John Jay Hooker - Legal Career

Legal Career

After finishing high school at Nashville's Montgomery Bell Academy, Hooker attended college at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He then served two years in the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps as an investigator. Upon discharge from the service, Hooker attended Vanderbilt University Law School. He graduated and was admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1957. He then practiced law with his father in the law firm of Hooker, Keeble, Dotson, and Harris, one of the most prominent law firms in Tennessee. In 1960, Hooker left his father's law firm to start a new law firm and one year later was joined by his brother Henry Hooker, and two years later by William R. Willis, forming the law firm of Hooker, Hooker, and Willis, which eventually became a ten-man law firm. This firm became the general counsel of the Nashville Tennessean and several other businesses by the time Hooker ran for governor in 1966. Struck by the inequalities in the southern society that confronted him at the time, he became identified as a young man with progressive Democratic politics. While practicing law, he also began a series of diverse business investments.

In 1958, Tennessee Governor Frank G. Clement asked Hooker and prominent Nashville attorney Jack Norman Sr. to become involved in the state's investigation of Raulston Schoolfield, an allegedly corrupt Chattanooga state judge. Based on the Norman/Hooker findings, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to impeach Schoolfield. Norman and Hooker were then retained to prosecute Schoolfield before the Tennessee State Senate, which convicted him on several counts. At the time, Robert F. Kennedy was general counsel of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, which was investigating labor corruption. In this capacity, Kennedy launched an investigation of Raulston Schoolfield. Kennedy came to Tennessee and testified in the Schoolfield impeachment trial. Thereafter, he and Hooker became close friends and remained so until the time of Kennedy's death in 1968.