My Life as a Radical Lawyer
Kunstler, William M. & Isenberg, Sheila
L ast winter I was a guest on a BBC radio program with the radical lawyer William Kunstler and the irrepressible MTV deejay Kennedy. The subject was the Reginald Denny trial, which had just reached...
...Kunstler gamely chuckled through our jibes, clinging to his novel theory that the Rodney King disturbance was not so much a riot as a spontaneous uprising by an enslaved people against their oppressors...
...Readers will have trouble understanding how a lawyer who started out defending oppressed Southern blacks and jailed civil rights workers ended up cashing checks from mobsters and terrorists...
...The William Kunstler we know today, of course, came into being in 1969 during the circus trial of the Chicago Seven...
...So did I, noting that Denny's general absolution proved he had sustained far more serious cranial injuries than any of us had suspected...
...Actually, this is not the way Captain Ahab is portrayed in Cliff's Notes, but let us hear Kunstler out: MY LIFE AS A RADICAL LAWYER William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg Birch Lane Press–Carol Publishing /414 pages / $22.50 reviewed by JOE QLIEENAN 80 The American Spectator December 1994 Even though Ahab did not bring down the white whale and ended up sacrificing his life as well as the lives of his crew, the youngest member of the crew, Ismael, survived and went back to sea...
...His job was to ignore us...
...ing his ludicrous theories didn't make the slightest bit of difference to him...
...Desperately craving the spotlight—a passion he does not deny—Kunstler in recent years has taken fewer and fewer cases in which the rights of certifiable underdogs are in question, and more and more cases that smell to high heaven...
...I cannot regard someone like John Gotti as more evil than someone in George Bush's position...
...But now that he has taken to defending scum, Kunstler is an increasingly isolated figure...
...The subject was the Reginald Denny trial, which had just reached its improbable denouement after the disoriented L.A...
...As he writes, "I am committed to taking somewhat politically incorrect causes in part because, over the years, my perception of good and evil has changed dramatically...
...But to Kunstler, it all adds up: the capitalist-pig government is evil, so those persecuted by that government must, in some way, be good...
...The fact that we had just spent the last 30 minutes ridiculJoe Queenan is the author of If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble (Hyperion...
...Our job was to make fun of his preposterous arguments...
...They were reinforced by their own exuberance and by the sheer numbers of oppressed people rising up and shouting: Screw You...
...Like Ahab the activists of the Sixties were devoted, involved and committed to the eternal war between good and evil...
...Kunstler, who at one point likens himself to David battling Goliath, underscores his loose grip on reality with this bizarre reading of an American literary classic: In Moby Dick, Melville' s theme of the never-ending conflict between good and evil was personified by the obsessed Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale...
...This is the reason Kunstler is as disliked by certain liberals as he is by conservatives...
...Until then, Kunstler had been a relatively low-key lawyer who worked in the civil rights movement...
...Kunstler in person was a relaxed, avuncular figure, all hugs and chuckles, who seemed determined to get the fetching Kennedy to share a cab downtown with him...
...He knew that we had our jobs to do...
...He didn't take any of this personally...
...K unstler has certainly had an interesting life...
...That's George "The Ice Man" Bush, and his moll Babs...
...We want change...
...Although Kunstler did not approve of the beating, he felt it was important to place it in its proper context...
...A generation ago, a significant number of Americans were right there in Kunstler's office when he defended Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, the Freedom Riders, and even when he negotiated with the doomed jailbirds at Attica State prison...
...They also believed they could win...
...7 The American Spectator December 1994 81...
...He was a consummate professional...
...The son of a New York proctologist and the grandson of the New York baseball Giants' team physician, Kunstler attended Yale, served with distinction in the South Pacific during World War II, wrote poetry, maintained an active correspondence with Dylan Thomas, and went to law school with Roy Cohn, whom he once recommended for a job...
...Kennedy, perhaps the only Republican ever to appear on MTV, spent a lot of time making fun of Mr...
...truck driver publicly forgave his attackers for their repeated lapses of taste in cracking his skull open during the Rodney King riot...
...His job was to perform...
...This being the case, Denny's beating was not a capricious act of senseless violence by a bunch of sociopaths, but an act of insurrection, fraught with political significance, carried out by an aroused citizenry...
...There may be climactic victories, no perfect green pastures, in the human rights struggles of today and tomorrow, but we must never fail to strive for a beachhead hero, and a beachhead there...
...Afterwards, the three of us had a nice chat, mostly about Kunstler's burgeoning acting career (he played a judge in Spike Lee's Malcolm X, and was left on the cutting-room floor of Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way...
...But after the festivities in Chicago, Kunstler became one of the most recognizable legal figures in the country, a man whose name first became synonymous with seemingly hopeless causes, then with hopeless causes, and finally with worthless causes...
...In it, Kunstler portrays himself as a man who has long been committed to the plight of the underdog, as evidenced by his work with Martin Luther King and the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, and with John Gotti, Colin Ferguson, and the guys who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in the 1990s...
...This sense of the lawyer as performing artist, blithely sequestered from reality, animates Kunstler's autobiography My Life as a Radical Lawyer, co-written by the previously obscure Sheila Isenberg...
...Like Ismael, we must always go back to the sea...
...Along the way, Kunstler's anchor in the sea of sanity seems to have come loose...
...In a career of amazing diversity, he once drafted a will for Joe McCarthy, shot heroin in a bathroom with comedian Lenny Bruce, and toasted a group of mobster clients by saying, "Here's to crime...
...No More...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
