"George Thomas Wilson, a retired magazine-marketing and P.R. professional now living in New York City, has never forgotten his first criminal-law class, at the University of Alabama School of Law, in 1974. It was taught by Clint McGee, who graduated from the law school himself, in 1940. Early in the class, McGee called on one of Wilson’s classmates, a United States Military Academy graduate named Roy Moore. “And, for the entire hour, McGee kept him standing and talking, standing and talking,” Wilson told me recently. “Finally, at the end of the hour, McGee said to him, ‘Mr. Moore, I have been teaching in this school for thirty years, and in all of that time you’re the most mixed-up person I’ve ever taught. I’m going to call you Fruit Salad.”
John D. Saxon, a civil-rights attorney practicing in Birmingham, also took McGee’s class. He confirmed Wilson’s account. “We’re all sitting there just kind of praying. ‘Dear Lord, glad this isn’t me, please help old Roy out.’ But he was totally, hopelessly confused.” Two days later, Saxon said, McGee called on Moore again. “He says, ‘Fruit Salad, take this case.’ ” Roy was puzzled, Saxon said, and McGee repeated himself. “He says, ‘Professor McGee, it’s me, Mr. Moore.’ At which point McGee gets him in front of the room, takes Moore’s hand, and starts turning him in circles. He says, ‘Mr. Moore, you’re all mixed up, like a fruit salad.’ He proceeded to call him Fruit Salad for the rest of law school.” Saxon added, “Years later, I’m watching the ten-o’clock news with my wife and there’s this circuit judge up in Etowah County with this little plaque with the Ten Commandments on the wall behind him, and I said to her, ‘Look, there’s Fruit Salad.’ ”
In September, Moore, who went on to become the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court—a position from which he was twice removed, for violating the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics—won a Republican Senate primary runoff over Luther Strange. He is now favored in the general election, which will be held on December 12th, to fill the seat recently occupied by Jeff Sessions, who graduated from Alabama Law in 1973, the year before Moore matriculated. (Moore’s opponent in the race is Doug Jones, a Democrat and former U.S. Attorney best known for prosecuting two of the Ku Klux Klan members behind the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four African-American girls.) Over the past few weeks, ten graduates and professors of the class of 1977, of various political persuasions, shared memories of Moore, both on and off the record, from his time in law school. Some remain in touch with Moore. A few consider him a friend or occasional ally. None, however, expected him to become a successful lawyer, much less a U.S. senator. (The Moore campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Saxon, who chaired Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign in Alabama, noted that Moore was not really involved in any of the law school’s extracurricular activities—the moot-court program, the student bar association, and so on. He called him “your average law student passing through.” Others offered harsher assessments.
“I remember our constitutional-law professor really ripping Roy apart using the Socratic method and thinking, in retrospect, ‘I can’t believe this man went to West Point.’ Because you kind of think that you have to be smart to go to West Point,” one classmate, who, like Moore, became a judge, told me. Another classmate said that she used to sit with a good friend of hers in every class. “Roy always sat in front of us, and he would turn around and flirt. He’s the one thing that brought humor to us, because he was, well, kind of a doofus,” she said. “He’d yak at us. We were both single, rolling our eyes.” She added, “And then Roy would ask all of these questions to put himself in the middle of debating with an intelligent professor, and he was always cut to shreds.”
Julia Smeds Roth, a partner at the law firm Eyster Key, in Decatur, said that she and her friends called Moore and those he spent time with “the lounge lizards,” because they were always in the student lounge playing cards. “He’d go to class, but he was argumentative, very stubborn, and not very thoughtful in his analysis of the cases. He was not a very attentive student. For the most part, students didn’t respect him much.” She added, “Of all my classmates, he was the least likely I’d think would become a U.S. senator.”
Moore is the oldest of five children born to a blue-collar family in Gadsden, and he was twenty-seven, a few years older than most of his classmates, when he entered law school. At the time, George Wallace, a segregationist Democrat and another Alabama Law School alumnus, was in the middle of his second term as governor. Moore had recently returned from Vietnam, where he’d been a military-police officer. Some who served under Moore there had referred to him, with sarcasm, as “Captain America,” chafing at his egoist style of command. One such officer, Barrey Hall, told the Associated Press, in 2003, that Moore’s “policies damn near got him killed in Vietnam. He was a strutter.”
Guy Martin taught Moore in a seminar titled Discrimination in Employment. He, too, served in Vietnam. Veterans told him that Moore demanded that he be saluted on the ground in Vietnam, Martin said, which everyone knew was a foolish thing to do. “When you go to Vietnam as an officer, you don’t ask anybody to salute you, because the Viet Cong would shoot officers,” he explained. “You’ve heard this a million times in training.” If Moore indeed violated this rule, Martin went on, “There’s nothing more telling about a person’s capability and character and base intelligence. It’s crazy.” In September, shortly before the Republican primary runoff, Martin, a self-described moderate, wrote an editorial in a local paper warning voters about his former student. In it, he describes Moore as a pupil so immune to logic and reason that he forced his exasperated teacher to “abandon the Socratic method of class participation in favor of the lecture mode.” (Martin remembers giving him “a C or a D. He did enough to pass.”)
Crawford Melton, a lawyer in Opelika, was friendly with Moore at the time. “He was very, very opinionated. To the point of just being ridiculous,” Melton said. “He had ultraconservative values and opinions. I’m not saying he wasn’t liked, he was just different.” Wilson said, “He was Looney Tunes from the beginning. But I never really thought he was malicious. Some of the verbiage that’s come out of him more recently, it’s a much harsher, meaner man than I remember.”
Most of Moore’s classmates didn’t recall Christianity being a noticeable part of his public persona. “I had no sense that Roy was a really religious person, that he was the kind of person who would say, as he said recently, that Islam is not a legitimate religion, that homosexuality should be outlawed,” Saxon said. He added, “I can’t get into his mind, or his heart, but I think it’s all political. He’s demagoguing on those issues.” (Saxon credited Moore’s work, as a judge, in advocating for court funding and siding with unions.)
Wilson believes that there were five gay members of Moore’s class, four men and a woman. “I was the only one who was really, obviously gay,” Wilson said. “I have a good sensibility about the way people treat me, and I never got a sense from Roy that he was judging me on that level. But it’s also true that through my entire law-school experience, I sang as a baritone soloist at the First Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa,” Wilson added. “Every Sunday I sang two services, and everybody in law school knew I did that. That Christian overlay may have been enough for Roy.”
None of the classmates or professors whom I interviewed, including those who described themselves as Republicans, said that they were supporting Moore’s Senate candidacy. “I probably won’t vote,” Melton said. “That’s how bad it is. I don’t think this Doug Jones has a snowball’s chance in Hell,” he added. “He’s a Democrat and they gonna . . . ” Melton trailed off. “Hell, Moore will get sixty-five per cent of the vote. I don’t care what the polls say.” Melton referred to a recent poll showing that Jones and Moore were tied. “I know what the public is gonna get out and do,” he said, sighing. “I mean, we’re one of three states without a lottery. Southern Baptists control the damn state. And they’ll vote for Roy. It’ll be a landslide.”
Saxon, like the others I spoke to, expressed surprise that Moore had come this far: “I think Mr. Chief Justice Fruit Salad was as far as we figured he’d get.”
Why Roy Moore’s Law-School Professor Nicknamed Him Fruit Salad | The New Yorker
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