JoePa Takes the Fall

by Bill Keisling

  3

  The Magic Moment:

  Six decades of Pennsylvania governors, AGs,

  and the state Republican Party:

  The Appointed Years 1950 to 1980

  This Thanksgiving I arrived late for family dinner. It was dark by the time I got to my brother’s house, cars filled the street and driveway, and everyone had already gathered inside.

  In the family room several of my uncles and brothers-in-law sat around the TV, watching football. Kids ran around on the carpet.

  The women -- my sisters, mother, aunts and sisters-in-law -- sat around the table chatting in the dining room.

  As always, with my family, it was a complicated meal. Over the years, many in my family have changed their eating preferences. Some had also changed their political parties, their religious affiliations, even their gender identification. There’s a lot to keep straight. A holiday dinner with my once-traditional Catholic family today means traditional Thanksgiving food, as well as vegan, vegetarian, and even kosher dishes.

  Our family dinner itself was quite and subdued. A pall had settled over our holiday. Everyone seemed to be in some state of subdued and shocked disbelief. Something seemed to have died. Pennsylvania? I thought.

  It’s another measure of the magnitude of everything that’s terribly wrong in Pennsylvania that our state officials in late 2011 finally delivered a scandal that our families were unable to fully discuss around our holiday table, though it played so heavily on our minds.

  In the weeks and days leading to the Thanksgiving holiday our public officials finally outdid themselves. They’d created a self-censoring scandal, a scandal so utterly contemptible and bad we couldn’t talk about it at the table in mixed company, with children present.

  Not that everyone didn’t know the horrible specifics. Everyone seemed to know the intricacies of the case. My brothers, brothers-in-law and uncles seemed to know every sordid detail. But no one spoke about it at the table.

  After dinner, in front of the TV set, the sports channel flickering in the background, some of the men emotionally spoke of the Penn State shower room specifics and executive office suite missteps like they were bad football plays. Flags were down all over the field, and each bad play was analyzed, play-by-play, with precision and emotion.

  As the dishes were being cleared away, I followed my father and a brother-in-law or two out to the cold back porch to get some air.

  Outside it was cold, damp and dark. The grass and the fallen leaves were brown and seemed smashed down into the ground. Everything was sullen, and had a dead feeling to it that seemed to go beyond ordinary winter.

  My brother-in-law picked up where he’d left off inside, upset I could see about Joe Paterno’s plight, gnashing teeth and waving arms.

  “What do you think, Pop?” I asked my father.

  Something unusual came from my father. He is a man who is usually fair to a fault, in an old-fashioned way.

  My dad, Big Bill, says to me, “I think Tom Corbett has some ‘splaining to do.” He screwed up his face, trying to make sense of the news reports he’d obviously closely read. “He says he only put a single trooper on the case.” I could see it didn’t make sense to him. “I guess his excuse is that he was distracted by ‘Bonusgate.’”

  My father halted, waiting to hear what I might throw in. I held my tongue.

  “Why did Tom Corbett have Joe Paterno fired when Corbett was every bit as complicit, if not more so, in the cover-up of all this?” my brother-in-law, from Philadelphia, wanted to know. It seemed to be the question of the moment on everyone’s mind.

  My Uncle Jim, a retired schoolteacher from Scranton, as always, had the simple explanation. In Scranton you don’t spend much time wondering about delicacies. You don’t see too many delicacies in Scranton. You do however know the pecking order.

  “Because Corbett’s the governor, that’s why,” Uncle Jim says.

  To understand the demise of Coach Joe Paterno in 2011 at the hands of a Pennsylvania governor, an attorney general, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party, we have to go back decades, I submit. We must travel back in time as long as, if not longer, than Paterno had coached at Penn State, since 1950.

  Joe Paterno spent his life a loyal Republican. Paterno was a Republican from another era, when to be a Republican in Pennsylvania meant something much different than it means today. In the mid-1960s, when Paterno started head coaching, to be a Republican here meant to be broad minded, fair, and progressive. It was a party of inclusive ideas, clean government, and homespun values. How had it come to represent the opposite? I wondered.

  The Republican Party in Pennsylvania changed greatly over the coming decades. It would lose its moorings. It would somehow leave behind, in the dust, one of its most faithful, inspiring, competent and accomplished sons, Coach Joe Paterno.

  Why was that?

  Let me tell you about Gov. Bill Scranton and Attorney General Walter Alessandroni

  It was with all this in mind that I began researching the history of the Pennsylvania governor’s office and its close interactions with the Office of Attorney General for the past fifty or so years. For me, as you’ll see, it was sometimes a very personal and even painful part of my own life that I had begun to research. The truth is, I’ve come to see, I’m sort of the Forrest Gump of Pennsylvania politics.

  A few days after Thanksgiving 2011, I happened across, on the Internet, an old black and white photograph of a Pennsylvania Republican attorney general from the 1960s.

  His name was Walter Alessandroni. I’d actually met Attorney General Alessandroni on the steps of the state capitol building when I was a boy of no more than four or five. I remember being introduced to him as my father’s little boy, and shaking his hand. That must’ve been the first I’d crossed paths with a state AG, but it would not be the last.

  What I didn’t know then was that the fate of my life, and that of my father, would be closely tied to the fate of Pennsylvania Attorney General Alessandroni, and state governor’s office politics. So this particular photograph I discovered on the net opened a much wider window into my past, as well as Pennsylvania’s past.

  Much to my surprise, standing in the same photograph from 1964 with Attorney General Walter Alessandroni, was my father. In the photo my father was a young man in his 20s. What was the story behind the photograph? I naturally wanted to know.

  I emailed a copy of the photo to my father.

  “I was digging through the archives about past PA attorneys general and came across this photo of you with Walt Alessandroni,” I wrote my dad. “Thought you’d be interested. What sort of guy was Alessandroni?”

  A day went by, and I heard nothing. Then a reply email comes from my father.

  He responds, “thanks, bill, for the walter Alessandroni picture... certainly kicks up some memories for me... when i see you, i’ll be happy to tell you about walter...dad.”

  So that’s how I soon found myself hearing these stories. I’d only known small parts of the story, mostly from first-hand experience.

  When Brown University graduate Joe Paterno began his coaching career at PSU, in 1950, only a few years after the close of World Wart II, the fortunes of the state Republican Party were in steady decline.

  Former Luzerne County Judge John S. Fine, a Republican, was elected governor in 1951, and remained in office until 1955. But after Fine, things were not so fine. Two Democrats -- George Leader, of York County, and David Lawrence, of Pittsburgh -- held the state house until 1963. Into the Kennedy years, the Pennsylvania Grand Old Party remained flat on its back, at war with itself. It was hobbled by a worn-out message and crippled political machines in Philadelphia and elsewhere that desperately needed retooling.

  The story and dynamics of what happened over the coming years and decades of Paterno’s career, and in Pennsylvania Republican politics, leading to the election of state attorney general Tom Corbett, is a fascinating one, worthy of examination and consideration.

  Change c
ame to the staid GOP of the 1950s with the election to U.S. Congress in 1960 of Bill Scranton. Scranton was the son of a wealthy family from the hard coal city that bears his name.

  At the start of World War II Scranton left Yale Law School to enlist in the Army Air Corps. He was a pilot in the Air Transport Command, and discharged as a captain.

  After the war Scranton finished his law degree at Yale. He got involved in local businesses and the politics of northeast Pennsylvania. It helped that his mother was a prominent national Republican Party committeewoman. Telegenic and smart, he was soon noticed by President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike appointed Scranton special assistant to U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He’d trained as a lawyer, and now Bill Scranton was training as a statesman.

  After about a year on the job at State, Scranton left to run for Congress in the city of Scranton’s predominantly Democratic 10th Congressional District. He handily beat the Democratic incumbent, Con. Stan Prokop, by some 17,000 votes, and went to Washington.

  With Bill Scranton’s election to Congress, my own young life would become intimately and singularly entwined with not only the Pennsylvania’s governor’s office and the state’s attorney general’s office, but also the eclipse of moderate and progressive Republicanism at the hands of what we call today Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan conservatism.

  In the late 1950s, while he was a young newspaperman in his early twenties, my father caught the eye of Bill Scranton, then running for Congress.

  My father was asked to work on Scranton’s campaign. When Scranton won, my dad, all of 24 years old, went with him to Washington as an assistant.

  Republican Congressman Bill Scranton quickly became known as an outspoken centrist. Congressman Scranton supported much of President John Kennedy’s social agenda, like the Peace Corp, and the belated push for civil rights. Scranton became known as a “Kennedy Republican,” a term unimaginable today. Can you imagine a Clinton Republican, or an Obama Republican?

  Though they were Republican, my father and his young friends admired John Kennedy. It wasn’t only that Kennedy was Catholic, as were my father and many of his friends, though that certainly was a source of pride. Like others, my dad admired Kennedy’s forward thinking optimism, his energy and speaking ability, his call for public involvement and sacrifice for our country, and certainly an elusive characteristic about JFK that used to be called “class.”

  In 1962 Congressman Bill Scranton was asked by party leaders back home to run for governor of Pennsylvania. Forward thinking state GOP leaders hoped Scranton’s moderate and centrist politics would have broad appeal and help restore the party’s faltering fortunes.

  In Philadelphia the longstanding Republican political machine was in considerable disarray, decline and turmoil.

  The labels we use today of liberal and conservative don’t apply. In 1951 and 1955, respectively, reform Democrats like Joe Clark and Richardson Dilworth were elected mayor of Philadelphia. Clark and Dilworth broke the stranglehold of the Philadelphia Republican machine that, until then, had controlled the Philadelphia mayor’s office for an uninterrupted 67 years. Before Clark and Dilworth, the last Democrat elected mayor of Philadelphia had been Samuel George King, who left office in 1884, during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur. Other changes were afoot: post-war suburbanization (think Levittown, in Bucks County), and the 1951 passage of a Home Rule Charter in Philadelphia presaged drastic upheavals.

  For most of the twentieth century the once-powerful Philly GOP machine had been run by the Meehan clan. For a quarter century, since the 1930s, Sheriff Austin “Aus” Meehan ruled the roost. In 1961 Aus Meehan, age 64, keeled over and died at a dinner held in his honor. His son, William “Billy” Meehan would succeed him as party boss.

  The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Thomas Ferrick, Jr., in 1994 wrote of Aus Meehan’s 1961 funeral and its aftermath like this:

  “They laid the sheriff (Aus) out at his big Victorian home on Rising Sun Avenue in Lawndale. The papers said that more than 50,000 people turned out for the viewing. His son (Billy) was 36 at the time.

  “A few of us got together. We talked to Billy,” recalled ward leader John Patrick Walsh in 1987. “He was kind of lost. And we were lost. We encouraged him to take over where his father left off.”

  This was precisely the magic moment when Bill Scranton emerged on the stage of statewide politics.

  The problems in Philadelphia had to be straightened out, or no Republican could confidently hope to do well in a statewide election, which often turns on turnout in Philadelphia and, especially today, its suburbs. (By the end of the century, Philly city Democrats would outnumber Republicans by about 4 to 1.)

  “It was fucked up,” my dad bluntly recalls. A group of concerned and relatively young Philadelphia Republicans, including the newly elected U.S. Senator Hugh Scott, coalesced to try to reform the old Philly Meehan GOP machine. Sen. Scott even threatened to run for governor himself.

  Instead, Hugh Scott backed Bill Scranton, and introduced Scranton to one of his group of young Philly reformers, an attorney with political aspirations of his own named Walter Alessandroni.

  Alessandroni was small in stature. No more than maybe 5’4”, my dad remembers. He was compactly and powerfully built, like a wrestler. He had been a Marine during the war. How driven a Marine was he? Alessandroni had joined the Marines Corp in 1943 as a sergeant and was discharged three years later as a major. He was a descendent of Philadelphia immigrants. His father and two uncles, like him, became lawyers. His wife was a “sweet” woman named Ethel.

  President Eisenhower in 1959 appointed Alessandroni U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Following John Kennedy’s election as president, Alessandroni got elected chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, itself a full-time job. The bar association’s chancellorship involved local politics, and also denotes that the Philadelphia bar considered Alessandroni a good lawyer.

  Alessandroni himself considered running for governor in 1962. He let it be known to party leaders that he was interested in running in the primary, and that he would like the nomination. But he immediately supported Scranton once the congressman said he was willing to run.

  He became a loyal Scranton supporter. Bill Scranton asked Alessandroni to manage his 1962 campaign for governor.

  In the primary Scranton beat former state Attorney General Bob Woodside, a staid favorite of some old-line GOPers.

  In the general election for governor Bill Scranton went on to face the now-entrenched mayor of Philadelphia (and Meehan up ender), Richardson Dilworth. (Dilworth Plaza in Philadelphia, next to city hall, was named for the former mayor. It was where Occupy protesters made camp in 2011. Today’s unhappy and disenfranchised young protestors camped out in the shadows of our past, without much knowing its significance.)

  The governor’s race between Bill Scranton and Mayor Dilworth grew spirited and acrimonious.

  His campaign fizzling, Dilworth asked Bill Scranton to debate. Scranton declined. Dilworth proceeded to buy time on a Scranton television station for a Saturday evening debate. Dilworth set an empty chair under the studio lights. It was to be another Dilworth “Empty Chair Debate.” This tactic, debating an empty chair, had worked well for Dilworth in a past Philadelphia election with a Meehan empty suit.

  Not this time. At the last minute Bill Scranton showed up at the studio, carrying in his hand a bucket of whitewash.

  Under the glaring television lights Scranton held out the bucket of whitewash and told a surprised Dick Dilsworth, “You’re all whitewash, Mayor Dilworth, all whitewash.” It was a magic moment, one of many to come for Bill Scranton.

  Dilworth appeared flustered, and never recovered. At one point in the debate Dilworth even insulted the voters’ intelligence by saying that northern Pennsylvania consisted of “Nothing but bears.”

  Scranton countered that northern Pennsylvania was home to “educated bears, and they vote.”

  Dilworth had paid for the debate, and got his head handed to h
im.

  Outside the studio, after the debate, an angry Dick Dilworth kept throwing personal insults at Bill Scranton. Vince Carocci tells the story in his book, A Capitol Journey:

  “Dilworth got right in Scranton’s face, boiling mad. Scranton pointed a finger at him in rebuke.

  “‘Don’t you point your bony, effeminate finger at me!’ Dilworth shouted at his opponent. ...(H)e appeared just inches away from getting physical. But Scranton refused to be baited.

  “‘You, sir, are a desperate man,’ Scranton responded coolly as he turned and walked away.

  This appeal to openness and honesty helped propel Bill Scranton to a landslide victory of almost a half a million votes.

  Today’s Republican leaders would do well to consider that bucket of whitewash, and what it represents to the Pennsylvania Republican Party, and the educated bears in the state who vote.

  After his election, Gov. Bill Scranton and his wife Mary moved into the temporary governor’s residence on the grounds of the Fort Indiantown Gap military reservation.

  The old governor’s mansion on the river in downtown Harrisburg, Keystone Hall, had been falling apart for decades. Gov. Gifford Pinchot in his last address to the state legislature in the mid-1930s had strongly recommended the crumbling residence be torn down and replaced. Almost three decades later Keystone Hall was finally razed, but the future governor’s residence in uptown Harrisburg had yet to be constructed. So the Scrantons lived in the Lt. Governor’s residence at Fort Indiantown Gap.

  Gov. Scranton appointed his loyal campaign manager and friend Walter Alessandroni state attorney general. Attorney General Alessandroni moved in with the Scrantons at the Fort Indiantown Gap governor’s residence, and lived with the first family. He’d commute back and forth on weekends to his home in Philadelphia.

  You’d be hard pressed today to imagine Attorney General Tom Corbett moving in and living with then-Gov. Ed Rendell and his wife, federal appellate court Judge Midge Rendell, though it conjures a funny mind picture, if not a plot for a television survival reality show, or a sitcom, like Three’s Company.