My Friend Len Weinglass | The Nation
by Michael Steven Smith, thenation.com
May 3rd 2011
“Death is not real when one’s life work is done well. Even in death, certain
men radiate the light of an aurora.” --Jose Marti
Len was not a 60s radical. He was something more unusual. He was a 50s radical.
He developed his values, his critical thinking and world view in a time when
non-conforming was rare. He told a newspaper interviewer in Santa Barbara in
1980 that “I would classify myself as a radical American. I am anti-capitalist
in this sense -- I don’t believe capitalism is now compatible with democracy.”
Socialism he thought could be, if given a chance. Len argued that socialism was
still a young phenomenon on the world scene, that another world, a
non-capitalist world, was possible.
He saw his legal work as his contribution to the collective work of the
movement. He didn’t care a bit about making a fee. “I want to spend my time
defending people who have committed their time to progressive change. That’s
the criteria. Now, that could be people in armed struggle, people in protest
politics, people in confrontational politics, people in mass organizations,
people in labor.” Defending people against “the machinery of the state” as he
put it, was his calling. He felt that one may have a fulfilled and satisfying
life if one “aligns with the major thrust of forces in the time in which you
live.”
The third of four children, he grew up in a Jewish community of 200 families in
Bellville, NJ and attended high school in nearby Kearney, where he was a star
on the football team and Vice-President of his high school class. He played
saxophone, was tall and handsome, and sported a fifties pompadour hair style,
spending a lot of grooming time behind a closed door in front of the bathroom
mirror. His father jokingly complained that he had raised a girl.
When Len graduated he wanted to take a trip across the country to California.
He got his father to drive him to the highway. His dad sat in his car weeping
as Len hoisted his thumb at passing trucks. Soon an eighteen wheeler stopped
and Len piled in. He called often from the road reporting that he was
frequently picked up by cars and trucks, that everyone was nice to him, buying
him meals and that he was making good time on his trip west.
He didn’t take any identification with him. There was a lot of anti-semitism in
the US in the early fifties. Len didn’t want people seeing his last name was
Weinglass and identifying him as a Jew. When he got to California he got work
on a truck farm, doing stoop farm labor with Japanese agricultural workers. One
night one of them was killed. Len was afraid that without an ID he would be a
suspect. He jumped the fence in the middle of the night and got out of there.
He went on to George Washington University in DC for college on a scholarship.
Len was an outstanding student and was accepted in 1955 into Yale Law School.
Len went from Yale in 1958 directly into the Air Force. In those days because
of the draft there was no choice. One had to go into the military. Len was a
lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corp and rose from second lieutenant to
the rank of captain. The Air Force had charged a black airman with some sort of
crime. Len was assigned the case and got him acquitted. This infuriated the
brass, which was used to exerting its command influence over the results of
military trials.
He was discharged from the Air Force in 1961 and went on to set up a one-man
law practice in Newark, New Jersey. When interviewed by the New York Times for
Len’s obituary, Len’s friend and law colleague Michael Krinsky (Len was of
counsel to the firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman of New
York, NY) said he had first met Len in Newark in 1969. He considered him “a
modern day Clarence Darrow”.
Krinsky told the reporter that Newark “was a rough place to be. A police
department and a city administration that was racist and as terrifying as any
in America, and there was Lenny representing civil rights people, political
people, ordinary people who got charged with stuff and got beat up by the cops.
He did it without fame or fortune, and that’s what he kept doing, in one way or
another.” He did it for 53 years, being admitted to the bars in New Jersey,
California, and New York.
We all know of Len for his famous legal work in the Chicago Seven case with
Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger and Tom Hayden during the Vietnam War period. We
remember his expertise in advocating for death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. He
finally got his friend Kathy Boudin out of prison after 23 years. He
represented Puerto Rican independentista Juan Segarra for 15 years. In the
Palestine 8 case, where the defendants were charged with aiding the Marxist
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he was part of a team which
stopped their deportation. That took 20 years. David Cole, his co-counsel along
with Marc Van der Hout, remembers that Len “...coined the term 'terrorologist'
while cross-examining the government’s expert witness on the PLO. He was a joy
to work with in the courtroom. Our immigration judge, who was Lenny’s age,
always eagerly wanted to know whether 'Mr. Weinglass' would be appearing
whenever there was a proceeding.”
Len took the tough political cases, the seemingly impossible ones where his
clients were charged with heavy crimes like kidnap, espionage and murder. “He
wasn’t drawn to making money. He was drawn to defending justice,” Daniel
Ellsberg said. “He felt in many cases he was representing one person standing
against the state. He was on the side of the underdog. He was also very shrewd
in his judgment of juries.” Len observed that a typical phone call he received
started out with the caller saying “‘You’re the fifth lawyer I’ve spoken to’.
Then I get interested.”
The Cuban Five was Len’s last major case. He worked on it for years up to the
time of his passing, even reading a court submission from his bed in Montefiore
Hospital in the Bronx. The case highlighted what Len considered the US
government’s hypocrisy in its “war against terror.”
Len came into the matter at the appellate level after the Five had been
convicted by a prejudiced jury in Miami. His client Antonio Guererro and the
others were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage against the US
sometime in the future. They were sent from Cuba to Miami by the government of
Cuba to spy, not on the US, but on the counter-revolutionary Cubans in Miami
who were launching terrorist activities from Florida directed at persons and
property in Cuba, attempting to sabotage the Cuban tourist economy. They
gathered information on the Miami based terrorists, compiling a lengthy dossier
on their murderous activities and turned it over to the FBI. They asked the US
government to stop the terrorists, who were targeting the Cuban tourist
industry by planting bombs at the Havana airport, on buses, and in an hotel,
killing an Italian vacationer. But instead of stopping the terrorists, the US
government used the dossier to figure out the identities of the Cuban Five, had
them arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms.
What Len said about the use of the conspiracy charge is illustrative of his
precision and clarity of thought.
Conspiracy has always been the charge used by the prosecution in political
cases. A conspiracy is an agreement between people to commit a substantive
crime. By using the charge of conspiracy, the government is relieved of the
requirement that the underlying crime be proven. All the government has to
prove to a jury is that there was an agreement to do the crime. The individuals
charged with conspiracy are convicted even if the underlying crime was never
committed. In the case of the Five, the Miami jury was asked to find that there
was an agreement to commit espionage. The government never had to prove that
espionage actually happened. It could not have proven that espionage occurred.
None of the Five sought or possessed any top secret information or US national
defense secrets.
Len had an ironic and wry sense of humor. He had a large one-room cabin atop a
high hill overlooking the Rondout reservoir in New York’s Catskill mountains.
He lived there in a teepee off and on for several years before designing the
cottage. He had a special joy, which he inherited from his mother Clara, for
gardening and raising fruit trees. This was an especially difficult pursuit
because he had mistakenly planted the trees on the south side of the hill where
they got plenty of sun but were vulnerable to a false spring, blooming early,
then getting damaged by a frost, which could occur up there as late as June.
Nonetheless Len persisted and sometimes got a crop of apples, pears, and plums.
The crop would then be eaten by the neighborhood bears. “I grow the fruit,” Len
complained, “then the bears come and eat it and I go to Gristedes.”
He kept his sense of humor even during those terrible final days at Montefiore
Hospital. His surgeon operated on him but abandoned his attempt to remove what
turned out to be a large spreading malignant tumor, undetected by the pre-op
CTscan. When the surgeon saw what it really was, that it was an inoperable
tumor, he could do nothing but sew Len back up and tell him the bad news. Len
looked up at us from his bed in the recovery room after being informed by the
surgeon, and said, simply, “summary judgement.” And so it was. He lived but
another six weeks, steadily declining, never getting to go home, never giving
up, even as several doctors told him “you are in the final stretch.”
Len was strong and vigorous up to his last illness. Since his high school days
he never lost his interest in football and closely followed the professional
game. He was a Giants fan of course, but sentimentally he liked the Green Bay
Packers because they were the only team in the league owned not by
billionaires, but by the municipality of Green Bay. While Len was in Montefiore
hospital the Packers made it into the Superbowl against the Pittsburgh
Steelers. “ Want to bet on the game,” I asked. “How about five bucks.” He
raised his finger to the sky. “Ten?,” I ventured. “No,” he whispered. “Fifty.”
So my nephew Ben got us a bookie in Connecticut and we put down fifty bucks
apiece. The Packers were favored so we had to give away 3½ points. Len advised
that this was a responsible bet. It sure was. The Packers wound up winning in
the last quarter by 4 points. I congratulated Len on his sagacity. That win
lifted his spirits.
Len was a longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild and served for a time
as the co-chair of its intenational committee. He was the recipient of the
Guild’s Ernie Goodman Award, named after the extraordinary Detroit socialist
lawyer and Guild leader who helped build the auto workers union and later
organized the Guild to send its members down south to protect black people
during the civil rights movment.
The Dean of Yale Law School Robert C. Post wrote Len’s sister Elaine to express
his sympathy, writing that “Leonard Weinglass lived a full and admirable life
in the law and exemplified the spirit of citizenship that lawyers at their very
best display. He brought great honor to the legal community and to Yale Law
School, which takes pride in all he did and was.”
Len was a Jew, but rejected the idea that it was racial ties or bonds of blood
that made up the Jewish community, seeing that view as a degenerate philosophy
leading to chauvinism and cruelty. He rejected Jewish nationalism, embracing
instead an unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.
Len was not religious. The emergency room admitting nurse asked him what his
religion was so she could fill out the questionnaire. He paused and answered
“leave it blank.” Two weeks later when he was admitted to the hospital he again
was asked what his religion was. “None,” he answered. Religion to Len was
superstition. Being part of a sect was too narrow and confining for Len. The
Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. The
historian Isaac Deutscher had a phrase for it, “the non-Jewish Jew.” Len was in
line with the great revolutionaries of modern thought; Spinoza, Heine, Marx,
Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud, and Einstein, whose photo hung in Len’s Chelsea
loft. These people went beyond the boundaries of Judaism, finding it too
narrow, archaic, constricting.
I don’t wish to stretch the comparison. Len was not so much a radical thinker
as a man of action. But his intellectual understanding - he was well educated
and widely read - powered his activity. He had in common with these great
thinkers the idea that for knowledge to be real it must be acted upon. As Marx
observed, “Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point
however is to change it.”
Like his intellectual predecessors. Len saw reality in a state of flux, as
dynamic, not static, and he was aware of the constantly changing and
contradictory nature of society. Len was essentially an optimist and shared
with the great Jewish revolutionaries an optimistic belief in the solidarity of
humankind.
Len died in the evening of March 23, 2011 as spring was approaching in New
York. He had plans to celebrate Passover in April, as usual, with his family in
New Jersey. He knew quite a lot about Passover, led his family’s observance at
the seder every year, and kept up a file on the holiday. He liked the idea that
the Jews had the chutzpah to conflate their own flight from slavery with spring
and the liberation of nature.
He had plans to tend his fruit trees on the side of the hill next to his
Catskill cabin. He would have put in a vegetable garden near his three block
long driveway, which frequently washed out and which he repaired with sysiphean
regularity. He would have set out birdseed on the cabin’s porch rail, where he
would sit in a lounge chair on a platform and watch the songbirds feed.
He loved being out on that porch, high up on a hill, particularly at day’s end,
seeing the sun go down over the Rondout reservoir which supplies some of the
drinking water to New York City. Back in 1976 he told a student reporter for
UCLA’s Daily Bruin that leading a committed life was satisfying, fulfilling,
and made him happy.
He will be remembered personally as a good, generous, and loyal friend, a
gentle and kind person; politically as a great persuasive speaker, an acute
analyst of the political scene, and a far-seeing visionary. Professionally Len
Weinglass will live on as one of the great lawyers of his time, joining the
legal pantheon of leading twentieth century advocates for justice along with
Clarence Darrow, Leonard Boudin, Arthur Kinoy, Ernest Goodman, and William
Kunstler.
“Lenny cannot be replaced,” wrote his friend Sandra Levinson. “There are no
words for the loss we all feel. Do something brave, put yourself out there for
someone, fight for someone’s dignity, do something to honor this courageous
just man.”
Leonard Irving Weinglass: Presente.
Original Page: http://www.thenation.com/article/160360/my-friend-len-weinglass
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