Alan Dershowitz—This Time, It’s Personal

In his work and in his fiction, the country’s most famous defense attorney tries to balance the scales of justice.
by Nan Goldberg

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                "Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the
                  Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in
                  perpetual session." —Franz Kafka

                    Kafka, he isn’t.

                    But Alan Dershowitz works in, and writes about, a realm with which Kafka
                    was all too familiar.

                    Not that Kafka would have been comfortable in Dershowitz’s milieu—the
                    American legal system, in which he is a celebrated defense attorney,
                    Harvard Law professor and author of 13 books including two novels, "The
                    Advocate’s Devil" and the newly released "Just Revenge." But then,
                    Dershowitz isn’t comfortable either. And that’s the point: both writers
                    struggle with a bewildering and dehumanizing reality in which justice may
                    be achieved only by a "deliberate leap in the opposite direction," in
                    Kafka’s words, or, in Dershowitz’s, by accepting "the cognitive
                    dissonance" of defending the guilty for the sake of a higher principle.

                    For example, there’s the double murderer on Death Row whose case
                    Dershowitz is handling right now. "Do I think the world will be a better
                    place if he’s free from prison? Well, the world would be a better place if
                    we didn’t have the death penalty. So I have to move the level of abstraction
                    from a particular case up to a more general principle.

                    "People wonder about [why I defended] O.J. Simpson," he adds. "They
                    forget that the day I was called and asked to join the case, he was facing
                    the death penalty."

                    Dershowitz, defender of such notorious clients as Simpson, Claus von
                    Bulow, Mike Tyson, and Michael Milken, agreed to talk with Book
                    magazine about his novel "Just Revenge." But it is impossible to talk about
                    "Just Revenge" without talking about his private life, and it is impossible
                    to talk about his private life without talking about his profession. "It is,"
                    Dershowitz agrees, "a very personal book."

                    It is a perfect summer day on Martha’s Vineyard—baby-blue sky
                    embellished by puffy white clouds, temperature in the 80s—and
                    Dershowitz, in loose, faded jeans and a T-shirt, seems relaxed and
                    cheerful as he shows a visitor around the house he and his family have
                    owned for seven years. He halts frequently to point out one or another
                    artwork from his enormous collection, which adorns every wall in the
                    place almost to the point of clutter. There are paintings, lithographs,
                    sculptures, minimalist female forms constructed of seaweed. There are
                    photographs: Alfred Eisenstadt in his studio, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elvis.
                    There is a large Andy Warhol portrait of Golda Meir. The artists are both
                    famous and obscure; many, he says, live here on the Vineyard. There is a
                    story behind each piece. Of course.

                    The house, off a dirt road in a secluded area of the Vineyard, is huge and
                    airy, with glass walls overlooking an enormous deck and swimming pool,
                    a view of the ocean from his second-floor office, and toys scattered all
                    over the place, including the large rhinoceros and slightly smaller
                    dinosaur that guard the tiny log cabin on the front lawn. Dershowitz, 60,
                    has two grown sons, Elon and Jamin, from his first marriage; a 9-year-old
                    daughter, Ella, with his wife, Carolyn Cohen; and two grandchildren, Lori
                    and Lyle - the children of Jamin and his wife, Barbara. Only Carolyn and
                    Elon are here at the moment, he explains; Jamin and his family just left,
                    and Ella is at camp.

                    He writes fiction, he says, partly for Ella and the rest of his family. "I have
                    to be able to justify what I do to my children, to my family, to my wife, to
                    myself. I could be representing the nicest people in the world, and doing
                    only cases that are gratifying and wonderful, so why do I spend so much
                    time representing such horrible people?

                    "In non-fiction, you can give all the reasons, but they all sound lame. [In
                    fiction,] I can put my soul and heart into a case and explain through the
                    vehicle of the case. If there’s a theme in `Advocate’s Devil’ [his first
                    novel, about an attorney who successfully defends a guilty rapist], it’s how
                    complex and difficult it is. Every decent human being who represents
                    guilty criminals ought to have trouble doing it. If you can too easily state
                    the reason, then it hasn’t gotten to your soul and your gut."

                    The case in "Just Revenge" involves an old man, Max Menuchen, a
                    Lithuanian Holocaust survivor who discovers that the man who murdered
                    his entire family, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Vilna, is
                    living outside of Boston only a few miles from Max himself. The mass
                    murderer, Marcellus Prandus, had never been charged with a crime; he had
                    emigrated to America, married and fathered two sons, and is now a
                    grandfather, a model citizen and devoted family man.

                    Prandus, an old man himself, has cancer, and there is no possibility of
                    using legal means to bring him to justice; he would be dead long before
                    the U.S. government could gather enough evidence to deport him. So Max,
                    who survived the massacre by clawing his way out of a mass grave
                    between the corpses of his relatives and neighbors, takes the law into his
                    own hands. He exacts a terrible retribution, for which he is arrested and
                    tried for murder. At trial, he is defended by an old friend, Abe
                    Ringel—also the protagonist of "The Advocate’s Devil"—a man who bears
                    a strong biographical and philosophical resemblance to Alan Dershowitz,
                    as well as Dershowitz’s mother’s family name.

                    "Clearly, Max did it," Dershowitz says. "He caused the death of this man,
                    and did it willingly and knowingly.

                    "At the beginning of `Just Revenge’ I have a dialogue in which Emma
                    [Abe’s daughter] persuades Abe to stop representing guilty people. Only
                    innocent people. And along comes Max! And Max is guilty! " Dershowitz
                    is smiling, clearly delighted by the intractable problem. "And Emma
                    pleads with him, `You gotta represent Max.’ And Abe says, `Aha! See?’"

                    "MY job," he continues, underscoring the point, "is to represent
                    ANYBODY. Sometimes they’re innocent, sometimes it’s a thug who’s
                    guilty. Right now I’m working to save the lives of 13 Iranian Jews who
                    were falsely accused of spying, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on
                    that, working on strategy, thinking about how to break into the system,
                    like in the ‘70s when I represented hundreds of Soviet Jews. When I
                    define my life that way, there’s no conflict between the case and what my
                    philosophy is.

                    "But a few years ago, I represented a woman who killed her husband. Six
                    shots, and then she reloaded the gun and shot him again—12 shots—and
                    she was claiming it was self defense. And I took that case, and I lost. But
                    while I was trying that case, women all over the country wrote to me. They
                    loved me. Even though, legally, how do you explain reloading that gun?

                    "So I have to remove myself from the day-to-day of one particular case.
                    That’s hard to do psychologically, and I tried to show in `Advocate’s
                    Devil’ how hard it is. It’s a little easier in this book, because Max is such a
                    nice man, and even though what he did might be terrible, he’s a friend of
                    the family . . . " Dershowitz pauses, reflects for a moment. "The theme of
                    THIS book is really revenge or retribution, when the legal system doesn’t
                    work."

                    In "Just Revenge," Dershowitz, who often seems to test his principles by
                    applying them hypothetically to the most extreme case, examines revenge
                    in the context of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

                    "I’m ambivalent about revenge, as you can see. I think it’s sometimes
                    appropriate. It’s not legal but it’s sometimes appropriate.

                    "I think if I had lived in Europe in the post-Holocaust period I WOULD
                    have taken revenge. This is how it should have been, in some ways; there
                    should have been more justice, there should have been more retribution,
                    there should have been more biblical justice—an eye for an eye.

                    "The idea that we allowed Nazi war criminals to come to this country and
                    help us build our space program is abominable. I mean Werner Von Braun
                    belonged in jail, not [venerated] as a hero. The victors—England, France,
                    others—who didn’t seek any kind of justice were just looking at
                    tomorrow, not worrying about yesterday. The problem is that by doing that
                    they created Pol Pot, they created Milosovich, and they created others
                    who have promiscuously engaged in continued genocide, because they
                    realize genocidal killers get away with it. That’s the message of the 20th
                    century: genocide works. Genocidal killers get away with it."

                    The lesser evil, Dershowitz believes, would have been to punish Germany
                    after the war—"even if it meant Germany went over to the Communists. It
                    would have been better for Germany to have become Communist than to
                    reward it by rebuilding it so quickly after the war.

                    "I remember reading in college, in Dostoyevsky’s `The Brothers
                    Karamazov,’ that one of the characters asks, `If by torturing and killing a
                    child we could produce total happiness for the world, would it be just?’
                    He just throws the question out; he doesn’t give an answer. And it stuck
                    with me for a long, long time, and in [the novel] I try to give an answer, but
                    there’s no perfect answer." suggested trim:

                    In 1962, when he was a law student, Dershowitz was asked to go to Israel
                    with Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, and help
                    broadcast the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He didn’t do it. "I had a clerkship
                    coming up, I was worried about my own career, and I didn’t go. I
                    sometimes think of how different my life would have been if I had. I think
                    if I had gone to Israel in 1962, my whole career would have been as a
                    prosecutor of Nazi war criminals.

                    "Sometimes I think I should have done that. There was a chance in the ‘60s
                    to really get those sons of bitches, but they got away with it and they died
                    happily in the arms of their families. And since I don’t believe in the
                    hereafter, that’s it. They just lived good lives, they died good deaths, and
                    now they’re buried and they’ll never have to pay a price for it. And that’s
                    one reason I had to write this book. I had this feeling of wanting a just
                    revenge, and we haven’t gotten it, we CAN’T get it in life. I had to get it in
                    fiction at least." end suggested trim

                    One thing Dershowitz is NOT conflicted about is writing. "The best part of
                    my professional life is sitting alone with a pad and a pen and writing. I do
                    everything by hand; I don’t know anything about computers at all. Those
                    four hours a day when I can sit, solitary, with the phone off, just me and
                    the pad and the idea—that’s the best. I actually wrote part of this novel on
                    the beach, or on this deck."

                    He is also a prodigious reader. "Kafka influenced me enormously, Kafka
                    and Dostoyevsky, from the legal justice point of view, more than any
                    other writers. From the point of view of characters, Bellow and Roth,
                    because they write about Jewish characters. I love Oates, I like the way
                    she gets into the minds of people." He also cites "all the Russian writers,"
                    both 19th-century and contemporary; Israeli writers A.B. Yehoshua,
                    Aharon Applefeld, Amos Oz; John Grisham’s "A Time to Kill"; and Scott
                    Turow’s "The Laws of Our Fathers."

                    Writing, he says, usually comes easily to him, whether it’s fiction or
                    non-fiction. "I have so many interesting people in my life and such crazy
                    dialogue that occurs, and I’m pretty good at remembering and writing it
                    down."

                    Fiction definitely has its unique pleasures. "My biggest thrill: I’ve had two
                    of my books made into movies [both executive produced by Dershowitz’s
                    son Elon]. The first one, `Reversal of Fortune,’ wasn’t as big of a thrill.
                    Why? Because the characters were real." But when he saw the movie
                    version of "The Advocate’s Devil," "to see ABE RINGEL on the screen!
                    That was a complete creation of my mind! They made it into a Sunday
                    Night ABC movie of the week. And watching these characters, I’m
                    thinking, `I invented this guy! He doesn’t exist!’"

                    Still, Dershowitz finds fiction harder to write, and "Just Revenge" was
                    especially so. "I first thought about writing it about 20 years ago, when I
                    discovered how many of my family were killed during the Holocaust. But
                    I didn’t think I had the talent to put together a novel on the Holocaust. It’s
                    daunting to write a novel on the Holocaust.

                    "The thing that’s so frustrating for me is, I KNOW I can’t write like Kafka,
                    I KNOW I can’t write like Bellow, I KNOW I can’t write like Roth, like
                    Dostoyevsky, and I normally don’t go into an area unless I think I can do it
                    as well as the next person. But in literature I made a clear decision. I’m
                    gonna write small novels, and try to create a new genre—the ethical
                    thriller. Some books are plot-driven, some are chracter-driven. Mine is
                    ethical-issue driven—driven by one or two great moral ethical dilemmas
                    that have to be resolved."

                    Kafka would have approved. He once wrote, "I think we ought to read only
                    the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We need the books that
                    affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone
                    we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from
                    everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within
                    us."

                    Dershowitz uses different words, but he’s saying almost the same thing.
                    "Whether it’s a book, a class, a legal case I’m defending, a column in a
                    newspaper, I think of myself as a teacher to the public. When I teach
                    ethics [at Harvard], I teach 15 problems, what I call the intractable
                    problems." He outlines one, which happens to be one of the subplots in
                    "The Advocate’s Devil": What if a man is convicted of murder and
                    sentenced to death, and another man comes into a lawyer’s office and
                    confesses to the crime. Should the lawyer break his oath of
                    attorney-client privilege and turn in the guilty client?

                    "I once taught this in a class and there was actually a shoving match, the
                    students were so angry with each other over their views Then I knew I had
                    a good one. Because there’s no right answer to that."