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When Captain Frank Murphy, U. S. Infantry, was mustered out of the Army of Occupation in Germany, he was one of the officers picked to stay and study in England. He polished his law briefly at Lincoln's Inn, London, then lit out for Trinity College, Dublin, where, as the son of a fighting Fenian, he was soon in the thick of the trouble. He returned to the U. S. hungry for public life and was soon attached as chief assistant to the U. S. district attorney in Detroit. Convicting a band of rich war profiteers was his chief accomplishment in this job. (A brazen young 'legger named Sherman Billingsley, now proprietor of Manhattan's Stork Club, where Frank Murphy sometimes goes, was another of his convictions.) He taught law at the University of Detroit on the side, got on the Recorder's Court, was backed for mayor by the Detroit Times, and was elected.
Feeding and pacifying the unemployed before there was any WPA was his major job then, and marvelous indeed was the change when Franklin Roosevelt transformed him from a salvage engineer in desperate Detroit into an Oriental potentate at $18,000 in the Malcanan Palace at Manila ("Oh boy, it's some palace!" he cried over the long-distance telephone to a Detroit lady friend). In overseeing the transition of the Philippines from dependent territory to semi-independent commonwealth, Murphy kowtowed too much, his critics say, to cocky little President Manuel Quezon, whom Paul McNutt had later to take down a peg. Fact is, Mr. McNutt found, as Mr. Murphy had, that the only way to get anywhere in the islands was through Quezon. Kowtowing too much to Labor is the common charge against him as Governor of Michigan, but it has come to light since that he took orders from Franklin Roosevelt to do so. Peaceful settlement of the great sit-down of 1937 remains his monument as Governor, but he regrets the long-drawn parleys of that stressful time, which he believes undermined the health of his good friend Walter Chrysler. "I seldom read novels because no novel could be so exciting as my life," says Frank Murphy with appalling seriousness. He is completely swept up by being No. 6 officer of the U. S. Government and sitting at the right hand of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Yet the fact that he has won and retained the admiration of more worldly men —including such diverse sophisticates as Franklin Roosevelt and Pundit Arthur Krock of the New York Times—argues that some human spark lies buried in his solemn egocentricity. His smile is usually slow and faintly superior, but when he heard of John Lewis' blast at "evil old" Jack Garner he chuckled: "It's a sinful world." No misogynist, he can and does charm women though his courtships do not go beyond dancing and horseback riding. Considered his closest lady friend: Anne Parker, daughter of Major General Frank Parker who was in command in the Philippines when Mr. Murphy was there and is now in Washington.