Back in the day, I wrote for an independent newspaper chain in Montgomery County, PA. There were seven papers, and I covered several areas. One was Upper Merion (which is how I came to cover the biggest murder trial in PA history; there were two trials, in fact: one for Bill Bradfield, one for Jay Smith. I covered the second, which was stranger than fiction. (I have written about it on this site in an essay entitled, “A Keeper and A Killer.” ) I covered Fort Washington, Upper Dublin, King of Prussia and surrounding areas. The nexus of this enterprise… the main newsroom and the printing operation….. was in the Fort Washington Office Park, a cold, dreary place. I worried that the zoning board hearings I covered would kill any creative instinct I harbored: they were so long, boring and contentious. To counter this, I researched some ideas of my own by pursuing the ‘location, location, location’ angle. When I learned that former Watergate Special Prosecutor Henry Ruth was working as special counsel for Unisys Corporation (in BlueBell, PA: my beat), I requested an interview. I had been so impressed by Ruth’s tenacity and his obvious emotion during the MOVE hearings in Philadelphia, when his questioning finally led to Mayor W. Wilson Goode’s admission that he had given the order to drop the ‘incendiary device.’
My copy of the story, dated October 22, 1987 is faded and would not reproduce well. In addition, it’s riddled with so many typos and awkward phrasing (definitely not mine), so I thought I would enter most of the story here so that all might benefit from knowing more about a great man’s thought process.
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“I didn’t set out to have a career like this, believe me,” said Henry S. Ruth Jr of Gulph Mills, special litigation counsel for Unisys in Blue Bell, PA. In the early ‘70’s, during the Watergate Era, Ruth could be seen on the televised hearings of the US Department of Justice’s Watergate Special Prosecution Force. In 1985, Ruth was in the public eye as a member of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Committee on MOVE. Recently, he testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for SCOTUS Justice nominee Robert H Bork. [My note: Ruth said, “I don’t want to see history rewritten just to confirm a Supreme Court Justice.”) In the ‘60’s, Ruth presided over the DOJ’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. These are some of the highlight of what has been and continues to be a brilliant career.
Ruth began in private practice in 1957, when he joined the Philadelphia law firm, Saul, Ewing, Remick and Saul. Spurred on by John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy during the 1960’s, Ruth decided to work in the public sector. “I went to Washington for a week and literally went to 25 agencies,” said Ruth, who found that the best way to meet potential employers was “to walk into somebody’s office at 6:30 at night when the secretaries and others are gone.” He was hired by Henry Peterson, then Deputy Chief of the Organized Crime Section, and after that first job, he said: “I never really applied for a job again, it just happened.”
What happened for Ruth included positions as Deputy Director of Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice; Director of the Research Institute for the US DOJ’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, posts in the DOJ’s office of Criminal Justice, and work with the Department’s Civil Rights division.
At the state level, Ruth has been a member of the Governor’s Law Enforcement Commissions in New York and Pennsylvania; he served as a consultant to the New Jersey Committee on Crime and Criminal Justice; and directed (NY) Mayor John Lindsay’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council from 1970-1973.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Ruth was an Associate Professor of Law there from 1967-69.
“One reason I got out of the prosecution business is that one gets too cynical,” he said. “I’m not that judgmental a person,” Ruth said. “We’re all human. We all, I think, tend to get our viewpoint slanted when we get power. The fact that there is a Watergate prosecution and a MOVE Commission make you feel that there is justice, not that there’s not.” Ruth’s emotional confrontation with Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor, Fire Commissioner William B. Richmond and Managing Director Leo Brooks stood out during the MOVE Commission hearings.
The Commission investigated the May 1985 battle between the radical group and the city police and fire departments, which resulted which resulted in the death of five children and six adults, and the destruction of 61 homes. When Ruth expressed his outrage that the city administration would not take responsibility for the tragedy, he spoke for the public. It prompted the Mayor to admit fault in the incident.
Ruth, who characterized the MOVE disaster as one of the most difficult problems a government official could encounter, said, “For one reason or another, at the beginning of some case or criminal investigation, people who have done the thing they now realize they shouldn’t have done usually do lie. If you keep plugging, and keep coming back to them, most of them eventually come around and tell you what happened. The most difficult (situation) is when a group of people hold the line at a common lie — that’s what you had at Watergate. John Dean versus everyone else in the White House. I don’t know where that would have come out without the tapes.”
Ruth said that the reforms wrought by the kind of arduous investigations that followed Watergate and MOVE “help for awhile.” He said the MOVE probe will affect police planning in Philadelphia for the next few generations. The national publicity focused on the MOVE tragedy will influence other police departments emergency planning.
Ruth, who has worked as a prosecutor and defense attorney, has some piercing observations on the roles. “As a criminal defense attorney, you’re outmatched,” he said. “Basically, you and your client may be the only ones who know if he’s guilty. If he’s guilt and he’s got a criminal background, you can’t put him on the stand.” Going to trial with an innocent victim is equally hard. “To lose if the guy’s innocent is the toughest thing of all: there you sometimes feel helpless.”
During the years he spent prosecuting organized crime figures, Ruth learned that “you can’t make those cases without using the bad guys as witnesses. Little angels don’t sit in on their meetings. Your responsibility is to make sure the testimony is reliable.” A prosecutor must resist the temptation to cut an unfair deal to gain witness, Ruth said, illustrating the point with an example.
During the Carter administration, Ruth represented Hamilton Jordan, then the President’s Chief of Staff. Jordan was charged with using cocaine at New York’s Studio 54. Rumors were rampant, press was sensational, and none of it was true, Ruth said. Jordan’s acquittal was the result of “that specific prosecutor being a very fair guy,” Ruth notes, and not succumbing to Studio 54’s owners’ lure. Faced with a massive tax evasion case, their proposition to the prosecution went something like: ‘We’ll give you Jordan if you go easy on us.”
Ruth, who claims to have “lucked into job after job” came to Unisys by way of the dinner table. Having returned to Saul, Ewing in 1981, he attended a dinner and was seated next to Unisys general counsel Curtis Hessler. “He ended up recruiting me.”
“Law practice has really changed,” Ruth says, “it’s like a big business.” Ruth reasoned that if he was going to be in big business, he might as well go with a $9 million corporation whose legal group is creative and “very collegial.” Ruth said that he had been going into the city for school or work for about 30 years and the suburban change was appealing to him and his wife. “I’m 56 years old and I was looking ahead ten years.”
The Ruth’s have three grown daughters who reside respectively in Vermont, Seattle, and California. Ruth’s wife, Tina, went into law after the children were grown, starting with a small firm in DC and progressing to an office of her own in Haverford, PA. Her specialty? “Divorce law. She keeps me on my toes,” Ruth said.
At Unisys, Ruth has a number of different tasks which are interesting to him. As counsel to the firm’s ethics committee and its government relations office in DC, Ruth’s energy will be channelled into familiar territory. To those who have become jaded with the workings of government and apathetic in the face of conflict and scandal, Ruth said, “I don’t want to be an old fogey, but I think there’s no sense of history.” He said he is cognizant of the force of history every time he votes, “We live in the best country in the world.” Not to have the motivation to preserve the sense of history is “tremendously selfish. Cynicism is a cop-out.”
To the young person who can only find fault with the system, Ruth says, “Get your butt our of that chair and get to work to change it, or keep your mouth shut and thank God for the First Amendment and the right to vote.”
Copyright Karen Bennett, 1987; 2024