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Early in life Mortimer displayed his urge to excel. He got top marks in school, became captain of his high school swimming team. When he went to the University of Virginia, he knew what he wanted. "I said to myself I wanted to be Phi Beta Kappa," he recalls. A lawyer who was a fellow student of Caplin's remembers how hard he ran: "Almost from the first day, we knew Morty would be first in the class. Nobody was willing, or had the energy, to compete with him."
Caplin went out for boxing at the university and, lacking any special gifts of physique, he had to work at it. Since Virginia refused to subsidize football players, it got trounced regularly on the gridiron. Recalls Law School Dean Frederick Ribble: "The students were humiliated. They felt their manhood was in question. Then along came Morty, the boxer. He started knocking people down and became a hero." Dogged Middleweight Caplin fought for a time with a broken bone in his right hand.
A Seven-Exemption Man. Besides being a campus hero and making Phi Beta Kappa. Caplin fulfilled predictions by finishing first in his law school class (average: 94.5). In addition, he won the Raven Award as an outstanding man in his class. As a youthful lawyer, Caplin found his way to the Wall Street firm of Paul. Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. In 1950, before getting a doctor-of-laws degree as a night student at New York University, he went back to the University of Virginia to teach. By the time President Kennedy tapped him to be the nation's chief tax collector, Caplin was earning $15.000 a year as a professor and about $12.000 more as a consulting lawyer; taking his $20,3000-a-year post on the New Frontier meant a loss in income.
In Washington Caplin is still running hard. "His briefcase never leaves his side," sighs his wife Ruth. But Caplin seldom misses his weekly Saturday workout in the Pentagon gym with his three sons. (He also has two daughters, giving him a total of seven exemptions on his income tax.) Only five pounds over his college fighting weight. Caplin often lunches on Metrecal at his desk, always bends and stretches through a strenuous course of calisthenics no matter how late he gets home. "I lie in bed and count for him." says Ruth. "It does me a lot of good."
Prophetic Exceptions. The tangled income tax laws that Commissioner Caplin is charged with enforcing were messy right from the beginning. Within a few years after the U.S. first imposed an income tax, to help finance the Civil War, President Lincoln apologized to the nation for the "inequities in the practical applications." But he added: "If we should wait before collecting a tax, to adjust the taxes upon each man in exact proportion with every other, we should never collect any tax at all."
That first income tax law (rates: 3% on income of $600 or more, 5% on $10,000 or more) included a prophetic batch of exceptions, including a provision permitting every taxpayer to deduct a house rent allowance, whether he was a renter or not—a forerunner of many anomalous provisions to come.