Abner Mikva, Lawmaker, Judge and Mentor to Obama, Dies at 90
By NEIL A. LEWISJULY 5, 2016
Abner J. Mikva, who was one of the nation’s leading liberal politicians for decades and an influential figure at the top levels of all three branches of the federal government, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 90.
Sanford D. Horwitt, a friend and colleague, confirmed the death, at a hospice care facility, saying Mr. Mikva had bladder cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Mikva represented the Chicago area in Congress for nearly nine years, became the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — widely regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court — and concluded his federal service with a stint as White House counsel under President Bill Clinton during a tumultuous period in the executive branch.
He had also been a mentor to President Obama and to Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court.
Mr. Mikva was an unusual combination of a highly regarded legal scholar who taught at the University of Chicago Law School and a skilled street-level politician who flourished in the raucous politics of Chicago. He was one of the few consistently successful opponents of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine at the height of its power.
A son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Ukraine, Abner Joseph Mikva was born in Milwaukee on Jan. 21, 1926. He often spoke about his early childhood years, when his father was out of work and the family was subsisting on welfare. He said the knit blue cap and clunky work shoes he wore for years marked him as a welfare recipient.
He attended public schools and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he met Zorita Wise, known as Zoe, on a blind date. They married in September 1948, and she survives him.
He later transferred to Washington University in St. Louis. During World War II he was a navigator with the Army Air Corps. Though he did not complete an undergraduate degree, he eventually graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and served as a clerk to Justice Sherman Minton of the Supreme Court.
He began his career in politics as a volunteer for Senator Paul Douglas and Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson, two of the leading liberal politicians in Illinois.
His first taste of Chicago politics, as he recounted in a taped oral history of the city, came when he walked into the headquarters of the Eighth Ward Regular Democratic Organization to volunteer:
“Who sent you?” the committeeman asked.
“Nobody,” he replied.
“Well,” the committeeman said, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”
The ward leader told him that they had no paying jobs to give out.
“I don’t want a job,” Mr. Mikva replied.
“Well, we don’t want nobody that don’t want a job,” the leader said.
In 1956, Mr. Mikva won his first election as a state assemblyman and was sent to Springfield, Ill., the capital, where his roommate was Paul Simon, later a longtime United States senator.
Mr. Mikva took on the Daley machine in 1966, when he lost a primary challenge to an 84-year-old congressman, Barratt G. O’Hara. Two years later, he defeated Mr. O’Hara and went to Washington. The machine took its revenge by changing the boundaries of his district, and Mr. Mikva was defeated by a Republican in 1972.
Ousted after two terms, Mr. Mikva began practicing law, but his wife bluntly told him that he was not cut out for it — that his temperament was more suited for boisterous elective politics. Heeding her advice, he ran for Congress again in 1974 in a new district on the region’s North Shore. Despite the district’s high Republican voter registration, he won, narrowly.
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President Obama awarded Mr. Mikva the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, in 2014. Credit Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
He served another two terms, winning re-election in 1976 by only 201 votes out of 213,407 cast.
In Congress he served on the House Judiciary Committee and sought to toughen criminal laws, saying that as a liberal supporter of protections for criminal defendants, as established by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, he had a special obligation to address public fears about crime.
Mr. Mikva was noted for his unrelenting efforts to outlaw all privately owned handguns — each session he introduced a bill to do so — a position that won him the enmity of the National Rifle Association. When President Jimmy Carter nominated him to the appeals court in 1979, the N.R.A. spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful lobbying effort to thwart his confirmation.
On the District of Columbia appeals bench, which was deeply divided ideologically, Judge Mikva became a leader of its liberal faction. He once got into a shouting match with a conservative judge in a private conference over whether to uphold an affirmative action plan for the city’s fire department.
Rising to chief judge of the court in 1991, he wrote an opinion reinstating a gay midshipman who had been expelled from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, striking down a Clinton administration regulation barring gays from serving in the military.
On most days before taking the bench, Judge Mikva used his privileges as a former congressman to visit the House gym, play paddleball and socialize with former colleagues.
Judge Mikva was 68, one of the most powerful judges in the country and on a comfortable path to retirement, when he decided to leave the bench for what he later called the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the White House. President Clinton brought Mr. Mikva in as White House counsel in the fall of 1994 to provide stability in judgment at a time when the president was facing several inquiries stemming from his investment years earlier in a local real estate venture known as Whitewater when he was governor of Arkansas. Mr. Mikva served a year in the post.
After leaving the White House, he served as a mentor to Barack Obama, then a young Illinois state legislator. Mr. Mikva had first become aware of Mr. Obama when he was told about a promising Chicago-area law student in his last year at Harvard Law School. An appeals court judge at the time, Judge Mikva reached out to recruit Mr. Obama as a law clerk. Mr. Obama declined, however, saying he wanted to try his hand at community organizing in Chicago.
“I’ve lost a mentor and a friend,” President Obama said Tuesday in a statement.
“No matter how far we go in life, we owe a profound debt of gratitude to those who gave us those first, firm pushes at the start,” Mr. Obama said. “For me, one of those people was Ab Mikva.
“When I was graduating law school, Ab encouraged me to pursue public service. He saw something in me that I didn’t yet see in myself, but I know why he did it — Ab represented the best of public service himself, and he believed in empowering the next generation of young people to shape our country.”
In 2014 Mr. Obama awarded Mr. Mikva the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
As a federal judge, Judge Mikva hired Elena Kagan as a law clerk, recommended her to clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, endorsed her move to a professorship at the University of Chicago and persuaded her to join him in the counsel’s office at the Clinton White House.
In 1997, Mr. Mikva and his wife founded the Mikva Challenge, an organization that raises money to encourage inner-city youths to become active in elective politics.
Besides his wife, he is survived by their daughters Mary, Laurie and Rachel, all of whom use the surname Mikva, and seven grandchildren.
In 2004, the couple served as international observers for elections in Ukraine. He wrote that the voting itself seemed straightforward, but when he followed the ballots to the central counting station, he saw 2,100 of them summarily discarded. He objected to no avail.
“I thought I had seen a lot of tough elections in Chicago,” he said, “but they were mild compared to this one.”
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