FBI director who fought allegations of abusing his position
William Sessions, the scrupulously straight-arrow director of the FBI from 1987 to 1993 who faced down the agency’s old-boy network to start bringing in more black, Hispanic and female agents, only to be fired for petty financial misconduct, died Friday at his son’s home in San Antonio. He was 90.
The cause was complications of congestive heart ailment, said his daughter, Sara Sessions Naughton.
Mr. Sessions bitterly fought a Justice Department report that accused him of abusing the perks of his job — avoiding taxes on his use of an FBI limousine and contriving work-related trips to meet relatives, among alleged violations. He refused to resign and ultimately was dismissed by then-President Bill Clinton in July 1993.
Proclaiming his innocence, he and his fiercely protective wife, Alice, blamed the report on disgruntled agents, saying they were unhappy with Mr. Sessions’ independence and his shake-up of the FBI’s traditional order created under J. Edgar Hoover, who had ruled the agency from 1924 until his death in 1972.
In addition to his own internal struggles with the agency, Mr. Sessions weathered sharp public criticism during his tenure for his handling of the fatal Ruby Ridge shootout in Idaho in 1992 and the fiery siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Only the third Senate-approved director since Mr. Hoover, the austere, teetotaling Sessions made his mark as a strict but principled federal prosecutor and then judge in West Texas before President Ronald Reagan tapped him for the FBI post in November 1987 to succeed William Webster, another federal judge.
In a typically self-effacing quip about his tough-lawman image, Mr. Sessions said at the time, “I don’t wear a gun belt. I don’t have any cowboy boots to my name. If I’m a West Texas tough guy, it’s only because we have dealt with difficult problems out here.”
In retirement, even though a supporter of capital punishment, he joined other former judges, as well as civil liberties lawyers and several members of Congress, in calling for clemency for two high-profile death row inmates in Texas and Georgia.
In letters and briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, he argued that the murder trials of the two had been so fundamentally botched, including by the use of questionable police lineup tactics and the participation of unprepared defense lawyers, that the pair should be spared the death penalty.
“When a criminal defendant is forced to pay with his life for his lawyer’s errors, the effectiveness of the criminal justice system as a whole is undermined,” Mr. Sessions and others wrote to the high court. One inmate’s sentence was ultimately commuted to life in prison; the other was executed.
Mr. Sessions also won lasting public support from Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., for his efforts in recruiting and promoting minority agents within the FBI — an agency that had conducted controversial surveillance of King and his organization under Mr. Hoover in the 1960s.
Mr. Sessions’ recruitment endeavors were a reaction largely to discrimination lawsuits by black and Hispanic agents and resulted in modest gains during his tenure — the black proportion of agents grew from 4.2% to 5%, for example — a pace he blamed in part on interference by FBI insiders.
William Steele Sessions was born on May 27, 1930, in Fort Smith, Ark., the son of a prominent Disciples of Christ minister.
At the end of World War II, the family moved to Kansas City, Mo., where Mr. Sessions finished high school in 1948. With the outbreak of the Korean War, he enlisted in the Air Force and became an airborne radar intercept instructor, mustering out as a captain in 1955.
While in the service, he married Alice Lewis, the daughter of an offshoot Mormon minister. She died in December. In addition to his daughter, of Weston, Conn., survivors include three brothers, Louis Sessions, of Dallas; former Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, of Waco; and Mark Sessions, of San Antonio; as well as nine grandchildren and five greatgrandchildren. A son, Jonathan, died in infancy.
In the still-insular world of the FBI, Mr. Sessions was an outsider, resisted by many in the agency hierarchy. He initiated changes that upset some but encouraged others in and out of the FBI, including his patrons in Congress.
He started an affirmative action program for hiring and promoting more minorities and pushed for higher pay and modernized dataprocessing equipment.
The breach between Mr. Sessions and the bureau became public in 1989, when he ordered agents to investigate the Republican-controlled Justice Department’s role in U.S.-backed agricultural loans to Iraq that were diverted to arms purchases, a scandal dubbed “Iraqgate” by the media.
Shortly after that, the Justice Department started an ethics probe into Mr. Sessions’ conduct as director, a tangled process climaxing in January 1993 with a scorching 161-page report issued by Attorney General William Barr — who is now in the same role under President Donald Trump — accusing Mr. Sessions of gouging the government, frequently for petty gain, and questioning his fitness to serve.
Alice Sessions told Texas Monthly magazine in May 1993 that she sensed long before her husband that the old-guard hierarchy of the FBI wanted to isolate and ultimately dump him, and that the Barr report was the vehicle for it.