[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 86 (Friday, June 26, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1270-E1271]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       IN MEMORY OF PAUL O'DWYER

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. THOMAS J. MANTON

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 25, 1998

  Mr. MANTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to commemorate the Honorable Paul 
O'Dwyer who passed away Tuesday night after a long and distinguished 
career. Paul O'Dwyer was a great American and a great New Yorker. His 
many, many friends and colleagues will miss his wit, wisdom, counsel, 
friendship, and unflinching dedication to the causes in which he 
believed.
  Mr. Speaker, as the son of Irish immigrants, born and raised in New 
York City, I cannot think of a person, other than my own father, that I 
admired more than Paul O'Dwyer. Of his many accomplishment over the 
years, I will remember most his indispensable role in fighting for 
peace in Northern Ireland. A fight which we all hope is now within 
reach, thanks to Paul's untiring efforts on the behalf of justice.
  Mr. Speaker, it would be impossible for me to adequately describe 
Paul's legendary career or capture what he meant to those who he cared 
about, and to me personally, in this extension of remarks. Let me 
simply say that New York, the United States and, indeed, the world have 
lost a great statesman and leader, the likes of whom we are unlikely to 
see again for some time to come.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that today's New York Times' 
obituary for Paul be placed in the Record at this point.
  Mr. Speaker, I know my colleagues will join me in offering our 
condolences to Paul's wife, his children, and the entire O'Dwyer 
family.

                [From the New York Times, June 25, 1998]

 Paul O'Dwyer, New York's Liberal Battler for Underdogs and Outsiders, 
                               Dies at 90

                         (By Francis X. Clines)

       Paul O'Dwyer, a spirited liberal voice in New York politics 
     from his immigrant days in the Democratic clubhouse to his 
     glory years as a fiery anti-Vietnam War insurgent, died 
     Tuesday night at his home in Goshen, N.Y. He was 90.
       Mr. O'Dwyer had been in failing health from the effects of 
     a stroke and died quietly in his sleep, according to his 
     nephew and law partner, Frank Durkan.
       To his deathbed, Paul O'Dwyer, a white-maned, fiercely 
     browed advocate, embraced a raft of minority causes, 
     identifying with indigents and immigrants, progressives and 
     underdogs well beyond America--from the guerrilla fighters 
     for a Jewish home state to the diehard rebels of his beloved 
     Ireland.
       Mr. O'Dwyer was an enduring if rarely elected politician 
     who impressed successive generations as an eloquent battler 
     in the name of conscience. Arriving in America at age 18, he 
     labored up from dock work and garment packing to become one 
     of New York's leading defenders of the underclass.
       ``The ideals should always come first,'' Mr. O'Dwyer 
     counseled in a long public life steeped in voluntary civil-
     rights battles and vociferous challenges of the political 
     establishment.
       Elected twice to the New York City Council, he seemed more 
     at home in the politics of the outsider. As an Irishman who 
     had lived under British occupation, he heartily joined the 
     ongoing American struggle against prejudice suffered 
     variously by Jews, blacks, women and the very latest 
     immigrant wave.
       ``Politics is the only machinery around on which you can 
     really straighten things out,'' he said in his softly 
     unyielding brogue.
       A fleet, unapologetic gadfly, Paul was the antithesis of 
     his older brother William, who rose from the police force to 
     become an urbane master of machine politics as Mayor of New 
     York from 1946 until 1950, when scandals shook his 
     administration. The O'Dwyers moved separately on the crest of 
     Irish-American political power before it faded in the city.
       Paul O'Dwyer far outlasted his brother ``Bill-O'' in public 
     life, fighting for the labor movement and embattled 
     immigrants in the 1940's, against McCarthyism and racial 
     segregation in the 50's, and against the Vietnam War in the 
     60's. In the antiwar movement, he stood as a patriarchal 
     exception in the eyes of young pacifists intent on trusting 
     no one over 30.


                    ``We Were Changing This Nation''

       An ally of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in the successful 
     antiwar challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson's 
     renomination in 1968, Mr. O'Dwyer scored an upset victory 
     himself in the New York Democratic Senate primary that year, 
     but lost in the November election to Senator Jacob K. Javits.
       ``We were taking a country engrossed in an immoral war,'' 
     he declared afterward, pounding the arm of his chair in 
     celebration of that struggle. ``We were changing this nation, 
     By God, we did it. We did do it.''
       He could make a rampart of a legal brief, too, successfully 
     litigating a landmark 1951 fight against the powerful 
     Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. That suit opened the way 
     for blacks to live in Stuyvesant Town, a huge Manhattan 
     housing complex, and presaged an era of desegregation across 
     the nation.
       Mr. O'Dwyer honed his courtroom skills suing insurance 
     companies in negligence cases. But his outside interests were 
     his larger life: He successfully defended Kentucky miners 
     accused of blowing up a bridge in a union dispute, just as he 
     won acquittal of a black teen-ager accused of homicide in a 
     New York City riot in the mid-60's. He sued City Hall to 
     force more budget money into public transit for the working 
     class, just as he defended an unpopular union chief during a 
     city garbage collection strike. In 1958, he joined with 
     Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, the former Governor, 
     to found the Committee for Democratic Voters, the state party 
     reform movement.
       But his outspokenness for minority causes helped deny him a 
     mainstream role in politics. As president of the New York 
     chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Mr. O'Dwyer was 
     denounced as a radical for angrily challenging Red-baiting 
     assaults on civil liberties by politicians who were intent on 
     searching for Communist leanings among teachers and other 
     government workers.
       ``When you come from the period of, first, the Depression 
     and then the McCarthy era,'' he explained, ``if you survive 
     that, then you're less likely to be cautious expressing 
     yourself.''
       Paul O'Dwyer was among the first volunteers litigating in 
     Deep South integration struggles. ``It was like a present on 
     Christmas morning,'' he enthused about his participation. He 
     was also gladly troublesome as a delegate to the 1964 
     Democratic National Convention, leading the fight to see the 
     black Freedom Democratic party of Mississippi represented. 
     Personally close to a generation of black politicians, Mr. 
     O'Dwyer managed the campaigns of several. He was credited by 
     Mayor David N. Dinkins with salvaging his career by coaxing 
     him back into public life after Mr. Dinkins had earlier been 
     forced to resign a city job because of his failure to file 
     income tax returns from 1969 to 1972.
       ``As a young person, Impressionable, I almost forget who I 
     was, as the Irish often do here,'' Mr. O'Dwyer once commented 
     on the roots of his desegregation fervor. ``Because you are 
     white you think you will be treated equally. I was corrected 
     by my brothers, who were here ahead of me.''
       He ruled the fading of an era when ``Irish Catholic'' was 
     synonymous with ``liberal Democrat,'' and told the joke about 
     a tenement clubhouse boss scandalized at the news that 
     O'Brien had turned Republican. ``That's a damned lie,'' the 
     boss thundered. ``I saw O'Brien at Mass last Sunday.''
       As a civil libertarian, Mr. O'Dwyer tapped into vivid 
     memories from his Irish childhood of insurrection against 
     British occupation forces. ''The Black and Tans used to drive 
     through the town, shooting it up,'' he said, recalling the 
     rampages of the British auxiliary police. ``It wasn't too 
     different from Mississippi.''


                   Defended Berrigan And Bricklayers

       A florid-faced, articulate bantam, Mr. O'Dwyer successfully 
     argued before the Supreme Court for the right of mainland 
     Puerto Ricans to take their voter literacy test in Spanish. 
     In 1972, he stood in defense of a pacifist group called the 
     Harrisburg Eight, led by the Rev. Phillip F. Berrigan, and 
     won them a mistrial on charges of an anti-Government plot 
     against the Nixon Administration during the Vietnam War.
       No less fervidly did he represent uncelebrated sandhogs, 
     hod carriers and warehouse clerks in formative trade union 
     years when, he recalled, ``strikebreaking and union-busting 
     remained widespread and brutal.'' He carried a union card in 
     Local 975 of the International Longshoremen's Association. In 
     1968, he declined to cross a wildcat picket line outside a 
     television studio when he was a Senate candidate, telephoning 
     the apoplectic interviewer to explain, ``These are my 
     people.''
       Mr. O'Dwyer accepted the role of the city's Commissioner 
     for the United Nations during the Dinkins administration. But 
     soon he was boycotting the U.N. cafeteria for its anti-
     unionism, and finally resigned so he could speak out against 
     human rights abuses by some of the nations he was supposed to 
     be welcoming.
       Born June 29, 1907, in the village of Bohola, County Mayo, 
     in western Ireland, Peter Paul O'Dwyer was the 11th and last 
     surviving child of Patrick and Bridget McNicholas O'Dwyer. 
     They were schoolteachers who raised their family in Ireland's 
     grim potato economy, packed into a rude house without 
     plumbing. He later endowed a home for the handicapped on his 
     family home site.
       ``I sprang from the `shabby genteel,' '' he once said with 
     a smile, using Eugene O'Neill's qualification for the 
     striving Irish poor. Paul O'Dwyer counted himself fortunate 
     for the high school education he received before having to 
     follow four older brothers to New York in the age-old 
     immigration of young Irish to opportunity.
       He soon picked up on the politics of Jefferson and Paine 
     after finding clannish lodgings in Mrs. Maguire's Irish 
     boarding house at West 103d Street and Columbus Avenue in 
     Manhattan. Landing a paying job within two days--a touch of 
     clubhouse patronage via brother ``Bill-O''--he moved fast on 
     the classic immigrant's route to betterment through night 
     school, first at Fordham University, then at St. John's Law 
     School in Brooklyn.
       So fast did he move that he had to obtain special 
     permission from Chief Judge Benjamin Nathan Cardozo of the 
     New York Court of Appeals to take his bar exam in 1929, four 
     years after arriving from Ireland

[[Page E1271]]

     and two years before he could receive citizenship. In 1931, 
     Paul O'Dwyer became America's newest citizen-lawyer, ringling 
     with the impulses of Thomas Paine. ``He sounded simple and 
     logical to my young mind,'' Mr. O'Dwyer explained.
       Anti-Semitism in college fraternities had bonded him to 
     Jewish friends, he recalled in his 1979 autobiography, 
     ``Counsel for the Defense.'' ``And the Kings County Young 
     Democratic Club thenceforward was made up of 35 Jewish 
     classmates and me,'' he noted proudly.
       It followed naturally that he was involved in the cause of 
     a Jewish homeland in 1946 by arranging for the illegal entry 
     of Holocaust survivors to palestine and by aiding the gun-
     running operations of the Irgun militants fighting the 
     British in the Holy Land. The next year, as chairman of the 
     Lawyers' Committee for Justice in Palestine, he pleaded at 
     the United Nations for Israeli sovereighty.
       Successfully defending an admitted Jewish gun-runner in New 
     York in 1948, Mr. O'Dwyer told the court, ``He was only doing 
     what every other freedom-loving person would be doing.''
       As a lawyer, Mr. O'Dwyer became a principal in one of the 
     city's flagship immigrant law firms, O'Dwyer & Bernstien. He 
     began as a clerk to Oscar Bernstein and worked his way to 
     senior partner. From the firm's offices in the financial 
     district, Mr. O'Dwyer helped build the business but found 
     time for assorted challenges to social injustice, typically 
     without fee. He soon was respected as one of the city's 
     sharper-tongued liberals.
       ``If I thought at the end of the year that all I did was 
     make a living, I'd regad it as a pretty incomplete year,'' he 
     said of his rich life as an agitator within the system.
       ``If I've had any success at all, it's been in large 
     measure from listening to young people,'' said Mr. O'Dwyer, 
     whose eagle-like visage--a darkeyed glare and shock of 
     prematurely white hair--stood out in the thick of any battle.


                   Leading a Welcome for Gerry Adams

       Even in decline he stayed keen for political justice. In 
     1994, he beamed from a wheelchair and led the welcoming 
     cheers when Gerry Adams, the Northern Irish republican 
     political leader, was finally allowed into the United States 
     to plead his grievance against Britain. Mr. O'Dwyer was the 
     national coordinator for the American League for an Undivided 
     Ireland.
       He ran 12 times for elective office in campaigns noteworthy 
     for thread-bare war chests and life-liberal agendas, daring 
     to call for decriminalizing drug addition in one. His two 
     successes were in 1963, as Councilman at Large in Manhattan, 
     and 1973, as City Council President, a post in which he made 
     sure to alter the city's official founding date from 1664, 
     when the British landed, to 1625, when Dutch settlers 
     arrived. In six total years in office, he instigated numerous 
     causes, including an uphill battle in 1965 to raise the 
     city's minimum wage to $1.50 an hour.
       Mr. O'Dwyer's abiding comfort was in the good fight. Losing 
     to Carol Bellamy in a 1977 bid to remain Council President, 
     he said ``I fought for a lot of civil rights 25, 35 years 
     ago, including women's rights, and I'm in poor shape to 
     complain if I find myself in the way of the machinery that I 
     myself helped set in motion.''
       He offered a decidedly Irish smile of bemusement when 
     critics focused on his antiwar activity and tried to dismiss 
     him as a single-issue politician.
       ``The one issue is fair play over the period of a 
     lifetime,'' Mr. O'Dwyer amended.
       His wife of 45 years, the former Kathleen Rohan, died in 
     1980. In 1984 he married Patricia Hanrahan, then the upstate 
     chief of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's women's division. She survives 
     him, along with four children from his first marriage: 
     William, of Albany; Roy, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla; Brian of 
     Manhattan, and Eileen O'Dwyer Hughes of New York. He had 
     eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
       Mr. O'Dwyer long tried to persuade his wife, Patricia, to 
     restake the family flag in elective politics. She finally 
     agreed this year, and he lived to see her running for the 
     95th State Assembly District in orange county, true to his 
     favorite line of Yeats:
     That I may seem, though I die old,
     A foolish, passionate man.

     

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