Word: boudin
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...Boudin is technically just one of Ellsberg's lawyers, but he has tended to dominate the defense. He does cut a picturesque figure, always in a rumpled suit, his gray-blond hair tousled and his courtroom table stacked with cluttered piles of books and memos. Occasionally he ambles around the court, one fist jammed in a coat pocket; at 60, he needs the periodic exercise because he wears a heart pacemaker...
...Boudin also dominates because he has built a reputation as one of the best appeals lawyers in the country. And he has recently been doing trial work to help fight the prosecutions of Dr. Benjamin Spock and Philip Berrigan. In the Ellsberg-Russo case, he is thus waging what to him is the third battle of Indochina...
Long before Viet Nam, however, Boudin was combating officialdom with what he calls "an 18th century sense of the rights of the individual against the government." It is a sense that he brings to every courtroom. "When I arrived here on the first day," he says, "I found the door shut and locked and ringed with U.S. marshals, and there were the Government lawyers already sitting at the table inside. That's exactly the point that bothers me. It won't have the slightest influence on this case, but the thought that they considered it their courtroom...
...Although Boudin says he "slid by accident into the law," his progress was almost inevitable. His father was a real-estate lawyer in Brooklyn; young Boudin spent his Saturdays clipping law journals in his father's office. Following law school at St. John's, he joined his uncle's firm, which specialized in trade-union cases. He had just set up his own practice when the cold war started, and Boudin undertook to defend union clients against charges of Communist influence. Did he have ideological reasons? "Not at all," he says. "I not only was never...
...Most of Boudin's union clients left him after he was assigned by the trial court to represent Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. (Ironically, her case, like the Ellsberg impasse last week, turned on a wiretap; Boudin won the Coplon appeal because authorities had eavesdropped on lawyer-client conversations.) Filling the gap in his practice, he began to make a name for himself in a series of passport cases: he diligently represented such noted left-wingers as Corliss Lamont, Paul Robeson and Rockwell Kent in proceedings that finally resulted...