Justin N. Feldman '42, Longtime Reform Democrat in New York City, Dies at 92

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Justin N. Feldman '42, Longtime Reform Democrat in New York City, Dies at 92

 

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New York, Sept. 27, 2011—Justin N. Feldman ’42, LL.B., was a Manhattan attorney and an unswerving critic of Tammany Hall who coordinated Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 U.S. Senate campaign and whose work in New York City politics spanned seven decades. He passed away on September 21, 2011, at the age of 92.
 
Born in Manhattan, Feldman earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1940 before graduating from the Law School. He served as a trial judge advocate in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and later as the American Veterans Committee’s director of veteran affairs. A reform Democrat, Feldman immersed himself in Manhattan politics as a prominent member of the Fair Deal Democratic Club, a group devoted to breaking Tammany Hall’s stranglehold on city politics. Feldman ran for president of his native borough in 1949 but stepped aside to make way for Robert F. Wagner, a Liberal Party candidate who won the election.
 
A year after his truncated bid, Feldman published a forceful article, titled “How Tammany Holds Power,” in the National Municipal Review. In the piece, he spelled out the machinations the political juggernaut employed to allow “a coterie of political leaders in Manhattan [to] frustrate insurgency, hold power for generations and select its successors.”
           
Feldman, however, had a hand in a successful insurgency against Tammany a decade later. After serving as an aide to Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. in the 1950s, he coordinated the successful 1960 Congressional campaign of Liberal Party candidate William F. Ryan ’49, who unseated Tammany’s candidate in the race for New York’s 20th district. That same year, Feldman worked on the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, later contributing proposals to the newly elected president on the restructuring of federal regulatory bodies.
           
In 1961, four Congressional districts in Manhattan were redrawn under a statute that turned Feldman’s attention to the complex issue of redistricting. As chairman of the New York County Democratic Committee, he challenged the statue in court, maintaining that it was unconstitutional. The ensuing case, Wright v. Rockefeller, eventually reached the Supreme Court, where Feldman argued before the justices that the redistricting concentrated the influence of African-American voters in one district and robbed them of the ability to impact Congressional elections in other districts. But in February1964, the Court ruled that the statute did not violate the Constitution.
           
Feldman supported another Kennedy family member’s political aspirations in 1964, coordinating Robert F. Kennedy’s successful campaign for one of New York’s U.S. Senate seats. Four years later, he served as a pallbearer for Kennedy following the senator’s assassination.
           
Over the next several decades, Feldman remained deeply involved in local politics. He served on the board of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, as chairman of the judiciary committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and on Mayor Ed Koch’s Charter Revision Commission, which generated a raft of changes in city election laws and cardinally changed the redistricting process for city council seats. Feldman stayed in touch with New York City politics through 2009, when he supported Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s successful campaign to become Manhattan’s district attorney.
           
A founding member of Landis, Feldman, Reilly & Akers, Feldman became head of litigation at Kronish Lieb Weiner and Hellman in 1982 and practiced until the age of 90. “Justin was instrumental in building our New York litigation practice, and every lawyer at Kronish Lieb benefitted from both his wisdom and his reputation,” said a representative for Cooley Godward Kronish, the successor firm to Kronish Lieb, in a statement released shortly after Feldman’s passing.
           
Feldman is survived by his wife, former Manhattan prosecutor and crime novelist Linda Fairstein; daughters Jane and Diane; son Geoffrey; and two grandsons.
                                               
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