Playing to the Crowd : JOURNEY TO JUSTICE.<i> By Johnnie Cochran Jr., with Tim Rutten (One World/Ballantine Books: $26, 383 pp.)</i>

“Journey to Justice” is a 383-page advertisement for Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Considerably more care seems to have gone into producing the photograph of Cochran that graces the front, side and back of the book than the writing that is presumably the title’s main attraction. While the photograph of Cochran is vivid, the narrative of his life is not. His memoir offers nothing that is memorable from a literary vantage and little that is revelatory--unless one counts as significant the news, if true, that Elizabeth Taylor objects to being called “Liz” and that Cochran works out with his personal trainer four times weekly.

Cochran’s autobiography resembles the books published by politicians during electoral campaigns--books that formulaically praise friends, attack enemies and say only enough that is self-critical to create a thin disguise of openness. “Journey to Justice” describes the author’s origins in Shreveport, La.; the nurture provided by his family; his education at Los Angeles High School, UCLA and Loyola Law School; his two marriages; his far-flung connections and friendships; and his career as a trial attorney. That career includes representing, among others, Geronimo Pratt, a leader of the Black Panthers whom Cochran was unable to save from a murder conviction that was probably unjust; scores of persons wrongly injured at the hands of the LAPD; the mega-entertainer Michael Jackson when he was accused of child molestation; and, of course, O.J. Simpson in “the trial of the century.”

One thing that is somewhat surprising about “Journey to Justice” is that it is so self-discrediting. Cochran’s memoir is so tendentious, so relentlessly self-serving and so crassly sentimental that it casts a pall of suspiciousness over itself. Consider, for example, Cochran’s portrayal of his parents. He pictures them as wise, supportive, patient care-givers who are largely responsible for the success he has attained. The problem is that his praise is so uniform that, after a while, it undoes itself. After all, even the best people err sometime or are marred by some vice. But not Johnnie Cochran Sr., or Hattie Bass Cochran, at least not in the pages of this memoir. Cochran Jr. writes that “no day was ever so grinding that [his father] was too tired to greet his wife tenderly [and] to speak at length with his three active children.” Was there really no time at which anxieties or frustration even briefly frayed his parents’ typical affection and respect? “Discipline in our family,” Cochran writes, “never was arbitrary.” Never?

One might have thought that Cochran, more than most authors, would be sensitive to the cumulative impact of implausible claims, ritualistic exaggeration and overly rigid adherence to a script. After all, those are the signs of fabrication to which he has repeatedly drawn jurors’ attention. But throughout “Journey to Justice” Cochran evinces little regard for the intelligence of readers. He plays them cheap, cynically gauging the extent to which many people are blinded by celebrity.

The section of Cochran’s memoir that has received the most media attention is that in which he asserts that Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti offered to permit Simpson to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Cochran offers no substantiation beyond his say-so for this story, which Garcetti denies. One cannot know for sure where the truth resides. I would not be shocked, however, to discover that Cochran’s story is merely a concoction thrown into his memoir to provide some newsworthiness to a rendition of the Simpson trial that is otherwise stale.

I come to this harsh conclusion because “Journey to Justice” is so clearly indifferent to authentic self-expression and so obviously a tool of mere marketing. Moreover, Cochran repeatedly displays a blatant willingness to spread misleading impressions, making statements that in all likelihood he does not even believe himself. Cochran asserts, for instance, that because Simpson proclaimed his innocence, and because he trusted his client, he would have eschewed any plea bargain. “From the first moment I had spoken with him after his arrest,” Cochran writes, “O.J. Simpson had unceasingly maintained his innocence to me. As far as I was concerned, that meant there would be no deals no matter how good the offer.”

This statement is ridiculous. Surely Cochran would have been willing to urge Simpson to consider a plea bargain if the prosecutor’s offer had been sufficiently attractive. What made the matter of a plea bargain implausible from the point of view of the defense is not that Simpson protested his innocence--people routinely claim to be innocent but engage in plea bargains nonetheless. The difficulty in Simpson’s case is that he was charged with such a heinous and highly publicized crime that the scope for bargaining was too narrow to be attractive to the defendant.

Although Cochran makes it seem that in Simpson’s case he would have opposed a plea bargain as a matter of principle, he provides ample evidence in other sections of his autobiography that he welcomes deals when the price is right. According to Cochran, Michael Jackson emphatically assured him that he did not molest the little boy whose charges besmirched the entertainer’s reputation. But that did not prevent Cochran from urging Jackson to enter into a deal pursuant to which he paid an undisclosed sum of money to the boy’s parents in return for their promise to forgo prosecuting a civil suit.

In addition to its vapidity, “Journey to Justice” resembles a typical campaign book in yet another way: It is largely, if not wholly, written by someone other than the titular author. Although “Journey to Justice” purports to offer readers Cochran’s views about deeply personal matters, including his religious convictions and love for his family, the fact is that the author did not personally write his memoir: Los Angeles Times staff writer Tim Rutten gets co-writing credit. Because of this and the general shallowness of the book, something rings false.

In fairness, “Journey to Justice” is no worse than those similarly co-written autobiographies rushed to press by Christopher Darden and Robert J. Shapiro. All of this simply suggests that the baseline for memoirs “written” by participants in the trial of the century is low indeed.