Dan Quayle's Legal Career

Dan Quayle, it might be said, put his ironies in the fire when he took on the entire legal profession in his A.B.A. speech. What is curious about this newly minted legal critic is not that the Vice President is a lawyer by training but that hitherto he has always been such an indifferent one.

When Quayle was under attack during the 1988 election campaign for enlisting in the National Guard in 1969 and thereby avoiding Vietnam, he had a simple explanation for his choice of military service: "I wanted to go to law school as soon as possible." But with a lackadaisical undergraduate record at DePauw University, he was far from standard-issue law-school material. Through family connections, Quayle finally won admission to the night program at Indiana University. There he met his soon-to-be wife Marilyn, another law student. Quayle, who has refused to release his law-school transcript, also worked full-time as an aide in the state attorney general's office. He passed the bar exam in 1974 and spent the next two years working for his father's newspaper, the Huntington Herald-Press, until he was elected to Congress in 1976. That was Quayle's entire legal record. Marilyn was the lawyer in the family; he was the politician.

Quayle's A.B.A. speech had its roots in meetings of the President's Council on Competitiveness beginning last December. His staff seized upon his scheduled appearance as an event that, as one aide put it, "would force us to get off the dime" on putting together a package of proposals for civil- justice reform. Such a package, it was believed, would provide Quayle with a high-visibility issue on which he could take the lead, thus enhancing his claim on the ticket for 1992. His remarks were drafted by his regular speechwriter, John McConnell, but the Vice President made extensive revisions during his recent trip to Latin America. In early May, Quayle road-tested some of his themes in a speech to a judicial conference. Back then he took pains to reassure his audience, "I'm an attorney; I'm also married to one -- so I don't want to bash lawyers." The Vice President abandoned these constraints last week, and an unlikely lawyer basher was born.