(née Steele) and the Reverend Will Anderson Sessions Jr.[1] He graduated from Northeast High School in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1948, and enlisted in the United States Air Force, receiving his commission October 1952.

[2] After a two-month search, Sessions was nominated to succeed William H. Webster as FBI Director by President Ronald Reagan and was sworn in on November 2, 1987.

[6] Sessions was viewed as combining tough direction with fairness and was respected even by the Reagan administration's critics, although he was sometimes ridiculed as straitlaced and dull and lacking hands-on leadership.

[6] Reflecting the tensions between the Justice Department and the independent Bureau, Sessions announced that the FBI would be looking into whether Justice Department officials illegally misled a federal judge in a politically sensitive bank fraud case involving loans to Iraq before the Persian Gulf War, and 48 hours later Sessions was the subject of an ethics investigation on whether he had abused his office perks.

[8][9] By law, it had to be included on all imported arcade games released in North America, and continued to appear long after Sessions left office.

[8] Sessions' major contributions to the US criminal justice community include the encouraging of the FBI laboratory to develop a DNA program with a strong legal underpinning and the automation of the national fingerprint process.

[13] The Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege were later cited as motivations for the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history before the September 11 attacks.

A report by outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr presented to the Justice Department that month by the Office of Professional Responsibility included criticisms that he had used an FBI plane to travel to visit his daughter on several occasions, and had a security system installed in his home at government expense.

He was appointed by Reagan as a Commissioner of the Martin Luther King Jr., Federal Holiday Commission, and was a Delegate for the Americas to the Executive Committee of ICPO-Interpol.

[23] Sessions was present on the American Bar Association task force examining the constitutionality of controversial presidential signing statements.

It concluded in July 2006 that the practice "does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries".