Attorney at Large

IN THE RING

The Trials of a Washington Lawyer

By Robert S. Bennett

Crown. 391 pp. $27.50

How does the conventional narrative of Washington, D.C., the one presented by "In the Ring" -- two parties in a state of permanent conflict, squabbling while the people's business sits unfinished -- account for a man like Robert Bennett?

Bennett is one of the city's most prominent defense attorneys, the guy the rich and famous turn to when they get in trouble; his past clients range from Bill Clinton and Judith Miller to Paul Wolfowitz and John McCain. He is also part of that unique group of lobbyists, political consultants and lawyers whose success is completely independent of which party holds political power. And while there may be nothing tawdry about representing clients with diverse views (everyone deserves a good lawyer), Bennett's book fails to recognize that his professional success is a direct product of the partisanship he decries.

Bennett's story begins with a brief description of his middle-class childhood in Brooklyn, but here, as elsewhere, he does not show much desire to move beyond cliches ("Everyone in life is dealt some good cards and some bad ones. One of my not-so-good cards was the divorce of our parents"). The "our" refers to Robert and his brother, Bill, but the reader does not get much insight into why Robert went on to become a Democrat while his younger sibling followed a decidedly different path (Bill is the former drug czar and social conservative activist). Potentially juicy anecdotes are discarded much too quickly -- Bill's date with Janis Joplin (!) takes up only a single paragraph -- and pretty soon the elder brother is off to Georgetown Law under the guidance of legendary lobbyist and fixer Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran.

In the 1980s we glimpse Robert Bennett working major cases (Abscam, the Keating Five), often as special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee. Bennett is a serviceable summarizer, although his accounts of the various cases under discussion read like press releases for whatever client he happened to be working for at the time. Going through his career case by case, he does show an admirably gentle side, remorsefully recounting the occasions where the best defense demanded that he embarrass someone in court. The lone exception to this generosity of spirit concerns special counsel Lawrence Walsh, who pursued Bennett's client Caspar Weinberger (later pardoned by the first President Bush on Iran-contra-related charges) and who is described as having the obsessiveness of Captain Ahab. By this point in his career, however, Bennett was playing to both sides of the aisle and smoothly working the Washington "scandal machine" that he speaks of so contemptuously.

One problem with this type of book is that the author is unwilling to say anything short of laudatory about his clients. So, for example, we hear about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott's love and respect for people of different cultures, even though Schott allegedly once used a racial epithet to refer to two of her outfielders.

Bennett does not help matters by sprinkling the text with dreary bits of lawyerly wisdom: "For me, being in the courtroom was the best part of the job" and "The most important of the lessons I learned as a law clerk was the importance of being candid and straight with the court."

The book's long defense of President Clinton during the Paula Jones case has similar deficiencies. Bennett's analysis of the issues and personalities involved (although not without merit) could have been written by anyone who watched television in the late '90s. "The country was very fortunate that President Clinton could compartmentalize matters as well as he did," Bennett writes at one point, perhaps revealing more than he intends. Still, Bennett's decision to constantly inform the reader of all the important crises from which Clinton was distracted while the Jones controversy dragged on is undermined by the eventual and inevitable revelation that the president had been consorting with a 22-year-old White House intern during the same period.

In December, John McCain found himself facing the possibility that the New York Times would print an explosive story about his relationship with a female lobbyist. As the paper delayed publication, McCain hired Bennett and threatened legal action. Bennett was of course the perfect choice, given his experience with potentially scandalous cases and his history -- dating back to the Judith Miller imbroglio -- with the Times leadership. One of his responsibilities after the story hit the presses in February was to go on every possible cable news show and defend McCain. Strangely, or perhaps not, the hosts kept hyping "In the Ring." Fortuitous timing, you might think. For Bennett, it doesn't matter whether the focus of the latest scandal is a Republican presidential candidate or a Democratic president. What his career proves, if nothing else, is that while the people may suffer from too many bickering politicians, not everyone in Washington is so unlucky.