Paul O'Dwyer, a leading New York Democrat and former president of the City Council, died last Tuesday at his home in Goshen, New York, after a long illness. He was 91 years of age.
He leaves his second wife, Pat, sons Brian, Rory, William, and daughter Eileen Hughes. His first wife, Kathleen, died in 1980.
Mr O'Dwyer, who retired some years ago as head of O'Dwyer and Bernstein of Wall Street, was considered an outstanding lawyer by his peers. He was an advocate for countless causes but essentially he was Ireland's advocate in the US.
When someone was in trouble, usually for political reasons or because official papers were not in order, Paul, as everyone called him, was only a phonecall away. An Irishman in Philadelphia who faced deportation in the 1960s summoned Paul. The judge welcomed "the distinguished Paul O'Dwyer" as he entered the courtroom and discharged the defendant immediately.
He defended Irgun, the Jewish resistance in Palestine, which was charged with shipping bazookas to Israel in 1948. Menachem Begin, later Prime Minister of Israel, publicly thanked Mr O'Dwyer when the defendants were freed.
He ran for office on the Democratic ticket in New York, first for representative in the Congress in 1948. His opponent was the later Senator Jacob Javits, in Washington Heights, a strong Irish community. But Paul had been tagged as a communist by many IrishAmericans and lost the election.
In 1968 he was chosen in a Democratic Party primary as the Democratic candidate for New York State. He lost again, this time to James Buckley, a conservative Republican.
At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, when students marched through the streets and were batoned by Mayor Richard J. Daley's police, Paul was in the middle of them, marching. He delivered a powerful speech to the Democratic Convention.
In 1971, he had a strange set of clients: the Berrigan brothers, both priests, Sister Jogues Egan, head of the Marymount Order, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, one of her nuns, and Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani scholar, who were charged with a plot to kidnap the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and hold him secretly for a week "until he publicly acknowledged" his acts in advising President Nixon to continue the "immoral" war in Vietnam.
Apparently this scenario was designed by J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. It grew from a wire-tapped humorous conversation in which someone suggested that if Dr Kissinger was brought before a panel of scholars, he might be persuaded to change his employment following a full discussion of his actions. It was, in other words, an elaborate joke. Mr Hoover had explained it all seriously to a panel of Congress and the charges followed.
Three lawyers were chosen to defend the accused: Leonard Boudin, a constitutional lawyer, Ramsey Clark, President Johnson's Attorney General, and Paul. The defendants were indicted on January 12th, 1971. Funds were raised throughout the US for their defence.
The Harrisburg Seven, as they were called, were found innocent of the charges. Sister Jogues Egan, from Antrim, died recently. Philip Berrigan married Elizabeth McAlister and is serving a prison sentence for anti-war activities. Father Dan Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, is a poet.
There are almost as many stories told about Paul O'Dwyer as a lawyer defending the poor and the powerless as there were about Daniel O'Connell in his prime.
He was honoured by the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota, with an honorary doctorate for his work. Now Dr Eoin McKiernan proposed him to the senate of the university.
Paul O'Dwyer was born in Lismirrane, in the parish of Bohola, Co Mayo, in 1907. He emigrated to the US in 1926 and worked on the docks of New York while attending night school. He got his law degree from St John's University on Long Island.
He was, as he wrote in a memoir, Counsel for the Defence, "the eleventh and last O'Dwyer in an already overcrowded five-room house, and while I know my deeply religious mother proclaimed me to be a gift from heaven, I doubt that the other members of the family subscribed to this view".
His father, Patrick, a teacher from Co Cork, married into Mayo by becoming the first principal of Lismirrane National School after answering an ad in a Dublin newspaper. He married the assistant teacher, Bridget McNicholas.
As a lifelong Democrat, Paul would not see anything extraordinary in having proposed that Bill Clinton should address the Irish in the Bronx during which the presidential candidate promised to take up the question of peace in Northern Ireland if elected. The rest, as they say, is history, but Paul O'Dwyer had an important role in making it.
A spokesman for the President, Mrs McAleese, said she would pay personal condolences to the Dwyer family tomorrow. The President also paid tribute to Mr Dwyer in her speech at last night's Irish Voice "Dreamer of Dreams" event.