Richard F. Cleveland

Richard Folsom Cleveland He was the son of President Grover Cleveland. Whittaker Chambers considered him critical to the successful outcome of the Hiss Case.

Early life Cleveland was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the second youngest son of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, and Frances Folsom. He was born nearly eight months after the end of his father's second term, and was named for his grandfather, Richard Falley Cleveland. He was the next to youngest of five siblings: sisters Ruth (1891–1904), Esther (1893–1980), and Marion (1895–1977), and brother Francis Grover (1903–1995).

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy

Hiss Case During the Hiss Case (1948–1950), Cleveland represented Time senior editor Whittaker Chambers. In his memoir, Chambers recalled of him:

The names of a number of other Baltimore attorneys were given me from which to make my choice of counsel. I listened to as many first-hand opinions as possible about all of them. Then I decided on the man whom I had decided on the first time that I read over the list—Richard F. Cleveland, the youngest son of the former President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, and a partner in the Baltimore law firm of Semmes, Bowen and Semmes.Until his name was handed to me, I had never heard of him. Yet it is hard to imagine that any other man could conceivably have filled the role that was thrust upon this quiet, deliberate, shrewd, deeply devout and deeply understanding gentleman.

From the first, he sensed that there was something missing in the Hiss Case. From the moment that I confirmed his intuition and told him what that missing factor was—espionage—he grasped the Case in its full meaning. He understood exactly what I had to do and why I was doing it.

Twice, at least, his words reaching me when he himself was not present, bore me up in critical moments. His letter, which was handed me by the FBI a few moments before I went in to testify in the first Hiss trial, offering me the support of a shared understanding and the force of his prayers, was a powerful help to me during my public evisceration by Lloyd Paul Stryker.

The other occasion was of a kind that no man could ever forget. It occurred in December 1948, during my days before the Grand Jury, when the outcry against me was deafening. Richard Cleveland and his wife had driven from Baltimore to our farm. If any conscious factor had influenced my choice of Cleveland as my lawyer, it was my respect for his father. To my gentle wife for whom in her loneliness that dark moment was darker than for me, Cleveland said in his gentle way: "In many ways, Whittaker reminds me of my father." It was, of course, the measure of Richard Cleveland, not of me.

Personal life In 1923, Cleveland married Ellen Douglass Gailor (d. 1954), daughter of Thomas F. Gailor, an Episcopal bishop in Tennessee, after having met her abroad. Ellen, a teacher, was a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, where she received a master's degree. Before divorcing in 1940 due to Ellen's alcoholism, they had three children: Anne Mary Cleveland

In 1943, he married Jessie Maxwell Black, the daughter of Capt. and Mrs. George Crosbie Black. They had three children:

He used the desk his father had used in the White House as president, and so it remained in the offices of Semmes, Bowen & Semmes because he was still working there as emeritus partner at the firm in 1974 when he died. He died in Baltimore on January 10, 1974, of chronic pulmonary illness. He is buried at Stevenson Cemetery in Tamworth, New Hampshire.