O'Dwyer, William (‘Bill-O’) (1890–1964), policeman, lawyer, judge, and politician in the USA, was born 7 July 1890 in Lismirrane (Lismiraun), Bohola, Swinford, Co. Mayo, eldest of eleven children (of whom six sons and four daughters survived infancy) of Patrick O'Dwyer, native of Tullylease, Co. Cork, national school teacher, and Bridget O'Dwyer (née McNicholas) of Lismirrane, unqualified assistant teacher to her husband in Bohola national school. After education in Bohola and at St Nathy's college, the diocesan secondary school in Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon (1903–8), he studied two years for the catholic priesthood in the Irish college, university of Salamanca, Spain (1908–10). Fearing adverse parental reaction to his abandonment of seminary studies, he emigrated to the USA via the port of Cherbourg (June 1910). Settling in New York city, he was employed in various unskilled occupations (1910–17), working on building sites, on Hudson riverboats and ocean-going freighters, and as barman in hotels and saloons. While working in the wine cellar of the Hotel Plaza, he attended night school (1914–17), obtaining a secondary-level-equivalent certificate. Naturalised a US citizen, he joined the New York police department (1917–25), initially walking a tough Brooklyn waterfront beat. Assigned successively as motor chauffeur to the department's borough inspector and clerk to the city's police commissioner, he studied in evening classes at Fordham university law school (1920–24), obtaining an LLB and passing the New York state bar examination. After an apprentice year teaching criminal law and procedures in the police promotion class, he resigned from the force and opened a small private law practice (1925–32).
O'Dwyer's sponsorship of a 1931 American tour by the Mayo Gaelic football team introduced him to influential contacts – including the wife of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, on behalf of whose children's charity the team played a benefit match – who promoted his appointment to the Brooklyn magistrate's court (1932–8). His service was notable for decisions favourable to striking trade-unionists, and for innovative methods with juvenile offenders that avoided custodial sentences. Appointed to the Kings (Brooklyn) county court (1937–9) to fill a vacancy, in 1938 he was elected to a fourteen-year term. The following year, he fulfilled an arrangement made with the Brooklyn Democratic party boss prior to his appointment, by resigning from the bench and successfully running for a four-year term at a lower salary as Kings county district attorney (1940–45). Within months he attained national prominence by conducting a sensational investigation into some eighty-five gangland homicides perpetrated by the national crime syndicate's Brooklyn-based enforcement squad – dubbed by the press ‘Murder, Inc.’ – resulting in convictions and executions of seven notorious hoodlums. O'Dwyer's failure to finger any top-ranking underworld figure, and the death of his star informant while under heavy police guard, would, in later years, fuel suspicions that he had been thrown inconsequential sacrificial lambs to deflect attention from the crime bosses, and, more sinisterly, that he had knowingly contrived in the deception. Acclaimed at the time as a strenuous mob-buster, as Democratic nominee for mayor of New York he polled much better than anticipated, losing the November 1941 general election to the popular incumbent Fiorello LaGuardia by some 132,000 votes out of a total of 2,250,000.
When the USA entered the second world war, O'Dwyer obtained leave of absence as district attorney (he was re-elected in absentia with cross-party support in 1943), and was commissioned a major in the US army. Assigned to a series of high-level administrative posts, he investigated corruption in contract procurement, and fraud in the supply of materials to the army air corps. Promoted to brigadier-general with state-department ministerial rank, he was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to head the economic section of the Allied Control Commission in Italy (a joint American–British command) (February 1944–January 1945). Overseeing a comprehensive demographic, industrial, and agricultural census of liberated Italy to determine needs, he facilitated increased allotment and distribution of food supplies, and recommended an early transfer of control to a civilian Italian administration. Resigning his military commission to serve as executive director of the presidential War Refugee Board (January–May 1945), he sought with limited success to facilitate easier entry of Jewish refugees into the USA; he initiated a food shipment to six German concentration camps prior to liberation, and transport of some 1,400 detainees to neutral Switzerland.
Once again the Democratic candidate for mayor, and also nominated by the leftist American Labor Party, O'Dwyer campaigned, despite his endorsement by Tammany Hall, as a progressive, independently minded, non-machine Democrat. Sweeping to victory by a record majority, he received 58 per cent of the nearly two million votes cast in a three-way race (November 1945). New York's one-hundredth mayor (1946–50), and the last of Irish birth, he immediately confronted a series of crises caused by the city's straitened finances, and transition from wartime contingencies to a peacetime economy. While lacking a comprehensive ideological vision, he proved an adroit and pragmatic problem-solver, managing each crisis in its turn, and forging broad popular consensus behind difficult decisions. After defusing several potentially crippling industrial disputes, he established (September 1946) a division of labour relations that worked with private-sector unions and employers to settle conflicts without walkouts. He faced down a threatened transport workers’ strike by announcing contingency plans to operate the city-owned subways with other municipal employees. Thereafter he cultivated improved relations with the powerful transport workers’ union, headed by Irish-born Michael J. Quill (qv), by granting a generous wage increase and reform of industrial-relations procedures within the transit system. In a bold decision, in 1948 he doubled the long-sacrosanct five-cent subway fare to fund capital investment and another substantial wage hike. Seeking funding for urgently needed infrastructural projects that had been delayed by wartime constraints, he secured an agreement with the New York state government that increased the city's borrowing and taxing authority. Presiding over the city's first billion-dollar budget (1947–8), he financed highway construction, public housing projects, and school building and renovation. To oversee the ambitious capital programme, he appointed the highly regarded Robert Moses – a veteran of Mayor LaGuardia's administration – to the newly created office of city construction coordinator. Scrapping LaGuardia's scheme for municipal financing, O'Dwyer negotiated a plan that facilitated construction and subsequent operation on a lucrative long-term lease of Idlewild (latterly Kennedy international) airport, which opened in 1948. He also spearheaded the campaign that secured the 1948 decision to locate the United Nations permanent headquarters in New York.
Warm and affable, with considerable personal charm, O'Dwyer commanded wide popularity; his relaxed, soft-spoken, casual style was deemed reassuring in the sober post-war climate. Under considerable mental and physical strain from the rigours of office, he was hospitalised in 1948 suffering from pneumonia and general physical collapse, and was diagnosed with a heart condition. He won re-election comfortably in 1949, winning just under half of the 2.5 million votes in another three-way race. Hospitalised again immediately after the election, after a prolonged recuperative holiday he tended increasingly to delegate authority. In August 1950, amid a simmering police corruption scandal that would implicate the financing of his re-election campaign with an illegal bookkeeping racket, he suddenly announced his resignation to accept appointment as US ambassador to Mexico (1950–52). Returning to New York as a voluntary witness before the US senate special investigating committee on organised crime chaired by Estes Kefauver (March 1951), he faced stiff questioning about his record as district attorney and mayor, and alleged connections with criminal kingpin Frank Costello. While no evidence emerged to link O'Dwyer directly with organised criminal activity, his performance in the televised hearings, and the subsequent committee report critical of his failure to take effective action against high-level racketeers, severely tarnished his reputation. Resigning his ambassadorship in December 1952 to make way for the incoming Republican Eisenhower administration, he practised law in the firm headed by his youngest brother, Paul O'Dwyer (qv), both in Mexico City (1952–60), and in the NY head office (1960–64).
The truth regarding O'Dwyer's alleged links to organised crime may never be satisfactorily established. He has been alternatively characterised as a skilfully contrived creation of the mob-controlled Tammany machine, his reforming image a carefully constructed façade; as an unknowing pawn in gangland turf wars; as a would-be reformer hopelessly enmeshed in a corrupt system; as an excessively trusting man betrayed by associates. Paul O'Dwyer alleged that files obtained under the freedom of information act indicated his brother to have been the victim of a wide-ranging smear campaign generated by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's antipathy to his left-leaning sympathies. O'Dwyer married first (1916) Catherine Lenihan (d. October 1946), telephone operator in New York's Vanderbilt hotel whom he met while tending bar in the same establishment. She was incapacitated by a series of nervous disorders, and invalided many years by Parkinson's disease; they had no children. He married secondly (December 1949), weeks after his re-election as mayor, (Elizabeth) Sloane Simpson, fashion model and socialite twenty-seven years his junior, daughter of Col. Sloan Simpson of Texas; they had no children. She obtained a civil divorce in 1953. O'Dwyer died 24 November 1964 of a coronary thrombosis, hours after admission with chest pains to Beth Israel hospital, NY; after funeral mass in St Patrick's cathedral, he was interred in Arlington national cemetery, Virginia. His memoirs, heavily edited and amplified by Paul O'Dwyer, were published posthumously as Beyond the golden door (1986).