Rebels, gangsters and presidents animate biography of radical lawyer Paul O'Dwyer

USA Today

5 days ago

Rebels, gangsters and presidents animate biography of radical lawyer Paul O'Dwyer 'An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O'Dwyer,' takes readers through the civil rights era, Northern Ireland, and post-war New York's machine politics.
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Harvard Law School's Magna Carta revealed as an original
Harvard Law School's Magna Carta revealed as an original, the school bought a 1327 copy of the Magna Carta from legal book dealer for $27.50 in 1946.
Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy's biography of Paul O'Dwyer examines the clash between purity and pragmatism in public llife.
The book includes cameos from presidents including JFK, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
O'Dwyer spent decades fighting for civil rights and desegregation.
His elder brother, New York Mayor William O'Dwyer, was dogged by unproven allegations of gangland ties.
In the endless dogfight between purity and pragmatism it's never clear who to bet on.
It's even harder to know who to love.
Radical Irish-American lawyer Paul O'Dwyer was a passionate purist who spent most of the 20th Century fighting – and often winning – for society's losers.
O'Dwyer stood up for Irish Republicans, the early Zionists, Blacks in the segregated South, Blacks in the segregated North, gays and lesbians during the AIDS crisis, Kentucky coal miners and, briefly, the entire population of Iran.
His elder brother, William O'Dwyer, was the silver-tongued, machine-backed mayor of post-war New York who traveled by chauffeured car and got things done – until creeping scandal pushed him from office, all the way to Mexico City.
The intensely loyal but often difficult relationship between these immigrant siblings is only the most attractive of several threads crackling through Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy's excellent biography, 'An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O'Dwyer' (available now from Three Hills Books).
The clash of zealotry and conciliation, the question of how best to do the right thing, animates the O'Dwyer story in ways eerie and often striking.
Sometimes tilting at windmills and at others slaying dragons, Paul O'Dwyer keeps popping up where the action is, wavy-haired, brogue-talking, and brave.
It's 1967: O'Dwyer is in segregated Alligator, Mississippi, watching the local polls to help out civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. It's 1968 and he's manhandled by Chicago cops while trying to save an anti-Vietnam war delegate from a beating at the riotous Democratic National Convention. There he is, sunburned in San Antonio, springing suspected Irish Republican Army sympathizers from federal lock-up.
And here he is in 1993, whispering to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries that the time might be right for the U.S. to get off the sidelines and broker an end to decades of violence and repression in Northern Ireland.
O'Dwyer, the youngest of 10, grew up in an impoverished hamlet in Ireland's County Mayo.
After graduating from a Dickensian church-run school and completing a year of college – supported by the meager salaries of his schoolteacher sisters – he was summoned at age 17 to New York by his four brothers, who'd already escaped across the Atlantic.
There he met Bill, who'd never laid eyes on the baby of the family.
Bill was something: A seminary dropout, he'd worked as a barman, riverboat furnace-tender, and laborer before joining the NYPD and becoming a lawyer. He flashed a gold tooth. Unlike his younger brothers, he didn't send money home.
He steered Paul into law school, and encouraged him to rise through the patronage and compromises of Tammany Hall – the city's ruling Democratic machine – though Paul chose more difficult means of ascent. Eldest and youngest formed a bond that would survive decades of friction over principles and tactics.
Bill was elected district attorney of Brooklyn, where he prosecuted the button-men of Murder Inc., but he was stalked by allegations – never proven – of gangland ties that would later undo his mayoralty.
Where Bill sent men to the electric chair, Paul defended accused killers bound for the death house. The contrast is even more striking when the book describes how their brother Frank O'Dwyer was himself shot dead in a hold-up, and his killer executed.
Paul O'Dwyer didn't let zealotry fence off the road to common ground. Fiercely anti-British, he refused to condemn IRA violence, and also refused to condemn attacks on Catholics by Northern Ireland's Protestant paramilitaries, reasoning – despite his Catholic allegiance – that he couldn't pit one group of Irishmen against another.
In the 1970s he caught hell for reaching out to the violent anti-Catholic bigot Andrew Tyrie, a man with plenty of blood on his hands, in search of a way to unite the poor of Belfast, Protestant and Catholic, against their shared poverty and unemployment in the British north.
O'Dwyer influence and compromise
While Bill O'Dwyer became mayor in 1945, the highest office Paul achieved was that of city council president, in 1973. He lost primary or general election races for mayor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.
Friends and foes "painted Paul as more influential than he actually was" in his brother's administration, the authors write. In retirement, Bill said his younger brother "had little patience for me because of compromises that I may have made."
"That's perhaps the difference between a successful politician and one who had to learn some things yet," he added.
In a now-familiar swing of the pendulum, the man who defeated O'Dwyer in the 1968 Democratic primary for senator from liberal New York, in a year of riots and tumult, ultimately lost – not to a Republican, but to the Conservative party candidate.
Fifty-six years later, at another moment of upheaval, a majority of New Yorkers pulled the lever for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election – but Donald Trump still won 30% of the city, the best GOP showing in three decades.
As Polner and Tubridy write, O'Dwyer's life is 'relevant to understanding America's and the world's polarization in the twenty-first century.'
Sense and sensibility
Back to the brothers: Who to love?
Bill O'Dwyer took the world as it was, made his deals, and built airports, housing, transit and sewers in America's biggest city.
Paul O'Dwyer tried to make the world a better place, catching where he could those who walked life's high-wire without much of a net. He died in 1998, shortly after the Good Friday Agreement ended decades of open conflict in Northern Ireland.
As Polner and Tubridy show, to make a go of things – in a story, a city, a republic – you ultimately need both characters, the pragmatist and the purist.