Inherit the mint; how Edward Bennett Williams made legal prostitution respectable.

• Author: Thomas, Evan
• Position: Excerpt from 'The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams - Legendary Trial Lawyer, Ultimate Insider

Michael Milken, the junk bond king, looked stricken. The Justice Department was closing in on the empire he had built out of vision, guile, and larceny. Frightened, Milken had done what many powerful men had done when they had a serious problem. He had done what Senator Joseph McCarthy, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, mafia don Frank Costello, LBJ aide Bobby Baker, singer Frank Sinatra, Soviet spy Igor Melekh, industrialist Armand Hammer, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Democratic Party Chairman Robert Strauss, Playboy owner Hugh Hefner, Texas Governor John Connally, financier Robert Vesco, Senator Thomas Dodd, CIA Director Richard Helms, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, Reverend Sun-Young Moon, and President Gerald Ford had all done before him: He had gone to Edward Bennett Williams.

Williams was not content to be just a great lawyer. He wanted power, and he wanted to be seen as a force for larger ends than the narrow representation of his clients. He was, at least in the beginning, an effective crusader for individual freedom. In the name of civil liberties and protecting the rights of the criminally accused, he helped spark a judicial revolution against unchecked police power in the fifties and sixties. Before anyone else, Williams exposed the illegal acts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation--the wiretapping, break-ins, buggings, and "black-bag jobs"--that were rotting J. Edgar Hoover's empire from within. Behind the scenes, he played a little-known but critical role in revealing and ultimately reining in the abusive power of Richard Nixon's White House. Williams not only urged Ben Bradlee to print the Pentagon Papers, he helped give The Washington Post editor the courage--and quite possibly, the inside information--to press forward with the newspaper's probe into Watergate when the rest of the establishment press was turning the other way.

Yet having exposed the abuse of power, Williams went on to protect it. Apparently without a second thought, Williams defended the very people exposed by the scandals that he had helped unearth. He defended a half dozen private and public powerbrokers from charges brought by the Watergate special prosecutor. He defended CIA Director Richard Helms against accusations that he had authorized an illegal break-in and lied to Congress. He defended the FBI's top specialist against charges of having performed black-bag jobs. And in the secret councils of the White House, he argued against restricting CIA eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

Williams saw no irony in playing both sides. He was an advocate, and he was intent on winning. If he could expose a scandal and then turn around and get off the people embroiled in it, so much the better. He won both ways. He always had. In the fifties, he had represented communists and fellow travelers before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), while at the same time he represented the greatest red-baiter of them all, Senator Joe McCarthy. Throughout his career, Williams appeared to be involved in a variety of conflicts of interest. But he believed he could represent everyone's interests at once, and he often succeeded in finding a middle way. Certainly he served his own interests. His individual clients were almost always happy as well. But viewed from a distance of years, Williams's ceaseless maneuvering sometimes to add up to one vast zero-sum game.

Williams would defend anyone, he liked to say, as long as the client gave him total control of the case and paid up front. He would represent mafia dons and pornographers for enormous fees. He would also represent priests, judges, and attractive women in distress for little or nothing. Yet he did not like to represent clients who stood for causes. He thought it was a mistake to mix ideology with law and he worried that political activists would not give him the total control he demanded. He refused to represent Dr. Benjamin Spock and several other antiwar activists indicted for inciting students to burn their draft cards in 1970. "They don't need a lawyer," he scoffed. "They need a toastmaster."

But when necessary, Williams could sound like a true believer. Imploring William F. Buckley to aid in McCarthy's defense in 1954, Williams declared, "We've got to save Joe! It's important to save the country from the communist threat." Buckley recalls that he thought Williams was a "good 100 percent witch hunter." With arched eyebrows, he adds, "and two years later I discovered he was Mr. ACLU." (By 1955, Williams had put some distance between himself and the senator.)

When he had to defend himself, Williams could be very persuasive. The New York Times's Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, took a liking to Williams and invited him to dinner one night during the McCarthy censure hearings. Some other prominent reporters were there, and they started in on Williams for defending McCarthy. How could he defend such a terrible man? Williams was tired that night, and a little dour and defensive, recalls columnist Rowland Evans, another guest. After moodily listening to the badgering, he began, "Well, it's a funny thing. A doctor is driving along the road at night, and there's terrible accident. He rushes over. The driver is bloody. The doctor immediately tries to save his life. Or a priest is on a boat and he sees a passenger crushed by a boom. The priest runs over to administer last rites. Neither one of them has asked the character of the victim. But when a lawyer rushes in," Williams looked at his accusers, "this is what happens!" The dinner table quieted. The questioning stopped.

Williams's logic was clever, but a little specious and self-serving. His speech, which became his stock reply to critics, smacks of the debating tricks taught at his alma matter, Holy Cross. Williams was arguing by inapposite analogy. Unlike lawyers who hold themselves out to criminal defendants, the doctor and the priest are not deliberately seeking money by helping the victims they chance upon, nor are they seeking to excuse the criminal acts of their patients/penitents. A priest has a duty to God; he cannot refuse a penitent. A lawyer, however, is not compelled to defend Joe McCarthy. The fact is that lawyers are not required to represent everyone who asks them to, and Williams himself often said so. He had a genuine sense of duty about the right to counsel, but it is fair to say that he was more interested in marketing himself and getting headlines than playing the Good Samaritan. He had little interest in cases that were unexceptional or uninteresting. He wanted cases that were notorious or lucrative--and preferably both.

With friends, Williams was gleeful about his notices. Frank Waldrop, the executive editor of the Washington Times Herald, remembers Williams lying, half drunk, on the floor of his house one night. "There are three things in life," Williams said. "Money, power, and public relations. My wife is rich, and I wouldn't know what to do with power, but give me those press clippings!"

By the sixties, Ed Williams's reputation as a trial lawyer was complete. He had nothing further to gain from astonishing victories in the courtroom, and he feared he had much to lose if he failed to live up to his reputation. Moreover, the guiltier the clients, the less sense it made to bring them before a jury. More and more, Williams turned to cutting deals with the prosecutor behind closed doors. This required access, a commodity most prized in Washington by the many seeking favors from the few, and it became increasingly important for Williams to cultivate and win over Washington insiders.

Though he continued to enjoy the company of scoundrels, his craving for respectability, his longing to belong, led him to climb toward loftier circles. In the sixties, Williams's ambition shifted from staging spectacular courtroom upsets to penetrating and then joining the Washington elite. Where once he was satisfied with fame, he now craved power.

Williams was in awe of Clark Clifford--the model of a private lawyer whose access and influence gave him real power. An invitation to Clifford's Christmas buffet was a more accurate indication of clout in the capital than membership in the Chevy Chase Club. Clifford understood that Ed Williams could be useful to him. Clifford preferred not to handle criminal matters, but his clients sometimes came to him clutching grand jury subpoenas. So Clifford began sending them down the street to Williams.

Williams was, in Clifford's estimation, a shrewed judge of character with a knack for solving problems. Increasingly, when Clifford wanted to chew over a difficult question, he gave Williams a call. Clifford flattered Williams: "How's my lawyer?" he would ask in his sikly, mellifluous voice. Williams, in turn, shamelessly flattered Clifford. "I'm still young enough in spirit to have living heroes, two of them, and you're one," Williams wrote Clifford in the summer of 1967.

Williams was untroubled by charges of "influence by association." "What are you supposed to do--stop practicing law whenever one of your friends becomes president?" he asked. The idea that one of his friends could become president did not seem remote to Williams. Getting your friends into office and then asking them for favors was the way the world worked--his world anyway.

Flying on the private jet of Phillips Petroleum on the way to handle a case with Clifford in the midseventies, Williams gleefully acted out a pantomime of a delegation of Arabs visiting Clifford in his office. Williams, a perfect mimic, imitated Clifford gravely telling the sheiks, "You understand, of course, that I can only get you access." Then Williams imitated the Arabs winking and grinning as they shoved a bag of gold across Clifford's desk. Clifford watched this performance with some distaste. "Now, Ed," he interrupted, "you know it doesn't work that way."

Williams's philosophy of life, he was fond of telling reporters, was...