Jerrold Nadler remembers when he began to figure out that you’ve got to fight back when life seems unfair.
It was 1957. Nadler was 10. He was at home in Brooklyn watching Disney’s film production of the 1943 novel "Johnny Tremain," a young apprentice of silversmith Paul Revere on the eve of the American Revolution.
In the movie’s climatic scene, colonial lawyer James Otis delivers a rallying speech to revolutionaries in a cramped wooden attic in Boston.
Otis was the colonial lawyer whose five-hour speech in 1761 decrying British "writs of assistance" would later become the foundation of the Fourth Amendment protecting Americans from unreasonable search and seizure.
At the end of his winding speech, the fictionalized Otis scans the room and leaves his comrades with a parting message: "We fight and die for a simple thing ‐ only that a man can stand."
"I still remember watching it," said Nadler, whom aides and confidants claim has a photographic memory.
Not long after that, the New York Democrat remembers, articles started appearing in the newspapers about the Supreme Court upholding convictions of people whose confessions had been beaten out of them by police. Only two justices, Hugo Black and William Douglas, issued dissenting opinions.
"Seven to two, Black and Douglas dissenting. There were a number of such decisions, always Black and Douglas dissenting," Nadler said. "I remember getting very angry and saying, ’I’ve got to do something about that.’"
Now, 61 years later, the lifetime politician who got his start in 1977 as a New York assemblyman while he was still attending Fordham Law School at night is ready to fight back.