Editor’s Note: Six years ago, Frank Kelley and I wrote his life story, published as the book The People’s Lawyer. He told me he wanted to write it in the hope it would inspire some young person to seek a life of public service. But it also told the story of a modern crusader for justice. This is the opening chapter of our book, which I am posting in the memory of that good man, who later became my good friend. Jack Lessenberry
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A Summons to Washington
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The phone rang. Washington, D.C. my secretary said. Important. I immediately recognized the voice on the line:
Bobby Kennedy.
Make that, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Calling me, to congratulate me on my appointment as attorney general of the State of Michigan. I’d been on the job exactly ten days. It was January 12, 1962. “I’ve only been on this job a few months myself,” RFK said. “We’re both a couple of new Irishmen on the block, and I think we should get to know each other very well.”
I thanked him and we chatted briefly. I promised to call his secretary and get to Washington as soon as I could. When I hung up, my head began to spin. “I’m beginning to move in a circle of public servants that would really make my father proud,” I thought.
There was still a slight air of unreality about it all.
Less than three weeks ago, I had been a small-town lawyer in Alpena, Michigan, celebrating Christmas Day with my wife Jo and my three children: Karen, not yet 16, Frank, 13, and Jane, who was ten.
I was in private practice and also handled the city’s business. That was my life, and as far as I knew, that’s what it would be for the foreseeable future. I was looking forward to my 37th birthday on New Year’s Eve, and another year in our mostly peaceful setting.
Eight days later, I was sitting alone in a cavernous office with 16-foot ceilings in the state capitol. Governor John Swainson had asked me to stop by his house in Lansing two days after Christmas.
Michigan Attorney General Paul Adams was resigning to take a seat on the state supreme court, and he had to appoint a successor.
I knew I was being considered for the job, but didn’t think I’d get it, mainly because I was too young. I figured the governor would ask me to have a drink in honor of my birthday,
I’d go back home, and that would be that. But when I got there, a maid appeared with three glasses of champagne. “Happy Birthday, Frank,“ the governor said. “Here’s to the next attorney general.”
Six days later, I was Michigan’s newly appointed chief lawyer.
But my ego wasn’t running away with itself.
True, I knew this was a wonderful opportunity. But I honestly wasn’t thinking of how I could use it to further my own career. My thoughts were more along the lines of “What am I going to do in this office to further the cause of justice and help my fellow man?”
That’s because I had somebody’s expectations to live up to: Those of my father: Frank E. Kelley, whom I have always sort of hero-worshipped. “I want you to be a lawyer in the service of the public and of your fellow man,” he told me.
He never had the chance to go to law school, or even college, himself. My dad had been orphaned at age eleven, in the tough industrial town of Detroit in the days before any safety net existed.
Yet he had pulled himself up, literally by the bootstraps he didn‘t have. He founded successfu7l businesses; raised a family during the Great Depression; given us a good life with a cottage up north at a time when other kids my age lacked shoes. Frank E. Kelley had become such a respected member of Michigan’s Democratic party he had cast Michigan’s votes for Harry Truman at the 1948 Democratic convention, the first convention ever televised.
But I couldn’t ask his advice now.
My dad had died of a sudden, massive heart attack more than seven years earlier. The very last words he ever said to me were: “You’ll be successful, Frank, I know it. But remember, it took me a long time to learn this, worry is a waste of time, because the things you worry about the most in life never happen.
“Enjoy your life, Frank.”
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Enjoy your life, yes. But also, I knew he meant, do something with it worth doing. “I want you to be a lawyer in the service of the public, and use it to help your fellow man,” Dad told me once.
That, after all, was what I felt the Kennedys were doing.
Thinking it over, I realized that Robert Kennedy had called me because, like him, I was an Irish Catholic, in a key state to boot.
Naturally, he wanted me for an ally early on. Regardless of the reasons, I’m glad he called. I would have been on his team anyway.
Within a week I flew to Washington with my very able assistant attorney general, Leon Cohan, for a meeting with RFK.
That meeting would help set the course of my professional life. When we arrived, my deputy and I were ushered into Kennedy’s reception area and seated on one of two comfortable couches facing the secretarial staff. There were two women manning the desk facing us. They were so flawlessly beautiful, they could easily have been movie stars. Later, Kennedy would tell me that he employed these attractive women for a reason.
He knew that half the people who came to see him would never have that opportunity, and the other half would end up waiting a long time before he was able to get to them. That was an era when almost all those with official business with the attorney general were men.
As long as the average fellow was allowed to sit there with these beautiful women, he’d be more content to wait. After that meeting, I would make sure that the first person my visitors would meet was a talented, poised and beautiful receptionist.
You have to remember by the way, that this was another era. At the same time, by the way, I was also hiring more women assistant attorneys general, and putting them in more positions of power, thane any one in my office had before or since.
But that wasn’t what has on my mind that winter day when I was sitting in the reception area of Attorney General Kennedy’s office in the Department of Justice. Incidentally, it was about as imposing a room as you can imagine, with a high and cavernous ceiling.
Visitors passed into his office through a wall of solid walnut. His office was enormous — about forty-five feet long and thirty feet deep, with a ceiling that was a good sixteen feet high.
Robert Kennedy sat behind an elevated desk, which made his slight, 5-foot, 10-inch frame appear more imposing.
He was eleven months younger than me — the guy many Michigan politicians regarded as a kid — but it was an era of young men in power. His brother, President John F. Kennedy, was 44.
The governor who appointed me attorney general to fill a vacancy, John Swainson, was seven months younger than me.
I felt we all had something in common; we felt we could make this world a better place. I was about to find out how true that was.
Our conversation began with Kennedy asking a few superficial questions about my background. Then, he launched a brief lecture.
“Frank,” he said, “I intend to use my office as a bully pulpit to initiate legal action against those who violate our citizens’ rights.
“Historically, most attorneys general, federal and state, have waited for something to happen, and then they react. I can’t do that. I’m going to be an initiator. I’m going after the injustice I see, and I’m going after the bad people, and I’m prosecuting them.
“I say this to you, because like me, you’re new in the job as the chief lawyer of a great state. I want you to be aggressive. I want you to use your bully pulpit. Reach out against injustice wherever you see it, and protect the public. If you do that and I do that, the people of our great country will have a new appreciation for the freedoms they enjoy as Americans and a greater sense of trust in their government and elected officials. They will see that their government cares about them.”
I listened as attentively, as if every word he’d spoken was the Sermon on the Mount. He was so energetic, his presentation sounded like a pep talk – the kind of pep talk that my father would have given me, were he still alive to do so.
I told Bobby that I respected him and agreed with everything he said. I wondered aloud whether he, like I, had been conditioned as a youth by his father to believe in the importance of public service.
He said he had — something his brother, President John F. Kennedy, would tell me himself later that year.
By the time we met, Attorney General Kennedy had already initiated an investigation against James Riddle Hoffa, the longtime, controversial head of the Teamsters Union, which happened to have its headquarters in my native Detroit. RFK did not bring that subject up, nor did I ask about it. Thirty minutes after it started, the meeting came to an end. Kennedy engaged in some small talk with Cohan, then walked me to the door. He put a hand on my shoulder and informed me that he would keep in touch.
Before we left, he instructed his secretary to give me all his phone numbers in case I should ever need to reach him.
I went back to Michigan deeply inspired by my meeting with Robert Kennedy, and determined to make the Michigan Office of the Attorney General a bully pulpit. I vowed to be a strong advocate for the public, and I certainly tried from that day forward.
What I never imagined, however, is that I would be doing that for the next thirty-seven years, longer than any attorney general in the history of the United States of America,
During my years in office, we would establish what I believe to have been the first Office of Consumer Protection in the country – even though I would be called a Communist in the course of doing it.
Among other things, we would take actions that would help lead to the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic one-man, one-vote decision.
We moved to greatly expand the attorney general’s office, and make it far more of an active crusader on behalf of the people.
We took on and tamed Michigan’s public utilities, which often acted as though they were something of a law unto themselves.
We would help legally end the restrictive system — almost unimaginable today — that in the early 1960s was still preventing worthy African-American and even Jewish-Americans from buying homes, renting apartments and living wherever they wanted to.
We did all this through times of enormous national upheaval that no one could then have imagined. I would be in office the day the man who came closer to royalty than anyone I’ve ever met, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. I was working to elect Bobby, my mentor as attorney general, President when he was murdered too.
I was attorney general when Detroit had the nation’s worst race riot, an event I saw firsthand in a way that was far more dangerous that I realized. I was there when Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, in what remains one of the nation’s biggest unsolved crimes.
I watched a state and society transform in ways hard to imagine. With a lot of help from a lot of superb people, I tried hard to make Michigan a more just society, too.
Along the way I met and worked with more famous and powerful people than I could ever have dreamed, from Presidents to show business types, from Martin Luther King to Danny Thomas.
I worked closely with five governors, helped create law and help Michigan orient itself to a brand-new constitution, something that was the equivalent of several seat-of-the pants PhDs.
I made my share of mistakes — personal, to be sure — and a few professional ones as well. I won ten November elections and lost just one, an episode which had a profound impact on my life and career. There were things I wish I had accomplished, and times when I didn’t succeed. But looking back, I have to say I had an interesting life, and a career that anyone interested in political science, Michigan and history might find it useful to study.
Maybe, just maybe, some young person may look at my life and see something of themselves mirrored here too. Just possibly, I thought, my story might inspire someone else to chase their dreams.
And sometimes, I allow myself to look back and think … not at all bad for the son of the owner of a speakeasy in Prohibition Detroit.
No doubt about it; I’ve had an interesting life, that took me through some fascinating times in our state and nation’s history.
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From: The People’s Lawyer, Wayne State University Press, © 2015, Frank J. Kelley
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