By Dan Murphy
Former FBI Director James Comey is a native of Yonkers, and most of his large Irish family grew up in the City and his grandfather was Chief of Police during the 1950’s.
Comey, who has taken criticisms from the political left, for re-opening the Hillary Clinton email investigation 10 days before the 2016 election, and the right, who believe that leaked memos to hurt President Trump, has a best-selling book and media tour underway? The book ‘A Higher Truth’ includes several excerpts that the media has pounced on that has occupied all the discussion about the book and Comey’s 4 decades of public service in law enforcement.
And while the book is clearly about Washington DC, and Comey’s service under President’s Bush, Obama and Trump, several pages of the book discuss Yonkers.
“From birth I had lived in a modest house, packed together with other modest houses, in Yonkers, nearly all my relatives were from Yonkers, a blue-collar city on the northern edge of the Bronx. My great-grandparents were part of a wave of Irish immigration to the area in the last 1800’s.
My mother and father grew up a few blocks away from each other on “the hill” an Irish enclave in the northwest part of the city. My grandfather dropped out of school in the sixth grade to go to work to support his family after his father was killed in an industrial accident. He later became a police officer and rose to lead the Yonkers Police Department.”
“Our home was immediately behind Public School 16, the school where I happily spent my early childhood years. My mother had attended PS 16. One of my grandmother’s best friends was the principal. And by the time we moved, I was one of the most popular kids in my fifth-grade class.”
“Yonkers and School 16 were the center of my world. I could see the big red-brick school through the tall chain-link fence separating my backyard from the school playground. My older sister, two younger brothers, and I would walk to school every day, circling the block because the fence was too tall to climb. I knew everybody, and as far as I knew, everybody thought I was a cool fifth-grader. I fit in. I felt like I belonged somewhere. That was a great feeling. But it ended when my dad took a new job with a company in northern New Jersey.” –all of this from the book–
Comey continues in his book about how he was ‘the new kid’ at school in New Jersey and how he was bullied and beaten up.
“Had my family stayed in Yonkers where I was a cool kid, where I was part of a group, I don’t know what kind of person I would be now. Being an outsider, being pick on, was very painful, but it made me a better person. It instilled in me a lifelong hatred of bullies and sympathy for their victims. Some of the most satisfying work I did as a prosecutor, in fact, was putting bullies of all kinds in jail, and freeing good people from their tyranny,” writes Comey in the book.
Lost in the media obsession over Trump, Hillary emails, and Comey’s firing, are messages that many of us who grew up in a law enforcement family can relate to: Always tell the truth.
Comey also describes his involvement in convicting Mafia Dons in New York City, and correlates them to the bullies he so hated in grade school. And while he didn’t come out and say it, Comey distain for bullies had something to do with his dislike for our President, in this reader’s view.
I have enjoyed the book so far. I recently purchased it on Amazon and I’m reading it on my Amazon Fire, and I also bought the audio version of the book, which I have never used. I would recommend it to our Yonkers readers regardless of your political persuasions.
