Memories of the Golden Child

January 16, 2022 Michael Olesker

Former Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs (Photo courtesy of Sol Levinson & Bros.)

From the time Steve Sachs was coming of age in post-war Forest Park in Northwest Baltimore, he was a kind of “Golden Child.” To know him was to kvell over him. And he was just getting started.

He graduated Friends School and went to Haverford. He won a Fulbright Scholarship to Oxford, and then he went to Yale for law school. He was smart, he was idealistic and he was driven.

In the ‘60s, when all political charisma was measured by Kennedy standards, he even had JFK hair. Then he found the perfect wife, the former Sheila Kleinman, herself a brilliant attorney. They were, by any measure, public and private, a golden couple.

When Sachs became U.S. attorney for Maryland, he developed a reputation as a fellow who followed the law, and cherished it, even when it pained him. He detested America’s misguided role in Vietnam, but he went after the “Catonsville Nine” anti-war fighters because, in their zeal to obstruct the military draft, they’d gone too far in destroying official records.

He developed a reputation for brilliance inside a courtroom, and toughness outside of it. Over in Southeast Baltimore one night, a local street racketeer who’d been prosecuted by Sachs for tax evasion told me, “Sachs? He’s the toughest. Them other guys don’t hold a candle. He’d lock up his own mother.”

“Was he straight with you?” I asked this guy.

“Straight?” the racketeer said. “What’s straight? He wanted to send me away. He’s ruthless.”

When I related this to Sachs, he said, “Sure, I’m tough. I like a fight. I think that’s fair. But ruthless, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.”

“Where’s the line between tough and ruthless?”

“Fairness,” said Sachs, without hesitating. “Nobody calls you ruthless when you prosecute bank robbers and drug pushers. Maybe that’s because they don’t have access to reporters. But start chasing white-collar, country club types, you start shaking the trees, you start going after people who thought they were immune and above the law, they get very defensive.”

He was elected Maryland’s attorney general two times, and people talked about him running for the U.S. Senate. This was 1986, when a lot of political figures around here found themselves in the midst of their very own legends.

Barbara Mikulski was gearing up for her own Senate run. Ben Cardin was talking about a run for governor. And so was William Donald Schaefer.

Sachs jumped into the governor’s race before any of them. He had the retiring Rep. Parren Mitchell as his running mate. It looked like a dream ticket, with Sachs, the Kennedy liberal and Mitchell, the civil rights icon.

Then Schaefer got into that gubernatorial race. He was finishing up 15 years as mayor of Baltimore. He was considered a political earth force. All air immediately went out of the Sachs-Mitchell ticket.

Blair Lee IV was their campaign manager and saw the impact right away. On the campaign trail that summer, with a sense of gallows humor, he’d tell Sachs, “Steve, you look almost life-like today.”

His political career ended there, but not his legal career. He went into private practice. He taught, he mentored a lot of young attorneys and he held to some old liberal principles, even when half the country seemed to slough them off.

His marriage to Sheila lasted nearly 58 years, until her death three years ago. And then, last week we lost Steve Sachs. He was 87. The “Golden Child” had a golden life, start to finish.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins.