THETFORD — As a 30-something lawyer in 1980, John McNally was interviewed by The Washington Post about his double life.
Along with being a partner in an Alexandria, Va., law firm that specialized in federal court litigation, McNally was among a dozen or more attorneys in the D.C. area “actively writing and publishing poetry,” the Post wrote ahead of a local writing center’s “Poets Who Are Lawyers” event, where McNally would read some of his work.
“Law and poetry are two very different operations,” McNally told the Post. “Poetry enriches life, while law restricts it. Legal training sharpens your mind by narrowing it, while poetry enlarges other facets of your personality.
“But don’t get me wrong, practicing law is very satisfying and I would not be happy without it. Nor without poetry. I need both.”
McNally, who moved to the Upper Valley in 1989, later traded his poet’s pen for a painter’s brush. Area art galleries, including AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, exhibited his oil and watercolor paintings.
McNally’s diverse talents made him something of a Renaissance man. But if his father had heard himself described in such a lofty manner, he “would have rolled his eyes,” said Jimmy McNally, his oldest of three children.
“He was self-effacing and humble,” said Greg Clayton, a Maine attorney who worked on cases with McNally. “He had a dry sense of humor that made him a fun person to be around.”
McNally died on Aug. 25, at age 76. For years, he had battled primary lateral sclerosis, or PLS for short, a rare, slow developing neuromuscular disorder for which there is no cure.
In McNally’s case, the cause could likely be traced to his combat duty during the Vietnam War, family and friends said. Like thousands of U.S. troops in Vietnam, McNally was exposed to Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide used widely by the military to eradicate crops and clear jungle canopy.
The son of a career Army officer and a nurse, McNally served in Vietnam after receiving a Navy-sponsored scholarship to Duke University. In exchange, he spent four years in the Navy as a lieutenant.
“He graduated with honors and a uniform,” said Rusty Sachs, a retired Norwich lawyer and Vietnam War veteran.
In 1968, McNally and his father were both shipped to Vietnam during the months-long Tet offensive — a series of Communist onslaughts that killed nearly 2,200 Americans in May of that year alone.
The younger McNally was assigned to a 50-foot aluminum Swift boat that patrolled jungle rivers and coastal areas. Sachs, a Marine medevac helicopter pilot in Vietnam, was among the few people that McNally talked to about his wartime experiences.
“He was going up rivers, pulling recon (reconnaissance) teams out under fire,” Sachs said. “But he was very modest about it. He’d say, ‘So many guys had it worse than I did.’ ”
When he returned stateside, McNally was given a desk job at a Navy office in Washington. It was there that he became friends with Ken Flynn, his superior officer and another Vietnam veteran. Together, they helped organize the Concerned Officers Movement, a group of military officers who spoke out against U.S. involvement in the war.
From a career standpoint, it was more than just a “little bit risky” to participate in the anti-war movement, but McNally didn’t waver, said Flynn’s wife, Grace Cavalieri. “John was an initiator,” she said.
Cavalieri soon discovered another side to the “hungry bachelor” that her husband brought home to dinner at their house in Annapolis, Md. “John was quite a reader,” she said. “He was all about language; all about writing.”
In 1976, Cavalieri, an award-winning poet and National Public Radio program host, and McNally teamed up to form the Washington Writers Publishing House, a nonprofit cooperative. (The organization, which has published more than 50 volumes of poetry, continues to operate, nearly 45 years after its founding.) McNally also initiated a program in Virginia public schools that teaches children how to write poetry.
“He was a great person to start things,” said Cavalieri, who was named Maryland’s poet laureate in 2018. “He’d then step back and let other people take the credit.”
McNally’s poetry appeared in many small magazines. In 1977, funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, he published a book, Northern Lights. (It’s still available on Amazon.)
Cavalieri is scheduled to talk via Zoom about McNally at “A Splendid Wake,” a project by Washington, D.C., poets to honor late writers at its next event on Nov. 8. McNally was a gifted writer, but he wasn’t “really a marketer,” which is what it often takes to become well known in poetry circles, she said. “He wasn’t ego driven. He’d just go his quiet way.”
After the Navy, McNally attended law school at the University of Virginia, and later worked as a public defender before moving into private practice.
Along the way, he bumped into Geoffrey Vitt, a lawyer at another Alexandria firm, at the city’s courthouse. They became friends, having lunch from time to time, before they both moved onto Washington firms, where they continued to stay in touch.
In 1989, McNally called Vitt to let him know that he was moving to Vermont to join a firm in Norwich. McNally had become smitten with small-town life on visits to the Upper Valley with his wife, Margaret Cheney, whose grandparents lived on Norwich’s quintessential Elm Street. (McNally and Cheney divorced in the early 2000s. She’s now married to U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt.)
Vitt later joined McNally at the same Norwich firm. Vitt and other colleagues often used McNally as a sounding board, dropping by his office for informal talks. “He had a great grasp of the law,” Vitt said. “He was a deep thinker.”
McNally, however, was “not crazy about the tussles of litigation,” Vitt said. “He hated petty lawyer disputes.”
Clayton, the Maine lawyer, had an office in northern New Hampshire when he met McNally. “We started out as adversaries (in a civil case), but we quickly became friends,” Clayton said. “He was a very engaging and interesting person. His interests went far beyond the legal profession.”
Clayton and McNally collaborated on difficult civil cases. One of the most challenging involved two young children whose parents had died in an apartment fire. (The children had been staying with relatives the night of the fatal fire.)
Two other lawyers had looked at the case and concluded “nothing could be done,” Clayton said. “But John and I figured out that the apartment didn’t have functional windows. The parents had been trapped in a bedroom and couldn’t get out.”
McNally and Clayton sued the landlord on the children’s behalf. An out-of-court settlement was reached that provided the orphaned children with “financial security” for years to come, Clayton said.
“John was incredibly committed to those types of cases,” Clayton said. “He saw the law as a way to help people who needed it the most.”
After his divorce, McNally moved to Thetford, where he had an art studio with large windows and woodstove adjacent to his house. David Cole, an attorney who shared an office with McNally in downtown Hanover for a decade, recalled McNally reaching out to a local artist for painting lessons.
After watching McNally at work, the artist told him, “I have nothing to teach you. You’re already an artist,” Cole said.
McNally “viewed writing and painting as a way to make sense of and enrich the world,” said his son Jimmy, a former public school teacher in New York City who now teaches in the music department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McNally’s other son, Peter, lives in Chicago as well. His daughter, Catherine, lives in Paris.
Casey Villard, of Etna, was McNally’s accountant. What started as a business relationship blossomed into a friendship. McNally encouraged Villard, who dabbles in painting, to explore his artistic side.
“He became like an older brother to me,” Villard said.
Villard has several of McNally’ landscape paintings, ranging from a depiction of Lake Como in northern Italy to a country road in rural Virginia, near where McNally spent part of his youth.
Said Villard, “John was a keen observer of life and that came out in his art.”
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.
