Scope and Content Note
The papers of Edward Bennett Williams (1920-1988), prominent trial lawyer, advisor to presidents of the United States, and sportsman who was president of the Washington Redskins football team and owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball franchise, span the years 1920-1990, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1960-1988. The papers are organized into Correspondence, Speeches and Writings, Subject File, Scrapbooks, and Classified Material.
The correspondence, spanning 1960-1988, is general in nature. Cards and letters expressing best wishes in response to Williams' frequent cancer treatments account for much of the correspondence. Correspondents include Brutus J. Clay, Clark M. Clifford, Jack Kent Cooke, Ronald W. Reagan, Eugene Rostow, and Jack Valenti.
Williams's speeches, interviews, participation in panel discussions, and statements, spanning 1956-1988 and indexed through 1988, comprise the largest portion of the Speeches and Writings series. Included in an articles subseries is material related to the chapter "You in Trial Law" that Williams wrote for the 1962 anthology Listen to the Leaders of the Law. The bulk of a books subseries includes reviews, correspondence, and research material related to Williams's 1962 book One Man's Freedom, in which he discusses constitutional principles as applied in his defenses of Frank Costello, James R. Hoffa, Aldo Icardi, Joseph R. McCarthy, and others. Also in the books subseries are files related to Robert Pack's 1983 authorized biography, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense. Correspondence with publishers and writers, among them Richard Condon, relates to other book projects associated with Williams.
The Subject File is comprised mainly of material concerning Williams's participation in public policy committees, boards of trustees of schools and colleges, cancer centers, and causes. Files relate to his chairing the American Bar Association Committee on Crime Prevention and Control, and the Funding, Legal, and Legislative Subcommittee of the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Narcotics Addiction, Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s. Williams declined requests from presidents Ford and Reagan to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but his interest in foreign affairs, defense, and intelligence issues is reflected in files related to his service with the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the Ford and Reagan administrations and with the private Committee on the Present Danger. Besides teaching criminal law and evidence for many years at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., in 1971 he was visiting professor of constitutional litigation at the Yale University law school in New Haven, Connecticut, where one of his students was Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose class paper with cover letter is included in the law professorships file.
Forty-eight volumes of scrapbooks, spanning 1946-1988 and indexed through 1978, contain newspaper and magazine articles, souvenir ephemera, and other material that trace Williams's career in law, sports, and politics.