this!? What’s this?! Are these newspapers?!”

“Yes, Sir, last night’s and this morning’s.”

“But — but — what are they?!”

“Newspapers, Mr. Dean.”

“Newspapers! The New York Post and the Daily News are newspapers?”

“Yes sir. Got them on the newsstand.”

“They’re not newspapers, Mr. Reynolds. They’re tabloids. No one in his sane mind reads them. What about The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal?”

“Uh, I took the first ones —”

“The first ones you saw.”

“The first ones I saw, yes. I wanted to get back in —”

“In a hurry.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I — I can go out and get . . . ”

“Yes, kindly do. Next time you’ll know. Gracious!”

Arthur Dean probably chuckled about this in private, for Brad became one of their most highly regarded lawyers. I am sad that as a lawyer I never had the opportunity to work with him. But late one morning in 1970, I did get a phone call at the office about my roommate.

“Hello, Mr. Shea, Gerald Shea?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Special Agent John Smith [I can’t recall the name]. I’m from the FBI.”

“Oh! Hello Mr. Smith.”

“I am calling about Brad Reynolds, William Bradford Reynolds.” (When the FBI recites the first, middle, and last name of someone, you think they’ve killed somebody.)

“[Gulp]. Is he all right?”

“Yes. He’s applying for a job in the Government, and he gave your name as a reference. May I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Of course.”

“Mr. Reynolds has said that you and he roomed together for four years at Yale. Is that correct?”

“Absolutely.”

“Now, here’s the second question.”

“Fine.”

“During those four years, did Mr. Reynolds ever do anything wrong?”

“Anything — wrong? Anything WRONG?!

“No, no. I mean, you know, anything really, really wrong.

“Certainly not, Mr. Smith. Brad never did anything really, really wrong.”

“Thank you very much.”

And that was it. Brad was leaving his firm to join the Solicitor General’s office, where he argued a wide variety of cases on behalf of the United States before the Supreme Court. He thrived in that position, as he flourished in everything he did as a lawyer.

Many of us know that Brad played the key role in uncovering the sale of arms to Iran in the 1980s to fund (illegally) the guerilla operations of the Contras in Nicaragua. Arthur Liman, who had served as counsel to the Senate Committee investigating the matter, told a small group of us at dinner one evening many years ago (well after the end of the hearings) that the entire Iran-Contra matter would never have come to light but for Brad's wisdom and cool head. As Assistant Attorney General, he was sent over to take a look at the office of Oliver North. Brad quickly identified and digested key documents, sealed off the office, halted the shredding of papers, and demanded the public disclosure of the matter. All this in the face of considerable countervailing pressure from North and others.

I never fully appreciated until recently, when I learned that Brad was dying, the profoundness of our friendship. Nor until this week had I fully understood the depth of his love for Lynn. At his memorial service in South Carolina on Sunday, his grandson read a sonnet, one of 20 poems Brad had written for Lynn during our years at Yale. I had never thought of Brad as a writer of poems. They are as lovely as the Sonnets from the Portuguese, and they bear the message that, as I had suspected when we were young, he may defy mortality after all.

Death does knock at every door
And then is stranger nevermore.
For all but time is limited.
And yet I know of one thing still,
Which death can’t take, which time can’t kill,
Which nothing can deprive me of,
And that is everlasting love.
My love for you can know no end,
For it alone death cannot send.
It will outlive both you and me
And last for an eternity.

I know I speak for Butch, Peter, and Jim when I say that nothing but our own deaths can sever our affection for our departed roommate. And, who knows, like the souls I once believed in, it may outlive us all, and last for an eternity.

[The following video shows Gerry lighting a candle in memory of Brad in La Madeleine Church, Paris, in October 2019.]