The great Irving Lehman served as a Judge from 1908 to 1944, the last four of which as Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals. The summit of Lehman’s career in the public consciousness occurred on the evening of June 19, 1945, when the City of New York held an official welcoming dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in honor of General Dwight D. Eisenhower on his triumphal home coming as the leader of the Allied Forces. The dinner followed a ticker tape parade for Eisenhower witnessed by an estimated 4,000,000 people. Approximately 1,600 people attended the Waldorf dinner, at which Lehman gave the welcoming address on behalf of the City. His speech was extraordinary — it expressed a singular love of America as the land of opportunity for people of all religious faiths and ethnic groups, at a time when the nation was at war.
Lehman’s welcoming address was his valedictory. Three weeks after delivering it, as he walked around his Port Chester estate with his pet dog, Carlo, he collided with the dog and broke his left ankle. Confined to a wheelchair, he hoped to be able to return to work for the opening of the Court’s October session. But an embolism developed, his heart began to fail, and on September 22, 1945 he died before his colleagues on the Court even knew he was ill. He was buried in Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2005, the Society published Chief Judge Lehman’s welcoming speech with an introduction by Trustee Henry “Hank” Greenberg. Prior to this publication, there was only a privately published text of the address, without any of the accompanying photographs relating to the Waldorf dinner itself. You can also listen to Lehman’s speech in the WNYC archives, along with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s introduction). In addition, the photographs below show the dinner’s multi-tiered dais that filled two full pages in a July 1945 edition of Life Magazine; a dinner ticket; and the dinner program and a page in it that shows where Lehman sat.
