Thoughts on Dershowitz

 Dancing with Mr. D.

Is it possible to be a Progressive Democrat and only half a dead man walking?

I think so. That’s the nature of my interest in Alan Dershowitz. He is simultaneously an example of what was worthwhile about the American liberal tradition and what is so tragically wrong with the contemporary Progressive UniParty that is speeding the United States to ruin at terrifying speed.

He is aware of this dichotomy in himself. Atypically for a man of his legal acumen, he flounders when he tries to provide advice and counsel during his  many televised interviews on the legal tornado surrounding Trump. He knows the kangaroo courts are wrong, perhaps horribly wrong, but he repeatedly falls back on his lifelong status as a Democrat and insists not only that he voted for Biden but intends to do so again. Which in a man of his reputed intellectual stature would be self-evidently absurd; Biden has always been stupid and inept and is now declining into physical and mental incapacity. Dershowitz is tap-dancing between a rock and a hard place.

This is a schizoid phenomenon worth looking into. My intention here is not a biography of the “unique individual” that is Alan Dershowitz. My aim instead is to make useful inferences about an archetype of a fine mind being riven and slowly consumed by a soul-threatening disease. 

Why an archetype? Not just because of the big-time lawyer thing. That’s a big part of it obviously, but he’s also representative of a public life lived so much in the mass media that the man of substance is also a celebrity and thus famous for being famous. Further, Dershowitz is important to examine because of his chronological age, which is far more significant than pundits ever seem to recognize.

The life in public is easily demonstrated. When I was writing Shuteye Nation (SN) a quarter century ago, he had already been a celebrity lawyer for decades. This was my entry for him in SN’s “Who’s Who” section (Note that the highlighted superscripts are working links to definitions in “The Glossary.)

WW.Y2000: <<Alan Dirtiwitz. The most brilliantly sanctimonious of all TV lawyers°, Dirtiwitz is capable of convincing even the most average Amerian (and you know how skeptical they are) that he’s the one who invented the concept of law° in the first place and is therefore the only one competent to explain it. Famous for his tirades about such topics as principle°, fairness°, and justice°, he has proved the immense scale of his own professional integrity° with the breathtaking fees he charged murderers like Ojay Simson and Klaus Von Bully for their acquittals. He has also written many books, including a novel about a brilliant TV lawyer who almost gets his own daughter murdered by one of his murderer clients and a nonfiction book about how it’s okay to lie about sex even if you didn’t go to Harvurd, provided you went to Yail instead. Most recently, Dirtiwitz got pretty effing steamed about the unprincipled° way the Republians° tried to convict Clitton for committing perjury° and obstructing justice°in a sex trial. In response to an extremely nasty and unprincipled spate of rumors following his defense of the Presdent, Dirtiwitz has sworn under oath that he’s had sex° himself on more than one occasion. He has since added to this testimony—informally—with the claim that his partner enjoyed herself too. Both times.>>

If you don’t trust my bias, here’s the current introduction to the Wikipedia entry on Mr. D.:

WIKI: << Alan Morton Dershowitz (/ˈdɜːrʃəwɪts/ DURR-shə-wits; born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer and former law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.

Dershowitz has taken on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients. As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Dershowitz has represented such celebrity clients as Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker. Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, then in 1984 for Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, part of the legal "Dream Team", alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He was a member of Harvey Weinstein's defense team in 2018 and of President Donald Trump's defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020. He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf.>>

Wiki also lists Dershowitz as the author of multiple books about law and politics, including a novel, The Advocate’s Devil, and a case history that got made into a movies starring Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow and Ron Silver as Dershowitz.

Click pic for trailer…

What Wiki does not mention is Dershowitz’s newest book, which is searingly critical of what the American legal profession has become. Thinking Wiki don’t like this one too much.

These days he is being interviewed everywhere about the parade of antiTrump cases trooping through the courts. As much as he knows that the entire legal campaign stinks, his tone is slightly different depending on which political mindset is sitting in the interviewer chair. So much time spent on cable news sets turns celebrities into performers seeking interviewer approval. Asked by a lefty he can find aspects of the classified document case that “don’t look good” for Trump. You mean, aside from the unconstitutional search on which the entire case is founded, followed by prosecutorial misconduct smashing the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and other requirements of due process, the banishing of the legally sacrosanct attorney-client privilege by an Obama appointed judge, and the repeated leaking of protected Grand Jury testimony to the press while the Biden and Pence cases proceed(ed) in legally required silence? 

What is going on with Mr. D.? At a deep level, outside of the mass media merry-go-round? This is where chronological age comes into play. Dershowitz is 84 years old. Born in 1938. Here’s the first thing that’s important about that… how he was raised and educated:

WIKI: << Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on September 1, 1938, the son of Claire (née Ringel) and Harry Dershowitz, an Orthodox Jewish couple. He was raised in Borough Park. His father was a founder and president of the Young Israel of Boro Park Synagogue in the 1960s, served on the board of directors of the Etz Chaim School in Borough Park, and in retirement was co-owner of the Manhattan-based Merit Sales Company. Dershowitz's first job was at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1952, at age 14.

Dershowitz attended Yeshiva University High School, an independent boys' prep school owned by Yeshiva University, in Manhattan, where he played on the basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. He later said his teachers told him to do something that "requires a big mouth and no brain ... so I became a lawyer". After graduating from high school, he studied political science at Brooklyn College, graduating in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He graduated in 1962 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws. He was a member of a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel but is a secular Jew.>>

People over the age of 78 are not Baby Boomers. Nowadays, they mostly belong to a rarely discussed demographic: War Babies (who in the context of WWII were born between Sep1938 and Aug1945.) The irony is that they did more to shape American Culture in the 50+ years before the 21st Century than the highly publicized Baby Boomers did. There have been three Baby Boomer Presidents and no War Baby Presidents at all. So what’s the big deal about a comparatively small population who spent their early childhoods in the years of uncertainty, rationing, deaths of family and friends, and early awareness of headlines than their far more pampered younger siblings?

Answer? Most of the biggest cultural impacts that made even today’s youngest Americans who and what they are today.

Who led the music revolution of the 1960s that made youth into a separate culture, secular, seduced by drugs and the temptations of “free love,” and the amorphous paranoia of any ignorant group that lives in a silo of equally myopic peers and feels entitled to have whatever they want? Who?

Bob Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the Who(?!), Pink Floyd, the Kinks, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Ronny & the Ronettes, Steppenwolf, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Credence Clearwater Revival, and the Animals were founded or headlined by War Babies, not Boomers. Amazingly, all popular music since their arrival at center stage has flowed from them, their music still fills the airwaves of American radio stations, and the ones who are still alive are still performing or thinking about their next comeback tour.

One can argue that the music led the politics or that the politics led the music, but the War Babies were also out front in the new left revolution of the 1960s, including Tom Hayden, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jerry Rubin, Bobbie Seale, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, et al.

The same holds true for serious writing that reached and molded the minds of Baby Boomers was not written by Boomers but talented pre-Boomers named Kurt Vonnegut, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Saul Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, et al, plus nonfiction tracts by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller and other feminists born in the 1930s. The two key players in the Watergate reportage that set the stage for career-destroying mass media were the War Babies Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

During the 50 years when War Babies were remaking America, Baby Boomers did a lot of not much. Not much memorable music, writing, or for that matter, politicking. All they learned how to do from their War Baby siblings was drugs and turning sociopathic at puberty. Boomer Bubba Clinton got himself elected President but his real legacy to the nation was the further erosion of the rule of law during the Lewinsky scandal and (far worse) the unleashing on the nation of his Medusa wife Hillary. Who paved the way for the disastrous Baby Boomer Obama reign and the subsequent seven-year coup attempt by Hillary to destroy Trump and the United States. (George W. was also a Baby Boomer. Not too good for the Boomer Brand, eh…?) Now, as the War Babies die off, taking their fire and creativity and rebellion with them, we have as a nation subsided into a herd of sheeple.

Back to Dershowitz. He’s a model War Baby, with personal circumstances amplified by his Orthodox Jewish elementary and middle school education, his assimilation into the FDR-acolyte universities (Yale and Harvard) of the immensely powerful CHYOS Old Boy networks in law and politics. These circumstances are responsible for the deep inner conflicts assailing him now.

He probably acquired respect, love, and passion for the law in his early immersion in the Talmud, That font of legal argumentation about theology which resides inside all morally based legal systems. This line from the Wiki text is provocative though: “He was a member of a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel but is a secular Jew.”

Why secular? That would be CHYOS and its absorbed from Oxford, long slow surrender to de facto if not de jure atheism. As he became a fierce Harvard advocate and professor at its law school, Dershowitz came to accept that whatever remained of his religious Jewish faith could be confined to his identification with the Jewish people, culture, and post-WWII nationality. He was an active, ardent Zionist with all the associated human emotions, be also had this to say about his philosophy as a defense attorney:

“At the time of the [Simpson] murders, Dershowitz was just finishing a book called The Abuse Excuse--and Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasion of Responsibility.  Concerned that Dershowitz's thesis may negatively impact Simpson's case, Shapiro decided to hire Dershowitz, in part to "shut him up." Rarely present in court, Dershowitz spent most of his time handling motions and other support documents. His main assignment was to prepare for possible appellate review of an adverse trial outcome.

In his book, The Best Defense, Dershowitz gave a view of the approach he would later take in the Simpson case.  "Once I decide to take a case," Dershowitz wrote, "I have only one agenda: I want to win.  I will try, by every fair and legal means, to get my client off--without regard to the consequences."   In his memoir The Best Defense, Dershowitz noted that "almost all of my clients have been guilty."

Dershowitz was not politically active, at least openly, during his tenure at Harvard. But he was unquestionably a witness to the overtly political organizing of Laurence Tribe, a fellow professor and SCOTUS wannabe, who identified and groomed promising candidates for national political careers in elected and high-level appointed offices. Since this days, Tribe has been discredited and disgraced as a conspiracy theorist and, well, deranged Trump  hater. Why should we car about Laurence Tribe?

FTA: <<After graduating from law school, Tribe clerked for justice Mathew Tobriner of the Supreme Court of California from 1966 to 1967, then for justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967 to 1968. He then joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor, receiving tenure in 1972. Among his law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been President Barack Obama (a research assistant for over two years), Chief Justice John Roberts, US Senator Ted Cruz, Former D.C. Circuit Chief Judge and Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Other notable students of Tribe were U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and lead manager for the first Impeachment of Donald Trump, and Jamie Raskin, lead manager for the second Donald Trump impeachment.

Tribe was part of Al Gore's legal team regarding the results of the 2000 United States presidential election. Due to the close nature of the vote count, recounts had been initiated in Florida, and the recounts had been challenged in court. Tribe argued the initial case in Federal Court in Miami in which they successfully argued that the court should not stop the recount of the votes which was taking place and scheduled to take place in certain counties. David Boies argued for the Gore team in a related matter in the Florida State Courts regarding the dates that Secretary of State of FloridaKatherine Harris would accept recounts. When the original Federal case, Bush v. Gore, was appealed, Gore and his advisers decided at the last minute to have Boies instead of Tribe argue the case at the Supreme Court. The court determined that recounts of votes should cease and that accordingly George W. Bush had been elected president….>>

(What happened after that you can read about here at Instapunk Returns.)

Where does all this put us? And where has it put Dershowitz? His new book constitutes a deep admission that the Harvard Law School to which he gave his professional life is now the Point of the Spear In creating a new, incredibly powerful elite ruling class that is — and behaves — contemptuously above the law, without principle or morality. So we know he’s feeling the pain of betrayal and loss. But at some point in the past, at some level, he was at least passively complicit in the unfolding destruction of his beloved Constitution. He might feel a need to make amends.

But he has also a record and a reputation. He defends his clients with every tool available or imaginable, and his ‘clients’ in national matters have always been Democrats. You can almost see the hammer fight going on his brain. And it’s doing damage. He’s no longer the 160-ish IQ he started with. And the difference isn’t athero-sclerosis. It’s mind disease. Imagine it as feeling often and unexpectedly dizzy, unable to determine precise orientations in mental space between impulse and judgment. The result? Even his legal arguments on teevee sound partial, tentative, and defensive rather than wise. After framing some weird ambiguous legalism regarding a Trump case, he still feels comfortable enough with Bannon to complain about the hurt of being shunned by lifelong friends and even members of his own family. And he simply cannot, like many of my erstwhile FB friends, make a clean break with those whose minds are wholly gone, no matter how close they once were.

In terms of cerebration he’s dancing on a tilting, turning floor in what amounts to a battle between the dismembered pieces of his soul. Is it just possible that there’s a seed of the old War Baby in there somewhere, fighting for life? I don’t know.

I can’t stand to watch him much anymore, but I feel sorry for him. I admire his accomplishments and the caliber of mind he once posessed. Still, I was pushed to go to law school when it seemed every smart guy had to, and I turned it down. As an attorney, I’d inevitably be a courtroom warrior. But as I contemplated becoming a defense attorney for an endless stream of the guilty, or a prosecutor whose performance is measured in conviction statistics (and a system rigged in their favor by incompetent appeals courts), I realized I could not tolerate a career on either side of the divide. Because if you’re not careful it can lead to the place this sad 84 year old man is flailing through a duet with himself…