Lay Bishop

(See Cover)

One evening last week Attorney General Frank Murphy arrived at the Green Inn, a comfortable shingled seaside hotel at Narragansett, R. I. With him were his chauffeur, his secretary, Eleanor Bumgardner, and his legal assistant, Edward G. Kemp. They registered, were assigned rooms and started up to them. It was then that the night clerk noted that Frank Murphy was so exhausted that it seemed for a moment he might not make the one-flight climb upstairs.

Next morning Frank Murphy was up at 8 a. m., breakfasted in his room (No. 12) on one ascetic glass of orange juice, then went out on the veranda to work diligently over mail and official-looking reports. Occasionally he would go inside, make long telephone calls. He had a portable radio which he tuned to catch all news reports, and he carried it with him when he went to the beach at n :30. There he stood for 15 minutes, knee-deep on the hissing shingle. After his circulation was thus methodically aroused, he plunged in, swam past the breakers, churned up & down parallel to the beach for 45 minutes, ably swimming side stroke, breast stroke, Australian crawl. Then he went to lunch (fruit only) at the moderately swank Dunes Club, then back to the beach to sun on a mattress, read (Grapes of Wrath) through dark glasses, listen to radio newscasts, until 5 o'clock. He swam for an hour again before returning to the Green Inn to dine on vegetables.-

This was the Attorney General's recuperative schedule for five days, varied only when he ate his vegetable dinner at the Dunes instead of the Green. Several eager Narragansetters invited the rufous gentleman, whose eyebrows rival John Lewis' and Jack Garner's for density and concentration, to break bread, but he politely declined them all. U. S. District Attorney J. Howard McGrath from Providence was his guest two evenings at the Dunes. Otherwise he kept alone. By week's end, when he departed in his big official Packard for a Michigan visit, he was fairly well rested. His nose was red, his freckles refulgent. He felt he had conscientiously obeyed the orders of his Chief, who had firmly told him: "Frank, I want you to get out of town [Washington]. . . ." But he could not relax entirely, for of all the top men in the U. S. Government, not excepting even the President, none was engaged upon tasks more pressing and important than Frank Murphy.

Cop's Job. The functions of the Attorney General's office are three: i) It pays off heavy political debts (even more liberally than the Post Office) with assistant attorney generalships, U. S. judgeships,- district attorneyships. 2) It advises Congress on the constitutionality of pending legislation and defends the constitutionality of that legislation when passed. 3) It enforces the laws of the land.

Under Homer Stille Cummings, the Roosevelt Administration's first Department of Justice completed function No. 1 in 1933, Function No. 2 early in 1939, when Mr. Cummings retired to his rich private practice in Connecticut. No further big New Deal test cases are slated to appear before the Supreme Court before 1941. Therefore the job that Frank Murphy was left when he succeeded Mr. Cummings was substantially a cop's job, and he took to it with all the fervor of an Irish moralist, all the energy that his red hair, purposeful jaw and 46 years bespeak.

For eleven months in 1924-25, Harlan Fiske Stone introduced a period of zealous prosecuting efficiency in the Department of Justice, even going so far as to press for antitrust investigation of Aluminum Co. of America, dominated by the family of his Cabinet colleague, Andrew Mellon. Mr. Stone was soon kicked upstairs to the Supreme Court and law enforcement became a subordinate job of the D. o. J. for the next 14 years until righteous Frank Murphy came along. There has been plenty of kicking in the Department since his appointment last January, but the kicker has been Frank Murphy and the kickees a great raft of high-&-low-placed malefactors, not a few of them important members of Mr. Murphy's own political party.

Kicking Around. Besides hunting Manhattan's murderous Racketeer Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter (in a race with Republican District Attorney Tom Dewey) and other Public Enemies, Mr. Murphy's men are also hounding down Louisiana's corrupt Democratic politicos. Having convicted Kansas City's Democratic Boss Pendergast and indicted Philadelphia's Republican Publisher Moses ("Moe") Annenberg for income-tax evasion, having prosecuted Federal Judge Martin Manton for "selling justice" in Manhattan and proceeded against big-shot Lawyers Louis Levy and Paul Hahn for their dealings with Judge Manton (rulings on their disbarment await the outcome of Judge Manton's appeal), Mr. Murphy's men are about to go to work on some of Hollywood's richest cinemagnates for alleged income-tax evasion and antitrust violations, and on the powerful stagehands union on charges of labor racketeering. Murphy men are also pressing ahead with their case against William ("Billy") Skidmore, gambling overlord of Chicago. That case might lead to self-righteous purging of the New Deal's loud-spoken Boss-Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago. And Murphy men are after Atlantic City's Republican Boss Enoch ("Nucky") Johnson. That case might lead to action against the New Deal's biggest black sheep of all: Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

In these last cases the soul of Frank Murphy may be tested to the uttermost, for the political explosive in them is nitroglycerin, not common black powder as in New Orleans and Kansas City. Yet none of his friends suspects for a second that the soul of Frank Murphy will fail the test.

Old D. o. J. Without unfairly aspersing Homer Cummings, it can be said that the D. o. J. under him suffered severely from acute politicomyelitis. This was only natural, since' Mr. Cummings shared his patronage with his crony, James Bruce Kremer, one of Franklin Roosevelt's heaviest political creditors. Fact is Mr. Cummings was a third choice. After iron-jawed Senator Tom Walsh died (on his honeymoon), Mr. Roosevelt was going to appoint Frank Murphy to Justice and send Mr. Cummings to the Philippines. Mr. Murphy had been only Mayor of Detroit and before that judge of a Recorder's Court, but he had performed early and valuable service herding other mayors to the Roosevelt standard and his administrative ability, at a raw outpost of Depression in the most highly industrialized U. S. city, had been proven. On second thought Mr. Roosevelt deemed the Philippines, whose independence was about to begin, more important than the Attorney Generalship (he did not foresee his Court fight). So he sent Frank Murphy out there first.

Mr. Cummings managed to improve prisons and streamline judicial procedure. Solicitors General under him (after North Carolina's old Judge James Crawford Biggs was got rid of) defended the New Deal's laws as best they could while the courts were being New Dealized. But conscious or unconscious procrastination and delay hampered Justice all down the line. The "Second Louisiana Purchase," by which Huey Long's political heirs returned to the New Deal camp at the same time that their incomes ceased to interest the Government, looked pretty conscious to many an observer. If Republicans return to power, they say the Department of Justice 1933-38 will most certainly be their prime hunting ground for New Deal ghouls. Realization of this was as strong a motive as sympathy for a jobless friend in Franklin Roosevelt's call for Frank Murphy after the latter was licked for reelection as Governor of Michigan last year.

New D. o. J. Aside from his barrage of major prosecutions the major news about Attorney General Murphy is his ripping out of Cummings personnel, replacing it with high-grade material selected largely by that able legal manpower scout, Tommy ("Uncorkable") Corcoran. This overhauling has extended to five of the seven executive offices in D. o. J. (The other two were overhauled while Cummings was still in: Stanley Reed for Biggs as Solicitor General, and later Robert Houghwout Jackson for Reed; Thurman Arnold as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division.) Mr. Murphy's substitutions were:

Oetje John Rogge for Brien McMahon in the Criminal Division. A rugged, redheaded, German-blooded trial lawyer of 35 from Peterboro, 111., Mr. Rogge was PFC's fighter in collecting $9,600,000 from Dawes Bank stockholders following the Chicago institution's famed $90,000,000 RFC loan. He licked some of the country's most expensive legal talent on that case, was given SEC's investigation of Chain Banker Giannini of California. The Louisiana mess is also his to handle and last week came the one touch needed to dramatize him as a knight of justice: he received two bullets in his mail and advice to get out of New Orleans. He stayed, of course, and told the newspapers. The New Deal counts on Oetje John Rogge to help neutralize the Republican knight, Tom Dewey, in Illinois.

Samuel Orman Clark Jr. for James Ward Morris in the Tax Division. Bright brother of former Dean Charles Edward Clark of the Yale Law School, now a U. S. Circuit judge, Sam Clark, too, served first with SEC. His presence at Justice makes Treasury lawyers (of whom Tom Corcoran's young friend Edward Foley is now chief) feel more like working with the Attorney General's Office, which they hitherto avoided.

Francis Michael Shea for Samuel Estill Whitaker in the Claims Division. Out of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School (1928), Mr. Shea worked on AAA, SEC and Puerto Rican Reconstruction before becoming, in 1936, Buffalo Law School's prodigy dean. His special study is bankruptcies & receiverships, at which lawyers rate him far above his predecessor, the mayor of Riverview, Tenn.

Norman Mather Littell for Carl McFarland in the Lands Division. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1921-24) from Indiana, Mr. Littell settled in Seattle, where he worked briefly for NRA but made his record in private practice in the Northwest. Interior Department lawyers used to have orders not to consult the Department of Justice. Now they do and the Lands Division is where they do much of their consulting.

Edward Gearing Kemp for Joseph Keenan as special assistant to the Attorney General. Mr. Kemp, 52, and like Mr. Murphy a bachelor, is from St. Clair, Mich. He was with Mr. Murphy in the Philippines.

Another, younger Murphy assistant, the watch dog of his outer office, is Mennen Williams, 25, a shaving soap grandson.

Outside his immediate official family, Frank Murphy has had Franklin Roosevelt's help in strengthening U. S. district and circuit courts, so that he can count on at least one high-calibre judge in each jurisdiction. In Manhattan, he counts on Circuit Judge Robert Porter Patterson, a Republican. In Philadelphia, it is Circuit Judge Francis Biddle, a New Dealer. New tone has been sought for the bench by picking eminent law teachers. Example: Herschel Arant, dean of Ohio State University's Law School, now a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The same revamping process has been applied to district attorneys. In Manhattan, lethargic Lamar Hardy was replaced by John Thomas Cahill, 36, another Corcoran familiar. Prosecutor Cahill is already famed for standing up to impressive John William Davis, the Democrats' 1924 nominee for President, in the Levy & Hahn proceedings. In Chicago, U. S. Attorney Mike Igoe had to be elevated to the district bench to make way for sharpshooting, young (36) William J. Campbell. Like

Jack Cahill, Bill Campbell took on a dean of the bar in Weymouth Kirkland and forced him to obey a subpoena for key evidence in the Annenberg case, which Lawyer Kirkland unsuccessfully tried to ignore on the ground of sanctity in the relation between lawyer & client. In Bill Campbell's hands will be the red-hot Skidmore case. Cardinal Mundelein and labor-loving Bishop Sheil are among his most active admirers.

In Homer Cummings' day, the law's delay was accentuated by court dockets loaded down with arrears. From a high of 45,000 pending civil and criminal cases in 1933, he got them reduced to some 22,000 in 1938, but there was still good cause for incoming Frank Murphy to demand faster action from the courts and his D. A.'s.

And the likelihood of his getting action is enhanced by his team's new morale. For not only does the team know that right from the top the D. o. J. wants no punches pulled, but under Frank Murphy the inferiority complex, almost the stigma, of being "a Government lawyer" has passed away. Not only are their tails up, their brains ready to tackle any brains which the biggest law offices can array, but the D. o. J. men realize that now, for once, all the Government's legal machinery can click together. What should always have been the Government's leading legal department has at last been brought up to the level of the other departments' and the independent agencies' legal talent. And all talents throughout the Government are willing to be pooled under Frank Murphy. This is especially important now that Congress seems bent on restricting the lawmaking function of those departments and agencies, exacting greater care in their rulings, providing appeal to the Federal courts from slipshod or arbitrary performance by their executives high & low. Passage of the Logan Act to accomplish this reform suddenly, and to a degree which Attorney General Murphy deemed too drastic, was averted last session only by a parliamentary trick (TIME, July 31, Aug. 14). Framing the reform with care and moderation is another major assignment for Mr. Murphy before Congress meets again.

Moral Armament. A great deal has been written about Frank Murphy's piety and goodness, about his mother's bringing him up to be a lay priest, about his deep horror of war after fighting in France, his asceticism (no alcohol, tobacco or even coffee), his celibacy, his painful honesty and sincerity. Yet he is still a surprise to men who meet him for the first time. That a man should actually be so good seems incredible, almost unhealthy. It is a fact that the high moment of his life came when Cardinal Mundelein called him a "lay bishop" and said: "Mr. Attorney General, you are one Catholic politician I don't have to worry about."

Tom Corcoran colorfully interprets him as "the modern counterpart of the fighting abbots of the Middle Ages." His private motto is: "Speak softly and hit hard." The self-absorption in which he is wrapped seems to act as a coat of mail when the going is roughest. It is not recorded that Frank Murphy ever discussed Moral Re-Armament with Evangelist Frank Buchman, but the latter might obtain some practical pointers from this saintly son of a smalltown Irish lawyer who has passed through an extraordinary series of positions unchanged and constantly rising higher.

When Captain Frank Murphy, U. S. Infantry, was mustered out of the Army of Occupation in Germany, he was one of the officers picked to stay and study in England. He polished his law briefly at Lincoln's Inn, London, then lit out for Trinity College, Dublin, where, as the son of a fighting Fenian, he was soon in the thick of the trouble. He returned to the U. S. hungry for public life and was soon attached as chief assistant to the U. S. district attorney in Detroit. Convicting a band of rich war profiteers was his chief accomplishment in this job. (A brazen young 'legger named Sherman Billingsley, now proprietor of Manhattan's Stork Club, where Frank Murphy sometimes goes, was another of his convictions.) He taught law at the University of Detroit on the side, got on the Recorder's Court, was backed for mayor by the Detroit Times, and was elected.

Feeding and pacifying the unemployed before there was any WPA was his major job then, and marvelous indeed was the change when Franklin Roosevelt transformed him from a salvage engineer in desperate Detroit into an Oriental potentate at $18,000 in the Malcanan Palace at Manila ("Oh boy, it's some palace!" he cried over the long-distance telephone to a Detroit lady friend). In overseeing the transition of the Philippines from dependent territory to semi-independent commonwealth, Murphy kowtowed too much, his critics say, to cocky little President Manuel Quezon, whom Paul McNutt had later to take down a peg. Fact is, Mr. McNutt found, as Mr. Murphy had, that the only way to get anywhere in the islands was through Quezon. Kowtowing too much to Labor is the common charge against him as Governor of Michigan, but it has come to light since that he took orders from Franklin Roosevelt to do so. Peaceful settlement of the great sit-down of 1937 remains his monument as Governor, but he regrets the long-drawn parleys of that stressful time, which he believes undermined the health of his good friend Walter Chrysler. "I seldom read novels because no novel could be so exciting as my life," says Frank Murphy with appalling seriousness. He is completely swept up by being No. 6 officer of the U. S. Government and sitting at the right hand of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yet the fact that he has won and retained the admiration of more worldly men --including such diverse sophisticates as Franklin Roosevelt and Pundit Arthur Krock of the New York Times--argues that some human spark lies buried in his solemn egocentricity. His smile is usually slow and faintly superior, but when he heard of John Lewis' blast at "evil old" Jack Garner he chuckled: "It's a sinful world." No misogynist, he can and does charm women though his courtships do not go beyond dancing and horseback riding. Considered his closest lady friend: Anne Parker, daughter of Major General Frank Parker who was in command in the Philippines when Mr. Murphy was there and is now in Washington.

Frank Murphy makes a great point about not letting his New Dealism affect his judgment as a legal officer. This might be considered political strategy for everyone knows that he is "liberal" enough to suit Franklin Roosevelt. But his best friends honestly believe that he does not aspire to the Presidency. He regards his Catholicism as an insuperable bar to that office, in his time, and says with utter seriousness: "If I had to give up the Catholic Church for the most exalted position on earth, I'd gladly give up the glory and power. I don't think I'd have any trouble making the decision. I love my church."

*No vegetarian (he loves three-pound steaks), Mr. Murphy was lately spoken to by his physician. -And the district judges pass out juicy receiverships, trusteeships, special masterships, references.

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