Book Reviews – by Kevin J Hamilton

Year: 2011

  • ‘The Fall of the House of Zeus’: Portrayal of lawyer’s fall not a pretty picture

    ‘The Fall of the House of Zeus’: Portrayal of lawyer’s fall not a pretty picture

    A review of Curtis Wilkie’s new book about Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs, ‘The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer.’ It has a confusing cast of characters and offers way too much information. Worse, its author’s bias toward his subject, who is a friend, shows everywhere, particularly in Wilkie’s attempt to portray Scruggs’ banal criminal misconduct as tragedy.

    ‘The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer’

    by Curtis Wilkie

    Harmony, 400 pp., $25.99

    Dickie Scruggs, in his heyday, was one of the most powerful trial lawyers in America. From his Mississippi-based law offices, he aggressively challenged Big Tobacco, asbestos companies and some of the largest corporate interests in America in enormous class-action lawsuits, raking in millions in legal fees along the way.

    A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, Scruggs was well connected in Southern politics and seemed invincible. He spent lavishly on yachts, vacation homes and private jets. Ultimately, though, his empire collapsed when he was convicted and sent to jail for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state court judge in 2008.

    In “The Fall of the House of Zeus,” Curtis Wilkie, professor at “Ole Miss” (the University of Mississippi), tells the story of Scruggs’ rise and surprising fall. Although a revealing tale of corruption, the book is significantly burdened by several flaws.

    First, Wilkie seems unable to tell the story without introducing approximately 700 characters, each with a short biographical sketch (offered for no apparent purpose). This leaves the reader gasping for breath and wanting to reach for a pencil to try to outline all the relationships and sort out which little subplot is or isn’t significant or meaningful to the larger morality tale. To say that the narrative thread is lost would be a vast understatement. The editors here surely should have been given some strong coffee and encouraged to use the red pens they were given when hired.

    Perhaps more significantly, despite Wilkie’s best efforts to portray Scruggs’ legal trouble as a Greek tragedy, it falls just a bit short. It’s indeed a shame that Scruggs attempted to bribe a state court judge to subvert justice and went to jail as a result, but this is hardly what most would consider a tragedy. It might be better characterized as what we sometimes call “justice.” Wilkie, who candidly admits that he is close to Scruggs, is unable to separate himself from his friend and tells the story from the most favorable viewpoint for his subject – damning almost everyone else as biased, unfair or partisan. Wilkie, of all people, should have known better: History at short range is dangerous, and this is a classic example.

    Finally, Scruggs’ misconduct is indeed offensive, but it’s nothing more than obviously stupid, not to mention criminal, misbehavior. Sometimes legal ethics can be complicated or arcane, but any schoolchild can identify an effort to bribe a judge as wrong. The more obnoxious misconduct here is what was legal. The book is crammed full of conniving, snarky lawyers cutting deals to divide millions of dollars of legal fees from class actions, then bickering among themselves, suing each other and generally acting like spoiled children squabbling over money.

    But that’s all legal and, at least to Wilkie, apparently normal behavior. It’s not a pretty picture. But in that context, it’s hardly a surprise that Scruggs found the temptation irresistible to weight the scales in his favor. Wilkie may have intended the reader to sympathize with Scruggs. Revulsion is the more likely, if unintended, result.

  • ‘Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’: new biography of an indefatigable champion of the underdog

    ‘Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’: new biography of an indefatigable champion of the underdog

    John A. Farrell’s ‘Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’ is a new biography of the legendary American defense attorney who defended union organizers, despised minorities and those accused of sensational crimes

    Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’

    by John A. Farrell

    Random House, 561 pp., $32.50

    America has long adored winning trial lawyers, and none more than Clarence Darrow. Born in 1857, he resigned from a promising career as a corporate lawyer to represent union organizers, despised minorities and those accused of sensational crimes. And he was devastatingly effective, winning most of his nearly 2,000 trials almost regardless of the circumstances, the defendants or the actual evidence.

    In “Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned,” John A. Farrell adds to a growing body of Darrow biographies. Farrell, a Boston Globe editor, draws from previously unpublished correspondence to give fresh insight into Darrow’s remarkable career.

    Darrow cared little about consistency, political agendas or larger issues. For Darrow, mercy (and a quick acquittal) was the only thing that mattered. It is, of course, a handy attitude for a criminal defense lawyer.

    He represented Thomas Kidd, an organizer put on trial in Wisconsin for leading a conspiracy to destroy the Paine Lumber Company by helping to organize a strike of its employees. Those workers earned 45 cents a day working under guard in locked facilities. The case was watched nationally as an early test of the right to organize – Darrow won and became labor’s leading trial lawyer. He also won acquittal for Big Bill Haywood, the secretary for the mine workers, accused of murdering the Governor of Idaho. He represented Eugene Debs, the Socialist, and hundreds of other social outcasts.

    Darrow was no businessman and would have fared poorly in today’s big-business orientation of most law firms. He worked for free in over a third of his cases. But the common theme of most of his cases was the defense of individual liberty against the gathering force of industrialization and government intrusion.

    In his most famous case, Darrow defended John Scopes, who was charged with teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee state law prohibiting such a science-based approach to education. Darrow saw the case as protecting education from “religious fanaticism.” His dramatic confrontation with William Jennings Bryan, who represented the State of Tennessee, was spellbinding and years later won Spencer Tracy an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Darrow in a movie about the trial, “Inherit the Wind.”

    Darrow took pains to polish his own image. He was remarkably successful at it. Farrell’s book all but gushes over in admiration for the great orator, but Darrow was hardly flawless, and would have fared poorly in today’s media-saturated world. He was unfaithful to a remarkable degree, ultimately divorcing his wife and remarrying, all the while sleeping with innumerable women across the country.

    He was indicted and stood trial twice for attempting to bribe a jury, ultimately resulting in a hung jury and an unshakable taint of guilt he could never shake. He was long-winded in an era when long speeches were the norm. He often took several days to pick a jury, and even longer to present his closing argument. In most modern trials, jury selection consumes a morning and trial judges frequently limit closing argument to an hour or two. Darrow could barely have introduced himself in that time. A modern jury would likely fall asleep before he got to the point.

    Farrell provides a thoughtful overview of Darrow, his life and his many accomplishments. It’s no small task with a subject so large and encrusted with such idol worship. But only when Darrow’s quite human failings are exposed can history appreciate his enormous gift to the American legal tradition.

  • David McCullough’s ‘The Greater Journey’: How France nurtured the American experiment

    David McCullough’s ‘The Greater Journey’: How France nurtured the American experiment

    David McCullough’s ‘The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris’ chronicles the outsize influence France, particularly Paris, had on American writers, artists, politicians and scientists in the 19th century.

    The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris’

    by David McCullough

    Simon & Schuster, 576 pp., $37.50

    There are few countries with as much in common as the United States and France. The French provided not only critical support to the American colonies fighting for their freedom but also much of the philosophical foundation for the young Republic. Long after the revolutionary dust settled, France continued to nurture the American experiment.

    From 1830 to 1900, a tide of influential Americans – artists, writers, painters and doctors – braved the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to visit Paris. What they saw profoundly changed not only the travelers, but also America itself.

    Charles Sumner studied at the Sorbonne, astonished to see black students treated as equals and, as a result, became an unflinching voice against slavery as the U.S. senator for Massachusetts, beaten nearly to death by a South Carolina senator on the floor of the Senate for his views.

    James Fenimore Cooper (“The Last of the Mohicans”) wrote some of his most significant works in Paris, working with his close friend Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse, inspired by the French communication system of semaphores, invented the modern electrical telegraph and his famous code and radically changed communications globally.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James all lived and worked in Paris. Charles Bulfinch, the architect who designed the U.S. Capitol, was inspired by touring Parisian monuments in 1787 with Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to France.

    In “The Greater Journey,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, captures this flood of doctors, writers, artists and free spirits who coursed through Paris. Moving chronologically, he tells the story through the eyes of these young travelers, astonished by the beauty of the city before them.

    McCullough’s skill as a storyteller is on full display here as he relates the treacherous Atlantic crossing, the horse-drawn carriages and less-than-ideal plumbing that greeted the travelers, many of whom had little exposure to anything outside the rural U.S. For aspiring artists who had never even seen a copy of the masterpieces of the Old World, the experience of an afternoon at the Louvre was enough to bring them nearly to their knees.

    The idea of telling the story of the French cultural contribution to America through the eyes of a generation of aspiring artists, writers and doctors is inspired, and McCullough draws on untapped historical sources to tell the story, against the roiling backdrop of a French military coup and a new Emperor (Louis Napoleon), a disastrous war with Germany that included a siege of Paris (setting the stage for WWI) and the horrific Paris Commune that followed.

    But the effort in several ways falls disappointingly short of its early promise. The historical narrative is disjointed. McCullough mentions Andrew Jackson’s defeat by John Adams, only to jarringly describe a toast to President’s Jackson’s election only pages later, without explanation. (Adams narrowly won in 1824 in an election decided by the House of Representatives but lost his re-election bid four years later to Jackson – but you wouldn’t know it from this book.) French history, similarly, unfolds with only cursory explanation of the events.

    Second, McCullough’s focus on such a wide cast of characters renders the portrait of each one superficial, scattered by a wide historical lens and large cast. Exciting accomplishments, tragic losses and almost everything in between is lost.

    At the same time, however, McCullough focuses inordinate attention on detailed descriptions of sculpture or paintings, distracting from the larger point McCullough is making: the powerful influence on American painting, sculpture, writing and medicine wielded by a small but hugely influential group who braved the dangers of transatlantic travel and brought home radical and transformative new ideas.

    Perhaps an 80-year history of France, told through the eyes of dozens of American visitors, can only be told with such a blurred historical detail. It’s a shame, though – with the absurd memory of “freedom fries” and hostility to one of our closest allies still ringing in our ears, it’s worth remembering the French contribution to American art, politics, science and medicine. But even with its faults, McCullough deserves credit for finding a compelling and largely untold story in American history.