Mikva and Minow: 90 years of crossed paths

To hear Newton N. Minow tell it, he and Abner J. Mikva have been friends since mere days after they were born.

“When he was born four days after me in the same hospital, for the last 90 years I’ve been wondering why he didn’t say a word to me,” Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said about his friend, the former congressman and federal judge.

“I don’t remember any of this,” Mikva said. “He must be making it up.”

It becomes clear soon after that he loves that story. Minow repeated it just as the Jan. 21 session of Ron Miller’s Public Affairs Roundtable got underway — the friends and colleagues that filled the room laughed.

The roundtable coincided with Mikva’s 90th birthday.

In addition to being born in the same Milwaukee-area hospital in 1926, they competed for the same spots on their Milwaukee high school newspaper.

They both enlisted in the Army, and they both went to law school.

The two friends even competed to become law clerks on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“My dean was more persuasive than his dean, and so I got the first clerkship that was available to Sherman Minton, who was the justice for this area,” Mikva said. “Newt was the one who called me and told me.”

Added Minow, “I interviewed with Justice Minton … and he said, ‘Just yesterday I picked a guy. His name was Mifka or Miska?’ I said ‘Mikva. Mikva. Abner Mikva.’ So I called Abner and told him he had the job. I said, ‘You son of a bitch, you did it to me again.’”

The friendship between the two even extends into their personal lives — the first person who took Mikva’s eldest daughter on a date ended up marrying Minow’s eldest daughter.

The two friends said they have only had one political disagreement throughout their careers — the 2014 Illinois gubernatorial election.

“Because I couldn’t take Gov. Quinn,” Minow said.

Mikva immediately replied, “Well, I wish I had him.”

Minow’s and Mikva’s long careers in government have earned them a legion of friends and colleagues.

As if to punctuate this point, their joint interview with the Daily Law Bulletin was frequently interrupted by other roundtable attendees who wanted to greet or congratulate the two friends.

The two friends are regulars at the roundtable series — the brainchild and pet project of Ronald S. Miller of Miller, Shakman & Beem LLP.

Every month, Miller invites a veritable who’s who of Chicago elites to listen and weigh in on that month’s discussion topic.

Miller asked Minow to speak at the roundtable’s 20th anniversary in December.

As vice chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, Minow recounted his decadeslong experience with organizing the debates, sharing anecdotes about each candidate.

The Public Affairs Roundtable is typically off the record to the press.

The events have their roots in a lunch Miller planned with John Clay, a founder of the Public Interest Law Initiative, and the Rev. Robert Strom, a community organizer, in 1995. Miller suggested they have lunch together and invite other people they knew.

They met at the since-shuttered Binyon’s restaurant. After their initial lunch, Jay Miller, then-executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, suggested making the lunch more formal. He wanted to discuss an issue that meant a lot to him: the decriminalization of marijuana.

“I didn’t know if it would go past the first session,” Miller said. “This (December 2015 roundtable) was the 173rd session.”

“This has been so personally rewarding for me, and from everything people tell me, it has been so useful for the community, that there are so many attorneys now who are reaching age 65 … you can start small and build up,” he added.

While Miller wanted more of his contemporaries to be there for the 20th anniversary meeting — he acknowledged in an interview that the group looked a lot grayer than it normally does — he has been thinking about the future of the roundtable and indicated he wants to bring in a younger and more-driven crowd.

To that end, Miller has enlisted the help of younger colleagues — like former Miller, Shakman & Beem partner Gabriel Bankier Plotkin and former Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law executive director Jay S. Readey — to bring in a more diverse set of participants to the roundtable.

“Usually for these meetings, they each invite eight to 10 of their contemporaries who are similarly involved in various community activities,” Miller said. “So you have a better age mix, and as time goes on, you have more and more of them.”

Mikva separately pointed out the homogeneity of the roundtable in January: The vast majority of people at the roundtable were white, liberal Democrats. Indeed, one unidentified person said he might be “the only Republican in the room.”

Expanding the membership of the roundtable is not so simple. Readey said recruiting a new class of regulars is difficult in part because their peers are still busy with their own careers.

“We found with folks in their 40s and 50s, people are at work trying to make it,” Readey said. “It makes it much harder for people to be regulars at luncheons. People switch employers, they move to new places.”

Readey added their “best shot” of a getting a new generation of roundtable attendees was to invite those who are engaged with their communities and public affairs.

The roundtable will still maintain its exclusive membership though; Readey said Miller has the final say on who gets the invite to that month’s meeting.

The roundtable acts only as a discussion and networking group — there’s no promise or call-to-action beyond what each member wants to do on their own.

Readey indicated they want to keep this non-committal format in the future.

“People peel away if there is some sort of orthodoxy if you want to follow through this path or do this idea,” Readey said. “It is meant as a discussion forum and thought salon.”

Minow expressed similar sentiments about the need to diversify the roundtable but also keep the format the same.

“I’d like to see some younger people, but I think the very civilizing discourse here is rare and its very important that be preserved,” he said.