The Man with the Big Laugh

The Man with the Big Laugh

Gamblers, touts and gangsters operated nonchalantly for years in Florida. In the midst of graft and corruption, since his inauguration in January 1949, stood Governor Fuller Warren, 45, a handsome man with silvery hair and one of the loudest belly laughs in politics.

Laughter and games, with art occasional murder, continued until a Dade County grand jury and the Kefauver Committee turned over a few logs and gave the public a quick view of the denizens that scurried for other cover. Governor Warren, looking and sounding outraged, took quick action: he fired a handful of sheriffs and constables (including Dade County's wealthy Sheriff Jimmy Sullivan). The quizzing went on and the governor saw another log overturned, right on the Statehouse lawn. Out scurried one of the governor's old friends, William Johnston, big-shot Miami and Chicago race-track operator, tagged by the Kefauver Committee as "an associate of Capone mobsters." Johnston unwillingly recalled that he had whistled up $135,000 for Warren's successful election campaign. Meanwhile, Warren reinstated Miami's Sheriff Sullivan, and his critics were back on the trail. Warren denied all their charges, stoutly affirmed that there is not the slightest connection between the governor's office and organized Florida crime.

The Kefauver Committee invited him to appear in Miami and testify. He refused. Angrily, the committee, now organized under the chairmanship of Maryland's Senator Herbert O'Conor, who was once a governor himself, slapped a subpoena on the governor, ordering him to show up in Washington this week. Warren challenged the committee's power to remove him from Florida and thus "restrain me from the discharge of my responsibilities as chief executive of a sovereign state." He appealed for advice to South Carolina's Governor James Byrnes, onetime Supreme Court Justice, and got some support. The committee was being "overzealous," Jimmy Byrnes thought. To take personal jurisdiction over a governor "threatens the existence of our form of government."

The O'Conor committee was aware of the shakiness of its position. Hopefully, it gave Warren another ten days to show up in Washington, even offered to go to Florida if Warren would put in an appearance.

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