Requiem for a bureaucrat
With its speeches, balls, and parades, Inauguration Day presents Washington at its grandest and, some would say, most grandiose. Amid the pomp, I found myself thinking about someone who wasn't in the crowd this year: Francis J. Lorson, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 69.
There is often great incongruity between one's fame and the quality of one's service, a fact of Washington life that Frank's career illustrated. For 30 years, he labored behind the scenes at the Supreme Court, rising from assistant clerk to chief deputy clerk. These vaguely Dickensian job designations matched the nature of his work, which served essentially one prosaic objective: to make sure that lawyers follow the court's rules, especially the rules about filing their papers on time and in the proper form.
But no job title could describe the informal role Frank played as a creative and discreet interpreter of the court's practices and procedures, hand-holder to nervous lawyers, and friend and confidant of court personnel, up to and including the justices.
In short, Frank's efficiency was anything but chilly. He helped the court operate not only smoothly, but humanely, even when the country and the court were deeply divided.
This is why his funeral Mass on Thursday was attended not only by family, friends, and coworkers, but also by a majority of the Supreme Court's members and the U.S. solicitor general. They came to pay their respects because, as Chief Justice John Roberts put it in his eulogy: "We all needed Frank's help."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is nearing 80, recalled Frank's "reassuring smile" as she prepared to argue before the high court during the 1970s. More intimately, she spoke of his support for her years later, when she was a member of the court and was battling cancer.
Bureaucrat is a bad word, and truth be told, too many who serve time in government deserve the label in its worst sense. But there are a lot of people in Washington like Frank Lorson - people who don't just put in their hours or blindly obsess over petty rules. They understand, as Frank did, the purposes behind the procedures. And one of those purposes, epitomized by the Supreme Court's rituals, is to direct human conflict into peaceful channels.
From the News Desk
Civilization does not exactly hinge on Supreme Court Rule 33, subparagraph 1(g), which requires that every Brief in Opposition be submitted to the court in an orange booklet. But it does hinge on it a little bit. And every little bit helps.
So this inauguration season, celebrate the president and all the other big shots. But recall, too, the humbler legions who stand behind our leaders, keeping them on schedule and helping them be great - or seemingly so. Spare a thought for Frank Lorson, a man whose funeral brought together the mighty and modest, just as death itself will someday unify and equalize us all. He was, the chief justice said, that rarest of Washington characters: "a quiet, unassuming man who had the charisma of one who knew what he was doing."
Charles Lane is a member of the Washington Post's editorial board. E-mail:lanec@washpost.com.
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