I rise to a point of privilege. On Thursday night, we bade farewell to a good and faithful public servant, a man dedicated to the rule of law, and unafraid to take on its strongest enemies, including brutal cops, crooked prosecutors, the Russian mob, suburban militias, gun manufacturers, thugs from the Pinochet regime, and the architects of the country's post 9/11 torture program, never taking a step back.
Farewell, Manhattan District Attorney Jack McCoy.
Sam Waterston has played the iconic New York prosecutor on NBC's Law and Order since 1994, breaking only when the show went off the air in 2010, eventually being bumped up into the DA's job over its last several seasons. When it returned in 2022, he was still there, surrounded by even younger associates and working with even younger cops. I have been a Waterston fan ever since The Killing Fields. One of my favorite of his performances was his voiceover of Abraham Lincoln in Ken Burns' Civil War series. In that role, he made an interesting choice in his delivery of the Gettysburg Address. In every performance I've ever heard of that speech, the person delivering it emphasizes the prepositions in its famous final line —"OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people." Waterston, however, leaned into the word, "people"—"of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE" ETC. I think Waterston's interpretation is the right one.
Over the two decades in which he inhabited the role of Jack McCoy, Waterston broke the mold of a show that, at its beginning, religiously avoided the personal lives of its characters. (The original ADA, Ben Stone, played with Jesuitical fanaticism by Michael Moriarty, apparently had no life beyond the office.) McCoy could not be bound by such petty restrictions. First, there was his tragic do-they-or-don't-they romance with ADA Claire Kincaid. (The elimination of Jill Hennessy from the cast is the one thing for which I will never forgive the producers.) From that, we lived through Anita Van Buren's cancer, Lennie Briscoe's alcoholic past, Jamie Ross' weaselish ex-husband, and Serena Southerlyn's memories of being an unbeliever on Christmas Eve. The show was better for that — the writing became sharper, and plots more involving. Promoting McCoy to DA and bringing in Linus Roache's Michael Cutter as McCoy's McCoy saved the last couple years of the show's original run.
Once Steven Hill's grumpy Adam Schiff left office, the DA role spiraled through some weird casting choices — Dianne Wiest? Fred Thompson? — but bringing back McCoy in the big chair brought balance back to the franchise, largely through the gravitas with which Waterston infused the role. His multi-episode face-off with a crooked governor cemented this new persona. (The governor's character was a mash-up of Eliot Spitzer's inconvenient libido and Rod Blagojevich's shopping of a U.S. Senate seat. Ripped from the headlines!) The denoument episode of that arc, "The Drowned and the Saved," took its title from Primo Levi's 1986 vivid memoir of World War II, including his time in Auschwitz. In it, Levi writes:
“Those who saw the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai will remember the absurd zeal with which the English officer, prisoner of the Japanese, strives to build an audacious wooden bridge for them and is shocked when he realizes that the English sappers have mined it. So you see, love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue.”That ambiguity is why we have our Jack McCoys.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
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