Edward Bennett

Edward Bennett coxed the USA four at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He competed for the Riverside Boat Club and graduated from Harvard in 1937. He then attended Columbia Law School. After law school, Bennett joined the firm of Alger, Dean & Sullivan, which later became Sullivan & Worcester. He served in the Army during World War II, first as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s staff, and later as a bomb disposal specialist and agent for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the forerunner of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). After the war he returned to Sullivan & Worcester.

In 1968 Bennett was appointed a Superior Court justice in Massachusetts. He served in that role until retirement in 1983. Bennett was a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, a woman accused of witchcraft and executed after her conviction at the Salem witch trials in 1692. Bennett was a top musician, having played tenor saxophone in the Gold Coast Orchestra at Harvard. He later claimed to have “spent more time on jazz music than studying.”