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PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Judge Greene: Pragmatist With a Bent for Shaping Law

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

From the first day that the Iran-Contra cases were assigned to him, U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene made clear that he planned to do things his way.

As the numerous Iran-Contra cases were parceled out among judges here, most made a special point of clearing their calendars to give top priority to the highly publicized prosecutions.

Not Greene.

When the highly paid defense lawyers, the elite prosecutors on independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh’s team and the numerous representatives of the government trooped into Greene’s courtroom for his first hearing on an Iran-Contra case, the judge taught them a lesson: He made them wait until he finished listening to arguments on a mundane accident case.

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“It was just his way of showing us he was not going to do things differently” just because the Iran-Contra cases were high-profile matters, one of the lawyers recalled.

Frequently hailed in the past as the “best trial judge in America” for his ability to control the massive federal telephone antitrust case that led to the breakup of the Bell System, Greene is no stranger to publicity or controversy. And his comments Thursday on Oliver L. North’s testimony are consistent with a longstanding willingness to say what he thinks.

“He’s not afraid,” said a Washington lawyer close to the judge. “A lot of judges are afraid of making a decision,” worried that a higher court will second-guess them. “He makes a decision and then doesn’t look back.

“This is the kind of case he lives for,” the lawyer added. “There are all sorts of complicated issues no one has decided before. He wakes up in the middle of the night pondering them, and he really loves it.”

In interviews, the judge has often spoken of himself as a pragmatist, saying he tries to find creative ways to shape the law to reach a “just” and “workable” result.

In the past, Greene, a liberal Democrat who worked in the Justice Department on civil rights cases when Robert F. Kennedy was attorney general, often was talked about as a potential Supreme Court nominee if a Democrat were elected President. Now, at age 67, friends say he has given up such ambitions and grown accustomed to the idea of spending the rest of his working life as a trial court judge.

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Greene, who is Jewish, fled Germany with his family as an adolescent--a background still revealed by a slight accent in his speech and marked sympathy for immigrants and the downtrodden. As a Justice Department lawyer, he was one of the chief authors of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From there, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him in 1965 to the newly created District of Columbia Superior Court, the local trial court in the city. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the federal bench.

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