William Steele Sessions (27 May 1930-12 June 2020) was US Attorney for the Western District of Texas from 1971 to 1974 (succeeding Segal Wheatley and preceding Hugh Shovlin), Judge of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas from 20 December 1974 to 1 November 1987 (succeeding Ernest Allen Guinn and preceding Emilio M. Garza), Chief Judge of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas from 1980 to 1987 (succeeding Jack Roberts and preceding Lucius Desha Bunton III), and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2 November 1987 to 19 July 1993 (succeeding William H. Webster and preceding Louis Freeh).
Biography[]
William Steele Sessions was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas on 27 May 1930, and he went to high school in Kansas City, Missouri before serving in the US Air Force from 1952 to 1955. He went on to work as an attorney in Waco, Texas from 1963 to 1969 and then worked for the Department of Justice in Washington DC, where President Richard Nixon made him a US Attorney in 1971. In 1974, President Gerald Ford named him a US District Court judge, and he served as a federal judge from 1974 to 1987, when President Ronald Reagan named him FBI Director. Sessions combined tough direction with fairness and disappointed George H.W. Bush with his nonpartisan nature, and he was personally disliked by Attorney Generals Dick Thornburgh and William P. Barr. Sessions was perhaps best remembered for creating the phrase "Winners Don't Use Drugs", which was legally required to be included on all imported arcade games released in North America from 1989 to 2000. The FBI drew significant criticism for its handling of the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, and, in 1993, he was forced to resign after it was revealed that he used FBI planes to visit his daughter and used government money to install a security system at his home. He returned to Texas in 1999 and died of heart failure in 2020 at the age of 90.