More than 170 former law clerks—and at least some of the Justices—have broken the Supreme Court's traditional silence; and the result is a searing account of the Court's inner workings from 1967 to 1975 that shows the Chief Justice to be a fool and quite possibly a scoundrel, that exposes the other Justices to ridicule and contempt, that casts doubt on the highest court as a judicious arbiter of anything. Whether or not this wholesale disrobing is a good thing, it was probably inevitable once Burger, newly installed as Chief, attempted to muzzle his law clerks and went on to flout the Court's rules of procedure—withholding his vote so he could join the majority and assign himself the writing of the opinion. In rebuttal, the other Brethren ganged up on him—determined not to let his unrepresentative views pass as the majority opinion, not to let his ineptly drafted opinions go on public record and become legal precedent. Ultimately they succeeded in stealing his majority: a dissent draft-opinion became the 7-1 choice. Its announcement stands, here, as the book's dramatic peak. What the reader sees, then, is a lawless court, ruled by the vanities and proclivities of men. Woodward and Armstrong would not, however, call it a Burger Court: with the ends increasingly polarized (Brennan and Marshall vs. Burger and Rehnquist), with the Chief a legal featherweight and a flagrant usurper, the nonideological craftsmen of the center—they contend—took control. This assessment is not entirely borne out by post-1975 rulings, many of them written by Rehnquist for the majority; but it is incidental to the book's impact. With every legal and extra-legal mo, explicated, with comings-and-goings and conversations recounted in creepy de tail ("The door to Stewart's inner office was open, and they heard someone come into the outer office. There was a moment of silence. . ."), it makes compulsive, unnerving, electric reading. Here is an elderly, intractable Hugo Black invoking a technicality to thwart the majority and bar innumerable Blackmun was dumbfounded. . . now he was a petitioners from the courts ("justice and had the same power"); here is Douglas, "never a man to procrastinate before wreaking havoc," sending a savage memo to the Chief (text provided); here is Stewart, haunted by the Sherlock Holmes case of "the dog that didn't bark," suspecting the Chief of "purposely leaving unanswered some crucial, but hidden, question." And, for comic relief, here are the annual (blue) "movie days." But only once, apropos of Douglas and two put-upon clerks, does the account become truly petty, and only very infrequently are thoughts imputed for which there is no plausible source. Dirty linen or not, most of this has to be believed—and it's dynamite.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0743274024
Page Count: 596
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
The journalist is Joe McGinniss. The murderer is Jeffrey MacDonald, subject of McGinniss' best-selling Fatal Vision, The relationship between the two is the paradigm for Malcolm's stinging indictment of all journalists' relationships to their subjects—an indictment that created a furor when published last year in the New Yorker, and which is here reprinted in full, with a new, slippery afterword by Malcolm. Malcolm flings the gauntlet: "Every journalist. . .knows that what he does is morally indefensible." Why? Because "he is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Case in point: McGinniss' alleged con of MacDonald. MacDonald claimed in a 1984 lawsuit that McGinniss had committed fraud and breach of contract by leading him to believe, through letters of support and years of friendship, that Fatal Vision would proclaim MacDonald's innocence, while instead the book portrayed him as a guilty psychopath. Malcolm diligently sifts through the lawsuit—including trial testimony by Joseph Wambaugh and William Buckley that defended a journalist's right to mislead a subject in order to get a story—and follows up with interviews with the lawyers, with expert witnesses, and with MacDonald (after initial contact, McGinniss broke off all ties to Malcolm). The jury favored MacDonald 5-1; McGinniss finally paid a six-figure out-of-court settlement to him. Malcolm sides with the jury, finding in her own relationships with her subjects, particularly MacDonald, reflections of the case's moral conundrums; in her afterword, she comments bitingly on criticisms of that finding, but glibly sidesteps charges that she had been inspired, at least in part, by her own—conveniently unmentioned—suffering by lawsuits directed at her by psychologist Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, subject of her book In the Freud Archives (1984). Strident in tone, overbearing in conclusion; but of major interest and importance for exposing profound ethical questions that before now have festered behind the stony shield of journalistic privilege.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1990
ISBN: 0679731830
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
IN THE NEWS
Soccer fans will appreciate these tales of life on the pitch.
Lincir’s debut, a slim collection of reminiscences in the form of personal essays and poems, relates his love affair with the world’s most popular sport.
Over 30 years, Lincir has played “thousands” of games of soccer. He’s watched and written about it religiously. For a short period, he even refereed. “Loving the game,” he writes, “is what it’s all about.” As in most romances, there were victories, losses and lessons in humility. Traumatized by his first booking (yellow card) as an 8-year-old footballer, which was the result of a mistake made by his coaching father, he was brought to tears at the dinner table when his younger sister, also a soccer player, asked if she might see the yellow card, unable to comprehend why Lincir wasn’t actually given one. At the age of 12, he scored the game-winning goal in a tough 2-1 match; problem was, he scored in his own goal, making the car ride home with his dad and teammate Sean especially unpleasant. In his freshman year of college play, Lincir tells of scoring the perfect Pele-like “bicycle kick goal,” only to have it taken away by the ref as “dangerous play.” When Lincir writes of his minor league soccer days, he describes it as a rough road of “long drives and low per diems,” a lifestyle so cramped that getting his own room for a night felt like hitting it “big time.” Despite all of these humbling experiences, Lincir concludes that “not trying is the only disgrace.” Slight but endearingly told, the tales are jargon-rich, with references to getting “nut-megged” and the “flip-throw.” The author’s honest heart is strong and his gentle sense of humor engaging, and an assortment of black-and-white photos help bring the stories to life. Lincir writes with the energy of a young striker at the start of a big match, although his poetry adds little to the assembled snippets. Additional inspirational essays might have been a better choice.
Soccer fans will appreciate these tales of life on the pitch.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615466439
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Leftback Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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