In 1906, reform-minded President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to change the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. That office, which in its original form opened in 1789, was older than the Department of Justice itself. The court in which the office’s prosecutors worked was known as the “Mother Court,” because it began operating weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Southern District of New York had been around since the founding of the country, and Roosevelt didn’t like what it had become — a place of political patronage, uninterested in troubling the powerful.
Roosevelt changed that with a single appointment, of Henry L. Stimson, a young, Harvard-educated Wall Street lawyer, who would go on to serve as secretary of state and secretary of war for four presidents of both parties, including a brand-new chief executive, Harry Truman, who needed to know about the atomic bomb. (“I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” Stimson wrote his new boss.)
As the new U.S. attorney, Stimson immediately fired people. They were all hacks, in his estimation, careerist or corrupt or both. He replaced them with recent graduates from top law schools, whom he wanted only for a few years, after which they would go work for fancy law firms and be replaced by other idealistic and talented young lawyers. Continue reading.