Laguna Niguel Author Has Lived Many Lives

He works behind the same desk at which Erle Stanley Gardner wrote most of his Perry Mason stories. Last year he published a book on the legal aspects of the trial of Jesus by the Sanhedrin that even mainline churches regard as mildly heretical--although he grew up traveling with his father, who was a minister and devoted Methodist circuit rider.

He has made a handsome living writing books on medical trauma for lawyers--although he never went to medical school. And he once quit the FBI to join the forerunner of the CIA in the middle of World War II because “things were getting pretty quiet at the FBI.”

These are just a few of the many facets of Marshall Houts, who has lived with his wife, Mary, in Orange County for more than three decades, raised a family of seven children here, and, not incidentally, written 44 books--the most recent a study of Dwight D. Eisenhower that Houts wrote in collaboration with Harold Stassen, former Minnesota governor and Eisenhower confidante.

Marshall Houts, now in his early 70s, has lived several quite different lifetimes.

There was the childhood of listening to his father preach in the mountain towns of eastern Tennessee and West Virginia (his saddlebags hang on the wall of Houts’ office). There was law school at the University of Minnesota, Houts’ first venture into the outside world. (“I went to Minnesota because I had a sister living there. If she’d lived in Slippery Elm, Pa., I probably would have gone there. And I went into law instead of medicine because I could get into law school right away, and it would have taken me three years to get into medical school.”)

There was the FBI period, right out of law school, when he served as an undercover agent in Brazil and Cuba--the subject of the book he is writing. The Office of Strategic Services period, when he was tapped by this predecessor of the CIA to parachute into the Japanese-held island of Macao (near Hong Kong) because he could speak Portuguese. The law practice period that ended when a friend recommended him to author Gardner to investigate a case for Gardner’s Court of Last Resort.

As a result of that brief association, Gardner hired Houts as general counsel for the Court of Last Resort, which re-investigated 600 cases of convicted murderers who claimed to be innocent--and won freedom for 41 of them. Houts spent 18 years with Gardner, and his wife, in appreciation, gave Houts her husband’s desk when he died almost two decades ago.

And, finally, there has been the period since Gardner’s death when Houts has concentrated on publishing “Trauma”--the largest circulation medico-legal periodical in the world--while he was writing the bulk of his 44 books and teaching at the UCLA and Pepperdine Law Schools and UCI’s College of Medicine.

Houts talked with me about all these activities the other day in the spacious Laguna Niguel home he and Mary moved into two years ago. He’s quite remarkably relaxed, evenhanded and self-effacing about a life and a work program that seem--on the surface at least--to be downright frenetic. He had just returned, for example, from a week in London, where he lectured to a British law conference, and discussed his book on the trial of Jesus with the BBC. “They wrote a script for it which I didn’t like very well,” he explained. “So I wrote one that they are now considering.”

He has been mildly surprised by the discomfiture this book has occasioned. The subject is something he has been thinking about, on and off, ever since law school persuaded him that the authors of the four Gospels had, at best, a primitive knowledge of Jewish law from which to write their descriptions of the trial of Jesus.

“The Gospel accounts,” he says, “couldn’t have taken place in view of the highly sophisticated Jewish legal system. And I don’t think the contemporary books written about Jesus’ trial are very accurate, either. They were mostly written from a Jewish bias, to take the onus off Jews. I came to a similar conclusion, but I didn’t set out to do that.”

As a result, Houts was asked to speak at a Jewish service in Fullerton, while advertisements for his book--his first, and so far, his only effort at self-publication--were rejected by the national newsletters of mainstream churches.

“I didn’t want to shake anyone’s faith,” he says mildly. “I’m not a Bible scholar--I hate that word--but I grew up with a knowledge of it and a love for it. Here, though, I was examining basic evidence, and I suppose I looked at it more intellectually than theologically.

“This frightens a lot of people who don’t want their safe, emotional bedrock disturbed. Everybody today is looking for a stability most of them can’t find. That’s why the fundamentalist churches are growing so fast all over the world. We’re reaching back to what we thought was safe when we were growing up.

“But theology isn’t like physical laws. We’d all love that, but it doesn’t work that way. Interpretations have changed over the great sweep of time. But no matter how liberal the theologians, they still don’t want to cast even the shadow of a doubt on the accuracy of the Gospel accounts.”

Houts has in his study an impressive array of well-thumbed books on Bible history and interpretations, and he talks of each volume with affection and deep knowledge. He read for me the King James version of the 137th Psalm, then contrasted this with later translations, shaking his head sadly. “I hate most of these new translations,” he said, “because they destroy the poetry of the Bible. The thrust of these words is not only in the theology but in the poetic expression too.”

His newly released biography of Eisenhower (“Eisenhower: Turning the World Toward Peace,” Merrill/Magnus Publishing Co.) is unlikely to raise the kind of hackles the Sanhedrin book did. It grew out of a conversation Houts had with Stassen--whom he has known since his law school days--about what Stassen planned to do with his voluminous private papers.

Stassen thought it over and then asked Houts if he would go through the papers. Houts found such a rich lode of insights and hitherto unpublished material that he persuaded Stassen to do the book, concentrating on Eisenhower’s contributions to U.S. foreign policy and leaning heavily on Stassen’s papers and recollections--including Stassen’s pivotal role in the establishment of the United Nations.

“He’s 83,” Houts says, “but he’s very sharp and has complete recall. But he also assumed the audience knew more than it did, so we had to fill in a lot of background.”

The “we”--a pronoun Houts uses a lot--refers to the contributions of his wife, Mary, who has served as Houts’ editor for many years. “I never could have done all this work without Mary,” he says. “We’ve gone through the same routine for years. She says something doesn’t sound right, and then I get mad and finally come around because I know she’s right. We’ve become the two greatest quacks in medical history.”

Although he has now turned “Trauma” over to new editors, Houts shrugs off the idea of retirement. “Writing,” he says, “is a disease. It isn’t terminal, but you never get rid of it either.”

If he ever wanted to live on his memories--which he wouldn’t--Houts could have a rich life. His recollections are--like the man, himself--warm and thoughtful and dispassionate. He was, for example, an official observer at Jack Ruby’s trial for the murder of Lee Oswald and has a painting of Ruby in the courtroom hanging in his office. (“There was no conspiracy. Ruby’s being in that place at that time was pure accident.”)

And he views his former boss, J. Edgar Hoover, as “a supreme egoist, but that wasn’t bad because that’s what was needed in law enforcement then. We had to have public confidence, and Hoover made that possible. And how badly we need it now.”

A few years ago, an IRS audit made it necessary for Houts to add up the sales of his books--most of them dealing with medicine and law. He told me, with mild embarrassment, that between 1971 and 1988, sales of his books had exceeded 24 million copies.

And he hasn’t even published that spy story yet.