Maury Maverick, Jr. (1921-2003)

By Geoff Rips

Maury was the only person I’ve ever known who made being cantankerous a virtue. Maury looked at the world from an oblique angle. You could see it in the way he stood, one hand in his pocket, his head cocked to the side as if to say you can’t see things right if you’re looking at the world straight on. In fact, Maury had one of the most expressive heads I’ve ever seen. Sometimes it looked like it weighed him down—with the weight of the world inside, as when he’d be sitting at a table and put his head down and wag it back and forth like a cudgel while muttering about the forces of darkness and what they were doing to our democracy.

Maury was a study in contradictions. He was a proud Marine veteran of World War II with a Quaker’s soul. He was devoted to Tom Paine, Jefferson, and Madison and believed deeply and passionately in this country as an idea but was so let down by it in practice. He cussed like the ex-Marine, trial lawyer son of Maury Maverick, Sr. would, but was a Zen Buddhist when he communed with nature, birds, dogs, and trees. He constantly and proudly referred to his Maverick heritage but carried the burden of his father’s fame and expectations to his grave. (He often told the story of visiting his father on his deathbed, who told Maury, “Well at least you didn’t turn out to be as big a horse’s ass as Elliot Roosevelt.”)

He was someone who cared deeply about people but had a hard time communicating and could never make small talk. So you’d often get bluster or gruffness or criticism. I’d get calls at the Observer—and for some stretches it was after every issue—where I’d pick up the phone and the voice would say, “Maury Maverick. You know you might be right about everything you say, but your stories are too damn long.” I took that to mean that he liked the stories. And he thought they were too damn long. He was probably right.

Then there was his sense of humor and that glint in his eye—even when it didn’t work too well for seeing. He could be playful. He wouldn’t let you get away with anything. He’d say something to try to rouse a response, say something on the edge of appropriate as a way of checking your pulse. For instance, Maury helped me apply for conscientious objector status. I’d had a rabbi who wouldn’t write a letter of support. Fortunately, the temple’s religious director, Milton Bendiner, wrote a good letter about war, peace, and the concept of Shalom on my behalf.

Maury constantly reminded me of how lucky I was to have four years of a college deferment before being called in the draft. As I was walking out of his office, after we’d completed the process, he called me back to give me one more message: “Now don’t go out there and fly bombers for those Israelis.” He couldn’t resist saying that.

Maury was a people’s hero. He’d stand up for you if you were ordinary folk whose rights were beat to shreds. He’d take on the toughest fights. He fought for civil rights and civil liberties in the days of Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy. He fought the Red Scare as a member of the Texas Legislature. He successfully defended Texas Communist Party Secretary John Stanford’s rights against search and seizure. He showed the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Hugo Black, that among the items seized were the writings of Pope John XXIII and those of Justice Black. You know he enjoyed that. He talked about the wounds from those battles like they were old war wounds. But you also knew they took their toll. Maury probably represented more conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War than anyone in the country. And most of them were farm boys or boys from the inner city who’d only begun to think about war once they were already in the service. Maury worked to get them out. That was a hard row to hoe.

Back in the early ‘80s, I’d heard that the legendary Emma Tenayuca had returned to San Antonio. I wondered if I could interview her for the Observer. Since she’d been run out of town for her politics four decades earlier, she kept a low profile. There was only one way to meet her. I talked to Maury and he set it up. He told her I was “good people.” When I was finally able to meet and interview her, she told me it was only because Maury had said I would be okay. He was the only person in San Antonio she trusted outside of her family. Maury was good people.

And he built a network of good people and urged them on. He never gave up, never thought the fight wasn’t worth waging. Until his dying day, and beyond in his last column, he engaged the world to make it better.

On the day Maury died, Dave Richards wrote his friends: “It is by no means clear to me that we will see another like him in our lifetime—the only good thing, I suppose, is he didn’t have to listen to Bush’s State of the Union or hear the results of the Israeli elections. Peace and Freedom are precious commodities.”

Maury Maverick’s Last Column

What say you, San Antonio: Is this war just?

“We wish to affirm our opposition to a military invasion of Iraq.”

—Statement signed by Archbishop Patrick Flores, Auxiliary Bishop Patrick Zurek and 53 priests of the (San Antonio, Texas) archdiocese at the annual clergy convocation held at Mo Ranch, Nov.18-20, 2002 (reported in Today’s Catholic, the archdiocese newspaper, Dec. 13, 2002)

I must have been among the top lawyers in the entire country who represented conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. My clients were poor as church mice.

The well-to-do boys were off to college, doing their patriotic duty studying 19th century literature. What’s more, my Democratic Party—to my despair—was more at fault than the Republican Party, doing the low-income boys that way while letting the swells go to college was an outrage.

I liked all my clients but was particularly impressed with poor-boy Catholics who, at one time or another at some Catholic school, had been told that a war must be “just.”

On Nov. 13, at a conference of U.S. Catholic bishops held in Washington, a long statement was issued expressing deep concern over a war with Iraq, which included, among many other points, the following:

“We support those who risk their lives in the service of our nation. We also support those who seek to exercise their right to conscientious objection and selective conscientious objection, as we have stated in the past.

“We pray for President Bush and other world leaders that they will find the will and the ways to step back from the brink of war with Iraq and work for a peace that is just and enduring.”

The bishops were careful to point out in their statement, “We have no illusions about the behavior or intentions of the Iraqi government.”

In question-and-answer form, let me now quote more from the statement that Archbishop Flores, Auxiliary Bishop Zurek and their fellow priests signed last fall.

Q: What about the people of Iraq?

A: “We are aware of their suffering under a brutal dictatorship over which they have no control.”

Q: Should members of the clergy remain silent or speak out?

A: “We cannot, as followers of Christ, remain indifferent or silent if our government embarks on a course of action which is immoral.”

Q: What is the distinction the Catholic religion generally makes between a defensive war and an offensive war?

A: “Traditional Catholic teaching on the criteria for a just war makes it clear that an offensive war, as distinct from a defensive one, is never morally justified.”

Q: What would be the price of a war with Iraq?

A: “We are horrified at the prospect of so much destruction and the loss of so many military and civilian lives.”

Q: What should the people of this world seek?

A: “May the people of Iraq, ourselves and people of all nations work and pray for the building of bridges of peace and harmony among all nations and peoples.”

What do you, gentle reader, think about a mandatory military draft that reaches out to the well-to-do as much as it does to the poor?

Postscript: During the Vietnam War, I kept a diary of sorts about my law practice representing conscientious objectors. Here’s an entry from that diary:

“I would walk to a federal court with a boy who didn’t want to kill or be killed in Vietnam. It was as if I had walked in with a mass murderer. People are frightened, including some judges, when you represent a political or religious dissenter.”

Cheers for the statement of Bishops Flores and Zurek.

What say the leaders of the other religions in San Antonio about a war with Iraq?

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The Washington Report Remembers

Maury Maverick

Everyone at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs was fond of Maury Maverick. The frequent missives addressed to various staff members in his unmistakable scrawling hand were welcome arrivals, as were his phone calls. This despite the fact that he frequently complained that our magazine was way too dense—too many pages, too many words—and couldn’t we make it a little easier on our readers?

Along with Washington Report publisher Andy Killgore, Maury was a dyed-in-the-wool Yellow Dog Democrat. Unlike his friend from Alabama, however, Maury could not bring himself to abandon the party of Eleanor Roosevelt. He agonized over the last election, but ended up voting for Al Gore, despite his own serious reservations and my repeated suggestion that he consider Ralph Nader.

Maury and executive editor Dick Curtiss had more of a love-hate relationship. I believe the word “Neanderthal” was thrown around—Dick’s sin apparently being that he admitted to being a “Rockefeller Republican.” Rockefeller or no, Republicans were not high on Maury’s list of evolutionary achievement.

What drew us all to Maury was the knowledge that he was a man of ideals and principles. He cared passionately for what was right, and defended it throughout his life. He suffered for it, too: not only because he often was in the minority—initially, at least—but because he truly identified with the suffering of the victims of McCarthyism, segregation, the Vietnam War, and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. And he wondered what had become of his country, as it turned rightward and Washington continued to pour money into Israel, despite the needs of Americans here at home and Israel’s increasing brutalization of Palestinians.

Maury often expressed to me his sorrow that his Jewish former comrades in arms, whom he considered standard bearers in the fight for justice at home and abroad, turned on him when he applied those same principles to the Palestinian issue. This was something he never came to terms with, and over which he agonized. In fact, I don’t think he ever really accepted it—despite the fact that he was constantly under attack, and feared his newspaper, the San Antonio Express News, might be forced to cancel his column as a result of Jewish pressure.

But Maury refused to be silenced. He continued to write and speak the truth. It seems to me, in fact, that he was constitutionally unable to comprehend how one could do anything but—and that this accounted in large part for the mystified sorrow with which he viewed our times.

Maury Maverick will be missed by many people in many ways. But I’m sure that those of us who were honored to know Maury would agree that the greatest tribute we can pay him is to make sure his words and deeds live on through us—so that, maybe one day, “mavericks” will find they at last have become the majority! That would be a fascinating world, indeed.—Janet McMahon, Managing Editor