Defender of Pariahs

ONE MAN'S FREEDOM (344 pp.) -Edward Bennett Williams -Atheneum ($5.95).

Edward Bennett Williams should have a good book in him about his spectacular career of defending some of the most violently unpopular of public figures. At 42, Williams has made upwards of $150,000 a year for standing between an aroused society and the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Costello. In times past, Williams has taken on various branches of the U.S. Government in behalf of Senator Joseph McCarthy, David Beck, Bernard Goldfine, allegedly Communist Hollywood writers and Confidential Magazine. But Williams has chosen instead to devote his first book to fervent advocacy of the cause that, he says, attracted him to his clientele in the first place: the civil liberties of society's pariahs. A cynic might wonder if these pariahs most often find a friend in Attorney Williams when they have publicity value, fat wallets, or both. But in this book, Williams takes the high road.

It is Williams' contention that whenever government infringes on civil rights "it begins with the weak and the friendless, or the scorned and the degraded, or the nonconformist and the unorthodox." Of the major civil liberties cases that have reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the past decade, most of the defendants "have been accused of murder, rape, arson, narcotics offenses, bootlegging and membership in the Communist Party."

Williams argues that the Bill of Rights is most endangered today not by the attacks of overzealous district attorneys and congressional committee chairmen but by public apathy. In a showdown, Williams fears that the majority of the American people would gladly trade the Bill of Rights for "a guarantee of total economic security until death." Noting that Chief Justice Earl Warren once said he doubted that the Bill of Rights would now be passed by Congress, Williams goes him one better: "I am doubtful that it would ever get out of committee."

Three main themes in Williams' book:

>> Congressional committees are going far beyond their legitimate powers of investigating the operations of the Government or gathering information to use in legislation: "A reckless minority is endangering the integrity of the entire Congress by persisting in investigations for the purpose of exposure or public punishment."

>> Williams concedes that the Fifth Amendment "without doubt hinders the conviction of the guilty far more frequently than it protects the rights of the innocent," but he pleads that a suspect witness before a congressional committee often faces "conviction if he confesses guilt, perjury if he denies guilt, and contempt if he stands mute." Williams' advice to his clients is simple: bear with ridicule and take the Fifth.

>> Though he was a good friend of Senator McCarthy, Williams acknowledges that the grand inquisitor from Wisconsin "transgressed the rights of some witnesses." Williams defended his friend before the Senate committee that in 1954 cited McCarthy for contempt, and in making much of the assertion that McCarthy's mail had been inspected without his knowledge, concludes: "History must show in one of its more ironical paragraphs that McCarthy was himself a casualty of a congressional investigation that flouted the rules of fair play."

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