Counsel for the Defense, by Paul O’Dwyer (Simon & Schuster, 302 pp., $10.95). In 1951 a group of New York City Irishmen got a proposition before Congress condemning the partition of Ireland. The legislators wisely considered it a joke, and the New York Daily News printed a riotous account of the debate— including, for example, the senator from Virginia saying: “We’ve already got our fingers in everybody else’s business in the world except Ireland’s, so some of you think we oughta get into this mess, too.” One of the men who wanted in on the Irish mess was Paul O’Dwyer, 11th child of a County Mayo family, immigrant, lawyer, and lifelong champion of dock-workers and political exotics. It was the sort of cause he loved. Counsel for the Defense, his autobiography, chronicles many others, beginning with trade unionism in the Thirties and continuing down to pacifism—as personified by Philip Berrigan—in the Seventies. O’Dwyer defended union clients in state and federal courts, and, after hours, he spoke against the Red-baiting Father Coughlin before the Royal Order of Hibernians, who reacted icily. But through it all, he was buoyed up by an inner voice that kept saying he was right. He extolled “fine and decent” Ed Sullivan, in order to save a black performer from the TV host’s boycott of suspected Communists. He defended Irgun gun-runners as “honest men, men who love freedom.” When the cause seemed noble, he deployed all his cunning and his rhetoric. The ends justified the means. It was good rhetoric, and portions appear verbatim in Counsel, outshining the narrative around it. O’Dwyer had to chop almost 1,700 pages from his original manuscript and Americanize nearly all the Irish expressions. The result lacks flair and focus. As O’Dwyer himself admits, liberals in the heat of battle are usually pretty dour; good accounts of their lives are rare. The anecdotes that survived the blue pencil show that O’Dwyer knows how to laugh. Simon & Schuster should have let him gush. paul t. hornak
Vida, by Marge Piercy (Summit Books, 412 pp., $12.95). Although the antiwar movement of the Sixties would seem to have been explored from every conceivable angle already, Vida is worth reading because it looks at this movement from a feminine viewpoint—a viewpoint that deals with people and their relationships rather than ideas and ideals—without the angry rhetoric that is the mark of so many feminist books today. Vida Asch, the central character in this sixth novel by Marge Piercy, has been a member of the underground, constantly moving, constantly shifting identities, ever since her involvement with the more violent segment of the antiwar movement. The novel moves back and forth in time from Vida’s bleak present to the hectic days when the antiwar movement was at its peak. Nearly ten years of virtual exile have cost Vida her husband and separated her from her mother and sister. Now, at this lowest point in her life, while the movement she has given up so much for is in disarray, Vida finds love and warmth with a fellow
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