Candidate Hoping Second Run For Attorney General Is Charmed

After graduating from Temple University in 1979, Eisenhower, a distant relative of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, went to Washington to earn his law degree at the Antioch University Law School.



He met his wife, Nora, in law school and the couple married in 1983.



The Eisenhowers then relocated to Great Britain, where the young lawyer earned a master’s of philosophy in legal theory at Oxford University, as a Marshall scholar.



Returning to Pennsylvania in 1985, Eisenhower began his legal career as a judicial clerk for Superior Court Judge J. Sydney Hoffman — a mentor for Eisenhower throughout most of his career.



In 1987, Eisenhower was accepted into the U.S. Department of Justice’s exclusive Honors Program — an initiative designed to recruit law graduates and clerks with no trial experience to work as Justice lawyers.



Assigned to the Civil Rights Division of the department’s Criminal Section, Eisenhower spent most of the next three years prosecuting hate crimes and police corruption around the country.



He took a break from that rigorous schedule in his first year with Justice to serve as an assistant prosecutor in the District of Columbia’s District Attorney’s Office, trying such typical big city crimes as drug possession, burglary, prostitution and weapons violations.



Toward the end of the decade, Michael M. Baylson, then the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, recruited Eisenhower to serve as a deputy in his office.



The Eisenhowers left Washington in December 1989 and Jim Eisenhower began in the Philadelphia office at the start of the new year.



Eisenhower described his courtroom style as sincere, fair and prepared.



“I’m not given to a lot of histrionics and theatrics; that’s not really my style,” he said. “I try to show respect for the court, for the system and for opposing counsel. — I always felt the end result was to do justice and not necessarily to get a conviction at all costs.”



Barry Kowalski, special counsel to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, recalled Eisenhower’s trial skills as “gentlemanly” but unwavering in his ability to put witnesses in a position to tell the truth.



Kowalski, a lead prosecutor in the Rodney King police brutality trial, actually traced his history with Eisenhower to his law school days at Antioch, where Kowalski was an instructor. After observing Eisenhower’s skills in a criminal defense clinic, Kowalski later recruited him for the Justice Department.



Kowalski described Eisenhower as a very thorough prosecutor, with “an ability to formulate an overall investigative plan and execute it well.”



“He was extraordinarily skillful with reluctant witnesses, putting them in a position, in a very gentlemanly-like manner, where they had no option but to tell the truth,” Kowalski said.



Together, they tried an excessive use of force case against police officers in Puerto Rico. Kowalski said Eisenhower’s reputation preceded him among the police officers in the U.S. territory, where he was known as the “feared Se?or Ike.”



And, Kowalski said, Eisenhower always remained cool under pressure.



In the Puerto Rico case, Kowalski said Eisenhower was assembling evidence days before the statute of limitations expired to build his case against officers who had shot a young man parked at a lover’s lane.



Ronald H. Levine, a former supervisor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, echoed Kowalski’s comments, calling Eisenhower a “master advocate,” who worked well under pressure and “really believed in his cases.”



“He takes his work seriously but doesn’t take himself too seriously,” said Levine, who headed the public corruption and labor racketeering section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and is now a partner with Post & Schell in Philadelphia.



Recalling his prosecutorial days, Eisenhower said his Justice Department work involved more long-term investigative work, while in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he had to deal with a large number of guilty pleas, in addition to the investigative and trial work.



“I think the trick to being an effective federal prosecutor nowadays is managing the investigation, handling the legal challenges and issues that arise pre- and post-indictment, and then negotiating the plea deal that’s the most beneficial to the government,” he said.



Eisenhower said that wisdom came to him from his time in the trenches of the D.C. DA’s Office, where there was scant time to prepare and more than enough cases to try.



“The skills you learn from not having all those advantages in preparation and just having to cross-examine a witness, make closing arguments to a jury and handle objections — learning those things early on” was beneficial, he said. “At the time it felt like boot camp, but boot camp can be a good experience once you get into the battle. Learning those things in a very pressurized environment was a very good foundation for my legal career.”

National Security Council

In 1994, Eisenhower left the public sector and joined the Philadelphia firm of Montgomery McCracken. He was only there for a year when he won a White House Fellowship, taking leave from the firm in August 1995 to join the National Security Council staff as an aide to the Clinton administration’s National Security Adviser, Samuel “Sandy” Berger.



In that position, Eisenhower worked on international and organized crime, terrorism and narcotics issues. In the fall of 1995, he drafted the order that was used to seize the assets of the Cali Cartel in Columbia under the same federal statute President Bush used to freeze Al-Qaeda assets in the aftermath of 9/11.



In the fall of 1996, Eisenhower also served as a liaison on behalf of several federal national security agencies in the creation of the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands.



“It was the first war crimes tribunal since Nuremburg so it was a really fascinating thing to go there, see the facilities; I met with the prosecutors and the lawyers to talk about what the United States could do for staffing,” Eisenhower said.



Jonathan M. Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state specializing in international law enforcement, said Eisenhower was a policymaker who understood the dark side of globalization and the relevance of local law enforcement agencies in the exercise of international law enforcement.



He credited Eisenhower for his coalition-building skills. Eisenhower could “gently bang heads,” Winer said, in an effort to bring the Justice Department, the FBI, the U.S. Customs Bureau and the Secret Service, among other security agencies, to the same table as the State Department on issues of national law enforcement.



“I wouldn’t have been able to do my job as well as I did without his help,” Winer said.



Eisenhower returned to Montgomery McCracken in the fall of 1996. Two years back into private practice, Eisenhower began to explore a bid for the Attorney General’s Office.



After losing the election to Fisher in 2000, he lent his services to the Rendell campaign, endorsing the candidate early in the primary season. He was the primary legal and criminal justice advisor for the Rendell campaign and a surrogate speaker for the gubernatorial hopeful on the campaign trail.



In late 2001, Eisenhower, along with John Estey and Kenneth Jarin, moved from Montgomery McCracken to Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, Rendell’s firm.



Jarin, a partner at Ballard specializing in labor employment and governmental relations, characterized Eisenhower as a “man for all seasons” as a private practitioner.



“He has tremendous understanding of governmental issues and how governments interact with other governments at the local, state and federal level, and how business and government interact, and how the law applies to those public/private interactions,” Jarin said.



Eisenhower said governmental relations has been a staple of his civil practice, including the representation of four city housing authorities — Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Houston and Washington D.C. His practice has also included internal investigations, ethics investigations, complex civil litigation and white collar criminal defense work.



This mix of a governmental and criminal practice prompted Rendell, shortly after taking office in 2003, to appoint Eisenhower to head up the Pennsylvania Crime and Delinquency Commission, replacing Republican Attorney General candidate Tom Corbett as chairman.

Crime Commission