Post World War Two

Bud left active service with the US Navy on May 1, 1946, having returned to Nashville two months earlier. 

Although his announced vocational choice had been business, presumably to become involved in the family business, Burk & Co. in Nashville, Bud’s focus had changed to law, in particular, international law. He decided to attend law school under the recently enacted G.I. Bill. Since he had graduated from Harvard  College in 1942, he successfully applied to Harvard Law School. He entered in the Fall of 1946. 

On June 6, 1947, Bud married his first wife (my mother), Elizabeth Irene Vosbury, in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Like Bud, Betsy served in the Navy as a WAVE during the war. She was born in Ling Beach, California in 1923 to Bronson Poindexter Vosbury, affectionately known as “Bink”, and May Irene Gale. Both grew up in Binghamton, New York and were married there in 1919. Bink attended and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1917 and became a Gunnery Officer.

Betsy was a typical Navy brat who moved to several different stations, including Newport, Rhode Island, San Diego, California and Shanghai, China. Her parents divorced in 1936. Betsy attended the University of Vermont and Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she graduated in 1943. She then enlisted in the Navy and worked in cryptography in Washington, DC. She met Bud while he was stationed there during the demobilization. 

After the wedding, the couple resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they resided at 7 Irving Terrace. His focus of study was international law and he received an LLM with a class rank of 69 out of 395. He also received the Addison Brown Prize for an essay he wrote on marine or private international law (the current prize is $9,000)

After graduation from Harvard Law in June, 1949, Bud took and failed the Tennessee Bar Exam (he was close to passing, but was weak on Tennessee law). In that same month, however, he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. 

During summers while in law school and continuing after his graduation, Bud studied at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies at its campus in Peterboro, New Hampshire and Washington D.C. In 1950, he received a Master’s degree from SAIS. Interestingly, Bud is listed on Wikispooks as a famous alumni of SAIS as a lawyer involved in cases “relating to deep events in the United States”. SAIS was established as a stand alone graduate school in 1943 by Paul Nitze and Christian Herter.Even today, it is considered to be one of the most preeminent institutions of foreign policy in the US.