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Marvin Mandel (April 19, 1920 – August 30, 2015) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 56th Governor of Maryland from January 7, 1969, to January 17, 1979, including a one-and-a-half-year period when Lt. Governor Blair Lee III served as the state's acting Governor from June 1977 to January 15, 1979 while Mandel was in federal prison for mail fraud and racketeering. He was a member of the Democratic Party, as well as Maryland's first, and to date, only Jewish governor.
Before he became the state's Governor, Mandel had been Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1964 to 1969 and a delegate since 1952.
Mandel was elected as Governor of Maryland on January 7, 1969, by the joint vote of both houses of the Maryland General Assembly due to the approaching vacancy created by the election of Spiro Agnew, the incumbent governor, as Vice President of the United States, as there was no lieutenant governor at the time to succeed to the governorship, as in most other states. Such an office was created by amendment in 1970.
Additionally, the mass transit system of Maryland was established and fostered under Mandel, enacting plans begun back in 1969 for the establishment of two urban subway networks. The first such rail network was for the Baltimore metropolitan area and its two adjoining suburban counties of Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County), and the second was for the National Capital area of Washington, D.C. (comprising several northern Virginia counties, and the Maryland suburban counties of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties).
A statewide public school construction program initiative for Baltimore and the 23 counties of Maryland to be equalized and fully funded by the State was undertaken while Mandel was governor. Accordingly, students in kindergarten or first grade would begin their public education through to high school with equally adequate buildings, supplies and teachers.
The additional executive departmental reorganization and structure simplified the state government. Although narrowly rejected by state voters in a 1968 referendum (because of several large controversial proposals), many of the proposed charter's other more generally acceptable provisions and reorganizations were later pushed past the legislature by the new Mandel administration and enacted into law and policy by the voters in several special elections/referendums and the edicts of the Mandel and later Hughes and Schaefer administrations. This included the reorganized four-level state court system.
Other similar administrative organizations and efficiencies were reflected in the various other departments as they were set up and took shape with the various "administrations", authorities" and "offices" arrayed beneath the state secretaries in the governor's new cabinet, including newer unprecedented departments such as the environment, general services, public safety and correctional services, and natural resources.
Mandel's idea to grow Maryland business and create more jobs was to attract existing overseas companies to the state. In 1972, Mandel selected Philip Kapneck, a local businessman, to start Maryland's International Business efforts by opening an office in Brussels, Belgium. In 1974, Mandel appointed Kapneck as Maryland Trade Ambassador. Mandel's initiative was so successful that over the next 40 years, his Trade Ambassador attracted hundreds of businesses, creating more than a hundred thousand jobs.
Mandel had already served nineteen months of his original sentence in the low-security federal prison camp at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, before having his sentence commuted by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Based on the reasoning of an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, a U.S. District Court judge overturned the former governor's conviction in 1987. A year after that, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the final decision, ending the long legal and political saga.
In addition, in 1980, Mandel's administrative aide Maurice R. Wyatt, Maryland District Court Judge Allen B. Spector, and State Health Department director Donald H. Noren were tried and convicted by Judge James Macgill on bribery charges related to payments for land development and septic tank installation moratoriums. Although not connected with Gov. Mandel's personal integrity and administration, these additional trials and convictions cast a pall on an otherwise overwhelming record of positive accomplishments in Maryland during the Mandel years.
Mandel's official gubernatorial portrait was not hung in the governor's Reception Room of the Maryland State House, the historic state capitol, with the most recent occupants of the office, until 1993, fourteen years after he left the executive chair and two administrations had intervened.
Mandel lived briefly in Arnold, Maryland, and lived and practiced law in Annapolis.
Mandel served as the chairman of the governor's Commission on the Structure and Efficiency of State Government, beginning in 2003. He was also a member of the Board of Regents for the University System of Maryland from 2003 through 2009.
Mandel died on August 30, 2015, at the age of 95 in Compton, Maryland. After lying in state at the Maryland State House, a funeral service was held in Pikesville, and he was interred at Lakemont Memorial Gardens in Davidsonville, Maryland. A Fall 2017 issue of his law school's magazine reported that Mandel had since been inducted into the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore Hall of Fame.
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