Television review: ‘William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe’

Emily and Sarah Kunstler have made a film about their lawyer-activist father, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” which airs Thursday as part of the PBS documentary series “POV.” It is both a biography detailing the most famous exploits of a famous person — “or infamous,” says narrator Emily, “depending on what you thought of him” — and, to a lesser extent, an attempt to understand that public person as a man and father. In their childhood view, he was “at the center of everything important that ever happened.”

Now, when I say “famous,” I know I am speaking of things — the Catonsville Nine, the Chicago Seven, the Wounded Knee incident, Attica — that may be so many empty syllables to the younger generations. Kunstler came into his own in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the nation was internally at war in ways that make the Tea Party look like, yes, a tea party. It was an era in which opposition to “a system that is resisting every voice of dissent and every wind of change,” in his words, was turning militant and the government sought in essence to criminalize protest, even as it broke the law itself in an attempt to bring down “the movement.”

Always a liberal — he had been involved with the American Civil Liberties Union and worked on civil rights cases in the days of the Freedom Riders — Kunstler was remade inside and out by the trial of the Chicago Seven, which saw defendant Bobby Seale bound and gagged by order of Judge Julius Hoffman. Kunstler left his family and suburban life — Emily and Sarah are products of a second marriage — grew his hair long even as he was losing it, tried drugs, spoke the language of revolution, and became a kind of go-to guy for dissidents in hot water.

Naturally, he became a person of interest himself. “While other children were frightened of ghosts and monsters,” says Emily, “I feared the police, the president and the FBI,” who, indeed, had taken an apartment across the street, the better to watch Kunstler.

A love of the spotlight also affected his professional decisions, though his vanity was not necessarily incompatible with his principles. Part of the filmmakers’ purpose here was to come to terms with some of the less righteous cases and causes their father took up in his later years, including a drug dealer who wounded six policemen in a shootout and Yusef Salaam, convicted (and exonerated) in the rape of “the Central Park jogger.” Representing the man accused of assassinating Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane brought protesters to the family’s doorstep. When he died in 1995, at the age of 76, Kunstler was involved in the defense of suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

But Kunstler comes off well in the end, an eloquent exponent of justice in the face of the law, and of every defendant’s right to counsel, even the “bad” ones. And the apples have not fallen far from the tree: The sisters’ production company, Off Center Media, makes short documentaries to highlight and rectify miscarriages of justice. And Sarah Kunstler grew up to be a defense lawyer.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com