MICHIGAN: Prodigy's Progress

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Soapy plugged through law school to win his usual scholastic honor record, but this time he could not resist the bull sessions. Like all universities, Ann Arbor was in a ferment over the New Deal. The standard bull-session topics of sex and religion went out the window, and long debates raged over the day's headlines from Washington. Soapy thought of himself as a liberal Republican, but a close friend, Jim Denison (now a successful Los Angeles lawyer), convinced him that there could be no such animal. Soapy flipped resoundingly into the New Deal camp, much to the distress of his family. (Elma Williams, in moments of political outrage, still sometimes calls her son a D.D., for damned Democrat.)

One day Denison proudly presented his new convert to Mother Denison, who was visiting the campus. Afterwards. Mrs. Denison said thoughtfully: "I am very much impressed with your friend Soapy. He is a Franklin Roosevelt at 24. He will some day be President."

Corner Turned. People were always saying things like that about Soapy, and some of them were politicians who knew a good thing when they saw one. Soapy was hardly installed as a lawyer in New Deal Washington before Michigan's redheaded Governor Frank Murphy summoned him to Lansing to be assistant state attorney-general. When Murphy went on to run Franklin Roosevelt's Justice Department, he made Soapy his executive assistant. Then Murphy sent Soapy into Michigan so the home folks could see him. Soapy was appointed as a prosecutor in Murphy's drive to get something on Republican Boss Frank McKay. McKay was indicted for fraud, but despite Murphy's lawyers—including Soapy—McKay was acquitted.

Soapy went into the Navy as a deck officer and gravitated to staff work. When he was discharged in mid-1946, a lieutenant commander with ten Pacific battle stars and a Legion of Merit, Murphy got him a job as deputy director of OPA in Michigan. By this time Soapy was on the make for governor, and—when the OPA job expired—he gladly seized at Fred Alger's offer of the spot on the liquor commission. At the same time Soapy Williams, the boy wonder of three schools, rounded the corner and came face to face with practical politics. He aligned himself with two highly practical Democratic groups which needed nothing so much as a popular candidate. They were the C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee and a Fair Dealing reform group known as the Michigan Democratic Club.

New Outposts. Today, Soapy's strength in Michigan is built on a sort of right triangle. The base is the powerful C.I.O.P.A.C., anchored by some 400,000 members of Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers in & around Detroit. The vertical side, extending far upstate, is the Michigan Democratic Club, founded by Soapy's good friend and law partner, Hicks Griffiths. The hypotenuse is the candidate himself. Each member of this triangular coalition is essentially dependent on the other.