Johnnie Cochran: L.A. quintessential

In one of the greatest of his late poems, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” Yeats described coming suddenly upon one of his friends’ portraits:

“And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man.”

That was the line that came to mind this week, when, after a long illness, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. died at the untimely age of 67. We were friends for many years and collaborated on his bestselling memoir, “Journey to Justice.”

O.J. Simpson’s acquittal made Johnnie an archetypal celebrity lawyer, and, in recent years, media commentators tended to forget that he was a celebrity because of his legal skill and not simply a celebrity with “law school” on his resume.

All the peripatetic activity and bicoastal living of his post-Simpson years notwithstanding, it really was impossible for the media or anyone else to understand Johnnie or his career except as a part of Los Angeles’ postwar history. He was a deeply rooted man -- in his Baptist church and closely knit family, in Los Angeles’ African American community and in the wider life of the city itself. That rootedness made him a man of joyful conviction and boundless confidence.

His view of the world was shaped decisively by the paradox of black Los Angeles in the years following World War II. To immigrant African Americans from the South, like the Cochran family, this was a city of unexpected and bountiful promise. But it was a promise on which the majority white community was determined to set firm limits. Enforcement of those barriers was the task of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose ranks then Chief William Parker filled with ex-servicemen, most from the South and Southwest.

To an extent not true in any other American city, the story of black progress among Angelenos of Cochran’s generation was a tale of struggle against the racism of the LAPD, and his conduct of Simpson’s defense was simply one more battle in that struggle. Paradoxically, though the city remained residentially segregated for decades after the war, it also was a place where interracial contacts and friendships flourished with a frequency and intensity rare in other large American cities.

Thus Cochran, a product of a then nearly all-white Los Angeles High School, UCLA and Loyola Law School, could become -- as one poll a few years ago found -- the most recognizable black man in America along with Louis Farrakhan, while at the same time living a life in which his closest personal friends were white and Jewish. It simply never occurred to him that those friendships were in any way precluded by his abiding concern for the African American community.

Like his fondness for stylish cars and his fashion consciousness -- which he claimed to have learned from Jewish schoolmates whose fathers were in the garment business -- Johnnie liked to call it “an L.A. thing.”

His rootedness allowed him to communicate with Los Angeles jurors, no matter what their race.

It’s often forgotten that the largest of the many monetary awards he won in police misconduct cases was secured on behalf of a young Latina, Patty Diaz, who had been sexually assaulted by an on-duty LAPD officer.

Cochran spoke fluent Spanish, and, as he later described it in an interview, that came back to him as he summed up Diaz’s case to a multiracial jury panel:

“As I brought my argument to a close,” he said, “I experienced one of those moments of intuition that veteran trial lawyers learn to trust; I could feel the jury was with me. I need to hold them there, and I improvised. I turned away from them for a second, then quickly turned back, making eye contact with each of the four Latinos on the panel. Without preamble, I spoke to them in Spanish. ‘Solo quien mueve con el saco sabe que pesa,’ I said.

“This is an old Spanish maxim that translates, ‘Only he who carries the sack knows the weight of the burden.’ The Latino jurors nodded their heads in agreement, and I knew they shortly would explain the sentiment to their colleagues in the jury room.”

It was an L.A. thing.

There is an old phrase in Gaelic that literally translates, “water under the ground.” It’s used to describe all the things a person knows simply because they grew up in a certain place. It stands as well for all the things people from a certain place don’t have to speak aloud to one another, because they simply know them -- in the way they know how the water moves beneath their common ground.

Deeply rooted as he was in Los Angeles, Johnnie communicated with the jurors weighing O.J. Simpson’s fate in a way that always eluded the spectators and analysts who watched the trial from some other perspective. Viewed solely through the reductive lens of identity politics, Johnnie’s final argument in the case looked very much like a cynical incitement and the stunning verdict that followed something perilously complicit, an exercise in juror nullification.

Or so it seemed -- unless you too had heard the evidence as someone who had lived his life in Los Angeles.

During the Simpson trial, this writer was part of The Times team assigned to cover the case. At the time, our house was a few blocks from Cochran’s Wilshire Boulevard office and, on his way home at night, Johnnie would occasionally stop by for off-the-record chats on how the trial was going from a defense perspective. The journalistic competition around the story was ferocious, so his visits were extremely helpful. In retrospect, they also were illuminating in ways not so obvious at the time.

On one warm evening as the trial wore toward its end, the subject of the Simpson jury came up:

“They don’t understand,” he said referring to the prosecutors. “These jurors are my people -- all of them, not just the black folks. I know their hearts, and they know mine. And when the time comes, that’s how I’m going to speak to them -- heart to heart.”

And so he did, and they responded in kind.

If most of their countrymen never quite understood -- well, it’s an L.A. thing.