Defending Our Right to Speak Our Minds

“Tough Talk” is a splendid book that gives us a lively tour of the state of free speech in America over the last 40 years as seen by one of its most vigorous defenders.

Martin Garbus, a 1st Amendment lawyer, tells (with the assistance of writer Stanley Cohen) the story of his life as a partisan for those unpopular causes and characters in whose liberty lies the freedom of all of us.

Artistic freedom? Garbus defends the obscenity-laden monologues of Lenny Bruce. Political expression? He speaks for the right of neo-Nazis who wanted to parade in 1977 in the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill.

Garbus hid copies of the Pentagon Papers in his garage. He worked with Cesar Chavez in the early days of the grape boycott. He defended Native Americans against charges resulting from their battle with the FBI at Wounded Knee, S.D. Garbus was also Robert Redford’s attorney in the actor’s successful attack on the Lorillard tobacco company’s Redford cigarette--”fresh as the wind.”

More than once Garbus endangered his livelihood and that of his partners by refusing to play by the accepted rules. For instance, he broke the solidarity of that brotherhood of libel defense attorneys known as the Libel Defense Resource Center by taking the case of a woman suing a New York Post columnist for falsely alleging that her claim of rape in a Brooklyn park was a hoax.

Garbus’ tale of how he became a lawyer is as interesting as the cases he handled. His father was an immigrant Jew from Poland whose back was broken in a pogrom. The father ran a tiny candy store in a predominantly Gentile section of the Bronx. Martin’s mother died when he was 3. He grew up, he writes, with a heritage of “fear and silence” in which safety for a Jew meant living unnoticed.

After high school, Garbus attended Hunter College and lived through the McCarthy years increasingly sensitive to civil liberties issues. At the age of 21, Garbus, a private first class in the Army who taught current events to fellow soldiers, found himself subject to a court-martial on trumped-up charges. He was accused of teaching why the United States should recognize Red China, why the use of the 5th Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee was a legitimate exercise of constitutional rights, and the like. He slipped out of the charges, but his life of passive silence was shed forever. Next it was New York University Law School and after that a lifetime of causes at the edge of conventional respectability.

There he still is. Garbus is deeply disturbed by those on both the right and the left who would restrain speech in the hope of improving human conduct. He is scornful of the argument made by feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and feminist critic Andrea Dworkin that pornography leads directly to violence against women. And he has no patience with colleges that set up lists of forbidden words. Reviewing historical events, Garbus writes that “stifling any form of speech always puts freedom at peril.”

“Censorship,” he concludes with a flourish that neatly sums up the story told in “Tough Talk,” “often begins at the threshold of good intentions.”