Nadine Strossen doesn't sleep much.
"I got up at 4:30 this morning," she says from the living room of her Manhattan apartment, which overlooks the Hudson River near Columbia University. "I always wake up without an alarm, because I have so much to do. I wish there were even more hours in the day I could create by not sleeping."
Since stepping down as president of the ACLU last October-after 17 years in the position-one might think Strossen would have freed up enough time for a few extra winks here and there. But that's not the case. It's late morning, and so far she's spent the day (a "light one," by her account) preparing for the seven speeches and three law school lectures she'll deliver next week. "I've literally not had a single day off, including weekends and holidays, in two years," she says, before adding, "but I'm not complaining."
This last statement is exotic in New York where griping is an art form-especially among overworked lawyers. But Strossen isn't a New Yorker; she's a Minnesotan. And Minnesotans don't complain.
Long before Strossen became the first female-and youngest-president of the ACLU, before she helped the organization nearly double its membership, before she gave 200-some speeches a year (never the same one twice) advocating individual rights and debating ideologues of all stripes, before she was a New York Law School professor, she was an 8-year-old girl in a Hopkins supermarket, getting patted on the head by a campaigning Hubert H. Humphrey. Soon after, she wrote Humphrey a letter, urging him to vote on a bill to preserve marshland for ducks. "I had this naïve view that I could affect things at a very young age," she says. "Humphrey put so much joy in his work-and [he had] that nickname, 'The Happy Warrior.' That's inspired me."
Though this was Strossen's first official deed of political activism, she had long seemed destined for her eventual career path. Her father was a Holocaust survivor who was rescued from a concentration camp by American soldiers just one day before he was scheduled for execution. (Later, in one of its most famous cases, the ACLU would represent the right of neo-Nazis to demonstrate in Skokie, Ill., a position Strossen stands by today. "My father's experience is what galvanized me," she has said.)
Her grandfather, it turns out, was a conscientious objector during World War I and was sentenced to stand in front of a New Jersey courthouse so the public could spit on him. At the very same time, the ACLU was being founded, in no small part to advocate for people taking unpopular, yet legal, stands.
In high school, Strossen honed the skills she'd eventually need to spar with resolute thinkers on the right: Antonin Scalia and William F. Buckley among them. She led her Hopkins High School debate team to back-to-back state championships in her junior and senior years. "She was a terrific debater," says Roger Trangsrud, one of Strossen's teammates and a professor at George Washington University Law School. "She was very articulate, very quick on her feet, and [she] could debate with people who brought unexpected arguments. Sometimes students who are bright and who stand out inspire resentment, but Nadine never did. That's been true throughout her career."
As a student, Strossen canvassed for Eugene McCarthy, though the two wouldn't meet until years later, after Strossen had become president of the ACLU. "I told him I admired his poetry; when I got home there was an autographed copy of his collection on my desk. I'll never forget the inscription: 'Mention his poetry to a poet, and his heart will be yours forever.'"
In 1968, on the eve of her high school graduation, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Strossen, the class valedictorian, quickly rewrote her commencement speech, urging her classmates to become engaged in the causes they believe in.
She followed her own advice at Harvard College that fall, where the women's rights movement was gaining speed; her participation in feminist groups sparked an interest in law. She enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she edited the law review and graduated magna cum laude in 1975.
After graduation, Strossen returned to Minnesota to clerk for Justice John J. Todd at the state Supreme Court (Trangsrud, her former debate partner, was among the other clerks). "It was such a different world then," she says. "I was the only female clerk. And there wasn't a single woman on the Minnesota Supreme Court." That would soon change, thanks, in part, to her ambition and tenacity.
In 1976, Strossen took a job at Lindquist & Vennum in Minneapolis. She remembers her first day on the job: "A senior partner was representing the Minneapolis School Board. He walked into my office with a bunch of files and said, 'Here, these are for tomorrow's hearing. You're representing the school board.' There I was, litigating on my second day at the job. I knew right away I wasn't going to just be carrying someone's briefcase."
Strossen quickly impressed her colleagues at the firm, not only with her work ethic-"I had a reputation as the only lawyer that kept two secretaries busy full-time"-but with her certitude. "Nadine hit this place like a firestorm," says Lindquist managing partner Daryle Uphoff. "Most people start here and tiptoe around. Not Nadine: She was very mature, very confident, and a great analytical mind. She had the whole package."
Another of Strossen's Lindquist colleagues, Kevin Costley, recalls the immediate impression Strossen made on their clients. "One of our clients was an attorney who owned a number of banks. He came in and said, 'I can go to any law firm, but I know good lawyers when I see them, and I want Nadine to represent me. I'm not going to Lindquist-I'm going to Nadine Strossen."
Following the lead of other Lindquist alums-including Walter Mondale and Don Fraser-Strossen used her free time to get involved in local politics, where she quickly scaled the ranks. "In Minnesota, you're not just a lawyer," she says. "You're someone involved in politics, community issues, the arts-I miss that kind of cross-pollination a lot." During her two years as a Minneapolis lawyer, she represented the state at the Democratic National Convention and joined the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus, where she urged Gov. Rudy Perpich to honor his pledge of seating the first woman on the state Supreme Court; Rosalie Wahl was appointed in 1977. Another of her colleagues, Marlene Johnson, would become the state's first female lieutenant governor.
Strossen credits Johnson and other local women's leaders-including Arvonne Fraser and L&P's own Carol Connolly-for helping fill her early career with the experience she'd need later at the ACLU. "One of the great things about Minneapolis-and one of the reasons I deliberately returned there after law school-is that it's so hospitable to newcomers," she says. "Especially women. Just by going to meetings and showing some energy, I was tapped for leadership positions."
Another of those positions was on the board of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, whose cases Strossen had volunteered on at Lindquist. There she found her calling. "I knew that I would eventually have to hone my interests. It wasn't a hard decision: The ACLU was head and shoulders above in importance to me. I've always thought civil liberties were the bedrock of everything else."
With a letter of introduction from then-MCLU director Matthew Stark to his ACLU counterpart, Strossen left for New York City in the fall of 1978. There she took another job in private practice, specializing in commercial litigation, and continued working volunteer cases for the ACLU until she became the organization's general counsel in 1986. Somehow-perhaps thanks to her light sleep schedule-she also found time to become a professor at the New York Law School, where she still teaches a full load of classes, including constitutional law, human rights law and, naturally, individual rights. ("I never miss a class," she says. "That's my absolute ironclad rule: My students come first.")
In 1991, Strossen became the ACLU's first female president and, at age 40, its youngest. During her 17-year tenure, she led the organization through milestone Supreme Court cases, breaking new ground in censorship (Reno v. ACLU), school prayer (Lee v. Weisman), reproductive rights (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), religious freedom (Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah), symbolic speech (Texas v. Johnson) and prisoners' rights (Hudson v. McMillian).
It's been a wild ride, one that has lasted longer than she originally intended. "I wanted to live and work in New York for a while, but I'd never planned to make it my home; it was to be a leave of absence from Minnesota. But then I met my husband [Eli Noam, now a professor at Columbia Business School]."
Today, save for the occasional speaking engagement, Strossen doesn't get back to her home state much. But that doesn't mean she stops thinking about it: The view from her Manhattan apartment-the mighty Hudson, with its barges and wooded bluffs-could pass for the Mississippi, as could the view from her weekend home on a river in Milford, Conn. Both vistas were intentional: "I chose what looks like Minnesota to me. My husband always says, 'My wife is from Minnesota; she needs a river or a lake.'" L&P
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