TOMMY THE CORK: WASHINGTON’S ULTIMATE INSIDER FROM ROOSEVELT TO REAGAN
By David McKean
Steerforth Press, $25, 368 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY JOHN S. MONAGAN
Anyone proposing to write a biography of Thomas Gardner Corcoran assumes a Herculean task. With “Tommy the Cork,” however, David McKean has not only accepted the challenge but has carried it off with remarkable success.
Faced with a bewildering arrayoftriumphs,tragedies, absurdities,contra-dictions and affections, he has assembleda portrait of this brazen and brilliant Irish NewDealer that is voluminous in detail andrevealing in its frankness.
For nearly 50 years, Tommy “the Cork” (a nickname bestowed by FDR) ranged through the corridors, committee rooms and salons of Washington as a skilled legislative craftsman, a political insider, a beguiling entertainer and a fixer of abnormal capacity.
A Rhode Island native, Tommy Corcoran was class valedictorian at Brown, where he also acted and played football, and then a Law Review editor at Harvard. After practicing in New York he came to Washington to serve, although a Democrat, in the fledgling, Hoover-sponsored Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
His position was technically assistant counsel, but it served as a convenient post from which to operate in varied capacities. He roamed widely through the governmental maze and, with his friend Felix Frankfurter, specialized in placing Harvard Law alumni and other friends in scores of positions throughout the federal structure, where their future political and administrative clout might prove helpful.
Corcoran was a skillful lawyer and when FDR wanted to invigorate the nation’s securities laws Corcoran, with Benjamin Cohen, earned a place in the very essence of the New Deal. He authored and lobbied for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities HoldingCompanyAct (PUHCA) and other legislation.
Through the success of this effort, he gained the admiration of Sam Rayburn, the House Commerce Committee chairman, and he reached a peak of influence as counsel to President Roosevelt.
Nor was it Tommy’s legislative skills only which FDR appreciated. He was soon pressed into service to play his accordion and sing his songs on impromptu occasions when the president and his staff sought recreation in the Maryland countryside.
In the preparation of important bills Corcoran showed great ability, but in securing passage, his competitive nature often impelled him to adopt a bully and bluster technique (which I experienced as a freshman congressman). This rubbed people the wrong way and made him enemies.
Rep. Ralph Owen Brewster, of Maine, charged that Corcoran had threatened to stop construction of the Passamaquoddy Dam in his district unless the congressman voted for the death sentence amendment to the PUHCA. Tommy strongly and successfully defended himself, but the incident left scars.
His continued vigorous backing of the administration program earned him notoriety, but his later support of the Supreme Court-packing plan and the subsequent attempt, with FDR, to purge opposing Democratic senators angered powerful figures and led to his departure from centrality in the White House.
His forceful lobbying at times skirted the bounds of propriety and on occasion exceeded them. He was constantly under investigation. He was charged in the Midwestern Gas case with improperly contacting a commission chairman. He was summoned before the Truman Committee in the Sterling matter, on the claim that he illegally sought price increases on ship construction contracts.
He denied wrongful action and, while boasting of his fees, offered a brilliant defense, but he aroused the distrust of President Truman, which later led to the placing for the Truman staff of a tap on his phone by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
He was widely and severely criticized in the El Paso case when he personally lobbied two justices of the Supreme Court on a motion to reopen that was before the Court.
In all these cases, his forcefulness conflicted with the laws requiring restraint, and he simply lacked the judgment that would prevent him from going over the boundary of impropriety and illegality. As a pragmatist, he knew that judges were not free of politics, even as he said to Tommy Boggs, “What’s wrong with talking to a judge?” But he was insensitive here to public opinion and the law.
It was this hardness of character that David Lilienthal thought Tommy developed in later years and that Mr. McKean characterizes as arrogance. It possibly contributed to the distrust of Tommy felt by people such as President Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Bobby Kennedy. Still, Corcoran was never convicted or found to be corrupt.
Despite his aggressive character, Corcoran had a gentler side that demonstrated itself in his college acting, his love of music, his skillful performance of piano classics and, in particular, in his filial relations with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
He started as a “quite adequate and quite noisy” secretary to Holmes, but in a later two-year period developed an intimacy through long hours of complex discussions in which, as Tommy once told me, Holmes’ ideas were “burned into [him] so deeply that [he] made evaluations by his standards ever since.” Tommy’s admiration verged on sonly love.
Unfortunately, he did not always adhere to the justice’s high ethical standards in his multifarious activities.
After he left government, Corcoran inevitably became what Mr. McKean terms “one of the preeminent lobbyists in Washington.” His prime saleable asset was “an extraordinary ability to get things done.” His clients covered the waterfront and his forays into Washington officialdom spanned the government.
He reaped the reward of his efforts financially and became so wealthy that he began annually giving money away to his children. His fees for a successful effort were enormous — once, he charged $10,000 for an effective telephone call.
His intensity brought tragedy as well as triumph. His concentration on his work was not conducive to regular family life and the pressures on his wife Peggy, an often lone parent of six young children, caused her to have recourse to the bottle with unfortunate results.
Corcoran’s burning ambition to make his daughter a carbon copy of himself was more than she could endure and she committed suicide in their home one evening. It was a crushing blow to her father.
It was perhaps this character element that led to the greatest frustration in his career, when, in 1941, Justice Frankfurter refused to give his support to Corcoran’s quest to become solicitor general. Corcoran had lined up impressive support and only Frankfurter’s approval was lacking, but the appointment was doomed without it.
The office was a special prize, at the acme of non-political professional achievement. Tommy thought that he was amply qualified, and besides, he had helped put Frankfurter in his exalted position and felt entitled to his backing. Rejection was a traumatic and severing blow from one whose friendship went back to law school days.
Corcoran’s attitude toward women was unusual. Some even said that he was “anti-woman.” He was not, but his approach was not conventional. He socialized very little with female companions in college or law school and he was 40 before he married Peggy Dowd, his secretary at the RFC. Mr. McKean also reveals that, surprisingly, he fathered a daughter in a brief, extracurricular, hitherto unpublicized Panamanian romance.
Tommy the Cork was a man of vast talent and powerful mind. His ambition was boundless and his accomplishments were legion. His friendships were broad, but there were many who questioned his motives and methods.
In a crucial national time, he moved at the very center of the White House and fashioned remedial legislation for the benefit of the nation. He was endowed with colossal energy and breathtaking chutzpah. His kindnesses were myriad, his generosity boundless. A man of contradictory impulses, he was also a villain who did no shrink from brutal expedients to “get things done.”
Like his friend Lyndon Johnson, he was a phenomenon almost impossible to describe inclusively, but in this engrossing study, David McKean has vividly reproduced his lively persona.
John S. Monagan is a retired U.S. congressman from Connecticut. His books include “The Grand Panjandrum” and “A Pleasant Institution: Key-C Major.”
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