Gordon Evans Dean

Background

Gordon Evans Dean was born on December 28, 1905 in Seattle, Washington. He was the son of the Reverend John Marvin Dean, a Baptist minister, and Beatrice Alice Fisken.  

Education

Dean attended public schools in Chicago, New York City, and Pasadena, California. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Redlands in 1927; and attended law school at the University of Southern California, graduating with the Juris Doctor degree in 1930. He earned the Master of Laws at Duke (1932).

Career

Dean accepted a position as assistant dean and instructor of law at the Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina, in 1930. During his four years there, he gained admission to the bars of California (1930) and North Carolina (1931). In 1934 Dean left Duke with Justin Miller, dean of the law school, to undertake a special study for the Department of Justice. They were to devise a more uniform system of probation, parole, and pardon in federal and state jurisdictions.

This assignment brought Dean into the criminal division under Assistant Attorney General Brien McMahon. There Dean helped carry out the widespread reforms launched in the Justice Department by Attorney General Homer S. Cummings during the Roosevelt administration. He helped organize the National Crime Conference in December 1934 and drafted legislation for implementing Cummings' twelve-point program to broaden federal authority in prosecuting racketeers, bank robbers, kidnappers, and other felons who were taking advantage of the limitations of state laws.

Dean also tested these laws by trying several key cases in United States district courts. He was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court in 1935, and, as chief of the appellate section in the criminal division, he argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court during the next three years. Dean's outstanding work in the criminal division led Cummings to appoint him as special executive assistant to the attorney general in 1937.

He was in charge of public affairs for the Department of Justice, and he advised the attorney general on the public relations aspects of all policy decisions in the department. He served in a similar capacity under Attorney General Robert H. Jackson. During this same period he also taught jurisprudence at the American University in Washington, and was a special lecturer on the American legal system at the Department of State.

In April 1940 Dean joined two former Justice Department associates, Brien McMahon and Walter E. Gallagher, in private law practice in Washington. During the next three years he handled several large accounts and a number of antitrust cases for the firm. In 1940 Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes appointed him to an advisory committee to draft rules of procedure for the federal courts. Dean served on the committee until the new rules were adopted by the Congress and the Supreme Court in 1944.

Late in 1943 Dean joined the navy as an intelligence officer. In May 1945, while still serving in the navy, he was selected by Jackson, now an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as his assistant in prosecuting major Nazi war criminals in Germany. Dean assisted Jackson in drafting the plan for establishing the International Military Tribunal during the summer of 1945 and then was largely responsible for collecting and organizing the massive compendium of documents to be used as evidence in the prosecutions.

He resigned his navy commission in September 1945, and after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials in 1946 he returned for health reasons to California, where he became professor of criminal law at the University of Southern California. At the same time he was also engaged in a private law practice and owned and operated an avocado and citrus ranch in Vista, California.

In the spring of 1949, at the suggestion of McMahon, who was now a United States senator from Connecticut and chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, President Harry S. Truman appointed Dean to the Atomic Energy Commission. Dean and Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss sparked the successful effort to reverse the commission's recommendation against development of the hydrogen bomb. Dean's effectiveness and close ties to McMahon led to his appointment as chairman of the commission by Truman in July 1950.

During the following three years Dean led the commission through a challenging period in which a vast expansion of facilities for producing special nuclear materials and weapons was undertaken. A sound administrator with an unerring sense of Washington politics, he continued to serve as chairman under President Eisenhower until the completion of his term on June 30, 1953.

With the assistance of Strauss, who succeeded him as the AEC chairman, Dean joined the investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers in New York City. He organized and became the first chairman of the board of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation, which he merged with the General Dynamics Corporation in 1955; he was senior vice-president and director until his death in an airplane accident at Nantucket, Massachussets.

Achievements

• Gordon Evans Dean was an important Criminal Division attorney and public spokesman. Dean helped to draft numerous provisions that became parts of the expanded federal criminal law and then, before the Supreme Court, he argued and won cases establishing that these new statutes were constitutional. Under Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, Dean was one of the Department’s top officials and its press spokesman.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Report on the Atom What You Should Know About Atomic Energy

Views

Dean was interested in stimulating private development of nuclear power for civilian purposes.

Connections

On August 9, 1930, Dean married Adelaide Williamson; they had two children.

By 1953 Dean's first marriage had ended in divorce. On Decmber 19, 1953, he married Mary Benton Gore. They had two children.

Father:

John Marvin Dean

Mother:

Beatrice Alice (Fisken) Dean

Spouse:

Adelaide (Williamson)

Spouse:

Mary Benton (Gore) Dean

References

• Kissinger: A Biography by Isaacson, Walter (September 27, 2005) Paperback