By Ward Peck
Editor
Vincent McKusick, who turns 86 in a few months, said he has no plans to retire. It is easy to imagine he could if he wanted to.
    The former clerk of the United States Supreme Court, former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and former partner at one of the state’s preeminent law firms, among other distinctions, lives modestly in the home he shares with Nancy his wife of more than 50 years.
    The ranch-style home is hardly noteworthy, except for its location on the ocean side of Cape Elizabeth’s Shore Road– set far from the road, nearly on the edge of the granite bluffs that keep the water at bay– if one were to construct a home made entirely of glass, it should be on the McKusicks’ lot. Even in today’s real estate market, the McKusicks could make quite a return on the investment they made 40 years ago. But the McKusicks see the value of their home where they raised four children and still often play host to their 10 grandchildren beyond its appraisal.
    McKusick grew up in Parkman, Maine, which he described as a suburb of Guilford.
    “The next question is always, ‘Where’s Guilford?’” McKusick said.
    He was born a twin; his brother Victor is a prominent genetics researcher at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They grew up on a dairy farm. Their father was a former schoolteacher and principal who later served as a legislator, and as chairman of the state board of education.
    He attended Bates College in Lewiston before being called into the Army in 1943, where he was placed in a specialized training program where he learned electrical engineering before being sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he played a small part in a project that would change the world forever.
    “I never have made representations about my role in the Manhattan Project,” McKusick said. “I was a gopher in researching and testing. I was literally one of the lab hands.”
    While McKusick may not have worked on the theories of splitting atoms, his work helped bring those theories into reality. His lab was charged with figuring out how to detonate the explosive shell surrounding the uranium core to begin the nuclear reaction. The trick was to get 32 separate detonators to trigger simultaneously to cause the core to implode, rather than explode in one direction.
    McKusick said the Manhattan Project was separated into many different pieces, which helped ensure the secrecy of the overall mission even among those who were at Los Alamos.
    “I knew generally what we were working on, but only a handful of people knew everything.”
    In 1946, shortly after the end of the war, McKusick was discharged from the Army. He said he always wanted to go to law school, but his new knowledge made him consider a slightly different path.
    “I had visions of becoming the world’s greatest patent lawyer.”
    He enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in short order earned a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, then enrolled at the nearby Harvard Law School where he earned the distinction of being named President of the Harvard Law Review.
    With his law degree in hand, he moved to New York to begin one of two clerkships that would place him in the position of shaping legal precedents still cited today.
    His first clerkship was for Learned Hand of the Second circuit Court of appeals in New York (Learned’s brother Augustus Noble Hand sat on the same bench), where he researched case law and drafted parts of decisions. He described the life of an appellate court judge as one of isolation; secluded in chambers the relationships between judges and clerks become close.
    From New York, McKusick moved to Washington, D.C. to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among the cases decided during his time with Frankfurter was Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, also known as the Steel Seizure Case, in which President Harry Truman moved to nationalize the steel industry in the face of labor unrest during the Korean War. The court ruled 6-3 against Truman, with Frankfurter in the majority. The precedent established by the case is still used today in determining the limits of executive power and the roles of the three branches of government in the system of checks and balances established by the constitution.
    In 1952– 55 years ago this month– McKusick returned to Maine and joined the firm known today as Piece Atwood, where he practiced for 25 years and was named partner.
In 1977 McKusick was appointed Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, where he presided for 14 years.
“It’s a wonderful job,” McKusick said. “It’s one of the best jobs a lawyer can have. Number one, you have all the intellectual challenges of case law and number two, you are CEO of the court system– working with the legislature and being chief administrator of the system. It’s a challenging job, but you feel you can accomplish so much.”
    Following his tenure on the bench, he returned to Pierce Atwood, not as partner but with the title “Of Counsel,” which he retains to this day.
    McKusick said the title is fairly versatile and can encompass a number of different functions and allows a very satisfactory relationship with the firm.
    What the title does not mean, at least for McKusick is sitting in an office with little to do. Much of his work these days, which he said averages about 25 hours a week involve arbitrating disputes between large and powerful parties. He described being an arbitrator as being “a private judge.”
    Several arbitration cases he has presided over were disputes between states and fall under the jurisdiction of the US Supreme Court, which appointed him Special Master with the authority to make conclusions regarding the facts and law and recommend a resolution to the court. McKusick declined to give details about the nature of the disputes in which he was named Special Master, explaining the reason many chose to seek arbitration is to keep their disputes private.
    Recently, The University of Maine School of Law created a new endowment fund named the Vincent L. McKusick Fellowship Fund, which will provide tuition and other support to incoming law students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, with the intent of increasing the diversity of the student body at the Maine Law School and within the legal community in Maine.
    McKusick said the purpose of the Fund is to increase the diversity of the bar in order to make it more reflective of the population at large, not only in Maine, but throughout the nation.
    “The bar should be a fair representation of the citizenry,” McKusick said. “It takes a long time for people to come up through the legal education system, so diversity in the bar comes a long time after shifts in the population at large.”
Asked if he will retire anytime soon, McKusick, who wrote an essay entitled “A Firm Foundation for Life After the Bench,” in which he credits his firm’s use of “his antiquity” for his satisfaction with his later life said he will work as long as they let him.
    “It’s what keeps me young.”