Prosecutors
89-Year-Old Manhattan DA Won’t Seek Re-election
Posted Mar 2, 2009, 06:35 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has announced he won’t run for re-election after 50 years of leading offices prosecuting federal and then state crimes.
The 89-year-old district attorney has always been good with a quote, the New York Times reports. He explained his decision this way: “It took me a while,” he said, “to realize I was getting older.”
Morgenthau is a decorated World War II veteran who led the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan until President Nixon told him to step down in 1969. He was elected to the job of Manhattan DA in 1974.
The Times says the powerful prosecutor had political skills and the ability to hire lawyers who would go on to become judges, well-known defense lawyers and even a state attorney general. “He could defend his territory fiercely,” the story says, “and he recognized the value of a political bloodline, hiring an Andrew M. Cuomo here, a John F. Kennedy Jr. there.”
Morgenthau “projected the image of the aristocratic prosecutor, an unflappable, even shy sort,” the story says. “But his ambition and reach had a boundless and very New York feel to them as he launched international investigations and pursued white-collar miscreants, stock manipulators and Mafia dons with equal fervor.”
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