THE AUTHOR

John Nolan joined Baker Company, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Marines, 1^st Marine Division in Korea in the Spring of 1951 and served there for the remainder of the year. During most of that time, a period of intense activity, he was the rifle platoon leader of Baker Company’s 1^st platoon. He was wounded and decorated (The Silver Star, Bronze Star w/ Combat “V”, Purple Heart) and left Korea on New Year’s Eve, 1952. Shortly after returning to the States, he wrote articles about the war that were published in PlC Magazine and The Marine Corps Gazette, an article on “Tactics and the Theory of Games” published in Army Magazine, and several articles on public issues for Commonweal.

After law school, Nolan was a law clerk to Justice Tom Clark, Supreme Court of the United States, and then joined the Washington law firm of Steptoe & Johnson, where he is currently a partner. He worked in the Kennedy Presidential Campaign in 1960. In 1962 and early 1963, with New York lawyer James Donovan, he helped to negotiate release of the Cuban Brigade, a project that involved extensive intermittent contact with Fidel Castro in Havana over a period of several months.

In 1963 and 1964, he served as the Administrative Assistant to the Attorney General (Robert Kennedy) and was active in civil rights and desegregation efforts in the South and in counter-insurgency initiatives in emerging nations in South America, Africa and the Far East. He helped manage Robert Kennedy’s Senate campaign in New York in the fall of 1964 before returning to Steptoe & Johnson. In the years that followed, he advanced all of Robert Kennedy’s foreign trips and, as Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Refugees, spent four weeks in Vietnam shortly before the Tet offensive. He handled national scheduling and advance for Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign of 1968.

Nolan has been a long-time Moderator of Aspen Institute Executive Seminars. He was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, England, in 1987 and again in 1992. He practices law in Washington, D.C., and he and his wife live in Bethesda, Maryland.