Fred Rodgers, Gamma ’62 (Amherst)

The Psi Upsilon Fraternity is celebrating its 175th Anniversary in 2008, and it was already 135 years old in the summer that I graduated from law school. But this great Fraternity and my Amherst College experience were far from my mind in June 1966 as I prepared for the New York State bar examination and pondered the implications on my nascent legal career of the draft notice I had just received from the U.S. Selective Service Agency instructing me to report for induction into the Armed Forces. The downtown law firm which had promised me an associate’s job wished me well.

Disturbing as was the prospect of entering the U.S. Army as a 25 year old “buck private” after seven years in academe –and three and a half very pleasant years as a member of Amherst’s Gamma Chapter of Psi U– friends were somewhat reassuring, offering good wishes like “Hope they don’t send you to Vietnam” and “Lawyers don’t get sent to the front, do they?”

Three years later my Fraternity contacted me. The Psi U magazine I received looked quite impressive, even though it was stained with red sand and dog-eared, functions of my then current status. The magazine reached me after having been forwarded a few times to my office in a tent-like structure at Landing Zone (LZ) English located in the central highlands of Vietnam. LZ English, named for a soldier who had been killed there in a mortar attack, was a fire support base located near the hamlet of Bong Song in Binh Dinh Province and was the headquarters of the 173rd Airborne Brigade where I was assigned as Judge Advocate (JAGC) and also worked as a part-time military trial judge, presiding over special courts-martial.

It was reassuring to know that even though I was no longer coddled in the familiar settings of the beautiful Gamma Chapter house on the corner of North Pleasant Street and Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, my fraternal organization, Psi Upsilon still cared about me as a brother. That a small national Fraternity had bothered to track down a twenty-eight year old graduate serving in Vietnam was intriguing. I had no illusions about making it to the national convention that year –I believe it was in Syracuse– but thinking it might be helpful someday to be associated with the Psi U organization, I sent in my check and joined the rolls of donors for the year 1970, ensuring I would continue on the mailing list.

The reason that I was appointed a judge so early in my legal career is because the previous year in 1968, Congress had passed the Military Justice Act of 1968 under the sponsorship of Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) and had created a number of new military judgeships that needed to be filled. The effective date of the Act was August 1, 1969, two weeks before I arrived in Vietnam as a newly minted military judge. Sen. Ervin had persisted for six years in trying to reform the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and his stamina at this effort resulted in part from his reaction to negative publicity about the existing military justice system, and news reporting on courts-martial involving soldiers who opposed the Vietnam war that had gained notoriety in the press.

The “criminal justice revolution” occasioned by the activist U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of its Chief Justice Earl Warren was afoot, as protests to the Vietnam war were gaining strength. Sen. Ervin was chiefly interested in improving trial procedures and increasing safeguards for the military accused, which he believed would follow the creation of the office of military judge, and would indirectly address the troubling problem of unlawful command influence on the outcome of courts-martial, especially those involving soldiers who came to the service through the draft.

The Department of Defense and the service branches had opposed this legislation in Congress, arguing that good order and discipline in the military could not coexist with an independent judiciary. Inevitably, the new law was not popular with the commanders in the field because many of them resented a new judiciary of young JAGC officers whose arrival undermined their authority, and had been created because Congress questioned their oversight of criminal justice in the military. The unpopularity of the law rubbed off on the new judges, especially when one of them made a ruling that caused tactical problems for the commanders, such as a judge’s order that a soldier attend a court-martial to testify at a time when the commander urgently need him in a combat operation in the field.

Membership in organizations “back in the world,” like the ABA, the New York Bar Association and my Fraternity were an opportunity to keep up with and correspond with old friends and colleagues about mutual concerns and a comfort to me on these lonely occasions. Fulfilling my dream in law school of becoming a judge, I became a full-time member of the U.S. Army Judiciary when I finished my tour in Vietnam in 1970 and was assigned to a five state judicial circuit in the southwestern United States.

I visited my family in Albany, N.Y. over the Christmas holiday in 1970, and learned that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller (a Psi U at Dartmouth) was hosting local citizens with his annual New Year’s reception at the Governor’s Mansion. I wore my Army dress blues with all my newly won military medals and, full of “attitude” as many returning veterans were, I stood in line to shake Rocky’s and Happy’s hands as the line wound closer to the Governor and his wife. Imagine his surprise as I “slipped him” the Psi U “grip.” Fortunately, after a moment of consternation, he made the connection and recovering, asked me where I had been a member of Psi U.

After leaving active duty in the U.S. Army, I remained a military judge in the Reserve for 16 years and not only served each summer on active duty at military posts located around the country but also served as a state court judge in Colorado. A civilian again in 1973, I joined the bench of the Denver Juvenile Court, and as I moved to new addresses over the period of my judicial career, the Psi Upsilon magazine continued to track me down.

At a judges’ meeting of the ABA in Washington, D.C., I met Judge Bill Robie (now deceased) who was then national president of Psi Upsilon, something I would never have known except for the magazine’s publicity of the accomplishments of Psi U’s alumni. Many lawyers and judges in Colorado, I have learned, are Psi U’s according to the directory and the news of alumni in the magazine. It’s fun to hook up with these brothers, and say the “secret words,” and slip them “the grip.” One of my good friends and former roommates at Amherst, Tom Hanford, comes to Colorado to visit his son and we often ski together when he does.

The Psi Upsilon Fraternity has weathered the many changes that the college and university fraternity system has undergone over the past three centuries. At Amherst it meant in the aftermath of World War II, abolishing the dining rooms in the fraternity houses as an effort to bring the undergraduates together in a central dining hall to break bread together. After I left Amherst, the college administration expropriated the fraternity houses. But to the credit of our great Fraternity, Psi Upsilon persisted and like our early brothers in the 19th century, bought a new chapter house, not as impressive as the beautiful colonial mansion in which I was privileged to live as a “gammie” in 1959-63, but certainly adequate to provide for the continuity of Psi Upsilon at Amherst into the future. These changes also meant adjusting to coeducation, and as my fraternity has done at Amherst, admitting women as Psi U “brothers.” What an impressive legacy.

May Psi Upsilon continue for at least another one-hundred and seventy-five successful years, and beyond!

Fred Rodgers, Gamma ’62 (Amherst)

Judge Frederic Rodgers of Black Hawk, Colorado is currently Chair-elect of the National Judicial College Board of Trustees. He is in his fifth decade of service as a trial judge.