The incurious investigator: why introspection was too dangerous for Washington's bravest sleuth.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: The Investigator: Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth by Terry Lenzner - Book review

The Investigator: Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth

by Terry Lenzner Blue Rider Press, 384 pp.

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Leonard Zelig, the hero of Zelig, Woody Allen's 1983 mockumentary, had a gift: he could appear before a motion-picture camera with seemingly every notable figure from the 1920s and '30s, from Charles Lindbergh to Al Capone to Joseph Goebbels to Fanny Brice. Ace investigator Terry Lenzner seems to have a Zelig-like ability to have been present and played a role in many of the great public dramas of the last half century. From the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 to Watergate, from Ken Starr's pursuit of Bill Clinton to the capture of the Unabomber to the death of Princess Diana, Lenzner can be seen trudging through the background, consuming shoe leather and thickening a callus on his dialing finger. In his memoir, The Investigator: Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth, Lenzner talks Harvard football with Robert Kennedy, double-dates with Donald Rumsfeld, dines at the Palm with Edward Bennett Williams, attends jailhouse communion services with Father Philip Berrigan, talks constitutional law with Sam Ervin, and performs oppo research on Mitt Romney's record at Fain. But for all of his impressive ubiquity and incontestable prowess as an investigator, there is a question that The Investigator leaves dangling: Has Terry Lenzner gotten to the bottom of Terry Lenzner?

Shared omnipresence notwithstanding, Zelig isn't the best pop-cultural exemplar of Lenzner, who evidences none of the agreeable spinelessness of Allen's character. Instead, with his steady, colorless prose, Lenzner conveys the implacable, unflappable, "just the facts, ma'am" demeanor of that other great pop icon, Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet. It helps Lenzner's credibility that he keeps his attention focused and his emotions under such tight control. Alas, it does little for the liveliness of his prose.

We first encounter Lenzner as a Harvard Law School student bored with the world of corporate law that he encounters as a summer associate. Fortunately, an attentive law firm partner (a descendent of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison--how's that for a cameo?) steers him into the infinitely more exciting experience of working in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. This occurred during the summer of 1964, when Washington was sending a small army of lawyers and investigators into steamy, hostile Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the murders of...