Yoichi Okamoto · Public domain

As a labor lawyer, Arthur Goldberg engineered the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO, uniting American organized labor under one roof. Kennedy made him Secretary of Labor, then a Supreme Court justice, where he wrote the majority opinion in Escobedo v. Illinois establishing a suspect's right to counsel during police interrogation. In 1965 he left the bench to become UN ambassador, helping draft Resolution 242 in the aftermath of the Six-Day War — the text that still frames Middle East peace negotiations today.