Edward Bennett Williams (May 31, 1920 – August 13, 1988) was an American trial lawyer, sports executive, and political insider. During his career, he was one of the most prominent defense attorneys in the country, famous for his celebrity clientele and for winning prominent criminal cases which appeared hopeless.
After graduating first in his class from the College of the Holy Cross and Georgetown University Law School, Williams began his career as a trial lawyer for the law firm of Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1944. He established his own criminal law practice in 1949 and soon rose to prominence for his representation of mobsters, labor unionists, and public officials. During the 1950s and 1960s, he served as defense counsel to U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy and Hollywood producers, and won acquittals for union leader Jimmy Hoffa, congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and U.S. treasury secretary John Connally in bribery and tax evasion cases.
During trials, Williams was known for colorful, dramatic defenses of his clients which often captured national media attention. He was particularly praised for his use of expert witnesses, and summoned testimonies from figures including Lady Bird Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Billy Graham. In 1967, he founded his own law firm, Williams & Connolly, then, from 1974 to 1977, served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, which he had previously represented in its 1972 lawsuit against President Richard Nixon for Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal.
Despite being an influential public figure, Williams never served in public office and rejected an offer from President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve as Mayor of Washington, and rejected subsequent offers from Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to serve as Director of Central Intelligence. Outside of his legal practice, he was involved in professional sports. He served as controlling owner of the Washington Redskins of the National Football League (NFL) from 1965 to 1979 and was its president from 1966 to 1984. He later owned the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball (MLB) from 1979 until his death in 1988.
Early life and education Williams was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 31, 1920, to Joseph Barnard Williams, a floorwalker in a department store, and Mary Bennett. His paternal grandfather, James, was a Welsh immigrant who converted to Catholicism and worked in an iron foundry.; . On his mother's side, Williams was descended from immigrant Irish dairy farmers. His parents married late and lived in a double-decker house; at the time of his birth, his mother was 44 years old. Because Bennett's next child was stillborn, Williams was raised an only child.
Williams spent his early childhood in Hartford, where he later recalled that, at the age of five, he resolved to become a lawyer after witnessing the trial of the gang criminal Gerald Chapman at the city's courthouse. David Rosen, an elementary school classmate and friend, remembered Williams as "quiet" and "very studious" as a child. According to Williams' biographer, Evan Thomas, his cousins remembered him as "soft-spoken and bashful in an engaging sort of way." A classmate, Charles Buck, remembered him as: "the most premeditated kid I've ever seen. He thought everything out, what he was going to do, how he was going to do it." A former girlfriend, Jerry Waterhouse, recalled: Ed was very bright. He was not studious. He was just a quick study. If he hadn’t done any Latin translation, I could walk down the corridor and read him the translation and he could pick it up just like that. I’d spend an hour and a half studying it, but in five minutes he could remember every word I'd said. It’s just incredible. He’s been like that ever since I’ve known him, and I’ve known him since he was thirteen years old.At an early age, Williams developed an interest in gambling and, when he was eight years old, began playing a numbers game betting on the balance of the U.S. Treasury, which would appear in the local evening newspaper. He attended Bulkeley High School, where he became president of its student council, class speaker, debate treasurer, and the winner of a prize for excellence in English. He recalled later that "at high school I practically ran the place," and the school's 1937 yearbook wrote that, "he always ruled with an iron hand and dominating will...and for this reason accomplished much."; . Williams, who wore a suit and tie to school everyday, became the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Torch, in which he had his own column, titled "Inside Stuff." For his dedication to reporting gossip, he was nicknamed "Walter Winchell" by fellow classmates.
When his father lost his job during the Great Depression, Williams began working as a gas jockey. His hours working at the gas station and maintaining The Torch took a toll on his academics, and Williams, although aided by his photographic memory, lost a potential scholarship to Yale University to another student. After graduating high school in 1937 at age 17, he was awarded a scholarship to nearby Trinity College, but chose instead to enroll at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he had won a full academic scholarship.; .
Holy Cross and Georgetown, 1937–1944 As an undergraduate at Holy Cross, Williams was "a relentless grind" who rose early to study, vowed not to drink or smoke, and was a member of a section of students who were placed on an accelerated curriculum. He later recalled that the college's professors "drove us like hell, absolutely beyond anything I’ve ever been driven in my life. We never had any time off. We worked all the time, seven days a week, around the clock. It was just brutal." The curriculum included the Jesuit ratio studiorum and stressed the study of logic, apologetics, rhetoric, metaphysics, and epistemology. Williams studied orators including Cicero, Demosthenes, Edmund Burke, and William Pitt, and translated the satires of the Roman poet Juvenal from the Latin originals. He particularly admired Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. He was a distinguished debater at Holy Cross, helping to defeat Harvard College in a debate tournament his senior year, and ran a debate team with a fellow sectionmate, William J. Richardson. Richardson recalled that Williams "had a corkscrew mind" and "would bore in on a sinuous or tortuous argument." In his senior year, Williams wrote a prize-winning essay titled, "Towards the True Norm of Morality," which called for "absolute standards for evaluating human acts."
Although he initially struggled academically in his first two years, Williams graduated summa cum laude from Holy Cross in 1941, ranked first in his class, and attained a score of 97 out of 100 in his bachelor's oral exam. Classmates voted him "most learned." He won full scholarships to the Columbus School of Law and to the Georgetown University Law School, in addition to being awarded a partial scholarship to attend Yale Law School. Because of Yale's cost, he chose Georgetown, but took a leave from law school after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 19, 1941, he applied to be a clerk at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Despite the bureau’s examiner rating him as "undoubtedly above average intelligence," he was rejected for being "too smart aleckie." He instead enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, completed training at Maxwell Air Force Base, and graduated from preflight school in April 1942. In 1943, however, he was medically discharged after suffering back injuries in a training plane crash.
Williams re-enrolled at Georgetown in June 1943. But before he had finished law school or even took the bar exam, he began working in the summer of 1944 as a law clerk for the leading Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, whose chief trial lawyer Howard Boyd had picked Williams "on the spot" after Georgetown professor Al Philip Kane recommended him as his "brightest student."; . In the fall of that same year, Williams graduated first in his class from Georgetown, was admitted to the bar, and began trial work at Hogan & Hartson under Boyd's guidance as the firm's youngest employee, at just 24 years old.; .
Early practice and marriage, 1944–1949 As a young trial attorney at Hogan & Hartson working closely with Boyd, Williams primarily focused on personal injury law. Boyd later said, "it was perfectly apparent from his first identification with the Hogan office that he was going to be a leader in his field." In one joint case, Boyd and Williams defended a streetcar company whose best witness had been killed in World War II before the case had went to trial. To replace the witness' testimony, the two called to testify a Hogan & Hartson investigator, "Pop" Martin, who had obtained a statement from the witness before his death, and, on examination, led the investigator to say, in a dramatic tone, that the witness had "gave his life for his country." Despite being reprimanded by the judge for the move, they won the case.; . In another early case with Boyd, they represented a man who sued a Washington hotel after a chair he was sitting in collapsed. Boyd considered an offer to settle the case for $10,000, but, at Williams' insistence, they went to trial instead, winning a judgement of $15,000 (equivalent to $274,338 in 2025). Boyd recalled:Somehow or other, Ed got hold of the chair and during the course of his argument to the jury he would pick it up a certain way and the thing would fall apart with a great clamor and then crash down on the floor in front of the jury. Ed, with pretended embarrassment, would pick it up and put it back together. I think it happened several times. That was Ed’s style. He was just effective at capturing the attention of the jury.Over time, as Williams gained more experience, he began handling cases alone without Boyd's supervision. His first solo case at the firm concerned a bicyclist who was sued for colliding with a pedestrian, with Williams representing the cyclist. He won the case—along with in damages—by choosing to countersue the pedestrian for obstructing the cyclist's way. In another case, he represented the Capital Transit Company against a woman, Ella Thomas, who claimed she had been injured in a minor bus collision and began experiencing extreme fevers in the hospital as a result. Williams, after spending an entire night examining her hospital records, found that she had been spiking her thermometer readings by placing them in a cup of hot water; under pressure from him during cross-examination, Thomas broke down and admitted to doing so in court. Her case was dismissed. Williams' abilities at trial brought him the attention of local Washington lawyers, who, along with local law students, began gathering for a chance to see Williams with Boyd at court. As described by Boyd, Williams' style was aggressive to an extreme. Williams could not accept defeat if he lossed and insisted on appealing if he did. In a case where he represented a department store against a woman who sought damages for sitting on a stool with no seat, Williams lost at trial, convinced the store's insurance company to endure the cost of appealing, lost the appeal, insisted on appealing for a second time (doing so pro bono), then finally won, depriving the woman of her damages.