Robert P. Patterson

Robert P. Patterson

Robert Porter Patterson (Sr.) (born February 12, 1891 in Glens Falls , Warren County , New York - † January 22, 1952 ) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 55th Secretary of War of the United States under President Harry S. Truman acted. His term of office ran from September 27, 1945 to July 18, 1947.

Career

Robert Patterson received his PhD from Union College , Schenectady and Harvard Law School . He then practiced as a lawyer in New York City . He served in the United States Army with the rank of major during World War I and received the Distinguished Service Cross for valor in France .

In 1930 President Herbert Hoover appointed Patterson a federal judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York . In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit , where he sat with judges such as Learned Hand , Augustus Noble Hand, and Thomas Walter Swan .

Patterson congratulates Col. Chauncey M. Hooper in Hawaii in 1943.

In 1939 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . A year later, in 1940, after 15 months of service in the Second Circuit , Patterson left the court and moved to the War Department. After a few months as Deputy Secretary of War, President Roosevelt promoted him to the newly created post of Vice Secretary of War ( Under Secretary of War ) at the end of 1940 , which after him was only held by Kenneth Claiborne Royall and William Henry Draper . President Harry S. Truman installed him as Secretary of War in September 1945. Patterson defended a united army (army and navy) and therefore had only one chief of staff. The first step towards this was the National Security Act of 1947, but this was improved several times, most recently with the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 . Patterson participated in the removal of segregation in the army forces, in particular during the final portion of the Second World War in the relationship that it has a African American squadron formed in Tuskegee , created, as Tuskegee Airmen was known.

Patterson returned to his practice as a lawyer in 1947. Truman allegedly offered him a reinstatement in his former judge's office at the Second Circuit , but he turned it down and chose to return to the private sector. Patterson later served as chairman of the New York Bar Association and the Council on Foreign Relations .

He died in an airplane crash on January 22, 1952 while trying to meet a client and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His son Robert , born in 1923, was also a federal judge in the Southern District of New York .

Web links

• Robert P. Patterson in nndb (English)
• Biography (English)
• Robert P. Patterson in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)