Scope and Content Note
The papers of Carl Eugene McGowan span the years 1921-1988, with the bulk of the material concentrated in his years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1962-1988. The collection consists primarily of court case files depicting his judicial career. Included also are correspondence, speeches and writings by McGowan and others, subject material, and miscellany. The vast majority of the papers are of a professional nature with almost none reflecting his private life. The collection is organized into six series: General Correspondence, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Speeches and Writings File, Subject File, Miscellany, and 2023 Addition.
With its receipt of the Carl Eugene McGowan Papers in 1988, the Library of Congress added another rich collection to its unparalleled holdings of modern judicial papers. [The following description is taken from Library of Congress Acquisitions, Manuscript Division, 1988 (Washington, D.C.: 1990): 26-27 ] President John F. Kennedy appointed McGowan to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1963. Because of its location in Washington and its jurisdiction over cases involving federal agencies, this appeals court is often considered second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Usually a moderating influence on this deeply divided bench, McGowan served as chief judge from January 1980 to May 1981 when he assumed senior judge status with a reduced work load. He continued to serve as a senior judge until his death on 21 December 1987, at the age of seventy-six.
Carl McGowan was born in Hymera, Indiana, on 7 May 1911, and grew up in Paris, Illinois. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1932, McGowan earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1936. He practiced law in New York City with what is today the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. In 1939 he joined the Northwestern University law school faculty in Evanston, Illinois, before serving in the United States Navy during World War II as special assistant to the under secretary of the navy and later as associate general counsel for the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. After the war, McGowan practiced law briefly in Washington with the firm of Douglas, Proctor, MacIntyre & Gates, before returning to Illinois in 1948 to rejoin the faculty of Northwestern's law school. He served as an assistant to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson from 1948 to 1952 and was a key organizer of Stevenson's unsuccessful 1952 Democratic bid for the presidency against Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. McGowan remained close to Stevenson and delivered the eulogy at the governor's funeral in 1965. After the Stevenson campaign, McGowan continued to teach at Northwestern, practiced law in Chicago with the firm of Ross, McGowan, Hardies & O'Keefe, and served as general counsel to the Chicago and North Western Railway Company until his appointment to the appeals court.
McGowan often complained that too many lawyers wrote poorly, smothering their arguments "under literally bushels of word, inexpertly put together." His own judicial opinions were noted for their precision. In a 1980 opinion, McGowan articulated standards that became widely adopted elsewhere for determining the admissibility in a criminal trial of information about defendants' prior convictions. In a 1977 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving a background briefing by Henry Kissinger, then head of the National Security Council, McGowan delivered a much-needed judicial definition of a background briefing. It is a procedure, said McGowan, "designed to permit dissemination of information to the public, while simultaneously avoiding the risks associated with the direct quotation of high-ranking government personnel or official attribution of sensitive statements to government sources identified by name."
Among the more notable of McGowan's cases was his 1973 vote with the majority in a 5 to 2 decision ordering President Nixon to turn over disputed White House tape recordings made after the Watergate break-in. In 1982 McGowan wrote the opinion rejecting Nixon's attempt to keep portions of some six thousand hours of tapes from being made public.
During his lifetime, McGowan expressed his desire to leave his papers to the Library, and the collection was formally donated after his death as the gift of his wife, Josephine Perry McGowan. The McGowan papers total approximately forty-five thousand items, with nearly three quarters of the collection consisting of files on cases that came before the appeals court. These files contain notes on and drafts of the opinions delivered in the case, copies of briefs, and notes on the views of other judges regarding the disposition of the case. The McGowan Papers also contain extensive files on procedural rules and the administrative conduct of the federal judiciary, particularly the appeals court; files relating to McGowan's many lectures and essays on legal matters; and papers concerning his participation in legal and judicial conferences and his legal education and research activities. The collection also contains copies of the judge's general correspondence file for the period of his judicial career as well as an oral history interview on Adlai Stevenson, drafts of his Stevenson eulogy, and lectures and essays he wrote about Stevenson.