Vol. 10 No. 2 (February 2000) pp. 130-132.

WILLIAM M. KUNSTLER: THE MOST HATED LAWYER IN AMERICA by David J. Langum. New York, New York: New York University Press. 451pp.

Reviewed by James C. Foster, Department of Political Science, Oregon State University.

Reading this book was a trip down memory lane, and not all the memories are congenial. I remember that, as an undergraduate Political Science major heading for law school in the late-1960s, I wanted to be Bill Kunstler when I grew up. So did many of my male friends. Much to my chagrin, although we guys admired Lennie Weinglass' brains and conscientiousness, we coveted Bill Kunstler's star power as well as the female groupies who apparently flocked to it. I also wince at our chutzpah in presuming to refer to them informally as Bill and Lennie, since neither my buddies nor I had ever met these men, much less knew them well. Oh well, it was a different time that seems long ago and far away. As Kurt Vonnegut, another 1960s icon, is fond of saying: "So it goes."

Professor Langum's biography of William Kunstler is a safe book. He has written a conventional, linear account about a person who lived an outlandishly messy life. I finished this book thinking, "This is what happens when a lawyer gets a hold of a person who's larger than life - he gets transformed, narrowed, and bleached. Langum's treatment is not Edmund Morris' DUTCH (1999). Saying that is not tantamount to promoting Morris' fictionalized first-person biography of Ronald Reagan as a successful model. Morris took big risks in attempting to capture his banal subject. Langum did not need a fictionalized character to bring Kunstler to life. What he needed to do was to let Kunstler be Kunstler. By working so hard to sell his brief for Kunstler, Langum renders "the most hated lawyer in America" not worthy of being hated. Indeed, William Kunstler does not fit well within the confines this lawyerly biography.

Another disappointing characteristic of Langum's biography is his agnostic attitude toward Kunstler. Langum is determined to stake out a middle position between those who despise Kunstler irrevocably and those who celebrate him uncritically. He takes great pains to dissociate himself from Kunstler-haters on his right and Kunstler fans to his left. He debunks Kunstler's critics for stereotyping him variously as a glory-hog, subversive gadfly, and/or sloppy advocate. Then he chides Kunstler cultists for ignoring their man's all-too-human foibles. After slogging through 300 plus pages of such studied equivocation, I recalled fondly Harry S. Truman's exasperated demand for a "one-armed economist" after he had grown weary of hearing "on the one hand . . . but, on the other hand . . ." from too many balanced advisors. If one could do a specific word count of Langum's manuscript, I'd wager that the word "however" would come close to the top of the list. As in: "'Kunstler had a very healthy ego, and what seemed an insatiable and self-centered craving for the

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limelight caused some to dislike him. However, the publicity he generated actually did help his practice and his clients" (p. 355). This is may be a fair-minded assessment but, in the end, it's also a cop-out.

"Kunstler's significance," concludes Langum, "ultimately depends on the politics brought to the evaluation" (p. 355). And what politics does Langum's bring? That particular buck doesn't stop on his desk. Langum's brief, in brief, is that Kunstler was a cause lawyer par excellence. This is the part of Langum's book that most likely will be of interest to readers of THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW. It's also least likely to come as news to my fellow Law and Courts Section members. Nevertheless, Langum's analysis is useful. He provides an instructive glimpse into an important episode in the history of the American legal profession, and it illustrates that episode with a fascinating account of Kunstler's evolution as a cause lawyer throughout his career. He devotes an entire chapter (Chap. 8) to "Radical Lawyers in Modern America," and Bill Kunstler is exhibit number one. Throughout the 1950s, Kunstler was a lawyer engaged in "a very conventional bourgeois practice" (p. 154), a "completely middle-class person" (p. 156). During the following decade, Kunstler often teamed up with Arthur Kinoy, to provide legal representation to participants in The Civil Rights Movement, and he filed hundreds of lawsuits. In August 1963, Kinoy briefly joined with brothers Michael and William Kunstler to form a law firm. Bill Kunstler delighted in announcing in open courts around the South that the three were "the new KKK!" Kunstler thought of the Chicago Seven trial, which Langum calls "Circus in Chicago," as his "radical Rubicon" (p. 163). According to Langum, however, it was his association with Kinoy that influenced "Kunstler's growth in political consciousness" (p. 164). Langum argues, furthermore, "the 1960s radicals came out of a context of support" (p. 164). Although hinting at the social origins of movements, unfortunately he does not pursue this line of analysis. Therefore, one might complement Langum's chapter with works by, for example, Piven and Cloward (1979), McGlen and O'Connor (1983), and McCann (1994). Regardless, Langum is not trying to write social science. Instead, what he does is offer a persuasive explanation of the similarities and differences between William Kunstler's personal radicalism and that of other radical lawyers.

"Opposition to antiblack racism was at the core of Kunstler's belief system" (p. 184). Here Langum finds the lodestar of his explanation. Even when Americans recoiled from their society's short-lived, fickle flirtation with social and cultural experimentation, leaving Kunstler something of a rebel without a movement, his "opposition to racism [remained] a moving line" (p. 184). In the early 1970s the American Indian Movement replaced the Chicago Seven and the Attica prisoners. By 1994 Kunstler was writing "today Muslims are the most hated group in the country . . ." (p. 184), hence his controversial representation of El Sayyid Nosair and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Tibetan Buddhist thought embraces the concept of "elegant outrageousness." I think William Kunstler personifies that idea. I also believe that Kunstler exemplifies what Hannah Arendt understood by vita activa: "a life devoted to public-political matters" (Arendt 1959: 13). Yes, Kunstler was perverse and flamboyant, a grand-stander and a womanizer. He also was a principled civil libertarian, and a stalwart friend to various groups and individuals who found

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themselves outcast and despised in America. Ultimately, in my book, he was sui generis. In that regard, I still hanker to emulate him.

REFERENCES:

Arendt, Hannah. 1959. THE HUMAN CONDITION. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor.

McCann, Michael W. 1994. RIGHTS AT WORK. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

McGlen, Nancy E. and Karen O'Connor. 1983. WOMEN'S RIGHTS. New York, NY: Praeger.

Morris, Edmund. 1999. DUTCH: A MEMOIR OF RONALD REAGAN. New York, NY: Random House.

Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1979. POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS: WHY THEY SUCCEED, HOW THEY FAIL. New York, NY: Vintage Books.