Vincent Hallinan; Combative S.F. Lawyer

Vincent Hallinan, the feisty lawyer whose defense of leftist labor leader Harry Bridges landed him in jail and prompted him to run for President in 1952, died Friday at his home in San Francisco. He was 94.

“He was one of the great lawyers of this century,” said Melvin Belli, another flamboyant member of the Bay Area’s legal community. “He had a lot of guts and a lot of courage and a lot of compassion for his clients--and he knew a little law too.”

Hallinan was born in San Francisco on Dec. 16, 1897, the son of an Irish immigrant who fled to the United States after killing a British rental agent. Legend has it that the boy was so in awe of his tempestuous father that when the great earthquake struck in 1906 he looked up at the broad-shouldered man and asked: “Why did you do that?”

Hallinan, who advanced quickly through parochial school, became captain of the football team and boxing champion at San Francisco’s Ignatius College, served as a naval officer in World War I, passed the California State Bar in 1921 and immediately won a name for himself as a courtroom brawler, bludgeoning his opponents with his intellect and his fists.

“He blew into the courts like a tornado,” said Gerald F. Uelmen, dean of the University of Santa Clara Law School.

By his own accounts, Hallinan had at least 28 fistfights with opposing lawyers in courthouse corridors. “Settling out of court” is what he called it.

Horrified by the corruption he found in the court system, Hallinan pressed successfully for reform of the jury selection process.

His militancy and willingness to accept unpopular cases won him adulation and notoriety, but the trial that almost destroyed his career was that of Bridges, the Australian-born president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union who had closed down West Coast ports in the bloody dockworkers strikes of 1934.

The strikes left Bridges a controversial and much-hated man, and 15 years later, in 1949, the government threatened him with deportation, saying he had lied in his petition for citizenship when he denied having ever been a communist. Hallinan agreed to defend him.

During the five-month trial, Hallinan was threatened with contempt of court at every turn. He responded with an attack on the prosecutor, saying he “had not seen inferior merits or inferior qualities better rewarded since Caligula made a consul of his horse.”

In the end, Bridges was convicted, although the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the verdict on grounds that the statute of limitations had run out.

Hallinan fared worse.

The trial judge sentenced him to six months in jail, citing him for contempt for his intemperate remarks during the trial.

“He always bragged about the fact that he went to jail and Bridges didn’t,” said Hallinan’s son, Conn. “He said that was what lawyers were all about.

“At a time when people shut up, he didn’t. It never occurred to him.”

On March 31, 1952, the day before he started serving his prison term, Hallinan was nominated as the Progressive Party’s candidate for President. That November, Dwight D. Eisenhower won with 34 million votes. Hallinan got 140,000.

A year later, Hallinan was convicted of evading $36,739 in income taxes, for which he served an 18-month prison term. But attempts to disbar him were unsuccessful, and during the 1960s he was back in court again, defending left-wing radicals and anti-war demonstrators.

Hallinan made the newspapers in 1975 when he fought off three would-be muggers with his cane. He was 80 at the time.

It was only recently that his health began to fail.

When Hallinan died his wife, Vivian, was at his side. He leaves four sons in addition to Conn Hallinan--Patrick, Mathew, David and Terence, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

A memorial service is scheduled for next Saturday at Local 34 of the ILWU in San Francisco.