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MILES LORD: I'm enjoying it very much. I have all my kids in my law office. And they're all working like little beavers. And they're letting me relax a little bit. I just handle the big decisions, but they do everything else.

GARY EICHTEN: Kind of lord over the operation as they are?

MILES LORD: Right. But sometimes, they advise me too. They'll stop me from doing something that a foolish little old man might do.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you work full-time now, Judge, or--

MILES LORD: Practically, practically. Probably four days a week, but it isn't programmed that way. I just sneak off sometimes for a couple of half days.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you handle most of the-- do you or your kids handle most of the cases that come to you? Do you refer most of them?

MILES LORD: We have--

GARY EICHTEN: How does that work?

MILES LORD: My kids handle some, but we only handle some of the bigger cases, some the tougher ones or the more interesting ones.

GARY EICHTEN: Mm-hmm.

MILES LORD: And then I have about 40 lawyers around this town. I have the biggest law firm in town without walls because I have experts in every field that are-- each one of them is doing some part of my work for me, you see.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you do any trial work?

MILES LORD: Well, strangely enough, when I really get ready to try a case, they've been settling lately. I got some pretty good settlements, didn't have to give up the opportunity to try them. I would like to have some to try. I have some interesting things that I may be able to get them into court. I love it. And my whole life was in the courtroom. And I'm not getting there as much as I'd like to.

GARY EICHTEN: Would you have an advantage, you think, because you sat on the bench so long yourself to work that judge a little better maybe than the other guy?

MILES LORD: No, I don't think so. I was just listening to the name of a bunch of the lawyers in Hennepin County, and most of them are lawyers that appeared before me or who that I helped to get to be judges by being on the governor's appointment or his selection committee or by talking to the members of the selection committee when I wasn't on there.

Some of them, I started to law school, just talked him into going. But I never would lean on that. Well, there's the judge up there in that black robe, that's in charge of the courtroom, as far as I'm concerned. And people think I might be impolite to a judge, that I might be. That's hypothetical. I never have been. But no way. That's-- ma'am, Your Honor, please. That's the way it goes, on your knees.

BOTH: [LAUGHING]

GARY EICHTEN: Do you miss being a judge?

MILES LORD: No, I do not miss it. I'm glad to be out of it. I worked my head off to get in there. I wanted to be one all my life. And then, some friends of mine had a little boy. They lived in Florida, and they kept talking about bringing him to Minnesota. So he came to Minnesota. And they dressed him all up. They told him how he was going to play in the snow and slide and skate.

He went out the door, and about 30 seconds later, he rapped-- [KNOCKS] on the door. "I want to come in now." "Well, aren't you going to play in the snow?" And he says, "I already did that." That's the way I am with the judgeship. "I already did that." I don't want to be a referee or a master or anything else.

I'm doing what I want to do. I'm representing the ordinary people that need help. I don't take on-- if a corporation hires me and a couple of them had to take on another corporation, if they're not trying to do rotten deeds to somebody, I would work with them. But I wouldn't take on corporate work against individuals, especially where there is-- where the corporation is not clearly in the right. I just wouldn't do that. I'm not partisan about it.

GARY EICHTEN: Why do you hate corporations, Judge?

MILES LORD: Do I hate corporations? No, I do not. I'd like to own them all. Then I'd have a monopoly.

GARY EICHTEN: [LAUGHS]

MILES LORD: No, I've worked for corporations, and I've helped corporations. But I never allowed a corporation to do any naughty business. I've worked for Indian reservations. I've turned over the government on a couple of Indian reservations. And they did big gambling, and they turned it over to the big gamblers, the non-Indians, and I object to that. I wouldn't work for them.

I don't believe in it. First of all, I don't like to take gambling money. And second of all, they go hire the biggest law firms in town. As soon as they get an office they can afford it. So I'm just plodding along with the ordinary person. Some poor guy gets run over, his kids get chewed up by a dog, or somebody feeds them bad medicine or cuts off the wrong leg or something like that. That's the kind of people I love to work for.

GARY EICHTEN: You know as well as I do, there are people, of course, who say you've become nothing but an ambulance chaser since you--

MILES LORD: Sure--

GARY EICHTEN: Left the bench.

MILES LORD: I'm an ambulance chaser.

GARY EICHTEN: Are you really?

MILES LORD: Yeah, if you define an ambulance chaser as a person who advertises and who will go out to a house to see a person who is injured, if they call him, then that's ambulance chasing. It's all in the eye of the beholder.

The people who are complaining about it most are the people who represent insurance companies, whose money I take and give to the poor, while they own all the big buildings downtown, or they're the lawyers who used to have hook-ups with the police department, policemen individually, the ambulance drivers, the nurses in the emergency room. Then they'd pay them a little stipend for sending them in a case.

I just cut out the middle man. I go direct to the consumer. I say, hey, this is me, Miles Lord. Me and my kids and my friends, my lawyers are good. And we're mean, and we want to help you. Come on in, and we'll do the thing for you. We'll get you more money than many other lawyers you meet.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you have a-- do you get a lot of people who at least, initially, give you a call who really are interested in ripping off insurance companies?

MILES LORD: Yeah.

GARY EICHTEN: It may not be hurt that bad.

MILES LORD: I have some of that. I've had people call up to and say, "I fell down stairs. How much money do I get?" I mean, they don't talk about who's at fault or what does your-- sure, I have a lot of cases I reject. And if a lawyer is real hungry, he might take those cases, I never would.

There is some fraud in the plaintiff's cases, but I want you to listen to me while I tell you about this. For every person who cheats an insurance company, I would venture to say that there are 20 who are cheated by an insurance company.

The insurance adjuster gets first on the scene to see that victim and says, no, don't hire a lawyer. He's going to charge you 33 and-- 1/3%. I am your friend. I'm going to help you all I can. I'm going to try and intervene with the boss to get you a lot of money. And so they play Mutt and Jeff between the adjuster in the field and the boss back in the home office.

And that poor client, that injured victim, gets bounced back and forth and back and forth. And they'll play with them for a couple of years, pay their hospital bills and so forth, and all at once, bang, they cut them off. People think the Statute of Limitations has run. It's too late. They played around too long. They don't know they have six years.

In fact, I'm just running an ad on some of the commercial stations saying, hey, if they play around with you so long that you think you don't have a case, call me, and I'll bet you, you do. You've got six years from the date of the accident.

GARY EICHTEN: What did you make of the famous case down in Arizona, the McDonald's lawsuit?

MILES LORD: Oh, that was a good-- that was a good case, I'll bet you. See, I happen to know.

GARY EICHTEN: Because that's been held up as the example of how things truly have gotten out of control in this country.

MILES LORD: You see, I know, Mrs. Kroc. I know how many airplanes she has. I know how big her boat is. I've been at her house. That's the lady who runs McDonald's.

GARY EICHTEN: Sure.

MILES LORD: Her husband invented the hamburger, I guess. But in any event, I would tell her-- I haven't visited with her about this, that that's a good lesson. Now, Joan, cool that coffee. She makes as much-- that is, the company does, she doesn't make it all, they make as much in one day on coffee as that verdict comes to, I believe.

GARY EICHTEN: But don't people have a responsibility to take some responsibility for their own behavior? I mean, I don't want to get into the specifics of the McDonald's case, but there is a kind of-- there is a sense in this country that people are so willing to sue everybody else and they just refuse to say, well, I goofed up and I got to swallow my pride.

MILES LORD: It sounds like all Rush Limbaugh talking. That's his deal, independence. Everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost. And if you happen to get run over or you happen to get burned or scalded or electrocuted or poisoned or amputated, you should just be a good citizen and let the people get away with it. But the law doesn't say that.

The law says that when somebody injures you through their negligence, through their carelessness, you are entitled to go to the court and to ask for payment for pain. Have you seen some people? Think of anybody that would be listening to this knows some poor devil that was rear-ended and he never got over it. They say it's temporary. They say it's soft tissue.

I have friends from some of my wife's bridge club, rear-ended 25 years ago. I said, go to a lawyer. Oh, no, no. I don't want to do that. They can't stand up straight today. They can't hold their head. They can't turn their head. And you don't know when that injury comes up. You get a whiplash injury, and you maybe not feel it for five or six months.

Well, if you haven't seen a doctor, in the meantime, the insurance companies will say, you just made that up. You fell down stairs. You weren't in the car. No, I take-- I make no apologies for the fact that people sue. People should sue.

GARY EICHTEN: Are you supposed to, as a judge, just sit there and read the law books and plug in the--

MILES LORD: I never did that.

GARY EICHTEN: --plug the case in or--

MILES LORD: I never did that. Not me. I refereed a case to see that everybody was fair with everybody else. And that they didn't come up with a bunch of boogeymen out of the woods that are supposed to have committed a crime, or some hypothetical possibility. I just cut that stuff out.

If I were on the Simpson case, it would have been over two weeks ago.

GARY EICHTEN: You obviously heard some of the biggest cases. Certainly, in recent Minnesota history, we're involved in some reserve mining comes to mind. What was the most interesting one that you heard that got a lot of publicity?

MILES LORD: Well, you know, some of them lasted so long that it-- you have to be interested in them. Sometimes, you know, judges say patent cases are very boring, but you get into them and they're interesting to see how things work and how people work to get a patent and so forth.

The reserve mining case was interesting, but it got boring after a while. I hadn't been in it two months before I realized that it wasn't really a case. It was just a tax gimmick that they were working to stall off the time when they'd have to invest some money to take that stuff out of the lake that dump-- that they were dumping. There are a lot of young people who don't even remember that.

I wasn't in it very far before I knew that there could be no resolution of it in a federal court. And that they were just using it to stall. The interest during the daytime, if you just counted the daytime hours, was running at the rate of $144 a second. If a lawyer said, I object. It's illegal, immoral and fattening, he would have made about $500 or $600 for the reserve mining company.

And they did that, and they delayed it. I became rather frustrated, so I just had my law clerks visit with the newspapers about what was going on. The radio people and the public radio carried a lot of stuff. It was a discouraging exhibition of what the law should be, of how the law should work. That was an example of, I tried to give like Judge Ito was doing.

I tried to give everybody all the time that they needed to prove their case. And as a result, it just went on for thousands of pages. And there was no resolution at the end. Finally, I got removed from the case because I wanted to check the air samples, basically.

The Mayo Clinic had been in charge of sampling the air, and so they brought which airborne asbestos is supposed to be much worse than stuff you ingest or eat or swallow. So I had them check the air, and they came back with three or four days of sampling.

I later found out each one of those was a rainy or snowy day. You couldn't find much dust in the air on a snowy day. The women were wiping it off the front porch, a quarter of an inch in the morning. So it wasn't a fun experience. Although the publicity that generated often is credited with alerting the world's-- the ecologists, at least to the dangers of industrial pollution.

So that was one I had what was then and probably still is the world's largest class action. I had that for several years and--

GARY EICHTEN: Dalkon Shield?

MILES LORD: No, the Dalkon Shield, I did that one in pretty quick. I was smarter in those days. I just called the company people in and balled them out, and they went bankrupt. I tried-- the only asbestos case is Johns-Manville, tried to a verdict, and they went bankrupt. So if a judge will take a hold of things, you can change it. But you have to be ready to do that. You have to be ready to do what a judge does.

Now, you mentioned something to me earlier about a-- while we were-- before we started this broadcast about a person's feelings, how they might or might not interfere with the judicial temperament or his decisions. Most judges that come from the Atlanta gentry, they come from more or less the establishment. And those who don't come from-- they would like to be promoted, and you can't make waves.

You can't be controversial if you're going to get promoted to the next higher step, to the Court of Appeals or to the Supreme Court. So, I never worried about that. I took the power that the federal judge has, which is usually manipulated by industry and money, and wealth and Wall Street. I took that and turned it against them. And that was a little bit too much for them to contemplate. They just raised heck with me.

GARY EICHTEN: Tell me about the case involving women's athletics.

MILES LORD: Well, I was once a male chauvinist pig, and my son-in-law came by one morning and said, Miles, I see you have-- that's Wayne Farris. He's a young lawyer, not so young anymore. Incidentally, that case was tried 24 and a half years ago. But in any event, he came by and said, what are you going to do for these women? I said, well, I might let them go out for wrestling.

They wanted to run on the boys' running team and play tennis on the boys' team. And I thought, I might let them go out for wrestling. He walked out. Pretty quickly, I got a call from my daughter. She says, Daddy, what did you say to Wayne? I didn't realize it then, but she had just-- she called from the hospital and just given birth to a little girl. So she was pretty passionate about what she was telling me.

And she said, you be careful. When I was in high school, I was a cheerleader. I could jump and holler and scream, she said. What did the other girls do when they got frustrated? Nothing but cry, Dad. You be careful.

I got a call from my sister. What did you say to Wayne? she told me. I said, well, he's a tattletale. What do you mean? She said, do you remember when we were up at Crosby and the girls could play basketball in old Black Bloomers with a wobbly ball, when the boys came on the court, "Off the court, girls, on with the boys" in nice wool jerseys, and so forth?

I thought that over, what these people had said to me. And then I heard the case. And I said that it was illegal for high schools or any other-- yeah, high schools, basically, to spend more money on boys athletics than they did on girls. That decision was opposed by, guess who? The Minnesota High School League, people who are supposed to be promoting athletics in high schools.

And I decided against them, and it was sustained on appeal. Later, Mondale Incorporated, that kind of thing into Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. And it became the law of the land. But this was what they call a seminal case.

GARY EICHTEN: How did you get involved in politics?

MILES LORD: Well, I think I did as many politician does. It wasn't really the call of the voter, the call of the electorate. It was the honing of the-- the hull of the creditors. [LAUGHS] I came to Minneapolis, I didn't know anybody. I came from this little town of Crosby in Harrington. I worked day and night. I didn't even know the kids in my law school class.

I didn't have any social life. My wife would stay home six months between even a movie, we would stay home. Maybe get a two bits and buy two White Castle hamburgers or I think you'd get five then, and have a big night out at home. So, when I got out of law school, I started looking around. I knew the little lady that ran the Harvard market, and she had a case. That's on in Dinkytown there in Washington Avenue.

And so, I thought, well, I'll take a run at politics and get acquainted with some people and do some good for my country at the same time. So I ran in what was then a very conservative area, Kenwood, and I lost. I had-- a friend of mine had a silkscreen company, which was a new method then, I thought. He gave me silkscreen signs to put up. I just add them up about 25 feet high, all up and down the line in Kenwood.

You could see just a line of them down the street. And then, the police would come out and tear them down. They had a Republican, Alderman. He'd send the police out, and they'd tear them all-- they'd tear them all down. They'd be down by 10:00 in the morning. And they started following around.

So one guy caught me up a pole. I went way up a pole and put a sign up there, and I came down. And this cop collared me. Hey, what are you doing up there? I said, I'm putting up that sign. What are you doing that for? I said, well, this guy, Miles Lord, told me to put a sign up there.

He says, you tell that Miles Lord we're going to get him. And he gave me a kick in the butt and sent me down the street. I didn't file any complaint. I just got out of there. [LAUGHS]

GARY EICHTEN: Well, then, so that-- what year was that?

MILES LORD: 1950, I believe.

GARY EICHTEN: So just a couple of years later, now you're the State Attorney General. How does that come to pass?

MILES LORD: Well, with a bit of notoriety, they got running for the legislature, somebody said, why don't you be an Assistant US District Attorney? Harry Truman was president. When did he end up? He ended up--

GARY EICHTEN: '52 was his last year.

MILES LORD: '52, yeah. So I served as an Assistant US Attorney. I was given the income tax assignment. And there were some of the people that Humphrey had dug out while he was mayor four years earlier. One of them was Tommy Banks, one of the local kingpins of what was then an underworld.

It wasn't too much of an underworld compared to now. But they had a bunch of liquor stores that he operated. And I sent him to jail. And I found the kids getting doped up in St. Cloud Reformatory. And one of the defendants I had said, he'd been on the dope habit, and he'd got out to steal money for dope. So we conducted an investigation up there.

Later, I learned that he could have sustained his dope habit on a paper route. But by the proceeds of a paper route, all he was doing was taking bennies or some Benzedrine or some of that stuff. But it made news. And I never was above. I never tried to hide my light under a bushel.

When I-- then, see, as a result of that kind of publicity, I had been-- I had attended some of Humphrey's speeches in 19-- oh, my goodness, 1943 or '42, around that way when he was running, before I went to the army. And I thought he had a pretty good philosophy. And I adopted it or it meshed with mine. And I've never really changed much from that.

GARY EICHTEN: Tell me about Hubert Humphrey.

MILES LORD: The most brilliant person I ever knew. Head and shoulders above anyone I've ever know or ever heard of. And I hear they have some of his cells. In the various operations, they have the cells. And I'd like to see them clone him. You'd really have something. I mean, the guy was brilliant.

He remembered everything. He thought of everything. He had instant recall. He had-- he could put things together. But the other night, I saw Bill Clinton make a speech to a group of people who were in Washington, an off-the-cuff speech. And it was a lot like Humphrey, more than almost anybody I've ever seen. Hubert was my good friend. I pulled a lot of tricks on him. But I-- we were good friends.

GARY EICHTEN: What about Eugene McCarthy?

MILES LORD: Gene was and is my friend. Gene says that people can forgive you for being wrong, but they can't forgive you for being right. And he said, no, it feels-- I don't know if he feels vindicated. I think there's not much vindication in saying that 50,000 dead people. McNamara admits 50,000 people died for nothing.

I never really liked that war. When the kids came in to me as a judge, I tried to talk them into doing something besides. When they didn't want to go to war, I tried to talk them into some kind of service. I think I only sent a couple. Minnesota prosecuted more so-called Draft Dodgers than any other state, at least per capita, a higher percentage.

One day, there was a little boy, a young kid in my courtroom. And I said, Danny, why don't you go and do some alternative work? Why don't-- I'll give you this sentence. You can choose it, go some work-- do some work, help the government. You can still write your letters, and do so, things like that. Now, Danny, you really ought to do that, Danny.

He says, Miles, why don't you bite the bullet and declare this damn war unconstitutional? And I said, well-- I said, most people call me Judge. He said, you call me Danny. I thought that was typical of those young kids during the Vietnamese war. The nuns would come in, and they'd been sitting in front of a building here or there. I had to giggle.

I never said I didn't enjoy being a judge while I was there. I enjoyed it. Until the end, I got tired of it.

GARY EICHTEN: Walter Mondale, can you give us your thoughts on him, another big Minnesota political figure? Do you have--

MILES LORD: Well, Mondale was my assistant when I was Attorney General, as you probably know. Then when I resigned, he took my place. Then when he-- and I said, the governor says, well, how will we elect somebody if you leave, Miles? Orville Freeman said when I was resigning.

I said, I have enough in the file to make the next Attorney General the most popular man in Minnesota. Why don't you be it? I said, I already am, let's go on from there. So I gave Mondale a file that contained the results of the investigation of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute. All Mondale had to do was to disclose it to the newspaper reporters, and he was the most popular guy in Minnesota.

Then later, Humphrey asked me to be the US Attorney. I really didn't want to take the job because I had had a very good taste of that six years earlier-- eight years earlier. And I knew about everything there was to know about it. So I thought. might as well take it. It'll be easier for you to be a judge because it'll be a little static anyway, if you want to become a judge. And from the stepping stone from the US Attorney's office is a better place, so, OK.

I stayed in that office six years. When I got there, I'm digressing. The Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation file was waiting for me. So I spent about two years prosecuting that and sending the people to jail. Nationwide charitable scandal that would make what's happened in the United way look simple.

Dozens of charities established for only the sole purpose of using the Sister Elizabeth Kenny donors' list to enrich the people who mail the letters. They charged double the cost. And they could send in a million letters into the slums where they didn't get much back, but they could send another million into the sucker list, you might call it, the donors' list that Sister Kenny had, and they'd come out about even.

But the only person that made any money on it was the mailers. They spent 10 years in jail, as did Mayor Klein, a former mayor of Minneapolis. So, Mondale, when he wanted to be-- go to the United States Senate, Hubert Humphrey went to the vice presidency, there was a vacancy in the Senate. I went up in the woods with Karl Rolvaag.

And after several bottles of pop, after we talked it over for a couple of evenings before the camp fire-- our families were along, the Rolvaag's family and mine, we sent for Mondale.

GARY EICHTEN: Why didn't you run yourself for the Senate?

MILES LORD: I never wanted-- well, I wouldn't say I didn't want to go to the Senate. I would have had a ball in the Senate. I would love to have gone. But my wife never liked politics. And she didn't want to go to Washington. And that's-- I tried to keep my promise because I promised I'd stay with her.

One time, I was feuding with Wendy Anderson because he had tried to interfere with the reserve mining case when he told me he would not. And then he appointed himself to the Senate, and I said, somebody should remove him from the Senate. I said, if nobody else does, I may do it myself.

And I said that two or three times. My wife, publicly, was in the paper. My wife said, Miles, if you keep talking about running in the Democratic Primary, you'll run, and you'll win. If you win the Democratic Primary, you'll win the general election, and you'll go to Washington, alone.

GARY EICHTEN: [LAUGHS]

MILES LORD: So that took the wind out of my sails. Rolvaag would have appointed me to the Senate. But he said-- I said, no, Maxine doesn't want to go. He said, I understand that. Who should we appoint?

GARY EICHTEN: Why do you suppose the Minnesotans have played such a-- at least for a while there, were playing such a big role on the national scale?

MILES LORD: Well, it was basically led by Humphrey. Gene was down there first. Eugene McCarthy was there for a couple of years before Humphrey came along, but there was enough. Like when a big truck passes, it kind of-- if you're on a motorcycle or a bicycle, want to suck you in behind it, that's the way Humphrey was.

And he vouched for Mondale. He vouched for Orville Freeman. He vouched for Gene McCarthy. He helped them. He taught them. He mentored them and did all the things that a great leader can do. And he was very instrumental in helping all of these people. And he was so good. He'd help anybody that would listen to him.

But I don't want to detract from those people there. Gene McCarthy is a great mind. He's a deep-thinker. And Mondale has his own capabilities. It's been fun to watch and participate in it. When McCarthy and Humphrey were running against each other for president--

GARY EICHTEN: What did you do? Whose side were you on on that?

MILES LORD: I was for Humphrey, but I never left Gene McCarthy's side either. I would get on an airplane-- I was a federal judge. I've seen federal judges run out of business for less than this. In fact, they removed Abe Fortas for helping Lyndon Johnson to write some speeches about Vietnam or something. But I would get on an airplane, and I'd ride, let's say, to Wichita with Hubert.

I'd get off, and Gene would be coming in there. I'd ride with him. And then that night, I'd get them together on their telephones so they could talk. And I-- there is a song, "We darn near made it that time." I was so close to getting them together. But some other people interfered, some people who were hearing about what I was doing, they wanted to run off and be the people that captured the flag.

And they got interfering with the relationship. In the last few critical days, I couldn't get them together. But I have never told anybody before what I'm telling you. We were at the Hilton Hotel in 19-- was it '58, the kids were riding across--

GARY EICHTEN: '68.

MILES LORD: '68, the kids were riding across the street. My daughter came to me-- my daughter Priscilla. She said, Dad, you should go over there. And here I am, a federal judge. Go over there and talk to those kids.

GARY EICHTEN: So you're in Chicago?

MILES LORD: Yeah, in Chicago by Lake Michigan. The kids were riding across the street, throwing stink bombs in the hotel and so forth. I went and looked around there and I came back. And I went up to Hubert in his suite up on the top. I said, Hubert, let's go across there. Let's go talk to those kids.

Secret Service just came, pushed me out of the way. I came back. I didn't push very easily. I said, Hubert, let's go over there. I said, the election is across the street, with the kids, with the protesters. He said, well, the election is probably across the street, but the nomination is down in the Cow Palace or whatever, I've forgotten the name of that place in downtown Chicago.

He says, if I go across the street with you, Lyndon Johnson may come here and take this nomination away from me. He said, I can't go. I said, well, then let me take the kids. So I lined up Skip and Nancy and Doug and Bobby Humphrey. I said, come on. And then I went to George McGovern. He was making a speech, and I walked in with these kids. He stopped his speech. He had a whole big room full of people.

He said, what is it, Miles? I said, I want to take the kids across the street. OK, he said, but you have to take them all. You have to take Gene's too. So here I marched up to Gene's suite with all of Humphrey kids and all the McGovern kids. And I said, Gene, where are your kids? Why do you want them? Because I'm going to take them across the street.

Gene said, that's my constituency. You needn't talk to them. I'll talk to them. I said, remember, we don't want any violence here, and it's going to happen if these kids get much wilder. My trip was over. A few minutes later, I heard Gene addressing the troops across the street. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-da, building up to a crescendo.

And that night, the kids got the hell beat out of them on the streets of Chicago. But I was still trying to mend it, still trying to get Humphrey and McCarthy together until the last night of the election. That didn't work.

GARY EICHTEN: DFL Party in the state is, well, it's was 50 last year-- turned 50 last year. Is it kind of lost its soul? How would you-- what's happened to the DFL Party in your mind?

MILES LORD: I think-- when you say it lost its soul, I think it lost its goal, and it lost its soul. If the goal is incumbency, these guys are scoring 100% there. See, of course, there's-- I have always had the theory that a politician should be ready to be expendable. You should stand up for what you believe. And if the voters don't want that, they vote somebody else in.

But too many voters will do anything to stay or-- too many politicians will do anything to stay in office. And that's why we find people voting for increase in workers compensation. That's why we can't-- you know what they say, our state can't afford taxes. Who said? How about Democrats nationwide?

Of course, I have to be careful. I think I'm the guy that told Mondale to admit he was going to raise taxes. But see, for me, I would have said the same thing. I'd say, hey, we got to have this stuff. You got to help us. This is our country. We're working together.

But of course, Reagan taught him to be selfishness and greed, to enter into the electorate, just as it does on the stock market where anything goes to make a profit. I believe you asked a question, has the Democratic party lost its soul? And I think it's lost its goal while it's seeking its soul.

Lobbyists in about 1973 or '74, some of the people from the governor's office went into the lobbying business, and the state has never been the same since. The same lobbyists will represent both sides of a case and give each one a half a loaf.

I think it's a mess over there. And I love most of the people over there. I know a great many of them. But my word to them would be to vote what you think is right. And if you get kicked out of office, go back to the farm or the law practice or the school teaching or wherever you belong. What's so important about your incumbency that makes you vote the same way that the opposition would vote? What are you then? Are you a Democrat or are you an opportunist?

GARY EICHTEN: Have you met any Republicans in your life that you like?

MILES LORD: Sure, sure. My father-in-law was a great Republican. He used to-- he had Parkinson's, and he'd shake and couldn't talk very good. We'd meet some strangers, and he'd say, I have this Parkinson's. It's a terrible thing to put up with. I shake, I drool, I can't speak plainly, he said, but I got worse problems than that. They said, my god, Mr. Santelli, what was that? He said, my daughter married a Democrat.

BOTH: [LAUGHING]

MILES LORD: Yeah, I've got it. If I told you some of my friends, you'd spook. You'd think that I had been double-crossing the Democrats, but they know where I stand, the guys from General Mills and Pillsbury, who were my personal friends, and from Archer Daniels Midland and a lot of places where I have friends.

GARY EICHTEN: What do you make of the popularity of talk radio these days, which is largely dominated, I think, by conservatives, the Rush Limbaughs, and so on? How do-- what's your reading on that?

MILES LORD: I hear some of that in Minneapolis. And I often would disagree with the people. But when you disagree with them, you get the button. They press the button, and you're not on the air anymore. I've heard them do it. I wouldn't call in and say, this is Miles Lord, and start trying to help straighten them out of the public, and then have them give me the button. They just. Cut me off.

They build their own audience, and they-- it's repeaters. And I have a young friend in Wayzata who calls all the time in this particular station, and they're best buds. And they know what each other's going to say. I don't-- I'm a great First Amendment person, and I think that's the whole-- the whole cheese is the First Amendment. That's what can save our country if the right-wingers will leave it alone, but--

GARY EICHTEN: Is it a good forum for the little person who, through the course of your life, you made a real effort to represent in your various offices?

MILES LORD: Let me tell you about-- I was talking with a friend of mine the other day, old Homer Bonhiver, this great CPA who's done a lot of great things around town here. I said-- I got a little philosophical. I said, Homer, there's a-- you and I don't realize it anymore. We're rich guys now. We've moved up, I said, but do you remember-- I mean, can you imagine how many people out there who don't have enough to eat, who don't have proper medicine, who don't have clothes?

They don't have proper grammar. They don't have proper education. They don't have proper family ties. And I'm not talking about Black people. At the time, I was thinking of white people, the non-- the old American colonists that came in here. I knew some of them. Some of them were related to me. But they don't-- there just is a different world for those people.

It's not the same world. It's not even the same world as the people who will listen to this radio. There are a kind of a Tony Bunch that listen to radio, intellectuals. There aren't many of those people that listen. Yeah, and Homer said to me after I mentioned this, he said, yes, and all those people are disgusted with life. And they don't know who's doing it to them, so they vote Republican.

What Limbaugh and a talk radio host, who was a radical right, do is to simplify the issues, to demonize, particularly the Democrat or Liberal politician, and to say there's where it's coming from. Whereas, if people don't know that about 2% or 3% of the people own, I think that's-- I think that's a figure that Rudy Perpich gave me yesterday when I had lunch with him, about 2% of the people or 3% owned 40% of the wealth.

And here is Rush Limbaugh out telling them what the people who are-- what the poor people's politicians are doing, how rotten they are.

GARY EICHTEN: President Clinton suggested a while ago-- about a month ago, after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that we need to tone down our rhetoric in this country. Would you agree with that? I mean, you've always been pretty outspoken.

MILES LORD: Yeah, but, you see, I'm only one voice. I am outspoken. But if-- and see, a lot of the talk shows are concentrating on one field. They saw Mr. Limbaugh do this thing and become popular, and they all are trying to do it. Now, I'm all for free speech. Anybody that wants to criticize me, I've been criticized many times. That's the way the game goes.

But to have a concerted effort to-- you see, the law says that you cannot use speech that will cause physical injury, that old theory about you can't yell fire in a theater. These people, particularly, Gordon Liddy, is telling people to shoot the police, shoot them in the head. But if you can't hit them in the head, give him a body shot, that'll slow them down.

Well, now, there are idiots that will follow that. We see some examples of them doing it every day. And it just seems to me that you wouldn't have to pass a law to get them to shut up if it's just suggested to them that this is terrible for you to do, Mr. Liddy. He was the one that was going to kill Jack Anderson, the newspaperman. He was ready to go and kill him. Put him on the air, he's great. If somebody makes money off it, it's OK.

You could advertise on his program for-- tell people if they get run over or shot to come see you, I suppose. But the company makes a lot of money. Now, I-- the Fifth-- the First Amendment is, I believe, one of the most important, the freedom of speech. I have never faltered on that.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you wish that you would have been able to become an Appeals Court judge or become a member of the Supreme Court?

MILES LORD: I wouldn't want to be on the Appeals Court. I turned that job down. Shortly after I was a district court judge, Eugene McCarthy said, well, do you want to be on the Appeals Court? And I said, no, on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, because that's too dry. That's just an intermediate thing. You get to review records. You can't say anything, you can't add anything.

Sometimes the people that sit on those courts get so bored they reverse the other guy just for the excitement of it, or they reverse them because one side had too many lawyers or things of that kind. Well, both Humphrey and McCarthy told me that if they were elected president-- and Mondale, I have that in writing from Mondale. If they were elected president, I would be their candidate for the United States Supreme Court.

Now that's three pals that ran for president. Three pals wanted to make me-- put me on the United States Supreme Court. I think I could have advised or convinced Maxine to go down there to Washington because I wouldn't be out politicking all the time. It's tough on wives to have their husband out all the time.

GARY EICHTEN: Was it better-- do you think you would have done well as a Supreme Court justice?

MILES LORD: What do you think of Paul Douglas? How did he do? Paul was a better writer than I am, but he was-- Paul Douglas actually went and looked at the places where they were going to build dams and see what would be covered up by it. He'd go and look at forests. Then he's going to come back and then come and sit on the court and decide the case. He was right out there, and he was outspoken, great guy.

Yeah, I would-- you don't have to be the world's greatest intellect. I don't ever claim to be that, to be on the United States Supreme Court. Sometimes those guys get so smart, they get lost in the books.

And any judge that's got too much brilliance, he's liable to forget what it would be like to be hungry out there, trying to dig in on some old, worn out land, trying to make a living or trying to make it as a small grocer and have the supermarkets come in and take you out, or a shoemaker or almost anything, or to have them downsize the company and send you out as they're doing now by the millions to work for $5 an hour while we claim to be the greatest country in the world.

I wouldn't have any problem being on the Supreme Court. I'd say what I thought. And sometimes they say the Supreme Court justices get themselves mixed up with God. I used to get people say, Lord, he thinks he's God, then to the extent that I could say what I wanted to say, do what I could within the law, to do what I thought was right, I always did that. I used the law. I used the judgeship to do what I thought was right.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you have any idea growing up in Crosby, Minnesota that you were going to end up doing all the things you've done in your life?

MILES LORD: I should say not.

GARY EICHTEN: What did you think you were going to end up being?

MILES LORD: Well, I remember one time when I was in high school, a man named [? Dap ?] [? Gray ?] came. He was a superintendent in an iron mine that was only about two blocks from my house. I said, Mr. [? Gray, ?] what's the future of common labor on the Cuyuna Iron Range? He said, Miles, there is no future for common labor anywhere. Hmm, I thought that over.

Then I met a guy named Earl Mollard, he was a superintendent of the mine. And I said-- let's see. The one who told me there was no future for common labor-- oh. He said, Miles, he said, whatever you're going to do, get out of town. He said, you never grow up in your own hometown. You're always Little Miles.

I listened-- that's about all. The only other advice I got was from my mother. She said, Miles, you ought to go to junior college at Brainerd, and then you could be a lawyer. She said, I think you'll make a good lawyer. And those are three points of life. You'd be surprised what a little bit of counseling can do for a kid.

I didn't get much advice when I was a kid, but I listened. So I got out of town when I was 20, came to Minneapolis and knew no one, and got a lot of jobs, working nights and so forth, started law school.

GARY EICHTEN: Kind of a wide swath.

MILES LORD: Oh, I don't know. Even when Moses led the people across the ocean, the water closed in behind him. You can't even see where they were. It was a wide swath at the time.