Mar. 19,
1951—The Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime, in the middle
of a 14-city media road show, had already reached a crescendo upon arriving at New
York's Federal Courthouse within the prior week, particularly with testimony by
reputed mobster Frank Costello.
But now,
in the first of two successive days, the nation would be transfixed by more testimony
unfolding through the emerging medium of television: William O’Dwyer,
the current US Ambassador to Mexico and the former mayor of New York City,
crumbling under hostile committee questioning, was experiencing the effective
end of his public career.
Costello,
nicknamed the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” would be sentenced to 18
months in prison for contempt of Congress when he broke off his testimony.
O’Dwyer, more cooperative, saw his reputation shrivel, a judgment formalized in
the committee’s final report that took him to task for allowing organized crime
to fester under his watch while he was Brooklyn District Attorney and New York’s
Mayor.
But the
hearings' importance lay beyond destroying O’Dwyer or the intrigue surrounding
the appearance of Costello, who worked out an agreement with the five-man
committee to allow only his hands to be seen by TV viewers.
Indeed,
the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce,
which held hearings in 14 cities, demonstrated the corrosive effects of
organized crime at the city and state levels, marked a cultural watershed,
positioned chairman Estes Kefauver for presidential and vice
presidential bids, and set the stage for deeper investigations into mob
influence.
What
follows in this past is based on research for a biography of O’Dwyer’s faithful
younger brother Paul that I wrote with Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice.
Accusations
had already appeared in the New York press related to what O’Dwyer’s interim
replacement as DA, a Republican, called his “laxity” and “maladministration” of
his district attorney’s office. The mushroom cloud of these questions led to
his hurried 1950 resignation from City Hall and appointment by President Harry
Truman as ambassador to Mexico.
Then Truman
gave his blessings to Kefauver—a colorful Tennessee politician who had made a coonskin cap his trademark in his successful 1948 Senate race—to examine mob
infiltration of city and state governments and summon their leaders, many of
them fellow Democrats, by request or subpoena.
Understanding
the environment surrounding the hearings can bewilder contemporary readers
unless they keep in mind these factors:
*Television:
An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in
March 1951. By the time the committee, its staff, and attendant cameras rolled
into New York, the hearings had become a sensation. Suddenly, “Kefauver block
parties” became the rage, and Broadway attendance took a nosedive as viewers found
the real-life drama on their small screens at home even more fascinating and entertaining
than what they would normally see on the Great White Way.
*Cold
War pressures: Just as communists sought to erode the international appeal
of democracy following World War II, so the mob world’s money was subverting
democracy from within, the new zeitgeist went. For that reason, Bill would be regarded not
simply as someone who may have pulled punches on behalf of shadowy figures believed to have underworld connections, but rather as a supporter of an “alien” conspiracy fomented by Italian
American criminals who were destabilizing the American experiment from
within.
*A
focus on gambling: Though the committee’s understanding of “organized
crime” encompassed “protection,” prostitution, murder, blackmail, and gambling,
according to the committee’s mission statement, it was the last that consumed
the lion’s share of its attention. Gambling was, Kefauver claimed, "the
life blood of organized crime," so the committee went to the areas where
the activity was most likely to flourish: cities, which were often controlled,
as in New York, by Democratic political machines.
Paul O’Dwyer, an attorney normally with a heightened awareness of his clients’
rights and interests, long afterward regretted having strongly urged his brother
to testify, even though Bill’s doctor had cautioned about the physical strain created by the hearings:
“I felt
his [Bill’s] appearance was imperative because he should not let his detractors
say they had frightened him from coming to a town over which he had presided
with such distinction for five years. It was immature reasoning, and in
retrospect, I believe I would not have given that advice to a client not
related to me but otherwise under the same circumstance.”
Bill’s
testimony, frequently non-specific, struck many as evasive. Moreover,
the normally self-confident pol who had been twice elected
Gotham’s mayor had been replaced by am energy-drained witness who, battling the flu and mopping
his perspiring brow, reacted with annoyance to his inquisitors rather than his
customary charm. He did little to hide, for instance, his scorn of Republican Charles Tobey of New Hampshire as a hypocrite:
Tobey:
“Why did [O’Dwyer aide James] Moran go to the apartment [of Frank Costello, in
1942] with you, to carry a bag or what? Was he an errand boy, a companion, an advisor?”
O’Dwyer:
“Senator, if the answer is intended to be anything other than sarcastic, I will
answer it.”
Tobey:
“When you were there, were you conscious that he was a gangster?”
O’Dwyer:
“I was conscious that he had a reputation as a very big book-maker.”
Tobey: “It
seems to me you should have said about Costello, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ And that
you should have left him alone, as if he were a leper. But instead you trotted
up to his place—”
O’Dwyer:
“I had business with him. They say there is a lot of it in your home state of
New Hampshire—30 million dollars a year… I wonder who the bookmakers in Breton
Woods support for public office in New Hampshire?”
Tobey: “I
hate a four-flusher!”…
When Bill was
back at his hotel room after concluding his testimony, family and friends
quickly sensed that he had lost his old elan, as described later in an oral
history interview by Brooklyn Eagle reporter Clifford Evans:
“Suddenly
he looked old. Suddenly this very proud man . . . who had gone from bartender
here in N.Y. all the way up to being the No. 1 citizen as Mayor, and then
during the war, had become a General and had been given the rank in our State
Department of minister—a man who, single handedly, on assignment from
Roosevelt, had negotiated with dollars and in secrecy for the saving of
thousands of Jews from Hitler’s Germany—a man who had done so much to make us
feel good, and suddenly, everything just crashed. The grayness about him and
the open window there— it was kind of a difficult moment.”
Now in his
early 60s, Bill finished out his term as ambassador a year and a half later.
Any possibility of a further diplomatic, or even political, career, let alone
influence at any local or national level, was over. Though he was never charged
as a result of the multiple investigations into his time as prosecutor and
mayor, he also was never able to dispel the miasma of doubt about his conduct
until his death in 1964.
City Hall
reporters recalled that, only a generation before, a prior New York Democrat, the
dapper “Beau James” Walker, had also departed Gracie Mansion in haste as a
corruption scandal erupted. More than seven decades would pass before another mayor
would see his time in office end prematurely.
The rise
and fall of Eric Adams eerily echoed O’Dwyer’s. As ex-cops from Brooklyn, they
ascended the political ladder largely based on their crime-fighting
reputations. The Irish emigrant and African-American tapped into the fierce
pride of marginalized groups that, by the time the politicians reached middle
age, had become crucial cogs of the city’s Democratic coalition.
In the
end, they could not maintain their political base. Party leaders prevailed upon
Truman to appoint O’Dwyer as ambassador. Adams, despite the Trump Administration’s
decision to drop federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal
foreign campaign donations, was forced to withdraw his independent bid for
reelection as mayor in the fall of 2025.
The
Kefauver hearings demonstrated the power of televised congressional hearings to
lift or lower individual politicians’ reputations. Ironically today, bipartisan
investigations of important national issues—a hallmark of Congress at least
since the Teapot Dome scandal— are in abeyance. They’ve all but disappeared
from contemporary politics since the election of Donald Trump to a second term.
That is a
striking if rarely commented-on development, especially considering that
Capitol Hill panels have shed light on government waste and misconduct through
the eras of Jim Crow, Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam war, Watergate, rampant FBI and
CIA abuses, 9/11, and Wall Street recklessness. The nationally televised
hearings focused on the January 6 US Capitol attack were the last of any
magnitude.
New rounds
of televised hearings are painfully overdue—inquiries unrelated to the dangers
once posed by organized crime, but to organized money and its similarly
pernicious effect on the functioning of democratic government.
As the
line between private and public interests has gone from blurred to all-but
erased, the survival of a balanced two-party system hinges, at least in part,
on the willingness of Congress to examine enormous conflicts of interest and
alleged corruption in Washington.
