By Ward Peck

Editor

Vincent McKusick, who turns 86 in a few months, said he has no plans to retire. It is easy to imagine he could if he wanted to.

    The former clerk of the United States Supreme Court,
former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and former
partner at one of the state’s preeminent law firms, among other
distinctions, lives modestly in the home he shares with Nancy his wife
of more than 50 years.

    The ranch-style home is hardly noteworthy, except
for its location on the ocean side of Cape Elizabeth’s Shore Road– set
far from the road, nearly on the edge of the granite bluffs that keep
the water at bay– if one were to construct a home made entirely of
glass, it should be on the McKusicks’ lot. Even in today’s real estate
market, the McKusicks could make quite a return on the investment they
made 40 years ago. But the McKusicks see the value of their home where
they raised four children and still often play host to their 10
grandchildren beyond its appraisal.

    McKusick grew up in Parkman, Maine, which he described as a suburb of Guilford.

    “The next question is always, ‘Where’s Guilford?’” McKusick said.

    He was born a twin; his brother Victor is a
prominent genetics researcher at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They grew
up on a dairy farm. Their father was a former schoolteacher and
principal who later served as a legislator, and as chairman of the
state board of education.

    He attended Bates College in Lewiston before being
called into the Army in 1943, where he was placed in a specialized
training program where he learned electrical engineering before being
sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he played a small part in a
project that would change the world forever.

    “I never have made representations about my role in
the Manhattan Project,” McKusick said. “I was a gopher in researching
and testing. I was literally one of the lab hands.”

    While McKusick may not have worked on the theories
of splitting atoms, his work helped bring those theories into reality.
His lab was charged with figuring out how to detonate the explosive
shell surrounding the uranium core to begin the nuclear reaction. The
trick was to get 32 separate detonators to trigger simultaneously to
cause the core to implode, rather than explode in one direction.

    McKusick said the Manhattan Project was separated
into many different pieces, which helped ensure the secrecy of the
overall mission even among those who were at Los Alamos.

    “I knew generally what we were working on, but only a handful of people knew everything.”

    In 1946, shortly after the end of the war, McKusick
was discharged from the Army. He said he always wanted to go to law
school, but his new knowledge made him consider a slightly different
path.

    “I had visions of becoming the world’s greatest patent lawyer.”

    He enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and in short order earned a master’s degree in Electrical
Engineering, then enrolled at the nearby Harvard Law School where he
earned the distinction of being named President of the Harvard Law
Review.

    With his law degree in hand, he moved to New York to
begin one of two clerkships that would place him in the position of
shaping legal precedents still cited today.

    His first clerkship was for Learned Hand of the
Second circuit Court of appeals in New York (Learned’s brother Augustus
Noble Hand sat on the same bench), where he researched case law and
drafted parts of decisions. He described the life of an appellate court
judge as one of isolation; secluded in chambers the relationships
between judges and clerks become close.

    From New York, McKusick moved to Washington, D.C. to
clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among the cases
decided during his time with Frankfurter was Youngstown Sheet &
Tube Co. v. Sawyer, also known as the Steel Seizure Case, in which
President Harry Truman moved to nationalize the steel industry in the
face of labor unrest during the Korean War. The court ruled 6-3 against
Truman, with Frankfurter in the majority. The precedent established by
the case is still used today in determining the limits of executive
power and the roles of the three branches of government in the system
of checks and balances established by the constitution.

    In 1952– 55 years ago this month– McKusick returned
to Maine and joined the firm known today as Piece Atwood, where he
practiced for 25 years and was named partner.

In 1977 McKusick was appointed Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, where he presided for 14 years.

“It’s a wonderful job,” McKusick said. “It’s one of the best jobs a
lawyer can have. Number one, you have all the intellectual challenges
of case law and number two, you are CEO of the court system– working
with the legislature and being chief administrator of the system. It’s
a challenging job, but you feel you can accomplish so much.”

    Following his tenure on the bench, he returned to
Pierce Atwood, not as partner but with the title “Of Counsel,” which he
retains to this day.

    McKusick said the title is fairly versatile and can
encompass a number of different functions and allows a very
satisfactory relationship with the firm.

    What the title does not mean, at least for McKusick
is sitting in an office with little to do. Much of his work these days,
which he said averages about 25 hours a week involve arbitrating
disputes between large and powerful parties. He described being an
arbitrator as being “a private judge.”

    Several arbitration cases he has presided over were
disputes between states and fall under the jurisdiction of the US
Supreme Court, which appointed him Special Master with the authority to
make conclusions regarding the facts and law and recommend a resolution
to the court. McKusick declined to give details about the nature of the
disputes in which he was named Special Master, explaining the reason
many chose to seek arbitration is to keep their disputes private.

    Recently, The University of Maine School of Law
created a new endowment fund named the Vincent L. McKusick Fellowship
Fund, which will provide tuition and other support to incoming law
students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, with the
intent of increasing the diversity of the student body at the Maine Law
School and within the legal community in Maine.

    McKusick said the purpose of the Fund is to increase
the diversity of the bar in order to make it more reflective of the
population at large, not only in Maine, but throughout the nation.

    “The bar should be a fair representation of the
citizenry,” McKusick said. “It takes a long time for people to come up
through the legal education system, so diversity in the bar comes a
long time after shifts in the population at large.”

Asked if he will retire anytime soon, McKusick, who wrote an essay
entitled “A Firm Foundation for Life After the Bench,” in which he
credits his firm’s use of “his antiquity” for his satisfaction with his
later life said he will work as long as they let him.

    “It’s what keeps me young.”