Charles Pierce's eulogy for John Doar, civil rights lawyer:

[muriel_volestrangler]

It was Doar who had been the Department of Justice's point man during the most perilous days of the civil rights movement in the South. It was Doar who had brought the federal case against, and had secured the conviction of, the men who murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and David Schwerner. It was Doar who had prosecuted the murderers of Viola Liuzzo. It was Doar who had overseen the turning of informants within the Ku Klux Klan itself. It was Doar who personally had faced down a mob in Mississippi, and who had been the point man for the Department of Justice during the voting-rights march that passed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He had ridden with the Freedom Riders, and had helped shepherd James Meredith through the gates of Ole Miss, when an authentic insurrection broke out there. John Doar was not going to be made nervous by some anxious congressman. When he was ready, he delivered his report, his voice never rising or falling, one fact after another, a clear line drawn from the Watergate Hotel to the Oval Office. There was no anger in his presentation. When he was finished, so was Richard Nixon.
...
Quite simply, there was no braver American amid the tumult of the 1960's and the 1970's than John Doar. Arguably, there were very few greater Americans during that same time. He made the law a shield, and then he made the law a sword, and he stood in against the most dangerous beasts in this country's heart and beat them all. He never wrote a book. He did not become the star he could have become. (Almost everyone else involved in Watergate did, god knows.) And, last Tuesday, he died, at the age of 92. When that smiling dunce, Reagan, got up at his first inaugural, and said that government was the problem, when he told that stupid Rotary Club joke about "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," I always thought about John Doar, who was from the government, and who came to help, and who did more for this country in three years down South than Reagan did in his entire sorry life. There is one thing more you should know about John Doar.

He was a Republican.

Every modern Republican should be ashamed of themselves because of that.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/John_Doar_RIP??src=rss