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Boy Wonder. Goldberg graduated from high school at 15 and entered upon a triple-time existence. Mornings he went to a junior college, afternoons he attended De Paul University, and nights he held down a post office job. As a tired-eyed 18-year-old, he was admitted to law school at Northwestern University—but only after proving, with some difficulty, that his two college transcripts represented the work of only one person.
While in law school, Goldberg worked part time as a clerk in a Chicago law office. Summers, he signed on as a construction laborer, once stepped on a rusty nail and had to wait out the then manda tory period of a week before he could collect workmen's compensation. He could not afford the loss of pay. "Ever since," he recalls, "I have not been friendly to the idea of waiting periods. Family needs don't wait."
Room at the Top. At 20, Goldberg graduated from Northwestern's law school with an A record marred only by a single B. There was never the slightest doubt that he would become a successful lawyer. In his very first case he pleaded an inheritance suit before the Illinois Supreme Court, and lost. But he lost few others over the next nine years, while building up a substantial reputation as a lawyer skilled in handling equity and corporate issues. Then, in 1938, two of Chicago's C.I.O. leaders—Van Bittner, a director of the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee, and Sam Levin of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers—asked Goldberg to represent the C.I.O.'s American Newspaper Guild, then on strike and in savage dispute with Hearst's Chicago Herald and Examiner. At that time both the C.I.O. and the Guild had Communists in high positions. "There was real trouble with the ideological conflict within the C.I.O.," recalls Goldberg, "and they needed a lawyer who was not only non-Communist but anti-Communist." Goldberg took on the dispute, helped bring about a settlement, and won the respect of both sides. That case, says Goldberg, started "my whole career in labor law."
The career was interrupted by World War II. Goldberg joined the Office of Strategic Services, spent the war in liaison with European labor unions, including those in Nazi-occupied territory, performing sabotage and espionage functions. Goldberg was discharged as a major in 1944, and the details of his work remain classified. All he will say is that published stories about his cloak-and-dagger operations behind enemy lines are false. He once wandered into German-held territory in France, but only because he had lost his way—and he quickly discovered the mistake and left the premises.