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On to Washington. After another tour of digging sewers in Denver, Rhyne collected his savings and his wife Sue and headed back to Duke, where he completed his undergraduate course and entered law school (one classmate: a young Californian named Richard Nixon). He worked before school on a Durham Herald paper route, after school as a contractor's assistant, and in his spare time he got in a little work playing guard in scrub football games. But in an accident on his after-hours construction job, Rhyne mangled his right hand; the hand is still badly scarred, and the little finger is permanently stiff. Figuring that he could get a Government desk job requiring little use of the injured hand, he quit Duke, went to Washington with his wife, enrolled in the George Washington University Law School. Sue went to work as a clerk in The Hecht Co. department store, while Charlie worked first for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then with a hard-drinking trial lawyer, "who demanded that I work all night when it was necessary, and it seemed like it was necessary a lot of the time."
Rhyne got his law degree from George Washington in 1937, remained in Washington and hung up his shingle. Among his first clients were several cities fighting the price-fixing edicts of the National Bituminous Coal Commission. Rhyne lost the case, but it put him deep in the fields of municipal and administrative law, where he has remained. Through his single-minded devotion to work—"I've told Charlie often," says an old friend, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Walter Bastian, "that he's going to be the richest dead man in the world if he doesn't stop working so hard"−Rhyne has come to be senior partner of a nine-lawyer firm that occupies an entire floor in a Washington office building. He is a recognized authority in the field of aviation law, has appeared many times before the U.S. Supreme Court, won a decision in the Phillips Petroleum case that oil and gas producers have been trying to reverse ever since with highly controversial natural-gas legislation.
Instrument for Peace. Along with his work and his rise in the practice of law, Rhyne worked and rose in the American Bar Association. When he joined the A.B.A. in 1938, it was dominated by an inner circle of Old Guardmen, most of them interested in the A.B.A. only as a legal spokesman for right-wing political conservatism. Charlie Rhyne became the leader of a group of Young Turks determined to convert the A.B.A. into an organization for working lawyers.
Perhaps the most significant of the rungs that Rhyne climbed to the top of the A.B.A. ladder was his chairmanship of the organization's International and Comparative Law Section. It had long been a hapless sort of debating society, of interest only to a few professorial types. Says Rhyne: "We tried to make it a lawyer's section instead of a professor's section." In the process, the boy from the North Carolina cotton farm became devoted to the idea that the rule of law as known in the U.S. could, in the most practical possible way, become a rule of law to bring peace to the world. And that idea has hallmarked the administration of Charles Rhyne as president of the American Bar Association.