And neither did Moses.
In Surrick's recent book, Lawyers, Judges and Journalists: The Corrupt and The Corruptors, Robert B. Surrick, Esq. gives an account of his over 30-year battle with Pennsylvania's political/judiciary complex. The book can be purchased on-line at http://www.surrickbook.com. The site also has excerpts of chapters. It could also be found at the Chester County Book Company, 975 Paoli Pike, West Goshen Center and 1078 E. Lancaster Ave., Brandywine Square, Downingtown.
In the battle process he brought down the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, got himself disbarred, destroyed his professional and personal career, lit a candle and continues to carry a torch for revolutionary change.
And Bob Surrick says that he is happier today than he has ever been in his life.
"I have had a lot of turmoil and a lot of trouble, but I am doing what I want to do and not many people can say that," he said. "I know the consequences of what is going on and I try and do what I think is right."
He said he is not a zealot nor is he an anarchist, although Ron Castile, who is now on the Supreme Court, called him an anarchist, one time, in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Surrick said that if you read his book carefully you will see that he does not take extreme positions.
"Is it extreme to call the Pennsylvania Supreme Court corrupt?" he said. "No, everybody knows that it is corrupt, everybody knows that things go on up there (Harrisburg) that should not happen."
Things like the $25,000 a year unvouchered expense accounts that Surrick said they voted themselves, out of budget provided by the legislature; he said it was an unauthorized pay raise and when he raised enough cane about it, they stopped doing it.
He said if that makes him a zealot, then he is a zealot, but he does not think that makes him a zealot.
"I think that all that does is make me a public-spirited citizen doing what he thinks is right," he said.
Right now Surrick is pushing his book as hard as he can push it.
And is gratified.
He said that he gets e-mails everyday from people who have read the book and who can't believe the book is written -- or that it is published -- but who are overwhelmingly in his favor.
According to Surrick, Clare Kephart, a former Middletown supervisor, said that Surrick's book was the most enlightening book he had ever read in his life.
Surrick said that he gets comments like that all the time.
There was, he said, only one piece of hate mail and that was it.
But Surrick said that his ego does not require praise.
"I know who I am and I don't need it for ego building purposes," he said. "It is just gratifying to know that other people are seeing some of the things that I am talking about in the light that I am talking about."
But who is this enlightened non-zealot, non-anarchist, public-spirited reformer?
And why would a gifted, intelligent, professional, family man, who loved his job want shake up the status quo?
Especially when he knew what would happen.
Robert B. Surrick was born on July 8, 1933 and grew up in a community known as Bowling Green, near Media; he went to Nether Providence High School, where he played football and basketball and baseball, and was considered a pretty good athlete.
He said that back then he did not care much about what was going on in the world if it did not involve football, basketball and baseball.
He grew up in a nuclear family and he remembers that the dinner table discussions were on a high plane and the family talked about what was going on in the world.
Surrick remembers very clearly, on Sept. 1, 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland, his father getting a globe and pointing out to the children that could understand (Surrick was only 6 years old at the time but could understand what was going on) where Germany and Poland were.
"I think I probably got my instinct for the need to do what was right from my mother," Surrick said. "She was always very clear with the children about that: 'you do what is right, forget the consequences and don't sit there and agonize over the consequences, if you do what is right, it will take care of itself'."
He said that was the way he was brought up.
After graduating from high school, Surrick next went to the University of Maryland, from 1951 until 1955, when he graduated.
He tried to play football there but was not big enough; he did play college baseball for one year.
But then, he said, he discovered the world and history and all of his athletic interests faded very, very quickly.
"When I went to college I had the extreme good fortune of getting hooked on to a professor history at the University of Maryland named Gordan Prange," Surrick said. "Gordon was a giant of a man who had studied in Germany from 1929 to 1933 and attended a Hitler rally in Munich."
Surrick said that Prange's lectures just turned him on to the "big" world and, while always a voracious reader, Surrick, at that time, became very, very interested in and began to read history.
He began to read books on government and politics and philosophy; his major field of study was Europe in the 20th century -- the first World War and the rise of National Socialism and the second World War.
"I still read an awful lot about that," he said. "Actually, I just finished Roy Jenkins' book on Churchill, all 935 pages of it."
Surrick said that Jenkins' book gave him insights into Churchill that he never had before; Churchill was a bit of a wildman, according to Surrick, a little bit of a loose cannon -- but when the chips were down Churchill brought Britain through WWII.
On Oct. 5, 1955 Surrick's mother died and on Oct. 12 he joined the Army.
He spent two years in the Army and considered it a wonderful experience. He is a firm believer in universal military training and says that everybody should give a few years of service.
"This is the greatest country the world has ever seen and we owe (service), I believe," he said. "It distresses me that some of the more liberal people take the position that we shouldn't have universal military training, but I think it is appropriate."
He said that the military was a growing up experience for him. College, he said, is a very insular place where students are insulated from the bumps and bruises of the world.
Surrick took basic training with the 101st Airborne (who had just been rotated out of Korea) and he said that plenty of bumps and bruises were inflicted on the new recruits.
One day, while he was home on leave. Surrick wandered into the Delaware County Courthouse and went up to the second floor where he saw a trial going on in Courtroom Number One.
Judge Sweeney was presiding.
Surrick said he was totally taken with the majesty, the dignity and the civility of the process -- and with the lawyers' ability to articulate; it was drama, it was competition, it was everything he ever wanted in life and he knew then that that was where he wanted to be.
In 1957 Surrick attended Dickinson School of Law and graduated in 1960, 16th in his class.
He is very proud of that.
He is the first person in his family ever to go to college, the first person in his whole family, on both sides (mother and father) to ever finish college and the first person to go to and graduate from law school.
He said that he would not have been ready for law school out of college and could not recommend to anyone that they go to graduate school immediately following college.
"I think there has to be a growing up period and I grew up," he said.
He loved law school.
The first day in law school, he said, was a Saturday class on property and Louie Dobb taught the class by Socratic method.
"(Dobb) looked over the list of new students and said, 'well, Mr. Surrick why don't you tell us what property is'," Surrick said. "And for one full hour I was on the griddle -- (Dobb) got me to admit that the moon was made out of green cheese, he got me to admit a whole bunch of other things, and then I just thought, I love this, I just love it."
His then brother-in-law, John Cramp of Hodge, Hodge and Cramp in Media (a premier firm, Surrick said) had said that if Surrick did well in law school the firm would have a place for him.
Surrick said that he was very lucky; Hodge, Hodge and Cramp was a trial and litigation firm and he was thrown into litigation, right off the go.
And he loved it.
Surrick's life then became all about marriage, raising children, going to PTA meetings, award and doing all the things that people do to get ahead in the world.
He was getting ahead and was doing fine.
In 1978 Surrick met Dick Thornburgh and they talked about the Pennsylvania judicial system.
"Thornburgh told me he was on the same page as me, that (the judicial system) was going downhill rapidly," Surrick said. "So I supported him against the powerful wishes of the Delaware County Republican organization, which was supporting Arlen Specter for governor.
Thornburgh beat Specter in the primary and went on to become governor.
Thornburgh then asked Surrick to serve on the Pennsylvania Judicial Inquiry Review Board, which Surrick thought was a good place to be because it had oversight responsibility of judges.
Surrick served for four, five or six months before, he said, it occurred to him that the Board was not prosecuting errant judges or judges guilty of misdeeds -- it was protecting the politically powerful judges because it operated in secrecy. It had a constitutional mandate of confidentiality.
Surrick said that he was very careful and did not reveal what was going on the Board but began to take public positions that the Board was not doing its job.
"Well, of course that made me about as popular as Kobe Bryant would be at a girl's school these days," he said. "And so I began to realize at that time that I was separating myself from the normal way of getting ahead in the world which is keeping your mouth shut, particularly in Delaware County, which is such a monolithic organization."
Surrick had some choices to make.
And with one exquisite choice in 1983, he voted to remove Justice Rolf Larsen from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Surrick knew what he was doing and what was going to happen when he voted and that he would pay for it.
"At the time Larsen was probably the most powerful man in Pennsylvania," Surrick said. "But in life you get faced, every now and then, with choices and I said, 'the hell with it, I'm going to do what is right, regardless of the consequences'."
Ten years after Surrick's vote, Larsen was ultimately impeached, convicted and removed from the Supreme Court.
Surrick said that Larsen was a bad man who should not have been on the Supreme Court.
"Rolf Larsen was (my) classmate in law school, (a) totally amoral man, who does not know the difference between right and wrong," Surrick said. "And he became the most powerful judicial officer in Pennsylvania because he was willing to build tunnels or bridges to the politically powerful people -- and it went both ways."
He said the lawyers treated Larsen -- and the wrong doing that Surrick said is so obvious in the judicial system -- as if there were no elephant in the room; Surrick said that if there is an elephant in the room lawyers pretend that there isn't.
He said that that is exactly what is going on right now -- lawyers ignore the elephant out of their own ambition and self interest, for monetary reasons -- none of which, he said, are good reasons.
"The lawyers would stand around and watch Bob Surrick get battered and not realize that they could be the next one," he said. "But they won't be the next one because they won't open their mouths and they won't say anything."
That really bothers him a lot.
It is a sad thing, he said, that it has gotten to the point where this is what is going on and that lawyers won't police their own.
But he said he was a whis-tleblower.
"You think any lawyer in his right mind is going to speak up today?" he said. "You know what happened to Bob Surrick."
There was one member of the Review Board, a lawyer from Pittsburgh, who, Surrick said, had left a big Pittsburgh firm and started out on his own and he and Surrick were friends; Surrick said that he knew that the lawyer believed everything Surrick believed about Larsen.
But the Pittsburgh lawyer voted against removing Larsen, out of, Surrick said, self interest. The lawyer was starting a new firm in Allegheny County, Larsen's home county, and could not afford to take the heat that had come from that vote.
Surrick said that he thought that was sort of indicative of the way the world was at that time.
"He went one way and I went the other," Bob Surrick said.
Surrick ran for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1993 and 1995 because, he said, that he was so angry with what was going on in the Pennsylvania judicial system.
Specifically, what was going on at that time was that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court -- in 1991 -- removed from the ballot the constitutional amendment to reform the Judicial Inquiry Review Board, reforms that Surrick had been pushing for 10 years.
Surrick said it was taken off the ballot because they said it was not properly advertised.
"I got so mad that I closed my office, got aboard (his sailboat) the Maverick and went down to the Exumas and lived down there for a year," he said.
He said he got bored absolutely to death and came back and ran for the Supreme Court in '93; he said he thought he could make a difference.
"That is truly why I did it," he said, "I thought I could make a difference."
Ultimately, in 1998, during a bad winter, he fell on some ice, broke two ribs and said he decided that he was never going through the political process again; he put his house up for sale -- sold the house in two weeks -- and went to Florida where he tied Maverick up and lived aboard for four years, with his computer, writing his book.
At the end of his book, Surrick writes "I'm going sailing. The blue-water beckons."
"I thought it was going to beckon but marketing the book is keeping me here," he said, "this too shall end and I would love to go back to Cuba -- I sailed to Mexico and I love Mexico."
An experienced sailor, Surrick loves the ocean; he got into sailing in the early '80s, late 70s and has sailed Maverick, his "very traditional boat" -- a 37 foot double ender Colin Archer design -- to Bermuda six times, New England, and up and down the inter coastal "ditch," probably 15 times and has sailed to Cuba three times.
He said that Cuba is an interesting place, steeped in history and not a third-world country; the people, he said, are hardworking and honest.
"They have been in the toilet for 50 years because of Fidel," he said. "I like the Mexicans for the same reason, they are hard working people, family oriented, honest and see life a little bit differently than we do."
Sailor Bob Surrick has been through lots of storms and two hurricane. The ocean, he said, is no place for amateurs -- amateurs go out there all the time and every now and then you see a news clip of a helicopter picking people off of boats out there.
Sailing takes a certain amount of planning and instinct for survival.
"You have nobody to blame but yourself if you screw up," he said.
In retrospect, Surrick says that he regrets the things that happened to him.
"Regret is probably not the right word -- saddened -- but I got bashed around pretty good as a result of what I did and it is still happening," he said.
Surrick was suspended for five years for saying a judge fixed a case when, Surrick said, everybody knew the judge fixed it; a three judge panel said that Surrick hadn't done anything wrong and that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had exceeded its Constitutional authority in doing what it did to him.
Then there was a meeting of 27 judges -- the whole Pennsylvania court, the whole district court -- who voted 14-13 to overturn the panel's recommendation of no discipline.
The judges then voted to trash the original panel that found that he didn't do anything wrong and put a new panel in its place who said lets do it again.
Trial lawyers, Surrick said, have become more powerful and as they see a need to put their own kind of people on the bench this kind of thing happens and he said that it is a shame.
Despite setbacks, Surrick continues to carry the torch for reform.
"Doctors are leaving Pennsylvania, it is not a crisis, it is a catastrophe, a total catastrophe," he said. "But it is not just Pennsylvania, there are 17 states that are in crisis -- doctors are going in droves to North Dakota, Wisconsin and other places."
And he said that it is not a question of economics for doctors, they are getting hit -- Medicare and health care provider payments are being reduced and their insurance is rising.
But he said that is not the issue.
The issue, he said, is the availability of health care for the people..
"If you listened to the trial lawyers, you (would) say there is no problem, the only problem is bad doctors," he said. "Well, sure, there are bad doctors, (but) there are bad lawyers, there are bad accountants, there are bad everywhere, that is not the problem."
The problem is the huge verdicts that have rolled out of Philadelphia -- $10 million, $20 million, $30 or $40 million verdicts against the doctor or hospital is not unusual; hospitals, he said, are curtailing services.
Surrick said that he does not know where it is going to end.
He says that the only answer is caps on jury verdicts for non-economic damages; California has caps, initiated in 1974, and have not had a problem since.
Surrick has been asked by the Political Action Committee of the Pennsylvania Medical Society to set up a senior citizens task force which involves speaking at senior citizen centers.
The message that he said he will carry to the senior citizens is that the problem is not economics, but the disappearing doctor and the availability of health care.
"Trial lawyers are the ones that are gorging at the trough -- they are the ones who are getting fat; I mean a $10 million verdict -- if you have a 1/3 contingent fee -- is a 3.3 million payday for a lawyer," he said.
A pretty good day.
Too, Surrick is upset about the silencing of the print media because of the fear of libel suits.
He said that during the 18 years that Gene Roberts was the Philadelphia Inquirer's executive editor, the newspaper won 17 Pulitzers, which was unheard of for a newspaper.
But during the 1980s (while Roberts was still editor) Surrick said that the judges and justices started the business of suing their critics, particularly the print media critics, for libel, effectively silencing the Inquirer; after Roberts left, the newspaper no longer did investigative reporting on the judiciary.
"If the media -- the guardian if the truth about what is going on in government -- does not tell you, who is going to tell you?" Surrick asks.
According to Surrick, Roberts once gave a speech at the University of North Carolina where he said in part, that what we must be concerned with is the people of power and priviledge not being held to account.
And, by not being held to account, Roberts said what we have to fear is not the sound but the silence.
"I have these two lovely grandaughters, ages six and two and I despair the words that they hear on TV," he said. "The discourse in this country and the world has been vulgarized and coarsened to the point of where are we going?"
Not going with the status quo, if Surrick has anything to do with it.
Surrick -- attorney, adventurer, author, grandfather, student of history; reader of Churchill, Franklin, Doctorow; admirer of Clemenceau and Emile Zola -- said, regarding the status quo, that he is "off the reservation."
But he has been very careful over the years about what he says, particularly what he says that goes into print.
"It is awfully easy to cross the line which will allow people to marginalize you or trivialize you," he said, "I never wanted to get there and I don't think it is happening."
He thinks that the messages that he has been sending have been received by people whom he respects and, of course, the only people in the world that count, he said, are the people that you respect.
Attorney Sam Klein, who died in 2002, was one of those people.
"Sam is a wonderful, wonderful man and there is not a day goes by that I do not think of Sam Klein," Surrick said, "Sam did what was right, Sam did within the confines of the system; he worked for a big firm and he couldn't go off the reservation but he sure did do what was right and I admire him a great deal."
So what one word would describe Bob Surrick -- zealot?Anarchist? Don Quixote? Whistleblower? Latter-day Moses?
He says the word "maverick" sort of defines him.
The word maverick comes from a Texan cattle rancher by the name of Augustus Maverick who won a whole bunch of heifers (little cattle) in a poker game one night.
Maverick refused to brand his heifers.
They would wander onto other ranches unbranded and that is how the word "maverick" came about -- they were different -- Augustus Maverick did not necessarily play by the rules and brand.
But Surrick defines maverick in a different sense.
"My boat's name is Maverick and I use it in a sense that it goes where other people don't go, or decline to go, or refuse to go or whatever," he said. "I guess that sort of defines me a little bit because I think that it is obvious when you read the book that I have done things that other people, particularly in my profession -- the lawyers -- don't do, out of their own self-interests."
Regarding a future book, Surrick says that he is probably a "one trick pony."
"I have sold over 800 books and my goal is to get up to around 1500, at which time I am hoping that a mainstream publisher will pick it up," he said.
He said he is convinced that if enough people read what he has written that it will stick with some of them and they will say "I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore".
Whether that will happen or not he does not know.
Surrick'sbook may be purchased for $23 to Robert B. Surrick, Box 42, West Chester, Pa. 19381 or online at www.surrickbook.com where there are sample chapters.