DETROIT –No, there will never be anybody like Frank J. Kelley, who is deservedly being remembered as Michigan’s longest-serving attorney general, and as the man who really invented that office in its modern form.
But Kelley, who died at 96 March 5, was also an outsized, delightful, larger-than-life personality. I possibly knew him better than anyone except his three children; he and I wrote his biography together a decade ago.
What he did in office was huge: Prior to Kelley, the office was mainly reactive; Michigan attorneys mostly defended the state or its officials when somebody sued them. Kelley turned that around, establishing new Consumer Protection, Environmental and Civil Rights divisions, and encouraging his assistant attorney generals to vigorously prosecute abuses wherever they found them.
He put scam artists out of business, got big utilities to roll back rate increases, and went after General Motors when they got caught secretly putting Chevy engines in Oldsmobile cars.
He was Godfather to many a career, from Governor Jim Blanchard and U.S. Sen. Carl Levin to Blue Cross’s Dan Loepp. In 1977 he befriended an extremely young attorney general from a small southern state, and told him what it was like to be new at all this.
That man was from Arkansas, and was named Bill Clinton.
But what many didn’t know about Kelley is that his course in life was largely set by three other Irish-Americans, two older than he. The first was his father, Frank E. Kelley, who ran one of the best speakeasies in Detroit and later became a major power in Wayne County Democratic politics. “I guess you could say I am a father-worshiper,” Frank told me back when we began working on our book about his life, The People’s Lawyer. (WSU Press, 2015)
“I’ve always been trying to make my dad proud of me,” he would say. One day in 1954, Frank went to see his dad before going to work. He was frustrated. There were too many young lawyers in Detroit.
He had a chance to go with a friend and start a practice in Alpena. But should he do it? He agonized. “It wouldn’t be a bad move, but you worry too much,” the older Kelly told him.
“Worry is a waste of time. Enjoy your life, Frank,” his dad said.
The two never saw each other again. The next morning, the son turned on the radio and heard that his father had died of a massive heart attack. His last words: “Tell Frank he should go to Alpena.”
He did, and that may have been the best professional decision he ever made. Seven years later, Michigan Attorney General Paul Adams resigned to take a judgeship, and Gov. John Swainson decided he had better appoint a successor from outstate, not Detroit.
The man he picked was the 37-year-old Frank J. Kelley, who was to stay in that job for an astonishing 37 years. A few weeks after he started, a man his age summoned him to a meeting in Washington: U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “Frank, I want you to be aggressive. I want you to use your bully pulpit. Reach out against injustice whenever 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 and a greater sense of trust in their government and elected officials.”
Frank Kelley told me long afterwards that he listened to every word as though it were The Sermon on the Mount. That meeting, and a hour he spent alone with President John F. Kennedy later that year, were in many ways the most important events in his life.
“An Irish prince,” he said of JFK. “He was, simply, the most charismatic person I’ve ever met.”
Frank wasn’t bad in the charisma department himself. He was an authentic character, who could spin as spellbinding a tale as anyone, some of which were even true. The late L. Brooks Patterson was drafted to be the GOP’s candidate against Kelley in 1982.
On Election Day, I asked the equally irrepressible Brooks where he would be that night, in case I needed a quote.
“What do you think? I’m running against Frank Kelley. Down in the bunker with Eva Braun,” he said. Frank, as he always did, won easily. “I started a million handshakes ahead of him,” he said later.
After he retired, he cofounded a successful Lansing lobbying firm, Kelley Cawthorne, and for the first time in his life made money.
Eight years ago, my phone rang one afternoon in March, right after Pope Francis had appeared for the first time.
“Don’t you think it was good of him to take my name?” Frank said, deadpan. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Kelley was, indeed, a million handshakes ahead of everyone. Most of us wish we could somehow shake that hand one more time.
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Jack Lessenberry is the co-author of The People’s Lawyer, the autobiography of Frank Kelley.
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