In the Ring

October 29, 2007
Important people caught in a jam—Bill Clinton embroiled in the Paula Jones lawsuit, Judith Miller facing jail time for contempt, Paul Wolfowitz battling ethics charges at the World Bank—often hire superlawyer Bennett to represent them. In this self-satisfied memoir, Bennett (a partner at the white-shoe firm Skadden, Arps) pays effusive tribute to friends and colleagues, proffers nuggets of wisdom to young attorneys (“While you should overprepare your cases, you should always under try them,” i.e., keep the presentation simple) and ferociously defends his clients’ reputations in rehashes of their cases. But his most zealous advocacy is for his brilliant lawyering, evidenced by courtroom proceedings that the author excerpts at great length. Alas, in print, lawyerly histrionics become rambling, turgid improvisations that try the reader’s patience: “Your Honor, I don’t look like Alice ... but I somehow feel like I am. I’m perplexed as she was. I’m concerned as she was. There are things that just don’t fit together for me.” What does come through is the preening self-regard (“Had I been younger and less experienced, I might have been intimidated meeting one on one with the president”) of an archetypal Washington mover-and-shaker.

May 1, 2008
Bennetts client list reflects some of the major Washington scandals in recent decades: President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones matter, Clark Clifford in the BCCI scandal, Paul Wolfowitzs departure from the World Bank, and Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra affair. In this memoir, Bennett recounts a career as an extraordinarily powerful lawyer on the Washington scene for more than 40 years, and in the telling he takes readers through a recent history of groundbreaking cases and scandal among the rich and powerful. He recalls his upbringing in Brooklyn, education at Georgetown and Harvard, and an early stint as a federal criminal prosecutor before going on to hone his skills representing accused white-collar wrongdoers. Bennett details the legal strategies behind his arguments in representing the famous and infamous. On a more personal level, he also details his voluntary involvement in the investigation of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church as he dutifully supported an institution that had always been a personal blessing to him. This is an absorbing look at one of the nations most influential lawyers and his clients.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)