Ramsey Clark obituary

Immune to growing criticism and unpopularity, through the years Clark became more liberal and left-wing, championing increasingly outrageous clients and causes. As probably the most liberal man ever to head the Justice Department he attacked big business, and he once wrote: “Old people in this country are eating dog food. If that doesn’t outrage you, you have lost a bit of your heart.”

In later years Clark became a scourge of US governments. He acted as defence counsel for Saddam Hussein and had a client list that read like a Who’s Who of global villains. His fierce opposition to US foreign policy led him to defend, among others, the Yugoslav leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, planner of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. It won him the title of “the war criminal’s best friend”.

A tall, gangly, unsmiling man with a slow southern drawl, he wore shabby suits, drove his own dilapidated Oldsmobile rather than a government limousine and travelled the world in pursuit of anti-American causes. A brilliant lawyer based in New York, Clark carried a full caseload of briefs, mostly of an extremely controversial nature, long after many of his colleagues had retired.

He was a particularly passionate critic of the US “war on terror” and called for the impeachment of George W Bush for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He defended his choice of clients by saying: “I’ve always represented people against whom there are prejudices.”

As the first Gulf War raged in 1991, Clark had toured Iraq to denounce the American bombing of civilian targets. It was then he first encountered Saddam Hussein and was invited by the Iraqi leader to advise him. Clark returned to Iraq every year after that for humanitarian missions and to denounce the trade embargo.

In 2005 Clark astonished even his close friends by taking on Saddam as a client and describing him as “reserved, quiet, thoughtful and dignified”. While most of the world regarded Saddam as a brutal dictator who gassed villages and murdered thousands of his political opponents, Clark declared that the Iraqi leader had been unfairly demonised by his captors. He claimed that he had been subjected to savage treatment, comparing it to the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. The court trying Saddam, he declared, was “a creation of the US military occupation” and did not meet the standards of international law.

The death sentence against Saddam, he claimed, was “victor’s justice” that would fuel violence in Iraq for decades. Clark added that he had been shocked by the “savage presentation” of Saddam after US forces found him in a hole in the ground. Saddam was “dishevelled, with his mouth open, people probing his mouth. This is hardly the road to peace if you want respect for human dignity”.

Clark said Saddam should be tried by an independent UN-sponsored court and was scathing about the verdict coming only two days before the US midterm elections. “We call it the corruption of justice, the abuse of the judicial system for political ends,” he declared.

William Ramsey Clark was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1927 to Tom C Clark, a government lawyer, and Mary Jane (née Ramsey). He quickly developed his own sense of social justice, fiercely opposing the death penalty by the age of 11. His father served as attorney-general under President Truman from 1945 to 1949 and went on to become a Supreme Court justice. He resigned when Ramsey became attorney-general to avoid any conflict of interest with federal cases being brought by his son.

Towards the end of the Second World War the 17-year-old Clark dropped out of high school to join the Marines. He eventually returned to his home state and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he met Georgia Welch, a political science student. They married in 1949 and a year later Clark took a law degree at the University of Chicago.

His wife died in 2010. Their son, Tom, a lawyer, died in 2013. He is survived by their daughter Ronda, who was born deaf, epileptic and with learning difficulties. Of his daughter Clark observed: “She’s taught us a lot about love, most of what we know, perhaps.”

After his studies he returned to Dallas to practise law with the family firm and lost one case in ten years. When John F Kennedy became president in 1961, Clark was invited to join the new administration as assistant attorney-general. He served under the president’s younger brother, Robert, in a department dominated by the human rights issues of the day. He said of that period: “I really thought it was the noblest quest of the American people, the determination to bring the equality we had preached into reality in our lives.” Robert Kennedy nicknamed him “the Preacher” and enlisted Clark to go to the South to supervise federal enforcement of school desegregation. He also took part in crafting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

During his two years as attorney-general he opposed FBI plans for wiretaps on suspected political opponents, including Martin Luther King Jr, and earned the scorn of the FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who called him a “spineless jellyfish”.

After leaving the Justice Department in 1969 he began to espouse increasingly radical causes. He gained worldwide notoriety when he joined the actress Jane Fonda on a visit to Hanoi in 1972. After meeting American prisoners of war he said those he had seen were in better shape than he was and he praised the hygienic standards in which they were being held. On Hanoi radio he deplored the American bombing of North Vietnam. The US secretary of state, William Rogers, described his behaviour as “contemptible”.

He made an unsuccessful run for the Senate in New York in 1974 against the Republican Jacob Javits. Clark’s liberal agenda, including gun control and cuts to defence spending, brought him a heavy defeat. After failing to be elected to the Senate again in 1976 he dedicated himself to working outside the system as an activist.

In 1980, defying a ban by President Carter on travel to Iran, Clark visited Tehran and offered to exchange himself for any of the 53 American hostages held by the revolutionary government. He lavishly praised the Iranian revolution and condemned American policy towards Iran.

The following year he visited Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker, in the Maze prison and said: “It is essential we resolve this crisis and save the lives of these courageous young men.”

Clark travelled from Hanoi to Tripoli, Grenada to Panama, Tehran to Baghdad to denounce US power. While widely criticised he also received praise from human rights bodies for his defence of Palestinians and Native Americans. Among the many controversial figures for whom he provided legal counsel and advice were the Nazi concentration camp commandant Karl Linnas; the Liberian president Charles Taylor; Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader in the Rwandan genocide who was accused of summoning Hutu death squads to massacre Tutsis; and Palestine Liberation Organisation leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, who was killed during the hijack of the Italian tourist ship Achille Lauro. He befriended the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi and backed a demand that President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher pay £54 million in compensation for the British-backed American air attack on Tripoli.

Closer to home Clark acted in civil lawsuits against the federal government after the attack by federal forces and burning of a compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect outside Waco, Texas, in 1993.

After decades of causing US governments more trouble than perhaps any other lawyer, Clark justified his activism against the state on the basis that he had the wherewithal to take it on. He said: “The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.”

Ramsey Clark, former US attorney-general and human rights activist, was born on December 18, 1927. He died of undisclosed causes on April 9, 2021, aged 93