D: You met her in Washington?

R: Yes. In fact, I met her in the navy. She was an ensign too, in the
 physical therapy department. Not one that I had anything t do with. They
 were worrying about my noodle, but I ran into her there.

 D: You said you became interested in tax law at Covington & Burling.

 R: Yes.

 D: How did you become interested?

 R: By doing it, by being told to do the problem and by sweating it out. This
 is the difference these days. Many more people go into tax practice with
 a good bit of training, even if they go in just out of law school. We had
 a course that was called "Taxation" at the University of Michigan. It was
 really as much Constitutional Law as anything. These days, we turn people
 out with at least some rudimentary knowledge of the federal income tax.
 Then, if they have an interest in it, many of them continue and take
 our graduate program or some come back for that purpose. That is what we
 like best. After they have had a little time to practice, they may come
 back and study tax somewhat more intensively. In any event, even before
 there were lots of trained people, there were all those problems.

 The sequence of this, you see, is that before 1913, taxation belonged to
 the accountants to the extent that there were any serious taxation
 problems. There were lots of problems, but no federal income tax. When
 the amendment was ratified and we all of a sudden had a federal income
 tax, there was a vacuum, really. There just were not enough people
 trained to handle tax problems. There were no lawyers who were seriously
 interested in income tax. The law schools did not consider it a matter
 worth training people for. As a matter of fact, I saw that same
 situation in England when I was there much later. English lawyers, until
 recently, have not been trained much in tax. I made the acquaintance of a
 person who was offering a seminar at Oxford, a very famous person named
 Ash Wheatcroft, who was on the faculty of the London School of Economics.
 Oxford had finally asked Ash to offer a seminar to their Oxford students
 so that they could, if they wished, at least get some training in income
 tax. Well, it was much the same way in this country. There has been a
 long transition here from practically no training, to an opportunity to
 study rather deeply before you get into practice in the tax area. We have
 been in the vanguard in that. N. Y. U., of course, had their graduate
 program before tax instruction. I think that we do not lag behind NYU
 anymore. We are doing some things a good bit better, I think, than they
 are, and we have had very capable people from the outset teaching in that
 area. That has not been entirely by accident, we have insisted on it. We
 have insisted on full-time people because they are the ones who the
 students have an opportunity to talk with. If you have part-timers, if
 you have practitioners teaching, they are too busy, and rightly so. I
 mean, they owe their time first to their clients.

D: Yes.

R: But we have had mostly people who are devoting their full effort to
 training students in the tax area. That is one of the very strong points


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