Wednesday, August 9, 1995.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant.

—James Joyce, Ulysses.

I was forty-one years old. In the afternoon I attended a

continuing legal education course in downtown Washington
offered to members of the Pennsylvania Bar. The instructor, a
senior judge of the Pennsylvania Superior Court, used
Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice to illustrate pertinent
matters relating to judicial decision-making. At the outset, course
participants were shown a video of the famous trial scene from
the play. The Merchant of Venice concerns an anti-Semitic
merchant who takes a loan from the Jew, Shylock but can’t repay
it, and without mercy, Shylock demands a pound of his flesh.
Portia, who impersonates a lawyer, saves the merchant in court.
The play takes an explosive turn when Portia—who, only
moments before, had promised Shylock he could take his pound
of flesh—suddenly, and without warning, invokes the “alien
statute” against the moneylender: having attempted to take the
life of a citizen, the “alien” Shylock has forfeited his property.

I was familiar with The Merchant of Venice, having read the play
years earlier in high school, in Mr. Rosenbaum’s eleventh grade
English class. Mr. Rosenbaum once said to the students, “If you
want a good livelihood, become a lawyer. The courtroom is pure
theater, and there’s always a need for actors.”
During the continuing legal education course, I happened to turn
around in my seat and, startled and surprised, I spied former
Pennsylvania Governor and United States Attorney General, Dick
Thornburgh. He too was taking the course. Thornburgh, as
Pennsylvania governor in 1979, oversaw the state’s emergency
response efforts to the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island
nuclear power plant. He was described at the time as “one of the
few authentic heroes of that episode as a calm voice against
panic.”

I recall this day because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the

atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan at the end of World War II.
That morning I read a disturbing article about the bombing in
The New York Times. The Times reported that throughout the war,
Nagasaki had been spared conventional bombing, although the
city was home to a strategically important naval port. The
residents of Nagasaki felt they had been accorded an indulgence
by a charitable Fortune. Unknown to the Japanese, the United
States military had refrained from an air assault on Nagasaki
because, in fact, the city had been chosen as a site for any future
atomic bombing. The Americans wanted to be able to assess the
effects of an atomic detonation on an intact city not damaged by
conventional bombing. Thus, for the residents of Nagasaki, an
extended period of imagined reprieve was shattered by the sudden
terror of the unanticipated atomic blast.

Later, in the afternoon, when I caught sight of Governor

Thornburgh—whom I associated with the Three Mile Island
nuclear disaster—it made an uncanny impression on me.