In the Ring
The Trials of a Washington Lawyer
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Robert S. Bennett has been a lawyer for more than forty years. In that time, he’s taken on dozens of high-profile and groundbreaking cases and emerged as the go-to guy for the nation’s elite. Bob Bennett gained international recognition as one of America’s best lawyers for leading the defense of President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case. But long before, and ever since, representing a sitting president, he has fought for justice for many famous (and some now infamous) clients. This is his story.
Born in Brooklyn and an amateur boxer in his youth, Bennett has always brought his street fighter’s mentality to the courtroom. His case history is a who’s who of figures who have dominated legal headlines: super lobbyist Tommy Corcoran, former Secretaries of Defense Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger, Marge Schott, and, most recently, New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. Bennett also served as special counsel to the Senate during the ABSCAM and Keating Five scandals and was a leading member of the National Review Board for the Protection of Children & Young People, created by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in response to the sex abuse allegations.
Taking the reader deep within his most intriguing and difficult cases, In the Ring shows how Bennett has argued for what’s right, won for his clients, and effected his share of change on the system. This is an intimate and compelling memoir of one lawyer’s attempt to fight hard and fair.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Important people caught in a jam Bill Clinton embroiled in the Paula Jones lawsuit, Judith Miller facing jail time for contempt, Paul Wolfowitz battling ethics charges at the World Bank often hire superlawyer Bennett to represent them. In this self-satisfied memoir, Bennett (a partner at the white-shoe firm Skadden, Arps) pays effusive tribute to friends and colleagues, proffers nuggets of wisdom to young attorneys ("While you should overprepare your cases, you should always under try them," i.e., keep the presentation simple) and ferociously defends his clients' reputations in rehashes of their cases. But his most zealous advocacy is for his brilliant lawyering, evidenced by courtroom proceedings that the author excerpts at great length. Alas, in print, lawyerly histrionics become rambling, turgid improvisations that try the reader's patience: "Your Honor, I don't look like Alice ... but I somehow feel like I am. I'm perplexed as she was. I'm concerned as she was. There are things that just don't fit together for me." What does come through is the preening self-regard ("Had I been younger and less experienced, I might have been intimidated meeting one on one with the president") of an archetypal Washington mover-and-shaker.
