Bernard Nussbaum

Nussbaum died from heart disease at his home in Manhattan on March 13, 2022, at the age of 84.

He had three children: a daughter, Emily Nussbaum (who is married to Clive Thompson and is on the staff of The New Yorker magazine; she was the magazine's television critic and won both the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary); two sons, Peter Nussbaum (married to Alexis Tannenbaum), Frank Nussbaum (married to Carlye Adler) and a stepson, William Kuhn. He also had six grandchildren.

Nussbaum also served on the Board of Trustees of The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City which encompasses seven major hospitals in New York City and a highly regarded medical school. He was a member of the board's audit committee and legal committee. He was also a member of a three-person independent review board appointed in 2014 by the Brooklyn District Attorney. The board reviews decisions made by the district attorney's office as to whether certain individuals have been wrongly convicted of crimes. That process resulted in a number of convictions being set aside and persons being released from prison.

On January 28, 2011, Nussbaum sent a letter to President Barack Obama stating that while serving as White House Counsel he extensively reviewed the Jonathan Pollard file. After pleading guilty in June 1986, Pollard was sentenced to an unprecedented life sentence for providing classified information to Israel without the intention to harm the United States. In his letter to President Obama, Nussbaum wrote: "Pollard has been appropriately punished for his conduct, and a failure at this time to commute his sentence would not serve the course of justice; indeed, I respectfully believe it would be a miscarriage of justice." After serving 30 years in prison, Pollard was granted parole and was released from prison on November 20, 2015.

In December 2008, Nussbaum married Nancy Kuhn, who had been a fundraiser for political and charitable organizations. Among other political races, she played an important role in raising funds, in New York State and elsewhere, for the Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale during the 1984 campaign. Nussbaum and Kuhn resided in Manhattan, Stamford, Connecticut, and Naples, Florida. Kuhn died of brain cancer in April 2021.

In January 2006, his wife Toby, to whom he was married for 42 years, died of pancreatic cancer. They met in 1958 when she was an undergraduate at Brandeis University and he was a first year law student at Harvard. Throughout her adult life she was active in political, community, and philanthropic affairs, particularly with non-profit organizations in the Jewish community.

In 2004, Nussbaum won a jury verdict in a New York federal court on behalf of the developer of the rebuilt World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein, against major insurance companies. After a trial lasting more than a month, the jury found that the September 11 attacks in 2001, when two towers were struck by two planes, was not a single event, as claimed by the insurance companies, but was, under the terms of the insurance agreements then in force, two separate events. This significantly increased the insurance payments due and resulted in a multi-billion payment to the developer for the rebuilding of the center.

The President, nonetheless, in response to media and congressional pressure, decided to ask the Attorney General to appoint an independent counsel and she did. A few months later, as predicted by Nussbaum, three appellate judges replaced the counsel appointed by the Attorney General with Ken Starr. An investigation then took place which never resulted in criminal charges against the President, but lasted for over seven years, until after the end of the Clinton presidency. It did, however, result, based on subsequent personal conduct (involving a White House intern) separate from the Whitewater matter, in Clinton being impeached by the House of Representatives in December 1998. He was ultimately acquitted by the Senate, but the impeachment proceeding subsequently affected future presidential elections, first involving Vice President Al Gore and later Hillary Clinton.

Nussbaum resigned on March 5, 1994, as a result of the Whitewater controversy and the position he took regarding the appointment of an Independent Counsel. President Clinton later wrote: "Bernie Nussbaum resigned in early March; he never got over my foolish decision to ask for an independent counsel, and he didn't want to be a source of further problems ... [he was an] able, honest public servant."

Nussbaum returned to his law firm in late 1994 and resumed the private practice of law.

In 1993, Nussbaum again left his law firm, when he was appointed Counsel to the President of the United States. During his tenure as President Bill Clinton's first White House Counsel he was involved in major personnel and policy issues facing the administration. These included the appointment of Janet Reno as Attorney General, the recruitment of a new FBI director, and the selection of approximately 100 federal judges, including Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Nussbaum was the recipient of awards from charitable and educational institutions as well as legal organizations. In 1993, he was awarded an honorary LL.D. from the George Washington University National Law Center. He served as Vice President of the New York City Bar Association and as President of the Federal Bar Council, a bar association whose membership consists of lawyers and judges who practice primarily in federal courts within the Second Circuit. He was a Fellow of the American College of Trial lawyers, a select professional association of trial lawyers from the United States and Canada.

In 1992, in a case which generated one of the most prominent legal ethics controversies of the decade, Nussbaum represented the law firm of Kaye Scholer. A government agency sued Kaye Scholer charging it with improperly withholding damaging information about its client, a large federal savings and loan association whose failure epitomized the savings and loan disaster in the early 1990s. The law firm vehemently denied it did anything wrong in representing its client; it maintained it had an obligation to represent its client zealously and not to disclose information harmful to its client.

While serving on the Judiciary Committee staff, Nussbaum met and worked with Hillary Rodham, a recent law school graduate who was also a member of the staff. She introduced him to the man she would marry in 1975, Bill Clinton.

In December 1973, Nussbaum left his law firm to serve as a senior member on the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff, led by John Doar, which conducted the impeachment investigation involving President Richard Nixon. Nussbaum participated in overseeing the fact gathering process. This included analyzing the White House tape recordings made by President Nixon, and interviewing significant witnesses such as John Dean, the President's former White House Counsel, John Mitchell, the former U.S. Attorney General in the Nixon administration, and Charles Colson, a former special assistant to the President. He played a role in presenting the results of the staff's inquiry to the House Judiciary Committee. In July 1974, the committee, in a bi-partisan vote, voted to recommend to the House of Representatives that the President be impeached. Shortly thereafter, on August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned. At the conclusion of the impeachment inquiry Nussbaum rejoined his law firm.

In 1972, Nussbaum represented Elizabeth Holtzman who, in a surprise victory, had defeated senior U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler, who at the time was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, by a little over 600 votes in the Democratic primary election. Celler brought suit in a Brooklyn state court to set aside that victory. Nussbaum won that case, which was ultimately decided by the New York State Court of Appeals, and Holtzman's election was upheld. As a result of that victory, Peter Rodino, a senior congressman from New Jersey replaced Celler and became chairman of the Judiciary Committee which later successfully conducted the impeachment inquiry involving U.S. President Richard Nixon.

In 1970, Nussbaum managed Robert Morgenthau's campaign for Governor of New York. He led a group of former assistant United States attorneys in conducting a statewide petition drive to place Morgenthau's name on the Democratic Party primary ballot for the party's nomination for governor, opposing Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court Justice, who was the choice of the Democratic Party leaders.

In the mid-1970s, during New York City's fiscal crises, Nussbaum represented the Comptroller of the City of New York. At the time the comptroller, along with the mayor and the city, were the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission into whether there was fraud in the sale of city securities. After a lengthy inquiry, during which numerous documents were produced and top city officials testified, there was no finding of any wrongdoing.

In 1968, Nussbaum ran for a seat in the New York State Assembly. In a close contest, in a Democratic primary election in Brooklyn, New York, he lost to the incumbent assemblyman.

In 1966, Nussbaum joined the New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one year after the firm was founded in January 1965 by Martin Lipton, Herbert Wachtell, Leonard Rosen, and George Katz, four lawyers in their early 30s who in time became preeminent in the legal profession. In 1966, the firm had less than 10 lawyers. As of 2022, it has over 250 lawyers and is one of the most successful corporate law firms in the United States.

In 1962, he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, in the office led by Robert Morgenthau. He was a federal prosecutor for more than three years and tried a number of major criminal cases. These included convicting, after a four-month trial, five officials of a federal savings and loan association of perjury. The perjury was committed by the bank officers to cover up the diversion of over $250,000 from the savings and loan association to finance a political campaign for Congress being conducted by the president of the association. He also won a jury verdict convicting a prominent accountant and investor of bribing and conspiring (with other major investors) to bribe an internal revenue agent.

Upon completing law school in 1961, Nussbaum was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. This fellowship enabled him to travel around the world for a year visiting over 30 countries. On his return he served for six months on active duty in the United States Army and was a member of the Army Reserves for six years.

In 1958, Nussbaum graduated from Columbia and was admitted to Harvard Law School. After his first year, on the basis of his academic record, he was selected to join the Harvard Law Review and was given a full tuition scholarship by the law school. In his senior year he became a note editor of the Law Review, succeeding future Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

He attended neighborhood public schools. In 1951, he was admitted to Stuyvesant High School, a specialized public high school in New York City which requires the passing of an entrance exam for admission. He graduated in 1954, having been a member of the school's academic honor society, and an editor on the school's newspaper, the Stuyvesant Spectator.

Bernard William Nussbaum (March 23, 1937 – March 13, 2022) was an American attorney, best known for having served as White House Counsel under President Bill Clinton.

Nussbaum, the first child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, was born in New York City on March 23, 1937. His father and mother originally worked in garment factories. His father was later employed by the labor union that represented garment workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Nussbaum grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, home at the time to many immigrant families from Eastern Europe.

Nussbaum was a member of philanthropic boards of trustees, including Brandeis University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He served as a trustee of the Boys Brotherhood Republic (now part of the Henry Street Settlement), a self-governing youth club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Created in the 1930s, Nussbaum was a member of that club as a child.