The Court and the Cussed Man

GIDEON'S TRUMPET by Anthony Lewis. 262 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Every so often a book appears that behaves like a minor classic almost from the day of publication, with warmly welcoming reviews, steady if not spectacular sales week after week, and a widening circle of quietly unanimous recognition for its unique excellences. In the three months since it came out, Anthony Lewis' Gideon's Trumpet has already established itself as that kind of book. It is not an out-of-the-way literary curiosity but something in some ways tougher to bring off: a sound, literate, readable introduction to an important though difficult subject--in this case, the changing philosophy of the U.S. Supreme Court during the last quarter century.

The Court & the Law. From the start, the legal community greeted the book with respect for its deft erudition. Reviewers spotted it as a fascinating account of the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, the obscure Florida convict whose now famous penciled petition to the Supreme Court eventually brought the precedent-shattering decision ruling that any man who cannot pay a lawyer is entitled to court-appointed counsel when on trial, even in state courts, for anything more than a petty offense. This decision brought Gideon a new trial (and his acquittal) and opened the way for new trials for a myriad of other Gideons. And future Gideons can be grateful. Only recently, however, is Lewis' book beginning to get the widespread general readership the lawyers and the critics agree it deserves.

Author Lewis has covered the Supreme Court with distinction for the New York Times since 1955. He clearly had his mind set for some time on a book that would explore both the day-to-day workings of the court and the long-term developments in legal thinking that have made it so important a shaping influence on the U.S. system, particularly in the last decade. The Gideon case was a stroke of luck that Lewis had the journalistic wit to seize on to animate what might otherwise have been a forbiddingly austere exercise in legal citations and abstract discussions. Gideon's dramatic struggle became the vital thread of narrative on which Lewis hangs his account of the inner workings of the court, the views and crotchets of individual justices, the great precedents related to Gideon's case, the decades-old, still continuing controversies of the scope of the court's authority and the nature of the federal system under the U.S. Constitution.

Unlikely Figure. Gideon himself hardly seems at first glance to be the figure of a man of destiny: gaunt, cantankerous, half-educated, a petty gambler and four-times-convicted felon. Yet as one lawyer remarked, "It has become almost axiomatic that the great rights which are secured for all of us by the Bill of Rights are constantly tested and retested in the courts by the people who live in the bottom of society's barrel." Gideon is a classic type of the cussedly independent man. His 22-page letter from jail (Lewis quotes it in full) to Washington Lawyer Abe Fortas, who was appointed to represent him before the Supreme Court, is an autobiographic gem that ranks with the famous letter that Nicola Sacco wrote from his death cell in Boston's Charlestown jail in 1927.

For reasons that Lewis meticulously explains, the court rarely agrees to review a case simply to correct an injustice. The lightning struck Gideon because the court was ready to confront the knotty question of the state courts' obligations, under the Bill of Rights and the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, to provide lawyers for indigent defendants in criminal cases. And as Lewis shows, the decision in Gideon's case is significant not simply because it overturns a 20-year-old Supreme Court precedent that had seriously disturbed many justices and legal scholars, but also because in so doing, the court moved with a swelling wave of legal opinion that has fundamentally expanded and shored up the protections of individual liberty in the past 30 years.

In casting his knowledgeable eye along the Supreme Court bench that sat on Gideon's case, and the long roll call of illustrious men who preceded them on the court and influenced their thinking, Lewis similarly relishes the inescapably human drama and conflict that the law provides. Lewis is himself clearly sympathetic for the most part to those "activists" who, like Justice Black, are usually urging the court to define its powers broadly. Yet he dispenses justice to the Justices with a perceptive and even hand.

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