‘The Runaway Jury’
by John Grisham
Doubleday, $26.95
John Grisham, the Old Faithful author of legal thrillers, has cranked out his latest – and one of his best – just in time for summer. Grisham has amassed millions of fans, and sold millions of books, despite frequent criticism that his plots often are absurdly unrealistic.
With “The Runaway Jury,” however, Grisham turns a sharp corner, providing his most credible plot and his most intriguing mystery to date. The novel is a gripping page-turner, exquisitely timed to coincide with rising public concern over smoking and tobacco.
Grisham sets the stage in a Mississippi Gulf Coast town where the widow of a lifelong smoker is suing a cigarette manufacturer for her husband’s untimely death from lung cancer. Armed with a team of high-profile lawyers, each of whom has ponied up a million dollars to fund an all-out assault on the tobacco industry, she is fighting for that crucial first victory that presumably will open the floodgates to a torrent of lawsuits against industry giants.
The tobacco defendants are equally well-armed with slick lawyers, high-priced jury consultants, discreet private investigators and ample cash, all furiously employed to hold back an onslaught of litigation. As in real life, Big Tobacco has won every trial to date, and it has no intention of losing this one.
With such high stakes on both sides of the courtroom, both teams work endless hours preparing for their clash. Both develop detailed dossiers on the potential jurors, probing their backgrounds, investigating their lives, and concocting elaborate theories on jurors’ likely attitudes toward smoking, tobacco and litigation. Consultants on both sides pull down millions in fees for opinions based on potential jurors’ facial expressions, body language and posture.
Worse, each side attempts to influence, bribe, even extort jurors to vote one way or the other. The architect for Big Tobacco’s defense is Rankin Fitch, who has “fixed” juries in prior cases when necessary and arrives for the trial with such preparations well in hand. Unfortunately, Fitch, his clients, and the anti-tobacco plaintiffs are all thrown off balance by the one juror – Nicholas Easter – who remains a mystery to all investigators and consultants.
Things are further complicated when a woman identifying herself as “Marlee” contacts Fitch and demonstrates inside knowledge of the jury – and a ruthless willingness to negotiate. As each of these opponents maneuvers for position, the jury seethes at the trial’s stately pace, the judge struggles to keep the proceedings on track, and the stakes inexorably rise.
Jurors often report feeling like pawns during complex litigation, and Grisham captures this feeling of helplessness with remarkable precision. Grisham’s jury, manipulated by the mysterious Easter, engages in minor acts of rebellion, causing the judge, courtroom staff and all the lawyers to chew their collective fingernails and reach for the antacid.
Unfortunately, “The Runaway Jury” features some of the potholes for which Grisham is famous. Most of the characters are shallow and undeveloped. For example, the attorneys – usually the stars of courtroom dramas – are little more than background shrubbery here; their conduct, motives and ethics all could have provided depth and color, but Grisham opts for the easy approach of drawing them as cynical, cliched cutouts. And Grisham’s ultimate twist – not to be disclosed here – is a bit predictable, though it could easily have been more provocative and devilish.
Grisham and all of his books, moreover, could benefit immensely from an infusion of humor, a quality sorely lacking in this self-important potboiler.
But even with these nits, “The Runaway Jury” is far and away Grisham’s most addictive courtroom thriller. He packs the book with distilled nuggets of testimony and arguments about tobacco-company liability for smoking-induced cancer deaths – an effort that could easily have sunk the book in a mire of detail and posturing. Instead, it adds a crucial texture of realism that immeasurably helps the novel.
Grisham’s publisher has opened sales of “The Runaway Jury” with 2.8 million copies in print, and it is virtually assured of being a summertime blockbuster and airport-rack staple even before its eventual paperback release. Hollywood is sure to follow, with Tom Cruise and Demi Moore waiting to learn their parts.
And Big Tobacco, long accustomed to the threats of Congress, the courts and the Food and Drug Administration, might finally have met its match.
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Grisham’s Latest Smokes Out Deceit Of Tobacco Trial
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Shapiro, Dershowitz Add To O.J. Pile
‘The Search for Justice’
by Robert Shapiro
Warner Books, $24.95
Two new additions to the rapidly swelling O.J. Simpson trial library have recently arrived in bookstores.
The first, Robert Shapiro’s “The Search for Justice” (Warner Books, $24.95), provides an account of the trial by one of O.J.’s lead defense lawyers.
The second, Alan Dershowitz’s “Reasonable Doubt” (Simon & Schuster, $20), takes a more academic approach, using the trial as a vehicle to address criminal law more generally.
Shapiro’s is, in many ways, one of the most straightforward books about the trial published to date. Shapiro shuns the pseudo-autobiographical approach used by O.J. prosecutor Christopher Darden in his recent O.J. memoir, “In Contempt,” and instead focuses on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and the trial of O.J. Simpson for those murders.
The Darden book is the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller; the more recent Shapiro book is No. 8.
Shapiro’s book is far from a classic. It does, however, have an appealing immediacy, taking the reader along from the day Shapiro was hired to represent O.J. to the day of the former football star’s acquittal. Although the book is a largely anecdotal account of the arrest, investigation and trial, Shapiro weaves throughout plain explanations for many of the criminal procedures designed to protect citizens from unjust convictions.
Shapiro’s book contrasts sharply with another recent O.J. memoir, by co-counsel Alan Dershowitz. In what has to be
Dershowitz’s 100th book, the Harvard Law School professor and sometime lawyer provides a tedious 200-page lecture on the principles underlying criminal procedure.
O.J. called Dershowitz his “God forbid” lawyer because he was responsible for appealing any conviction that might have resulted from the trial. Because no appeal occurred, he had a relatively minor role in the case. Whatever Dershowitz’s skill at appellate briefing, his book is dry, ponderous and taxing. Staying awake beyond Page 20 requires substantial effort.
Shapiro, by contrast, keeps his description of the so-called “Trial of the Century” lively with detailed descriptions of O.J.’s cell, his communications with his lawyers, and the increasing bickering between the “Dream Team” members hired to represent him. Shapiro was O.J.’s first, and principal, lawyer, hired even before Simpson’s arrest.
Shapiro hired all of the other defense attorneys. He considered, but rejected, the infamously self-promoting Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence. Nonetheless, Shapiro takes almost all of his hires to task for their trial performance, calling Carl Douglas “pedantic” and “boring” and F. Lee Bailey a “grandiose loose cannon” who had reportedly “lost his fastball.”
Shapiro skillfully describes the tension that developed between himself and Johnny Cochran, including Cochran’s last-minute scheduling of defense strategy meetings while Shapiro was out of town.
Astonishingly, Shapiro notes that he tape-recorded the conversations between himself and Cochran in their car as they rode to court in the mornings, but he offers not a word of explanation about why he did so. It is striking evidence of the chilled, even hostile, relationship between the defense lawyers during the trial. By the end of the trial, Shapiro’s wife, disgusted with the conduct of the defense lawyers, refused to appear in court or sit behind the defense table.
Shapiro notes throughout the book the glare of publicity, complaining about it on one page but proudly noting his celebrity dinners on the next. He mentions dining with Connie Chung, Norman Mailer, Martin Landau, Warren Beatty, and an engagement party for Larry King. In one passage, Shapiro describes a post-dinner conversation with Chung in which she “jokingly” offers to sleep with Shapiro in exchange for an exclusive interview with either Shapiro or Simpson, professing to have “cleared it” with her husband.
Shapiro, like Darden and Dershowitz, criticizes Judge Lance Ito for his indecisiveness, and Ito’s televised interview during the trial. However, he defends the television broadcast and mutes his criticism, perhaps in recognition of his ongoing career as a lawyer in Los Angeles County.
Although Shapiro has harsh words about lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, he reserves his sharpest barbs for his partner on the case, Cochran. He complains about Cochran’s “incessant baiting” of Darden, Cochran’s “bodyguards” from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, and Cochran’s methodical efforts to inject race into the trial. After the verdict, Shapiro criticized Cochran for “dealing the race card from the bottom of the deck.”
Throughout his book Shapiro makes great efforts to distance himself from his own trial team, as if to claim victory, yet at the same time disclaim responsibility for the racial strategy and negative public reaction to the trial and its outcome. It is, of course, a balancing act doomed to fail at the outset.
However, Shapiro’s failure is at least passingly engaging and occasionally enlightening. Dershowitz’s treatise is merely mind-numbing. -
‘In Contempt’: Darden’s Anecdotal View Of The O.J. Trial
‘In Contempt’
by Christopher A. Darden with Jess Walter ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $26
O.J. Simpson is a name that once evoked memories of heroic acts on the football field, but now conjures distinctly different images.
For many lawyers, his very name brings into focus an embarrassment of a trial, so out of control that it smeared an entire system of justice.
For many in the African-American community, the name evokes memories of a bungled investigation and a racist cop from a notoriously bigoted police department.
But for others, O.J. Simpson is nothing more than a fallen hero, almost certainly guilty of a brutal double murder, but set free by a terribly misguided jury drawn from one of the most racially divided cities in America.
One of the more interesting characters to emerge from the O.J. trial – and virtually the only one to survive it with his integrity intact – is Christopher Darden, the 39-year-old African-American lawyer who served as the co-prosecutor in the O.J. trial.
Darden arguably had the most difficult role of anyone in the nearly year-long trial. In his just-released autobiography, “In Contempt,” Darden details his role as a black man, prosecuting a black hero, in a trial not only racially charged but grotesquely sensationalized.
Darden notes in his acknowledgments that his goal had been to write a “book that would remain on bookshelves and in libraries for the next hundred years.” Measured against that somewhat pretentious standard, Darden falls short.
The book is largely an episodic account of the O.J. trial, without any serious focus on larger issues, as if Darden were unsure of exactly what he wanted to say. By any other measure, however, the book is a successful and interesting anecdotal account of the trial from someone with a spectacular vantage point.
Written with Jess Walter, a journalist and author from Spokane, “In Contempt” is styled as an autobiography. The first third of the book peels back the layers of Darden’s life, his large family, and his childhood in California. He takes particular care to highlight his troubled older brother, Michael Darden, always two steps ahead of Chris – experimenting with drugs and the fast life while insisting his little brother stay behind. Michael later contracted AIDS, and Darden weaves his relationship with his dying brother throughout the book.
But this is primarily an O.J. memoir. While the book touches on most of the notable events of the trial itself, it does not even attempt to chronicle the trial’s details, dissect the errors by the parties or the court, or make any larger points about law or justice in America. Instead, Darden veers from anecdote to anecdote and unleashes his anger at the bungled investigation, the racial strategy employed by the defense lawyers, and the misguided conduct of the trial itself.
Found evidence
Darden reveals that – long after O.J.’s Bronco had been seized and searched – he stumbled upon a blood-stained towel in the back of the vehicle that the police had overlooked.
He also noted other key pieces of evidence that were lost: a three-page set of notes on domestic abuse apparently written by O.J. himself that was shredded by an O.J. associate before they could stop her and an eyewitness who saw O.J.’s infamous white Bronco run a red light near Nicole Brown’s house just after the crime, but who destroyed her own credibility by selling her testimony to a tabloid before the trial started.
Darden reserves his harshest words for Judge Lance Ito. Darden recounts Ito’s sexist treatment of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, including Ito’s offensive “joke” in one side conference with Cochran and Darden over a pair of panties in the background of a photograph. Judge Ito commented that “you couldn’t ask Marcia because she doesn’t wear any.”
Darden notes the irony of Ito’s frequent but toothless threats to remove the cameras from the courtroom, while at the same time posing for pictures with boxes of mail he was receiving from admirers.
Startling behavior
Perhaps the most stunning revelation is a meeting in Ito’s chambers in which a juror complains that he had wanted to attend a UCLA football game. Ito, apparently oblivious to the blatant impropriety, asked defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran if he could help. While Darden watched in amazement, Cochran leaped at the chance to provide a gift to a sitting juror.
For tabloid fans, Darden describes his friendship with Clark, forged under nearly impossible conditions. But he refuses to directly address the question of whether the relationship was deeper than platonic friendship. His disingenuous coyness is enough to raise an eyebrow, but this book provides no direct answers to those interested.
Throughout, Darden returns to his brother’s unsuccessful fight against AIDS, his declining health, blindness and death. It is a provoking metaphor for the O.J. trial or the criminal justice system more generally, but one that Darden indifferently offers and then ignores.
Since the trial’s conclusion, Darden has retired from the practice of law and now teaches part time at a law school. His retirement may well provide a more telling comment about his faith in American justice than anything in this book. -
A Closer Look At The War For California’s Redwoods
‘The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California’s Ancient Redwoods’
by David Harris
Times Books, $25
California’s redwood forests began growing more than 2,000 years ago – centuries before Columbus set sail, before the Dark Ages began. Neither Wall Street, nor its famed takeover artist Michael Milken, remotely existed.
Yet by some curious twist two millennia later, the fate of these ancient forests somehow ended up the subject of a highly leveraged hostile takeover and a classic battle between corporate America and its environmental antagonist, Earth First!
The Pacific Lumber Company, operated by the Murphy family in the tiny Northern California town of Scotia since 1904, seemed in its prime a highly unlikely target of environmental protests. It was notable not only for its huge stands of virgin old-growth redwoods, but also for its relatively benign approach to forestry. Long before it was fashionable, the company abandoned clear-cutting, instituted selective logging and limited the total cut to the growth during the same year – in other words, sustained forestry.
All that came to a rather screeching halt in 1985, when the firm came to the attention of a Texas-based conglomerate, Maxxam Inc., and Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz. To Hurwitz, Pacific Lumber was grossly undervalued: All one needed to do was borrow money to finance a takeover, then pay back the loans by selling off divisions and liquidating the forest, yielding a tidy profit in the process. Assisted by financing from Michael Milken, Hurwitz and Maxxam set out to do just that.
They met remarkably little resistance at first. But then, enraged by the highly accelerated logging of old-growth, the environmental movement began confronting Pacific Lumber. Earth First! activists staged large-scale protests, sit-ins on trees, and other acts. The battle reached its peak with a car-bombing attack on two leading Earth First! activists, a crime never solved.
“The Last Stand” hardly takes a neutral stand on all of this. David Harris, overwrought and breathless, builds the story in David-and-Goliath terms; in his world, the bad guys are irredeemably evil, and the good guys can do no wrong.
Well, maybe. There certainly isn’t much to be said in defense of unsustainable cutting of virgin old-growth, particularly when dictated by corporate conglomerates trying to fund their own hostile takeovers. But Harris – like Sen. Slade Gorton on the opposite side of the fence – doesn’t even try to imagine a middle ground. Worse, his approach leaves one longing for the sound of Goliath hitting the ground, but that fall, at least in this case, never comes. As Harris well knows, the war is still being played out.
Nonetheless, “The Last Stand” is an arresting portrait of the redwood battle at its high-water mark. For entirely different reasons, the book is likely to cause both sides of the timber dispute to grind their teeth. That alone is a considerable accomplishment. -
New Biography Chronicles Bcci Lawyer’s Mighty Fall
‘Friends in High Places: The Rise and Fall of Clark Clifford’
by Douglas Frantz and David McKean Little, Brown, $24.95
Few people can come close to matching the towering resume of Clark Clifford, who since the 1940s has served as a close political adviser to Democratic presidents, from Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter.
Throughout decades of power and influence, Clifford actually served in the government for only a few years: first as counsel to President Truman and later as secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson. Mostly, Clifford worked as a private lawyer, where his reputation as the consummate insider attracted many of the largest corporations and most powerful individuals in America – Howard Hughes, the DuPont family, AT&T and Phillips Petroleum all retained Clifford to solve their Washington problems.
In large part, Clark Clifford defined the modern lawyer-lobbyist, practicing in a twilight between public service and private obligation, between politics and law. A striking example was his connection with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas – Clifford loaned him money, paid his mortgage, even his daily bills while the justice vacationed at Goose Prairie, near Mount Rainier.
However, neither man revealed this when Clifford appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of his well-heeled clients. Republicans trying to remove Douglas from the court failed to uncover the Clifford connection, a relationship that would have doomed the justice’s career.
Douglas Frantz and David McKean’s “Friends in High Places: The Rise and Fall of Clark Clifford,” attempts to capture this phenomenal career; it succeeds as a summary of Clifford’s life, a biography lite. Its greatest value is its last 100 pages, which detail Clifford’s involvement with the infamous Bank of Commerce and Credit International, which ultimately led to his indictment and fall from grace.
Here, the authors offer expertise and depth: Frantz is an investigative reporter for The New York Times; McKean was an investigator in the BCCI scandal. Together they coherently describe Clifford’s amiable stumble into a hornet’s nest of international intrigue. He eventually escaped criminal charges, but significantly damaged his reputation. As he himself put it, the scandal left him with the “choice of either seeming stupid or venal.”
Clifford’s own autobiography, “Counsel to the President,” remains a better guide to the man’s remarkable life – but he relegates the BCCI affair to a single footnote.
Want the complete story? Read the autobiography, then the last 100 pages of “Friends in High Places.” Or wait until someone puts this fascinating individual in perspective in a single, complete biography. -
Gallons Of Proof — Legal Saga Shows How The System Really Works
‘A Civil Action’
by Jonathan Harr
Random House, $25
For a parent, there is nothing more terrible to consider, much less experience, than the death of a child. In Woburn, Mass., Anne Anderson watched her young son Jimmy die a slow, painful death from leukemia – and Jimmy, she soon learned, was not alone. A number of other children, all from the same small, blue-collar neighborhood, had suffered the same fate.
Anne Anderson’s neighborhood lay in the shadow of industrial facilities owned by two of the largest corporations in America, and the water in that part of Woburn had long been a subject of dispute. Residents complained of its taste and smell, but city officials repeatedly assured them that everything was fine. The water, they said, contained nothing unusual and was perfectly safe for everyone, even children, to drink.
Not satisfied with the city’s response, Anderson and her neighbors sought a remedy in the courts. Jan Schlichtmann, a flamboyant young trial lawyer with expensive tastes and a flair for winning jury trials, was hired by the families of the young victims. His small office proceeded to take on two of the nation’s major corporations – the W.R. Grace Co. and Beatrice Foods – who were represented by two of the largest, most respected law firms in Boston.
Schlichtmann, who favored using expensive hotel suites, with lavish meals and expensive wines, to influence settlement discussions, wagered virtually everything he had on the case: his office, his home, his savings, even his expensive sports car. By the middle of the trial, he was up to his neck in debt and his car had been repossessed; by the last days of the trial, his associates were fending off angry creditors and juggling the firm’s last remaining dollars to ensure that Schlichtmann could pay his dry-cleaning bills for the rest of the trial, if nothing else.
Schlichtmann’s experts discovered that toxic chemicals from the two plants had seeped underground and poisoned the neighborhood’s water supply and, with it, the children who lived there. But many things are believed to contribute to leukemia – even peanut butter has been suspected – and very little is known for certain of the causes.
Difficult case to prove
Most of the dumping had occurred long ago, and only the tattered remnants of history remained: witnesses with fading memories, empty rusted barrels, and earth contaminated by layers of pollution from different sources at different times. Sorting out the causal link between one source of pollution and a disease as poorly understood as leukemia can be difficult business at best; proving it under the harsh conditions of a courtroom can be impossible.
Despite these handicaps, “A Civil Action” tells a gripping story of epic environmental litigation – a story so compelling that Robert Redford is directing a movie version. Author Jonathan Harr immerses us in this legal drama, taking us backstage to watch lawyers fashioning legal proof from raw human experience. Harr, who has written for The New Yorker and other journals, pored over eight years of litigation records and reviewed 50,000 pages of depositions and trial transcripts.
What emerges is a picture of the civil justice system far different from that usually portrayed in the popular media. Here, lawyers make mistakes, face financial realities, and do their best in difficult situations. Unlike their 30-minute, prime-time colleagues, they toil for years before an ending that is never as clean-cut as one might hope.
Harr tells this story with consummate skill, jumping back and forth between the families, their lawyer and the defense, to build real-life suspense. As Schlichtmann aptly describes a trial, it is “like being submerged in deep water for weeks at a time. The world above becomes a faint echo. War, scandal, and natural disaster may occur, but none of it seems to matter.”
Yet Harr plainly has his sights set higher than merely retelling the story of the trial, compelling as it is. The Woburn case vividly illustrates how our system of justice allows a small handful of working-class families to hire a lawyer, step into court and challenge powerful corporate interests.
But that’s only the most obvious, and least interesting, lesson. Harr’s triumph is in his brutally accurate depiction of civil litigation when played for keeps with high stakes. Despite strong evidence of pollution by the defendants, it took eight years and millions of dollars to complete the case.
Costly to everyone
By the end, lawyers on both sides had been found to have violated ethical obligations, and one lawyer was driven to bankruptcy. The sheer cost of the trial – expert analysis and testimony, graphic exhibits and thousands of hours of preparation – ultimately absorbed a huge percentage of the award for damages. The remainder was reduced further to compensate the families’ lawyer’s contingent fee.
The families who suffered the tragedy – remember them? – ultimately recovered a relatively small amount after years of struggle. Their lawyer was left in bankruptcy, and their corporate opponents were left to ponder liability on obscure grounds.
“A Civil Action” has an uncomfortably untidy ending – but perhaps more true and accurate than we might like to admit. -
‘The Death Of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America”
‘The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America’
by Philip K. Howard
Random House, $18
Americans love to rail against excessive regulation – at least until someone gets hurt. Then they cry, “There ought to be a law!”
Philip K. Howard’s new book, “The Death of Common Sense,” is the latest swing of this pendulum. The slim volume is packed with splendid examples of absurd regulatory inflexibility – like the portable public toilets in New York, doomed because they were not wheelchair-accessible; or the nuns who were stopped from converting townhouses into homeless shelters because they could not afford to install elevators.
Howard complains that this growth of bureaucratic rule-making stifles economic growth and impedes the very safety and environmental objectives that the regulations are supposed to ensure. “Common sense,” he declares, is the solution.
But countless lives have been saved by seat belts, air bags, air-quality standards, child-resistant drug bottles and flame-retardant requirements for children’s pajamas. Howard threatens to throw the baby out with the bath water. And “common sense” is not always obvious, especially to unelected government regulators.
Still, as our own governor was distressed to discover last month when he tried to allow a girl to keep a horse she had found, formidable regulatory barriers often thwart common-sensical solutions. Flexibility and measured deregulation can be valuable goals. Howard’s overwrought manifesto at least provides a starting place for the debate. -
A Valuable Profile Of Hugo Black
‘Hugo Black: A Biography’
by Roger K. Newman
Pantheon/Cornelia & Michael Bessie, $35
Talk about a confirmation problem. While Clarence Thomas had to worry about sexual harassment and Robert Bork had to explain his radical conservatism, Hugo Black, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Franklin Roosevelt, was burdened with the mother of all confirmation worries: membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
But it was 1937, and confirmation hearings weren’t what they are today. Ironically, if current standards had been applied, America would have lost one of its greatest justices, and the Warren Court might never have achieved its legacy of individual rights and liberty – due in part to the contributions of Justice Hugo Black.
With a life this colorful and significant, it is astonishing that no serious biography of the one-time Alabama senator has been written before now. Legal scholar Roger K. Newman finally fills that gap, providing a long-overdue profile of this enigmatic justice.
EARLY TRIAL WATCHER
Hugo LaFayette Black was born in rural Alabama in 1886. His father ran a general store near the county courthouse, where young Hugo sat mesmerized through virtually every trial. This early exposure served him well, first as a law student at the University of Alabama, then as a county prosecutor, judge and trial lawyer.
Then, in 1923 – three years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate – Black joined the Ku Klux Klan. The organization was at its peak; the initiation ceremony for him and others was attended by 25,000 people. Black later claimed he only “went to a couple of meetings and spoke about liberty.” Newman, however, documents extensive involvement with the Klan and its reciprocal support for his Senate campaign.
Once elected, Black enthusiastically embraced the New Deal, and the Supreme Court nomination was his reward. Despite persistent KKK rumors, the Senate confirmed him, with one senator dryly remarking, “Hugo won’t have to buy a new robe; he can have his white one dyed black.”
Later, when an enterprising journalist uncovered Black’s Klan involvement, the nation erupted, and Black was able to put the issue to rest only after a dramatic nationwide radio broadcast.
STAUNCHLY DEFENDED CIVIL RIGHTS
Ironically, on the High Court and in the Senate, Black rejected Klan principles that had helped him gain power. He became the court’s most ardent defender of individual liberty. Indeed, decades later his son introduced him at a bar-association gathering by saying, “Hugo Black used to wear white robes and frighten black people. Now he wears black robes and frightens white people.”
Black believed that most constitutional provisions were absolute. The First Amendment, he liked to emphasize, says “Congress shall make no law,” not “some laws” abridging freedom of speech. “Being a rather backward country fellow,” he explained, “I understand it to mean what the words say.”
By his death in 1971, Black had seen many of his ringing dissents from earlier, conservative rulings become law during the more liberal Warren Court of the 1960s. Just weeks before he died, his concurring opinion in the Pentagon Papers case – he rejected the Nixon administration’s attempt to halt their publication – capped a career devoted to protecting First Amendment freedoms.
This is a compelling survey of a kaleidoscopic career, but it’s only half complete. While Newman comprehensively portrays Black’s life work, he almost completely avoids any discussion of his personal life, his troubled wife, or his daughters. His family moves through the book like shadows, ill-defined and unexplained.
Newman’s efforts are nonetheless a good first step toward understanding Hugo Black. It’s just a shame it isn’t more. -
Legal Thrills — `Undue Influence’ A Real Blood-Tingler
‘Undue Influence’
by Steve Martini
Putnam, $22.95
Laurel Vega has a problem. In the midst of a hostile custody battle with her sleazy ex-husband, his new wife is found naked and dead – shot through the head – in the family bathtub. The evidence ominously points to Laurel.
Her only hope for keeping her children, and maybe her life, is Paul Madriani, who was married to her late sister.
So begins “Undue Influence,” an outstanding new courtroom thriller by Bellingham author Steve Martini, among the best of the recent flood of lawyers-turned-authors. Since debuting two years ago with “Compelling Evidence,” followed last year by “Prime Suspect” – both national bestsellers – Martini has more than 4 million copies of his books in print.
“Undue Influence,” however, outshines those earlier works; indeed, it rivals Scott Turow’s masterpiece of the courtroom-thriller genre, “Presumed Innocent.”
Courtroom veteran tells story
Once again, the story is told by Madriani, a battle-scarred courtroom veteran who is raising his young daughter Sarah since his wife Nikki’s death from cancer. He also made Nikki a deathbed promise to protect her younger sister, Laurel – a promise put to the test when Laurel is charged with the grisly bathtub murder.
There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence of Laurel’s guilt: She had left town after the murder and was apprehended several states away, washing a rug the ex-husband claims came from the bathroom where the murder occurred; a witness has placed her at the scene near the time of the murder; and the prosecutor produces video footage of a heated argument between Laurel and the victim.
In addition, an item from the dead woman’s purse was found in Laurel’s purse at the time of her arrest, and – to make matters worse – homicide detective Jimmy Lama, who is in charge of the investigation, has a blinding grudge against Madriani. Lama is only too delighted to have Madriani’s sister-in-law as a prime suspect for murder.
Of course, things are not always as they seem – a fact that the novel tantalizingly underscores as it thunders toward a devilish conclusion.
Author’s own experience shows
Martini’s own courtroom experience shows as he expertly propels readers through radical shifts in the interpretation of the physical evidence in Laurel’s trial – leading first to the conclusion that she did it, then casting doubt, then reversing things once again. In the last few pages, Martini deftly resolves the case with an unexpected but cleverly foreshadowed twist – a surprise resolution that seems a required element in today’s legal thrillers, but one that few writers can pull off as convincingly.
Martini emerges as a peer of Turow for, like the Chicago attorney’s fiction, “Undue Influence” has a plot that flows effortlessly and credibly, generating considerable suspense from a series of stunning courtroom reversals and surprises during a dramatic trial. Martini also easily surpasses the current king of the legal thriller, John Grisham, whose bestsellers such as “The Firm,” “The Client” and “The Pelican Brief” tend to rely on transparent plot contrivances to fabricate suspense and stitch together loose ends.
“Undue Influence” is not without weakness, however. It remains overburdened with sexual innuendo and unrealistic male-female dialogue, both common curses of the genre. One would think that, by now, the tough-talking, super-macho cop/detective/lawyer would be retired in favor of the subtler – and richer – characters who animate Turow’s more literary thrillers.
Nor does Martini attempt to address any larger moral issues: His purpose clearly is to entertain, not philosophize. But this is a criticism applicable to most thrillers – and “Undue Influence” stands head and shoulders above the pack. Indeed, readers should exercise caution; this book will lay waste to your sleeping schedule. -
Paging Bill — A Look Inside Clinton’s White House . . .
‘The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House’
By Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster; $24
To hear Bob Woodward tell it, President Clinton’s first months in the White House were chaotic, disorganized and filled with tension between his economic advisers pushing deficit reduction and his former campaign staff pushing candidate Clinton’s social agenda on welfare reform, health care and public investments. Woodward, the assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, is the author of “The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House,” his “inside” review of the first 18 months of the Clinton presidency.
Woodward reports that the president often exploded in anger at his staff for confused or poor-quality work and that Hillary Rodham Clinton bitterly criticized the White House staff for forcing Clinton to become “Mechanic in Chief.” According to Woodward, the first lady railed at the staff that she spent more time picking a family movie than they spent considering strategy.
The book is based on a series of “deep background” interviews with virtually all of the significant officials at the White House, including Clinton himself. Woodward’s introduction defensively notes that it is not intended to serve as a definitive history. That’s good. It’s not. Woodward instead aims to fill that gap between daily news reporting and, later, more scholarly efforts at history. But Woodward falls short of even that limited goal.
The book is filled with direct quotations or descriptions of what one or another of the players saw or thought during the events under discussion – remarkably similar in style to the pseudo-fictional biography of Sen. Ted Kennedy, “The Last Brother,” released (and widely panned) last year by Joe McGinniss. The difference, Woodward insists, is that his material comes directly from interviews with the participants – pure hearsay rather than pure fiction. He attempts a preemptive strike against criticism by pompously declaring that his notes and tapes will be deposited with Yale University, to be opened in 40 years.
The book focuses almost exclusively on the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing to pass the administration’s budget. From presidential promises and cajoling, to outright shouting matches between the president and reluctant Democrats, Woodward purports to deliver the inside story.
But this “review” of the first 18 months is absurdly incomplete. Woodward barely even mentions some of the most critical events – both positive and negative – of the first 18 months. NAFTA, the Family Leave Act, Whitewater, the Lani Guanier fiasco, the withdrawn nomination of Zoe Baird as attorney general, gays in the military, the appointment of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and virtually every aspect of foreign policy all get short shrift.
Even on the budget process itself, the book is remarkably uneven and choppy. Presidential adviser George Stephanopolous, for example, was plainly a favorite source. Many key events are recounted from his view, to the exclusion of others’. Woodward’s newspaper-style chapters lurch from one participant to the next, describing what are often mundane or unremarkable meetings. The book, indeed, often has the feel of a rough cut-and-paste from a few dozen separate interviews.
The book, to paraphrase Sidney Blumenthal, is all overture and no opera. Is it really remarkable that the first Democratic administration in 12 years was disorganized when it took over? Or that a president can be angered by sloppy staff work? Woodward, for all his tsk-tsking, fails even to give credit where credit is due: Clinton did forge a majority and pass a budget for the first time in years. And NAFTA. And the Family Leave Act. Maybe the legislative process was messy – all arm-twisting, anguished compromise, and shouting. But that’s not news; that how legislation gets passed.