Thomas J. Cahill

Thomas J. Cahill (June 8, 1910 – October 12, 2002) was the chief of police of San Francisco, California from 1958 to 1970, the longest tenure as chief of police in San Francisco history. He served under mayors George Christopher, John F. Shelley, and Joseph Alioto.

Early life Cahill was born June 8, 1910, on Montana Street on the North Side of Chicago. His family returned to County Kilkenny, Ireland, when he was a child, and Cahill returned to San Francisco in 1930.

Cahill was educated at Callan Christian Boys School and studied to become a teacher at Ring College in Dungarvan, Ireland and received the school's Gold Ring Award, granted only to student who could speak, read and write Gaelic. However, after returning to San Francisco at 19, Cahill, a red-headed Irishman, could find little work and drove for the City Ice company. He then needed a good job to help support his new wife, Margaret Smythe (he had married her in San Francisco in 1938). He chose the profession of law enforcement, entered the police department as a recruit, and graduated from the San Francisco police academy in July 1942. Cahill, in an interview with local San Francisco media shortly before his death, claimed his relationship with Mayor John F. Shelley was broken by the Summer of Love in 1967: "Jack Shelley, (a Democrat, former liberal congressman and labor leader), did not want to show a heavy hand toward the Hippie & Flower Children element." When hippies flooded Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury district, Cahill contacted the new California governor, Ronald Reagan, for the California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard to enter San Francisco and sweep the hippies from the city. By law, Reagan needed a request from Shelley. Reagan and Cahill pleaded for his signature, Shelley refused.

On a national level, Cahill was one of the more well-known city police chiefs. He was the only police chief to be selected by Lyndon Johnson to serve on the President's Commission on Law Enforcement, in 1965. He impressed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who called him the best public administrator in the entire US, so much that Cahill was one of the two finalists (along with Clarence M. Kelly) for the FBI Director post. He was the only police chief in the country to be on the acclaimed television program, Meet the Press, and his discernment and articulateness struck everyone, when he appeared as a panelist on February 19, 1967.

In 2000, he married 80-year-old Elizabeth Wright, a longtime friend and the widow of a former Fremont police chief, Clinton Wright.

He died of congestive heart failure on October 12, 2002, at 92 in Lake County at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Clearlake Park, California. He was survived by his third wife, Elizabeth (Wright), four children (Thomas, Jr., John, Edmond, and Elizabeth) and many grandchildren.