Sometimes, I get the opportunity to do really special things. The first week in October was such a time when I was invited to speak in Annapolis, Maryland at the Governor Calvert House, a part of the Historic Inns of Annapolis, to the Local Insurance Government Trust which comprised representatives of local government from all over Maryland.

 

                I had never been to Annapolis, though I had heard much about it. The Governor Calvert House, where I both stayed and spoke, is right across the street from the Maryland State House, still a working state capitol where the Legislature regularly meets.

 

                The sidewalks and streets are all paved with brick, and if you go on a walking tour, in about three short blocks, you are on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay with the Naval Academy to your left.

 

                Dinner was held at another part of the Hotel complex in an old house that has in the basement a well known and rich in history restaurant called “The Treaty of Paris”. It is so named after the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. Legend has it that in the afternoon at the close of the war, General George Washington resigned his commission, leading the war, in the state capitol, which was then the national capitol and walked the short distance to the restaurant now named after the famous treaty and proceeded to have dinner and have way to much to drink.

 

                For breakfast the next day there was a well known local eatery, called “Chick and Ruth’s, named after the original owners. It was fantastic. There is nothing like it in North Carolina that I have seen. It is not large, but in the middle of the restaurant, there is a huge American flag, and every morning at 8:30 a.m., everyone who is there stands and recites the Pledge of Allegiance.

 

                If you have the chance to go to the historic part of Annapolis…go. Tour the shops, the capitol, have the best crab cakes anywhere and walk the grounds of the Naval Academy. You will be glad you did.

                About the only times people, who come to my programs and speeches, write anything down is when I repeat some comment or statement someone else has said. I am a collector of such thoughts. There is no end to such a list, as it is always growing, and you may have your own, and if you do and wish to share it with me, I think that would be great. But until then, here is my list of thoughts that I believe are worthy of writing down and saving.

 

·         The best way out is always through. Robert Frost

·         To get to a place you have never been, you first must do things you have never done – many people

·         Let your ayes be ayes and your nayes be nayes – Sermon on the Mount

·         Magnificent Defeat – it is sometimes in our most crushing defeats, that we learn the miracle of grace and have a second chance. Frederick Buechner, in a book by that same name

·         The prisons are full of people who should have taken the train to Montana – just walk away from a desperate situation…slow down and take a deep breath – Wade Smith

·         It is better to live your life in Technicolor than in black and white – Jean Spaulding

·         Don’t cry past Tuesday – how to get on with your life – Charles E. Poole, in a book by that same name

·         Truth is the most powerful weapon any person has – Wade Smith

·         There are three things that are real…God, human folly and laughter…since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we should do what we can with the third – John F. Kennedy

·         In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer – Albert Camus

                Just last week I was sitting in Café Carolina at Cameron Village in Raleigh and in walked Jackie Murdock. He is a little older than he was when he was an All ACC first team basketball guard in 1957 for Wake Forest, but he still looks the same. The face has not changed. He played only one year in Winston-Salem…the first year the school was there and graduated with the first class on what was then the new campus.

 

                I was a kid when he played and was connected at the hip to Wake Forest, even on the old campus in the town of Wake Forest where we played in Gore Gymnasium in front of a sell-out crowd of about 2,000. But that was a golden time. I remember Jackie hurling down the court for a fast break layup, and I remember in his senior year when he set the NCAA record for consecutive free throws at 39.

 

                Then there was 1966 when for one year he was the head basketball coach at Wake Forest, taking over from Bones McKinney. The basketball situation was a mess, and one day, after the season was over, he was invited to meet with Dr. Tribble, the school president and was told the school wanted to go in a different direction and would not be hiring Jackie as a permanent coach. Jackie looked at Dr. Tribble, accepted his decision and told him he had hoped he could help the school turn things around, much as Dr. Tribble had had to do. And then he got up and walked out.

 

                Jackie never looked back and had a successful career in Raleigh with the North Carolina Department of Transportation as the Secondary Roads Officer. But even though he is now a little older, and he probably can’t run down the court quite as fast, he still remembers playing and wanting to beat Carolina. He once said as a student that every Wake Forest freshman learns when he or she first comes to school that that is the great goal.

 

                And sometimes he did. But then on this day, Jackie left the restaurant with his friend Grey Poole to play golf. Grey played basketball at Carolina. But just for an instant, time stopped and memories went back to when Murdock, Dickie Hemric, Lefty Davis and Ernie Wiggins were just about the best thing around. Jackie Murdock still is.

                I first met Bernie Segal in the winter of 1978 in Washington, D.C. at an oral argument involving Jeffrey MacDonald before the United Supreme Court. Since the early days of 1970, not long after first being accused by the United States Army of murder, he had been at MacDonald’s side, winning the Article 32 Hearing in the summer of 1970 that initially cleared MacDonald. Then, there came the Federal Grand Jury deliberations in the late summer, fall and winter of 1974, culminating in an Indictment for three counts of murder in February, 1975. Finally there were four years of appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court.

 

                Then, there was the summer of 1979. That is when all hell broke loose, and for seven weeks, beginning in mid July, there was a packed federal courtroom every day while something close to a war took place between Jeffrey MacDonald, Bernie Segal and Wade Smith and the federal government, represented largely by Brian Murtagh, a Justice Department lawyer, on loan from Washington, and myself.

 

                Through it all, there was Bernie Segal, absolutely larger than life.  He was smart, diligent, tenacious, taking no prisoners, and fully confident in the rightness of his cause. He never quit, and he had trouble leaving witnesses alone without hours of questioning. Indeed, Judge Franklin Dupree, the presiding federal judge, said at a local luncheon for the Wake County Bar that summer, that “Bernie Segal was the only lawyer he knew who could cross examine a witness for three days in an uncontested divorce case.”

 

                Bernie’s client did not win that summer. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted on all counts of murder and is still in federal prison in Maryland. But Bernie’s legal career went beyond that one case. He was a law professor for years at Golden State University in San Francisco and, I am sure, taught hundreds of law students how to better practice law on behalf of their clients.

 

                I had neither spoken with or seen Bernie in years. But I remember him well. He was a passionate advocate for his client. And to me personally, he was fair.

Jeffrey MacDonald, Wade Smith and Me

 

 

 

                In the summer of 2004, the 25^th anniversary of the federal prosecution and conviction of Jeffrey MacDonald for the murder of his pregnant wife and two small daughters, Jim Heavner, the owner of WCHL, the flagship radio station of Chapel Hill, conducted a wide ranging three part interview with Wade Smith, one of MacDonald’s defense attorneys and also later one of my defense attorneys, and myself. During the middle hour of the interview, we talked in detail about the MacDonald trial.

 

                Now, we are putting portions of that interview, unedited and just as it was then done, on my website which is www.blackburnseminars.com. If you go to the home page and scroll to the bottom middle, you can click on and just listen. You don’t need a special device, just the ability to click. In coming days we will have more of the interview, but for now, there is a very interesting several minute clip.

 

                Some of you may not know, but at the end of the trial, during the time of the closing arguments, Wade, who was supposed to be the closer for his side and make the last argument for about an hour, never got the chance to really speak. That is because the other defense attorney, Bernie Segal of California, took three hours and fourteen minutes for his argument, leaving Wade just sixty seconds to argue his points to the jury.

 

                I was worried that the Court might give Wade more time, and so perhaps as a preemptive move, I offered Wade ten minutes of my time, which he took. During the entire defense argument to the jury, this was the quietest the courtroom ever got. In the book Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss quotes a juror as saying “perhaps if Mr. Smith had spoken more”. But he didn’t, and we will never know.

 

                Wade and I talk about this moment in the clip on my website. You can hear his own personal thoughts about that time, now long ago, but still fresh in memory.   And, you will hear me say it might have made a difference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                It was early 2006, and I had just moved into a new townhome in Raleigh, not far from Cameron Village. The place was owned by a friend of mine from college, whom I had met when I was a sophomore at Wake Forest, and she was a freshman from Raleigh. Susie, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, has a twin sister Stella who lives now in Greensboro, North Carolina. The two of them, through a corporation set up by their late father, own the townhome, and knowing I was looking for some place new to live, offered it to me.

 

                During the first visit, I turned on the lights to see if the power was on, and that everything worked. All was fine but the stove. I turned every knob and pushed every button…and nothing. So I emailed Susie and told her the stove didn’t work. Her response was immediate. “You want to cook? Jim, I have known you since I was seventeen years old, and I know you can’t cook. So why do you care if the stove doesn’t work”?

 

                Of course, the problem was simple. The power switch was in a different location from all the others, and it was off. It took someone professional to tell me that.

 

                Fast forward five years. I am still here and still learning how to cook. I have learned what vegetable oil is and where to find it at the grocery store. I have learned the word “sauté”, but wonder why they don’t just say “cook and stir quickly in a pan”? I have some successes, such as lemon chicken, a great recipe sent to me from California years ago by my daughter Stacy. Of course the only thing lemon about it is that you squirt some on it at the very end. 

 

                Then, there were the failures.

 

                The first time I ever tried ribs on the grill that is what I did. No one ever said put them first in the oven. I still remember I had never seen that color of black when I took them off the grill. It is always awkward to eat something that looks bad, tastes the same way, and still try to pretend how good it is and only needs a bit of tweaking. What it needed was being thrown away.

 

                  So I bought a cook book, The Pioneer Woman Cooks. Even though I am no longer a small child, I still like books with lots of pictures in them, and this book has them every step of the way. Cook books with pictures will make you smile.

 

                Then there was the movie “Julia & Julia”. Julia (the other one) kept making Boeuf Bourguignon like it was nothing. So I thought, how hard can this be? Well…it took most of Saturday to buy a Dutch oven that was less than $70.00.  Then, after reading the recipe directions via Google, I saw there were 45 steps to it.

 

                Step 1 read “First prepare the bacon: cut off the rind and reserve”. I had no idea what any of this meant. But then Step 2 said in part “Cut the bacon into lardons”.  Step 3 called for “Simmer the rind and the lardons for ten minutes”, and Step 4 said “Drain and dry the lardons and rind and reserve”. Mercifully, Step 5 read “Pre-heat the oven to 450 F”.

 

                There were still 40 steps left. One day later, it was done, and so was I. While this recipe is very good, I would not recommend it for the fainthearted.

 

                 I am still learning which is the real reason for this new blog. Last Sunday a friend of mine called mid afternoon and said she was thinking of having some folks to her house and cook vegetables and have some wine for a few friends.  She specifically mentioned squash casserole. Just as I was getting ready to say “I can be there”, she told me she had decided not to do it at all.

 

                Have you ever had some food idea on your mind and can’t get rid of it? That has been me all week. I have just been thinking how good squash casserole would be. But how to do it? Where can I find a recipe? The Pioneer Woman didn’t help too much but on Google, I found Paula Dean. But her recipe calls for both squash and zucchini. This troubled me, so at lunch on Sunday, I asked another friend, who was treating me at Winston’s, why would you use zucchini for squash casserole? “Jim, zucchini is squash…it just isn’t yellow. You can use zucchini. It will still be squash casserole”. 

 

                The adventure continues.

 

               

 

               

 

 

 

                Three years ago this Labor Day, John Drescher, the Senior Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, called and said he wanted to write a Sunday newspaper column about me and asked specifically if I would be willing to give any personal advice on former Senator John Edwards. I was driving at the time and almost wrecked the car. As politely as I could, I declined his invitation. Mr. Drescher went on to write a column anyway, but it was sort of vanilla, because I did not directly answer his questions as to what John Edwards, or any person who has either fallen from grace or is in the process of doing so, should do.

 

                Now, three years later, I still resist giving anyone specific advice, unless that person asks, and I can assure you, no one has asked. At the same time, as I have continued, probably like you, to watch public lives and careers implode, I am struck by how often these people do not understand the wisdom of Robert Frost’s great line, that “the best way out is always through”.

 

                Please understand that I am a late follower of this advice, and indeed if I had personally followed such thoughts sooner in my own life, my career as a lawyer might very well have turned out differently. At the very least, it would not have been any worse.

 

                1993 was my year of coming out. That is the year when my mistakes and real errors in judgment became public knowledge. While late January of that year saw many newspaper and television stories about me published, I made no public comments. I hunkered down, stayed at home went for long solitary walks, and talked often with my lawyers in Raleigh and psychiatrist in Durham. It took me almost the entire year to fully appreciate and accept the consequences of my own actions, so I know first – hand how difficult that is for anyone.

 

                The best advice I ever got was made not by any lawyer or psychiatrist, but by Rick Gammon’s paralegal, who told all of us how dumb we were in not telling the entire story immediately and all at once. “Just get it out and do it now” is what she said. “And…tell the truth…all of it”

 

                Finally, I did that and have always been glad I did. I only wish I had done it sooner. I wish it had not taken me almost the entire year.  Still, I have always believed, and believe today, that it is tough for people to tell the truth, when that truth is adverse to what we want people to know about us, and we do not know the ultimate consequences of that truth telling. But here is the deal. The truth is likely to come out anyway, and it is far better to tell it yourself rather than have someone else do so.

 

                You should not need a public relations person to tell you what to say. You are the only one who knows the real truth. Telling it just washes everything else away. Sure, there will be consequences, and some of them might not be pleasant. But as surely as night follows day, it is the only way out, and the only way back. You just have to have faith, and as one of my good friends has said, “Faith to let the flower bloom”.

 

               

                Earlier this week, I was at the 42^nd Street Oyster Bar with some friends, and in walked Wade Smith, carrying a book, ready to eat dinner by himself at the Bar. Instead, he saw us and joined us for about an hour. Towards the end of the conversation, after hearing one of the participants tell him how much her daughter liked his nephew, Roger Smith, Jr., and what a good job he did in representing her, Wade told a story about marketing.

 

                Some time ago, the State Bar asked him and nine other lawyers to make a six minute presentation at the Bar Center in Cary. It was to be a one hour CLE presentation on marketing. Wade was the last to speak.

 

                While waiting his turn, he became alarmed as lawyer after lawyer stood up with a fancy video or power point presentation. Wade had none of those. Finally, it was his turn, and as he reached the podium, he decided to tell the audience the truth…that he really had not much to say and certainly no formal presentation by video.

 

                Wade just leaned forward and said that the philosophy he and his firm had was to treat every client as though he or she was the most important one the firm had, and if the case went to court or a jury trial, to make sure that every person in the courtroom, including the members of the jury, would want to hire him or his law firm if that person ever needed legal representation. And…each member of the firm tried hard to return every phone call and every email as quickly as possible.

 

                Finally, he told the story of his grandfather who had no formal education, and could neither read nor write. Before he made a closing argument to a judge or jury, Wade said he went somewhere by himself and sat quietly for a few minutes, gathering his thoughts, and telling his grandfather, this argument was for him. That way, he was sure he would be doing his best.

 

                That is marketing.

 

               

                You would think it is not too tough to write a brief Afterword to a book you wrote some years ago. It doesn’t have to be too long. In fact, the representative of the printing company I use, Sheridan Printing Company, located in Michigan, said 3,000 words would be just about right. At approximately 300 words a page, that is only about 10 pages, and my book was just over 200 pages. So, I knew I could whip this out in no time.

 

                I sat down at the computer and began to start…nothing came…nothing. I had not figured out what to say. My book, Flame-Out, From Prosecuting Jeffrey MacDonald to Serving Time to Serving Tables, was first published in 2000, and though it has been through a total of three printings, it still had been over ten years since I last put pen to paper and talked about the life changing events that had taken place in my life some years before.

 

                I had no plan. So writing any words, much less 3,000 was going to be difficult. I got up from the computer, shut it down, and just tried to think what was the purpose of an Afterword any way. Why do people write them in books that are old? I knew the immediate answer to that. A new Afterword gives the book a new life, new relevancy, and maybe someone will buy it. But, still about what?

 

                Slowly, it came to me that I needed to write about some of the people I have met these last years while making speeches and holding seminars about life, ethics, issues of mental health and just surviving adversity. I wanted to write about someone other than myself. I wanted to tell other peoples’ stories. As I started writing again, it came easily to me. I remembered a young lady, who is no longer here, and the ravages of depression and mental illness, the mother whose daughter was in a terrible car accident but lived, though she no longer speaks and has not done so since December, 1993, the young teenage boys, standing in front of a sentencing Judge on charges of under age drinking and stuggling to tell the truth, and of course the wisdom I learned not that long ago from the writings of Robert Frost, that “the shortest way out is through”.

 

                I finished the Afterword. It soon will be printed and published. But it isn’t  3,000 words. It is over 4,000.