The autumn rituals of high school football have changed little over the decades, and on the surface would have appeared, on a chilly Michigan afternoon in October 1942, much like those we see today. But the players’ parents, huddled in the wooden bleachers, must have entertained mixed feelings as they watched their sons in the bloom of youth. Soon most of them would be going off to war.

The two teams represented the largest public high schools in their respective towns, Port Huron and Mt. Clemens, which hugged the east coast of Michigan’s Thumb, about forty miles apart. They were...

Ten days after D-Day the Germans had been pushed far away from the coast, and the Normandy shore had evolved from a battlefield to a port. ANew York Timescorrespondent described it as “a crowded beach where tanks, munitions and men were being unloaded in a steady stream.” Britain’s King George VI was escorted ashore the same day. He performed an open-air investiture, decorating seven British officers and men. He then walked about for a few minutes, returning the salutes of those who recognized him, and sailed back to England.¹

John Swainson would not have that option. He was...

As a high school student, Johnnie Swainson had not thought much about his future. There had been some talk about becoming a dentist. That was out now; too much time on one’s feet. But now some kind of professional education was a necessity: “I had spent enough time in the hospital to know that I wasn’t going to earn my living with my hands or my back. I certainly wasn’t going to drive heavy equipment.”¹

And college was now a realistic prospect. Through the G.I. Bill, a grateful nation offered to pay the costs of college education for its returning...

For most of the first half of the twentieth century Michigan was a Republican state. From 1900 through 1946, the Republican candidate won eighteen of the twenty-three biennial gubernatorial elections. Only one Democrat had managed to be reelected governor—in 1914. In the quadrennial presidential elections, only Franklin Roosevelt had managed to break the Republican hold on Michigan’s voters. In 1946, when Republican prosecutor Kim Sigler ran for governor, even Wayne County (home of Detroit, the nation’s fifth largest city), had gone Republican.

Both houses of the Michigan State Legislature were under complete Republican control. After the 1946 election the...

On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1955, John Swainson took the oath as an elected member of the Michigan State Senate. He was twenty-nine years old. And although the Senate was traditionally recognized as the “upper house” of the legislature, its members were elected to the same two-year term of office as the members of the State House of Representatives (the “lower house”). The sole difference was the size of their districts. He would have to seek reelection in only two years.

Swainson was a diligent state senator—he never missed a session of the Senate. He worked on improving...

On Tuesday, March 3, 1960, Mennen Williams asked for fifteen minutes of time on Michigan radio and television stations to announce his decision on another run for governor. Barely restraining his emotions, Williams told the audience that he would not seek a seventh term, but hoped to work for the cause of world peace in some national office.

The next day Michigan’s secretary of state announced he was a candidate for governor.

James M. Hare, forty, had served as Michigan’s elected secretary of state since 1955. A former public school attendance officer and political science professor, Hare had been a...

Paul Bagwell, forty-seven, and John Swainson, thirty-five, may have been the most articulate pair of rivals ever to contest the office of governor in Michigan. Each spoke in complete sentences, perfectly parsed.

Bagwell was, in fact, a professional rhetorician. A champion debater at the University of Akron, he went on to coach debate at Michigan State, where his varsity team won gold medals at national competitions. He was appointed head of the speech department at age twenty-nine.¹ In 1959 the university appointed him as its director of scholarships.²

Born on a farm in North Carolina, Bagwell, like Swainson, played high...

Lattie Coor would long remember the night he arrived in Michigan. Coor was just twenty-four, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He had begun work on a research project, assisting three professors who were comparing the relationship between public schools and politics in three states. Coor was assigned to gather data on Michigan, but he was having difficulty getting state officials to return his calls, so he decided to pay a visit to the state capital.

He arrived on a cold night in late January 1961. After checking in at the Jack Tar Hotel in downtown...

The great majority of successful politicians rise locally. They begin as mayors, school board members, state legislators, their achievements rippling through small ponds. Most never go further, but some impress their colleagues or regional party leaders enough that they advance, incrementally, to greater responsibilities. Only a few, through lucky timing, boldness, and shrewd understanding of the moment, manage to rise to the very top. But even so, they bring themselves to the attention of the public purely in the context of the public offices that they hold and seek. This was the story of John Swainson.

There is another, rarer,...

As he departed the Henrose Hotel late on the morning of November 8, John Swainson’s reaction to his first electoral defeat was philosophical. “I’ve dropped a few balls before,” he told a supporter. “You just have to pick them up.” In answer to a reporter’s question about what had defeated him, Swainson agreed with Neil Staebler that his veto of the Bowman Bill “was the biggest single thing.”¹ Later, he said, “When 1,340,000 people vote for you, there is no feeling you have been rejected. Any governor must face hard decisions and then at an election face the consequences.”²

The...

In 1969 the family moved out of Lafayette Towers. Alice and the children moved to the farm the Swainsons had bought in 1964, outside the village of Manchester, in Washtenaw County. John visited them on weekends, but during the week he bunked with Alice’s uncle, who lived within Wayne County. It was obviously a temporary arrangement.

To anyone paying attention, it would have been clear that John Swainson was not planning to continue as a Wayne County circuit judge much longer. State law required a circuit judge to reside within his Circuit. In Swainson’s case, this meant he had to...

The town of Adrian nestles in the southeast corner of the mitten of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Like many southern Michigan towns, it was settled in the early 1800s. By the late twentieth century many such towns in Michigan had disappeared or become bedroom communities serving nearby cities. But Adrian was too far away from major population centers to become a bedroom community. Instead, it remained a reasonably self-sufficient regional center of 20,000-plus, more spread out geographically and offering more commerce than many other towns of its size. On its outskirts sit two colleges: Adrian College, a private school of 1,000...

In the United States there are fifty-one criminal justice systems. The federal system operates under its own statutes and rules, and so does each state. But they all have certain features in common, most of which are mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

Anyone arrested for an alleged crime is entitled to be arraigned without undue delay; in Michigan the time limit is forty-eight hours after arrest in most cases.

The arraignment process is fundamental to the American criminal justice system. The judge explains the defendant’s legal rights, supervises the reading of the formal charges against the defendant, ensures that the...

A round-faced, curly-haired bear of a man, Robert C. Ozer was the son of a Philadelphia truck driver. Ozer had begun his career fresh out of law school in 1967 in the local prosecutor’s office in Baltimore. There he had gone after public officials who took payoffs to allow gambling. After two years he had left for Philadelphia, joining the Federal Strike Force in the local U.S. Attorney’s Office. There he led an investigation of bribery and kickbacks in the sale of voting machines. Public officials and executives of the voting machine company were indicted across the country, and all...

On Monday, May 20, 1975, the trial ofUnited States v. Swainson and Wishcommenced at the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Detroit, a squat, gray 1934 neoclassical revival building.

TheDetroit Newsobserved that Swainson appeared relaxed as proceedings began. His wife and daughter accompanied him into the courtroom.

After most of the Detroit-area federal judges had disqualified themselves (because of their personal acquaintance with Swainson), the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had brought in Carl Rubin, a federal judge based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Using streamlined procedures that were years ahead of their time, Judge Rubin astonished nearly all...

With the government’s evidence completed, the time was appropriate for each defendant to move for directed verdicts of acquittal on several of the counts. In such a motion the defendant asks the judge to take the decision out of the jury’s hands based on the argument that the prosecution has presented all of its evidence and no rational jury could find the defendant guilty based on that evidence.

The most significant of these motions was Kohl’s renewal of his pretrial argument that there was no “independent” evidence of a conspiracy outside of the tapes, and therefore the tapes did not...

Judge Rubin immediately brought all counsel into his chambers. He knew that they would need to discuss proposed instructions to the jury, but he was thinking beyond that: “Gentlemen . . . on the one hand we can complete our conference, start final argument, and charge [i.e., instruct the jury] this afternoon and let the jury go out to dinner and start deliberating this evening, or we can do nothing this afternoon and allow them to deliberate tomorrow morning. Now one of the questions this turns upon is what sort of time you gentlemen are considering for final argument.”¹

The...

John Swainson was convicted of three counts of perjury. He appealed his conviction, unsuccessfully, to the U.S. Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to accept the case. Thus, the verdict is final. But nothing precludes us from examining the evidence—all the evidence we can find—and reaching our own historical verdict.

Did John Swainson receive a fair trial?

He himself addressed this question. In July 1977, while appearing before a panel of the State Bar of Michigan that was considering his disbarment, Swainson said that, while he did not agree with the jury’s verdict, he believed...

Before the trial there had been a few calls for John Swainson to resign from the Supreme Court. But he had satisfied most of the mainstream press and legal community by remaining as a justice but stepping aside from all court business temporarily, pending the outcome of the trial. After all, he was presumed innocent.

But now he had been convicted of three felony counts, and Michigan Compiled Laws, section 938 provided that a person convicted of a felony could not hold public office.

After the guilty verdict, Bruce Leitman, who had joined Swainson’s legal team to present his motion...

When the Michigan Supreme Court reversed John Whalen’s Adrian burglary conviction in 1973, the justices remanded the case back to Lenawee County for a new trial. That trial was duly held, and Whalen was convicted again. On May 30, 1974, Lenawee circuit judge Rex Martin conducted the sentencing. Whalen believed it might have helped him if the FBI had sent someone to tell the judge about his cooperation in the Swainson investigation. But the strike force’s investigation was still secret in 1974, and its leaders were unwilling to run any risk of exposure. Not only did the FBI decline to...

All of his adult life he had risen early and headed off to work. And it had been meaningful work, doing things that would affect the lives of others. Now there was nothing. He was barred from every vocation that he had ever pursued.

He had been the subject of wide admiration. Now he was the subject of scorn.

John Swainson’s life from 1976 to 1980 traces two nonparallel courses. The first is his descent into alcohol abuse. The second is his struggle to make a living and—just as important to him—to maintain the personal and political contacts...

Two days after his second drunk driving arrest, John Swainson checked himself into the alcohol rehabilitation program at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor. To a reporter who tracked him down by telephone he explained, without drama or self-pity, “I’ve got a problem, I want to cure that problem, I want to save my life. I’ve been arrested twice in three years for drunk driving. Obviously, I’ve got a problem and it’s alcohol.”¹

The program required six weeks and he had to live at the hospital for the first three weeks.²

The VA alcohol program seems largely to have...

Donald McKim, in editingThe Cambridge Companion to John Calvin,commented:

The biographer . . . would accomplish only half his task if he were content to offer a value-free chronological treatment, for we are dealing with . . . a person whose life is inseparable from his effect on history. . . . It would be inadequate to present such persons without any evaluation, all the more since they themselves saw the meaning of their existence in the battle for social values.

Much of John Swainson’s life was dedicated to the battle for social values, albeit in the context...