Albert G. Besser

engineer, for which he felt he had no qualifications, Al jumped at the chance to sign up for the foreign language program, although to do so meant going AWOL.

An officer who spotted him outside the testing tent agreed — Al was already persuasive — to let him try his luck with two years of high school French. “If you fail,” the officer said, “you’d better start running because, young man, you’re in a peck of trouble.”

Having succeeded, Al found himself studying Chinese at Berkeley. Volunteering for hazardous duty without asking what it entailed, Al was accepted into the Office of Strategic Services and served behind Japanese lines in China. His small unit arrived in Shanghai before the official peace treaty. Al commandeered a jeep to seek out a Jewish family that had been ghettoized in the Hongku District, and the community greeted him like a conquering hero.

Providing rations and care packages and communications with the outside world was one of his fondest memories. In 2017, U.S. Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont ceremoniously awarded Albert G. Besser the Congressional Gold Medal as a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services.

Discharged overseas in February 1946, Al spent six months teaching economics at St. John’s University in Shanghai before returning stateside. He entered Yale Law School, Class of 1949, that fall. Over the next three years, during which he made lifelong friends and prepared for what would be a career devoted to advocacy, Al was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and elected to Phi Beta Kappa (for his undergraduate work) and to the Order of the Coif (honorary legal society).

His first job after law school was with the esteemed firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn in New York City, where wearing a bowler hat to the office was de rigueur. Besser left New York for New Jersey when he wed Miss Greta Joy Rous of Brooklyn, N.Y., in December 1952. Over the next 68 years, 5 months, and 17 days they became entwined like the branches of a single oak tree.

Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey in the mid-1950s, Besser co-founded Hannoch, Weisman, Stern & Besser, which grew to be one of New Jersey’s preeminent law firms. Highlights of his career include winning a consequential antitrust case in the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully defending Kenneth Gibson, the first Black mayor of Newark, and bringing the Nets basketball team to New Jersey.

In addition to handling high-profile cases, Besser worked tirelessly to effect justice for the underdog and the indigent, as exemplified recently by his pro bono representation of impecunious clients and victims of domestic violence in Lamoille County.

The nickname “Bulldog,” bestowed upon Al in law school by his dear friend Hugo Black II, followed Al through life, latterly in his email address, private moniker and online password. The image befits Besser’s perseverance and tenacity. The Biblical mandate “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” encapsulates his lifelong honesty, integrity and single-minded motivation. The law, for him, was less a profession or source of income than a dedicated calling.

In his youth, Besser would get 18 holes of golf out of the way to please his parents before heading to the tennis court. An avid tennis player, he was a founding member of the Stowe Tennis Club, in 1954, when it still used the courts at the Tollhouse at Stowe Mountain. He loved to hike with his growing boys, shepherding them all over New Jersey and up and down the Long Trail until they graduated to more exotic climbs. Whatever the weather, Besser would swim in his pond every morning from Memorial Day to Labor Day, accompanied for 45 years by generations of dalmatians.

He became a patron of opera and the arts primarily to please Gretchen, then discovered how much he enjoyed these broadened horizons. By inviting potential clients to a box at the Met, he found he could kill two birds with a single stone.

Al and Gretchen travelled widely, especially after he “retired” from Hannoch Weisman and they moved into their Morrisville ski house. Among Al’s favorites were three trips to China, the first immediately after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when small children stamped on posters of the Gang of Four, passersby begged for Polaroids, and Al found himself mobbed at every street corner because he could speak Mandarin. For the rest of his life, up to a recent stay at UVM Medical Center, he bewitched every Chinese person he met with his courteous and old-fashioned colloquies in their tongue.

As a frequent letter-writing contributor and columnist to the Stowe Reporter, Al consistently and passionately espoused principles of justice and liberal democracy. He championed free speech, advocated for gun control, and pleaded to abolish the death penalty. Al was the longest-serving editor in the history of the New Jersey Law Journal, Zoom-attending his last meeting 10 days before his death.

Albert G. Besser is mourned by his wife Gretchen; sons, James, Neal and Brian; sister, Ann Besser Scott; son-in-law, Joseph Bocchino; and extended family, countless friends and mentees. The family extends appreciation to the staff of the Manor for its care and kindness.