Although best remembered for his two unsuccessful runs for the presidency, Thomas E. Dewey is arguably the greatest prosecutor in American history. His cases confronting organized crime figures are legend, and then is his courage.
 |
| Thomas East. Dewey (1902-1971) |
During his time as Manhattan district attorney, Dewey received a alphabetic character and telephone call on the same twenty-four hour period explaining how he would be murdered on his commute home that very evening. Nevertheless, that night he made a signal of leaving work at his regular time, exiting through the same door of the office building he always used, and took his regular route abode. The only modify to his routine was that he instructed his driver to leave the lights on inside the machine every bit he defiantly traveled up Fifth Avenue.[ane]
The intrepid and incorruptible Dewey was built-in in Owosso, Michigan, over his gramps's general store. His male parent endemic and operated a local newspaper, the Owosso Times. Dewey later recalled, "There was nothing interesting about my youth, except that I was working all the time."[2] His wife, Francis, after said, "If Tom had a grocery shop, it would exist the first 1 to open in the morning, and the last one to close at dark."[3]
Dewey earned a degree in choral music in 1923 at the University of Michigan and obtained a police force degree at Columbia in 1925. Earlier settling on a legal career, he seriously considered becoming a professional vocalizer.[4] His baritone voice would serve him well in the courtroom and on the campaign trail.Celebrated Prosecutor
Afterwards starting in private practice on Wall Street, Dewey was named primary assistant U.S. attorney in 1931, a task for which he showtime won headlines for successfully prosecuting notorious bootlegger Waxey Gordon and ruthless mob enforcer Legs Diamond. Diamond, known as "the clay pigeon of the underworld," survived so many attempts on his life that rival mobster Dutch Shultz remarked, "Own't at that place nobody that tin can shoot this guy so he don't bounciness back?"[v]
In 1935, New York Governor Herbert Lehman appointed Dewey special state prosecutor subsequently the New York City D.A. was reluctant to pursue mobsters and decadent officials. He was given a staff of threescore, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia assigned him 63 police officers.[6]
Dewey's initial big target was Dutch Schultz. In response, Schultz devised a detailed plot to assassinate Dewey, merely Lucky Luciano, head of the Genovese crime family, and the other mob bosses determined that Dewey'southward killing would bring downwards too much heat. So, they had Schultz gunned downwardly instead. Dewey then relentlessly pursued gangland kingpin Luciano and won a conviction and a xxx-to-50-year sentence grounded on Luciano's wide-scale prostitution racket.
It was upon the Luciano case that the 1937 blockbuster film Marked Woman was based, with Humphrey Bogart in the office of a crusading D.A. based on Dewey and Bette Davis as the star witness for the prosecution. Popular radio dramas were also inspired by Dewey's prosecutorial feats. The Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed: "If yous don't think Dewey is Public Hero No. one, listen to the adulation he gets every time he is shown in a newsreel."[7]
Dewey, who was chosen "the Gangbuster," also imprisoned the former president of the New York Stock Exchange for embezzlement and a leader of the American Nazi Party on the same charge. In 1937 he was elected District Attorney in Manhattan in a landslide. A newspaper headline read: "Hoodlums Kickoff Out every bit Dewey Starts In."[viii] In his new post, he won confidence after conviction of gangsters and crooked politicians. Dewey advised: "At that place's no need to blindside on the table to prove a signal. Facts will practise it."[9] Dewey'southward biographer explained:
Dewey learned to savor the cat and mouse game of pursuing and trapping wrongdoers. He learned that lethal testimony could be extracted from banking company and telephone records, produced on gild of the m jury. He sent agents to tail suspects, relied on the wiretaps and handwriting analysis, and developed graphics that might dramatize an otherwise disruptive collection of paper proof.[10]
Republican Politics
In 1938, at the age of 36, Dewey was convinced to run every bit the Republican nominee against Gov. Lehman, but lost. In 1942, however, he was elected governor and won re-ballot in 1946 and 1950. Equally i of the greatest governors in New York history, Dewey drastically cutting the country debt while increasing funding for education and improved wages for state employees and teachers. He also streamlined country government and expanded the academy and highway systems. Moreover, he achieved enactment of the offset country police barring racial and religious discrimination in employment. Speaking of his governorship, Dewey said, "It is our solemn duty … to show that authorities can take both a caput and a eye, that it can be both progressive and solvent, that it can serve the people without condign their master."[11]
 |
| Pres. Truman triumphantly holds a newspaper incorrectly proclaiming Dewey the winner of the 1948 presidential race. |
In 1940, at the age of 38, Dewey lost a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, chiefly considering of his young age. Yet in 1944 he won the nomination, but lost to President Franklin Roosevelt with 45.9 percent of the vote.[12] In 1948 he was again the GOP nominee, choosing California Gov. Earl Warren as his running mate. But nigh everyone thought that Dewey would defeat President Harry Truman. Thus, he ran an overly safe, frontrunner'south campaign vague on issues and suffered a surprising loss with 41.5 percent of the vote.
By 1952 Dewey had abandoned his presidential hopes and helped to secure the nomination for Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.[13] Furthermore, he successfully urged Eisenhower to select immature Sen. Richard Nixon of California every bit the vice-presidential nominee.[14] Afterwards Vice-President Nixon, on behalf of President Eisenhower, offered Dewey the position of chief justice, but he declined because he did not want to live the cloistered life of a justice.[15] Earl Warren was nominated instead.
Dewey was recognized as the leader of the moderate, metropolitan, anti-neutralist fly of his party centered in the Due east, while at the same time pursuing his lucrative private practice in New York. But past the mid-1960s, with the GOP moving in a much more than conservative direction, Dewey had withdrawn from about of his political activities, notwithstanding confessed: "They tell me that politics is a affliction, and I know that onetime firehorses never lose their interest in fires."[16]
 |
| Dewey convinced Dwight Eisenhower to select Richard Nixon as his vice-presidential nominee in 1952. |
In 1971 members of President Nixon'south cabinet came to believe that presidential aids H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were "poisoning the atmosphere effectually the President" and isolating Nixon to the danger of his assistants.[17] Information technology was concluded that "[s]omeone was needed who was not only genuinely disinterested but who appeared disinterested, and tough enough to tell Nixon that he was risking his presidency out of misguided loyalty."[xviii] They settled upon Dewey, a greatly admired confidant of the president, who had turned downward a 2d opportunity offered by Nixon to be primary justice upon Earl Warren'due south retirement in 1969.[19] Dewey was seen as the only person with the standing in Nixon's eyes able to convince him to fire the duo. Hence, he was to exist recruited on his render from his Florida vacation.[xx]
On March sixteen, 1971, at the request of the Nixon family unit, Dewey was preparing to leave Miami to wing to Washington to exist at the White House for the proclamation of the wedlock of Nixon's girl. Merely after calling for his driver to have him to the airdrome, Dewey was plant in his hotel room dead of a heart attack at the age of 68.[21]
Dewey died as ane of America'due south preeminent lawyers. His funeral was attended by the president and protégé he might have saved from the clutches of Watergate.[22] The keys to his success were integrity, hard work and courage. Dewey observed, "It is a wise man who said, 'From the alter of the past take not the ashes but the fire.'"[23] Thomas Dewey's remarkable life was a blazing burn, the fire of justice.
Notes
- Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times 30 (1982).
- Id. at 53.
- Id. at 317.
- See Tony L. Loma, "Dewey, Thomas E. (1902-1971)" in ii Encyclopedia of Politics: The Left and the Right 615 (Rodney P. Carlisle, ed., 2005).
- Don Rittner, Legendary Locals of Troy 66 (2011).
- See Hill at 615.
- Smith at 216.
- Lillian B. Miller, ed., "If Elected …" Unsuccessful Candidates for the Presidency 403 (1972).
- Smith at 105.
- Id. at 126.
- Id. at 352.
- Run into Miller at 403-404; 419-421.
- Id. at 421.
- Richard Nixon, Memoirs 84 (1977).
- See Smith at 605.
- Id. at 609.
- Id. at 633.
- Id.
- Nixon at 419.
- Smith at 633.
- Id. at 637-38.
- See id. at 640.
- Id. at 543.
RUSSELL FOWLER is director of litigation and advancement at Legal Aid of E Tennessee (LAET) and since 1999 has been adjunct professor of political science at the Academy of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He served every bit the law clerk to Chancellor C. Neal Small in Memphis and earned his law degree at the University of Memphis in 1987. Fowler has many publications on law and legal history, including many in this Journal.
Enviar um comentário for "Richard Norton Smith Thomas E Dewey and His Times Reviews"