Attorney memoir recounts career trajectory and advocacy for Israel

4.2.12 WC: 191694 In my 40s, I made another career change. I stopped writing law review articles and started to write books about law for a general audience. My first book, written in my early 40s, was The Best Defense, which became a national best seller and is still in print. It has been followed by 28 additional books, six of which became best sellers. My books have been translated into a dozen languages, and well over a million of them have been sold throughout the world. One of them, Chutzpah, was the number one best seller on The New York Times and other lists. My career as a popular writer of non-fiction and fiction has been gratifying, especially when readers tell me that my books have influenced their thinking and their lives. I think of my book writing as part of my job as a teacher, both to my Harvard law students and to my readers. In my 40s, I also became a regular presence on national television, explaining the law and advocating civil liberties positions. I appeared frequently with Ted Koppel, Larry King, Katie Couric and other widely watched shows. As a result, I became something of a public figure (for better or worse.) I also met my second wife, Carolyn Cohen, and began to live a more stable and rewarding home life. In my 50s, my life changed again. Because of my success as a lawyer, my media visibility and my books, I began to attract world famous people as clients. The nature of my practice changed considerably, and although I still took half of my cases without fee, the fees for my paying cases went up dramatically, and for the first time in my life I was relatively wealthy. My wife and I—who by this time had a daughter named Ella—bought a beautiful home in Cambridge and a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. We began to collect art and to open our home to students and charity events. Shortly thereafter, my son Jamin married Barbara and had two children, Lori and Lyle, making me a relatively young grandfather. Clients, including several billionaires, were flocking to me and I had my choice of cases. I tried to strike a balance among the cases I took, but the media focused only on my rich and famous clients. Suddenly I was a celebrity lawyer. I hated that designation, and it didn’t accurately reflect my day-to-day work, but it stuck and my obituary will probably use the term, no matter when it is published. My next career change took place in my 60s, when I began to devote considerable time and energy to the defense of Israel against efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. As I entered my seventh decade and looked back on my life’s work, I saw most trends moving in a positive direction: freedom of expression, though never secure, was expanding; science was playing more of a role in solving homicides that ever before, though the courts were not keeping pace with technological developments; racial, gender, religious and even sexual orientation, equality, though far from complete, was much closer to reality than when I was growing up. There was, however, one important issue that was moving in the wrong direction: the campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel—being conducted by the strangest of bedfellows, the hard ideological left and the hard Islamic right—was crossing dangerous lines. Israel’s imperfections (and what nation is anything but imperfect) was becoming the newest excuse for legitimizing the oldest of bigotries. The line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism—a line Martin Luther King warned about in a speech at Harvard shortly before his death—was being crossed. For the first time in my adult life, I was seeing an increase in the hatred of Jews. 352 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017439