Letter: If lawyer is defending Starr …

Thursday, Oct. 29, 1998 | 11:17 a.m.

At the risk of pedantry, we must note that Joe McCarthy seldom nicked an innocent person. He was a loose cannon, all right, but his chief error was to speak of "card-carrying Communists" when his targets were in fact the sort of cunning subversives who avoided outright membership in the party.

However, "McCarthyism" and "witch hunt" remain the all-purpose charges and weary metaphors of those who used to defend Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and other Soviet agents and sympathizers.

Dershowitz is too young to have defended that generation of scoundrels, but his taste runs to equally unsavory defendants: Jonathan Pollard, Claus von Bulow, O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, various pornographers, and now Clinton. As a rule of thumb, having Dershowitz in one's corner is a pretty good indicator of guilt.

But the character of his clientele never stops him from assuming moral superiority to his opponents.

Jack Kocienski

archive