Edward Bennett Williams

A tall heavy-set man with hazel eyes and a placid face gazed around the Law School Forum, casually ran his fingers through his curly brown hair, and began to talk. For 15 minutes he quipped about being president of the Washington Redskins and about being called "one of the fellows" by inmates of the Atlanta Penitentiary.

Then, with a sudden change in tone, his voice began to rise, to speed up, and soon he was racing through a fluent speech, hardly pausing for breath. He spoke for an hour, with restrained emotion, about the decay of his profession and his cause -- criminal law.

Edward Bennett Williams does not look like a criminal lawyer. He has no slick black suits, waving arms, polished mannerism, pudgy cheeks or bouncy movements about him. His sincerity, earnestness, and conservative attire completely contradict the flamboyance associated with the old-fashioned trial lawyer.

Williams seems incapable of anger or depression. He talks softly and easily in private conversation, smiles often, and listens courteously with apparent interest. There is an aloof informality about him, creating an air of casual righteousness. He tends to sit impassively and listen, occasionally murmuring a reply. Williams talks with amusement about himself, but at any mention of criminal law, he quickly becomes animated.

Williams did not begin his career as a criminal lawyer. After graduating from Georgetown University Law School, he entered a firm and defended corporate interests in hundreds of routine negligence and damage suits.

Soon, however, he abandoned the secure life. "There were only a limited number of possibilities for being run over by an automobile," Williams says, "and so I could see no future in that practice."

As a criminal lawyer, Williams has devoted his career to destroying the notion that a lawyer be ideologically identified with his client -- or, as he says, "the insidious concept of guilt by client." Williams, who admits that he thoroughly enjoys a court fight, has taken spectacular and unpopular cases to make his point.

Past clients include Bobby Baker, Jimmy Hoffa, Joseph McCarthy, Adam Clayton Powell, and Frank Costello. The more obnoxious the client is in society's eyes, the more likely that Williams will take the case in order to demonstrate the constitutional guarantee of counsel to everyone. A full and fair defense is especially necessary for the defendent already condemned by public opinion. Political and moral problems, outside the legal process, threaten the individual rights of such people, he says.

"When people ask me how I can associate with hoodlums," Williams says, "I reply that a lawyer's duty is not to admire his clients, but simply to defend them."

"A clergyman can give counsel to the worst sinner, but when a lawyer gives counsel to someone who has had the condemnation of society, people say it's scocking," he adds. And he believes that the attorney should "exploit the law to the fullest benefit of his client" -- within the limits of integrity and the facts.

Williams concentrates on cases dealing with civil liberties and he talks romantically about constitutional guarantees. "The courts are our most essential institutions for the preservation of human dignity," he says. And it is in discussing cases where individual rights are threatened that Williams becomes most heated.

When defending public figures, Williams has charged $1000 a day to appear in court, and for that reason he is often accused of ignoring the poor. "I am willing to match the record of defense of the indigent in our firm, which contains 14 members, with any comparable firm in the country," he is quick to state. His firm accepts poor clients on the basis of each case's legal significance.

A basic concern of Williams' is the trend away from criminal law. "Trial lawyers are a vanishing breed," he says, "and criminal trial lawyers are well nigh extinct." Top lawyers in firms are concerned only with money matters, he believes, and much of the blame rests with the law schools themselves. One survey he cites shows that only seven out of 502 students polled after the first year of law school were favorably disposed to criminal law. For Williams, it has become a mission to travel among law schools, telling students to use himself as an example and skip the corporation jobs to become criminal lawyers.

Though he has defended controversial figures who are publicly distasteful, Williams believes that he succeeded in avoiding any imputation of guilt. "People have come to accept me as representing all sorts of ideologies. Of course it has not always been that way, but after seeing me defend both Communists and right wingers, people can understand that it is not a matter of mutual beliefs between client and advocator," he says.

With his reputation established as an almost legendary trial lawyer at the age of 46, Williams appears to be bored and may attempt something new. When asked what excited him most, he replies, "Nothing right now," even though he is in the process of defending the accused assassins of Malcolm X.

Ten years ago Williams, a resident of Maryland, said that he had no interest in entering public life. With the acquisition of the Redskins, which he claims is his only hobby, he has inevitably been pulled into public service to a certain extent. Now there is a good possibility that some day he may seek elective office, he says. "It would be interesting to see if people would vote for a criminal lawyer," he muses.

"In the past, it has been the prosecuting attorney who excelled in public relations and the criminal lawyer who did poorly. It would be an interesting test for me to run sometime."

Once before, Williams chose the unconventional way to serve the law; now he may seek to help make the law. With characteristic exuberance and self-confidence, he enjoys the prospect of a battle.