Reproduced with permission of the Detroit Free Press
Headline: EX-GOVERNOR REBUILDS LIFE
Sub-Head:
Byline: JOEL THURTELL FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Pub-Date: 3/7/1985
Memo: ALSO RAN IN WAYNE WEST AND DOWNRIVER ZONES
Correction:
Text: Almost a decade ago, state Supreme Court Justice John B. Swainson, his
wife, Alice, and their two lawyers stood facing a locked security door on the
16th floor of the FBI’s Detroit office building.
The door swung open, revealing a tall, blond FBI agent who announced, “Mr.
Swainson, I have a warrant for your arrest.”
Swainson’s arrest on charges of bribery, mail fraud and perjury just before
the July 4, 1975, holiday signaled the end of a long career in public service
— a career that had brought Swainson, once known to news writers as
Michigan’s “boy wonder,” to the governor’s mansion and to the state’s highest
court.
Before the federal grand jury indicted him that year, Swainson had appeared
as the most likely successor to Philip Hart’s seat in the U.S. Senate.
Ruined politically, Swainson looked back on his life and pondered why it
was that disaster followed him.
“I’ve often said it’s a long road that takes no turns,” the Free Press
quoted him as saying. “I think sometime some of this will make sense.”
This was not the first tragedy Swainson had suffered.
In 1944, he was a 19-year-old machine gunner in Gen. George Patton’s 3d
Army when 15 pounds of TNT in a German land mine exploded. Swainson, who a
year earlier was captain of the Port Huron High School football team, lost
both of his legs.
On the wall of the staircase leading to the study at his 165- acre farm
near Manchester hangs the Swainson coat of arms. Under it is the family motto:
“While there is breath, there is hope.”
TODAY, the former state senator, former lieutenant governor, former
governor, former Wayne County circuit court judge and former state Supreme
Court justice has picked up some of the pieces.
He takes part in local affairs, and he is sought after for advice on how to
deal with state and county authorities.
In general, though, he lives a life far less public than his early career
would have suggested.
While the scope of his life has narrowed, his relationship with the little
Washtenaw County town has deepened.
After his conviction, Swainson was disbarred for three years. Able to
practice law once again, he has been offered partnerships in several law
firms. Instead, he earns a living as a mediator of civil cases for the Wayne
County Circuit Court and as a Michigan Employment Relations Commission
arbitrator.
“Have robe, will travel,” Swainson jokes.
Although the jury found him innocent of the U.S. attorney’s bribery
charges, convicting him on perjury counts, Swainson has no thoughts about
returning to political life.
“That would be almost impossible . . . because instead of saying ‘John
Swainson, former Democratic governor of the state of Michigan, said today . .
. (news stories would say) ‘John Swainson, convicted felon.’ “
Foreclosed from political activity, he applies his executive talents now
to Manchester Historical Society projects. Swainson is in his second one-year
term as president of the local society.
BEFORE THE TROUBLES with the Justice Department began, Swainson had little
time to take part in local life.
“He was a busy man then,” recalls Maynard Blossom, a retired Manchester
High School government teacher. Swainson was not well known in Manchester
nine years ago, and because people didn’t know him, “there were many who
obviously took it for granted he was guilty,” Blossom said.
Out of public life, and with his work load much lighter, Swainson has
taken time to meet local people, and “he’s a very well-received man here now.”
But 10 years ago, when Swainson’s daughter, Kristina, was 17 and a senior in
Manchester High School, the other “kids considered John guilty without a
trial,” Blossom said.
All in all, though, Manchester was not a bad place to weather a storm.
Today, Swainson says, “I am completely accepted in this community as the
person I am, not what somebody else said.”
“We all survived and have a good life and still have a good life,” he said.
“But it isn’t what you would pick.”
FIVE DAYS after the jury found him guilty of lying to a federal grand
jury, Swainson handed Gov. Milliken his resignation as Supreme Court justice.
That night, after a press conference , Swainson walked across the
Manchester High School football field beside his daughter.
It was Father’s Night, and as Swainson stepped onto the field, the audience
applauded.
The worst was yet to come.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1977 would refuse to hear his appeal, he would
serve his sentence for perjury — 60 days in a Detroit halfway house — and in
October, he would be disqualified from practicing law for three years.
“It was a very depressing situation, as you can well imagine, and I was
having a hard time — when you’re used to working long hours, and all of a
sudden you’ve got nothing more to do, that’s real tough,” he said.
“I learned that a job is the most important thing a man can have . . . What
do you do with yourself? It isn’t a question of starving, or anything like
that — we were fortunate we did have some income, but it’s a terrible,
terrible thing to have to live through.”
When he resigned from the Supreme Court, his only income was a war
disability pension.
He was feeling morose — worse than usual, on Nov. 15, 1977. It was the 33d
anniversary of the explosion that cost him his legs.
Swainson went to a party in Lansing, drank three martinis, then got into
his car and headed for Manchester.
Near Napoleon in Jackson County, he was pulled over by state troopers who
arrested him for drunken driving and later found a marijuana cigaret in his
jacket pocket.
Swainson admits he had been drinking, but denies any knowledge of the
marijuana cigaret.
“I have never smoked marijuana in my life,” he told the Detroit News. “All
of a sudden my world is tumbling down.”
“I regret this more because of my family,” he said, and “I’m terribly
disappointed.”
But the drinking continued.
A second drunken driving arrest in 1980 finally convinced him to seek help.
“I’ve got a problem, I want to cure that problem, I want to save my life,”
Swainson told reporters.
JOHN GOAD BURLEY Swainson, 59, is a ruddy-faced, sandy-haired man with blue
eyes and gold wire-rimmed glasses. He smokes Kent IIIs as he flips through a
World War II scrapbook his mother kept for him.
A yellow newspaper clipping from 1945 tells how a woman saw the legless
war hero sitting in a train station.
“Oh, you poor boy, were you overseas?”
“No, lady,” Swainson responded. “The Army drafted me this way.”
“Wise-a–, ey?” Swainson murmurs, smiling, turning the scrapbook’s pages.
Always, the conversation turns back to the grand jury and his trial — a
case that began under former Attorney General John Mitchell as a political
assault on a popular liberal Democrat, according to a 1976 article in The
Nation magazine.
Nixon was president and Watergate was still largely undetected when
convicted burglar John Whalen told federal prosecutors he had passed a
$20,000 bribe to Swainson through a bail bondsman. The case was shelved,
apparently because of insufficient evidence, and lay dormant for three years.
He harks back to the dark days after he resigned as Supreme Court justice.
“It was very tough, very tough. It was harder to recover, obviously, from
that than it was from the loss of the legs.”
OF THE FIVE men who went out on night patrol Nov. 15, 1944, only two
survived.
One, a man named Brousseau, suffered a concussion and never regained his
mental faculties.
While he was still a senior at Port Huron High School, 18- year-old John
Swainson decided to enlist in the U.S. Army’s specialized training program.
The Army would give him a college education, then commission him as an
officer.
“But they decided they would invade France, and they needed infantrymen a
lot more than they needed students.”
Swainson had been in the Army about seven months by Nov. 15, 1944, and
Patton’s 3d Army was battling the Germans near Metz in Alsace-Lorraine,
France.
He volunteered to help take rations and ammunition to part of the company
that had been cut off.
“We’d take turns sitting up all night on the machine gun. So I figured,
here’s a way I can go out on this patrol a couple hours and I can come back
and sleep.”
“There was a tree down across the road. The jeep is loaded with ammunition
— mortar shells, small arms ammunition and one driver.”
Two soldiers walked alongside the jeep, while Brousseau and Swainson went
ahead to look at the tree.
The jeep had stopped over an anti-tank mine designed to be set off when a
heavy weight was removed from it.
Swainson had returned to the jeep to tell the others to come help move the
tree. As he turned back towards the tree, the mine blew up.
“The man who was driving, they only found parts of his hair.”
“So I get all the blast in my back. My one leg was severed at the time. The
other was so badly broken they had to take it off at the aid station.
“I woke up at Verdun four days later. I couldn’t see my feet sticking up.
So I picked up the sheet, and I ain’t got no feet.”
Later, from a hospital in England, Swainson wrote home: “The pain is quite
bad, but there are guys here who are worse off than me.”
AT FRANCO’S, a pizza and coke restaurant in Manchester, the cooks and
waitresses are used to the jovial, middle-aged man who walks with the barest
trace of a limp.
A waitress sets a hot pizza on the table and asks, “Can I get you anything
else?”
“Yeah,” comes Swainson’s deep chuckle. “I’ll have a Manhattan.”
It is a wry little joke for Swainson, who claims, “I haven’t had a drink
since 1980.”
Away from his house, Swainson’s mind roams far from the past.
His thoughts are never far from politics, however.
He speaks of the Vietnam war, which ignited a minor firefight in the
Swainson household. Swainson, then on the Supreme Court, was a hawk of the “My
country, right or wrong” variety.
Eventually, his sons persuaded him Vietnam was a bad war.
And the Vietnam veterans got a raw deal — they have no GI Bill and were
treated like it was they who lost the war, he says.
His opinion of the Reagan administration is nearly identical to his view
of the Republican Party.
“The thing that distinguishes Democrats from Republicans in many
instances,” says Swainson, the veteran Democrat, “is compassion.
“We can empathize with other people’s problems; Republicans don’t have
that.”
Back in the Swainson kitchen, the telephone rings, and he soon is
discussing with his caller the Manchester Historical Society’s quest for oak
chairs to match a table in the blacksmith shop the society restored.
He throws himself into the project as if it were an interstate highway that
needed his backing.
HE ADMITS, however, that the mediation he does for Wayne Circuit court is
not very challenging for someone who once sat on the Supreme Court.
In 1962, after his defeat for a second term as governor, a portrait of
Swainson was hung in the Capitol rotunda at Lansing. The artist refused to
paint in the details, however, claiming Swainson’s political career was
unfulfilled.
“The unfinished portrait,” Swainson calls the picture.
Now, his political career apparently permanently derailed, he tunes in a
news program on a portable television and adjusts the sound so it is barely
audible.
He followed the news even in the dark days of the 1970s, when it seemed to
be running against him.
Swainson believes he was tried largely in the newspapers, that federal
prosecutor Robert Ozer timed his moves — such as Swainson’s July 3 arrest —
to coincide with major holidays, making it impossible for Swainson to
respond.
Ozer boasted of conducting “investigation by terrorism,” The Nation
reported in 1976.
Swainson is convinced the federal government, in Republican control, set
out to destroy a promising political adversary.
But that bitter conclusion was not easy for a man who, as a judge, had
symbolized the process of justice.
“I found myself in a very difficult position . . . as a member of the
Supreme Court to say that . . . the system is no good.”
“I can’t go screaming around, ‘I got screwed. I had an appeal, that’s about
all we can promise anybody.”
Chronology
Here are some of the highs — and depressing lows — in the life of John
Swainson, once known as Michigan’s political “boy wonder”:
* July 31, 1925: John Goad Burley Swainson is born in Windsor, Ont., the
son of a salesman.
* April 1926: The Swainsons move to Port Huron, Mich.
* 1940: John Swainson becomes an Eagle Scout.
* 1942: Swainson is elected captain of the Port Huron High School football
team.
* 1943: Swainson graduates from Port Huron High School.
* 1943: Joins U.S. Army.
* 1944: An infantryman, he is assigned to Gen. George S. Patton Jr.’s 3d
Army and shipped to Europe.
* Nov. 15, 1944: Swainson loses his feet and lower legs when a land mine
explodes.
* 1946: Enters pre-law program at Olivet College.
* 1946: At Olivet College, Swainson meets and soon marries Alice Nielsen of
Detroit.
* 1947: Toboggan accident injures a leg, forcing further amputation.
Swainson is advised by physicians to live in a warm climate.
* 1947: Transfers to University of North Carolina.
* 1949: Earns bachelor’s degree from University of North Carolina.
* 1951: Earns law degree from University of North Carolina.
* 1951: Becomes case investigator for Wayne County Bureau of Social Aid.
* 1952: Forms law firm in Detroit.
* 1954: Becomes a Democrat and is elected state’s youngest senator for
18th District in northwest Wayne County.
* 1956: Re-elected to Senate and elected minority leader by Democrats.
* 1958: Elected lieutenant governor of Michigan.
* 1960: Elected 40th governor of Michigan, the state’s second youngest
chief executive and first who was not native-born.
* 1962: In second race for governor, Swainson is defeated by Republican
George Romney.
* 1962: FBI electronic bug records top underworld figures who mention
Swainson’s name.
* April 5, 1965: Elected Wayne County Circuit Court judge.
* 1966: Internal Revenue Service probes income matter at time when
Swainson is possible federal judge candidate.
* June 1969: Becomes president of NARCO, a group aimed at combatting
growing problem of drug abuse.
* 1970: Elected associate justice on Michigan Supreme Court.
* 1972: U.S. attorney under Attorney General John Mitchell begins
investigation of possible bribery charges against Swainson.
* 1975: Newspapers report Swainson as possible candidate for U.S. Senate.
* July 3, 1975: Federal grand jury indicts Swainson.
* Nov. 2, 1975: Federal court jury acquits Swainson of bribery and mail
fraud charges, but convicts him of three counts of perjury before a grand
jury. Swainson is highest Michigan official ever convicted of a felony.
* Nov. 7, 1975: Resigns from state Supreme Court, exactly 30 years after
his discharge from Army.
* 1976: State Bar Grievance Board starts disbarment proceedings against
Swainson because of perjury conviction. Board adjourns case to wait outcome of
Swainson’s appeal.
* 1976: Swainson withdraws from practicing law. Joins lobbying firm.
* Early 1977: Federal appeals court and U.S. Supreme Court reject
Swainson’s appeal.
* Early 1977: Swainson secretly enters a Detroit halfway house to serve
60-day sentence for perjury.
* Oct. 6, 1977: Grievance Board disbars Swainson for three years.
* Nov. 15, 1977: Anniversary of the land mine blast that cost Swainson
both legs. Attends party in Lansing, drinks three martinis, drives toward his
Manchester home.
* Early morning of Nov. 16, 1977: Ten miles from Manchester, state police
arrest Swainson on drunk-driving charge. Police find marijuana cigaret in
Swainson’s coat pocket.
* Oct. 29, 1979: U.S. Supreme Court refuses to block Swainson’s trial on
marijuana possession and drunk-driving charges.
* January 1980: Pleads guilty to drunk-driving charge and pleads no
contest to marijuana charge. He is fined $250 and his driver’s license is
restricted.
* Early 1980: Swainson’s application to be reinstated to Michigan bar
delayed by conviction in 1977 drunk driving and marijuana case.
* May 1980: Arrested on drunk-driving charge in Lenawee County.
* May 1980: Enters six-week alcohol treatment program at Ann Arbor
Veterans Administration Hospital.
* 1981: Swainson’s license to practice law is reinstated.
* 1983: Begins working as Wayne County Circuit Court mediator and as
arbitrator for Michigan Employment Relations Commission.
* August 1983: Suffers weakness in aortic artery. Surgery repairs defect.
* October 1983: Swainson is elected president of Manchester Historical
Society.
* Nov. 14, 1984: One day before 40th anniversary of the land mine explosion
that cost him both legs, Swainson delivers speech at unveiling of his portrait
in Michigan Supreme Court.
* December 1984: Swainson’s name appears in newspaper articles again, now
in interviews as president of Manchester Historical Society trying to preserve
a 300-year-old bur oak tree.
Caption:
Illustration: PHOTO COLOR AL KAMUDA; PHOTO FREE PRESS
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: NWS
Page: 1A
