Andrew Meier - Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

I never look back.

In a career unlike any other in the annals of American law, he prosecuted every order of crime and every species of criminal: bribe-takers and bribe-givers, serial killers and drug dealers, Mobbed-up families and Mobbed-up industries, molesters and rapists, stalkers and terrorists, gun-runners and gamblers, prostitutes and vigilantes, loan sharks and digital pirates, bookmakers and boiler-room operators, arms dealers and insider traders. He had seen the good go bad: crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked bakers, crooked truckers, crooked union bosses, crooked bankers, crooked accountants, crooked ambassadors, crooked priests, crooked rabbis, crooked doctors, crooked coroners, crooked engineers, crooked PTA officers, crooked CIA agents, crooked philanthropists, crooked turnpike authority executives, crooked traders, crooked defense attorneys, crooked prosecutors, crooked judges, and crooked inspectors of everything made in New York City, from its steaks to its skyscrapers to the cement of Yankee Stadium. There were crimes of passion, too, but few by comparison. The urge always seemed to start, and end, with money. Money was oxygen. Stop the flow, he would say, and youll stop the crime.

Now, after thirty-five years as the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morris Morgenthau, at ninety years old, was leaving the job.

A quartet of reporters flanked the DA, one on either side, two across the long table. The last of the farewell press conferences had come weeks earlier; now as he spoke, photographers ducked in and out, edging the half-packed boxes that formed islands in the cavernous room to record the final hours. It was nearly eight oclock on a cold Friday evening, New Years Eve, in the last year of the first decade of the new century, and the district attorney, called the Boss by three generations of prosecutors, was holding court one last time.

Since 1937, when Thomas Dewey became district attorney, only three men in New York had won election to the office. Frank Hogan, the dapper Irishman who succeeded Dewey, served thirty-two years. Morgenthau assumed the post in 1975, and stayed in it until 2009. Previously, he had served nine years as the chief federal prosecutor in New York, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New Yorkfrom 1961, when John F. Kennedy appointed him, until 1970, when Richard Nixon could suffer him no more. In all, he had been a fixture in the firmament of law and order for six decadesand not only in New York City.

Bob Morgenthau, as only the few he let in close could call him, had no cause to rush his last press conference. Little had he loved more, all these years, than to hold a conclave in his thralland he knew he would miss it. Two inches shy of his former six feet, as lean as he was at twenty-one156 pounds then, 157 nowhe retained a lanky agility. His gait had slowed to a shuffle, and he had long since given up cigarsBordeaux remained his lone indulgencebut for years he had practiced tai chi and yoga, switching between the two on alternate mornings.

The face was distinctive, long and angular. He was fine-boned and clean-shaven, his hair a cottony white. His forehead was broad and high, but it was the nose, bent like a hawks and angled right, that was most prominent. His blue-gray eyes hinted at unseen strength. He seemed to use them as props now, squinting to forecast disbelief and shuttering them with one hand as if to conjure thought. They could be watery, but the eyes were keen, and when opened wide, they revealed a startling depth.

What will you do? a reporter asked.

No plans to quit working, he said.

In the winter of 2009, Morgenthau was not only the retiring district attorney; he was a city institution. At one of the many dinners honoring him that year, he was introduced as the DA for lifeand maybe after. No prosecutor in U.S. history had served longer, and none had had a more profound influence on law enforcement. None of the contendersDewey, Hogan, Rudy Giulianicame close. Even the new man in the White House hailed the legacy. Introducing his first nominee to the Supreme CourtSonia Sotomayor, one of the DAs celebrated protgesBarack Obama affixed the adjective legendary to the Morgenthau name.

Morgenthau had long since outlived ambition or ideology. In his final months in office, asked to explain his endurance, he gave the credit to luck and longevity. Youve got to have Lady Luck sitting on your shoulder, he would say. The linea souvenir of the war, when he faced German bombers in the Mediterranean and Japanese kamikazes in the Pacifichad proven its worth; on the banquet circuit it cut short the questioning, but to his wife, children, and closest friends, the words rang untrue. He was a man, they knew, who drew his resolve and stamina from another source.

Robert Morgenthau was a scion of one of the great American families. His great-grandparents, Lazarus and Babette Morgenthau, arrived in New York from Germany in 1866, the year after Appomattox. Once wealthy, Lazarus had lost everything; he would live to see his children grow rich again. In America, the Morgenthaus fulfilled a dream, becoming one-hundred-percent American. They had helped elect presidents, expose a genocide, and wage war. They had formed a dynasty.

Henry Morgenthau, Roberts grandfather, born in the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1856, was among the first in the Democratic Party to back Woodrow Wilson for president. Henry Jr., Roberts father, born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1891, was Franklin D. Roosevelts longest-serving aide, a confidant of three decadesone of the first to see FDR unable to walk, and among the last to see him alive. And the DA, who raced sailboats with the Kennedys as a boy on Cape Cod, was at Bobby Kennedys side on November 22, 1963.