Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism - Hardcover

Dershowitz, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470167114 ISBN 13: 9780470167113

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling author, Harvard Law School professor, and tireless defender of civil liberties unearths a little-known letter by his hero, Thomas Jefferson, and shares its secrets. The letter illuminates Jefferson’s views on freedom of speech in a way that has important implications for the country today, particularly in the struggle against terrorism. This book is about the remarkable letter Dershowitz found, how he found it, and why it matters not only to him, but to us today.

About this title

About the Author

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one of the country's foremost appellate lawyers and a distinguished defender of individual liberties. His many books include the #1 New York Times bestseller Chutzpah, Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, and the Wiley books The Case for Israel, also a New York Times bestseller; The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved; What Israel Means to Me; and Blasphemy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the Back Cover

Freedom of speech, the right to voice one's opinions without fear of government reprisal, is one of America's most dearly held principles--championed by the founding fathers, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and exercised with passion and frequency by Americans of every persuasion. What happens, however, when a speaker publicly exhorts others to violent acts that threaten to cause injury or death? Can a line be drawn between speech that incites violence and that which does not, or is all speech protected under that Bill of Rights? Even Thomas Jefferson himself was silent on the subject--until now.

In Finding Jefferson, #1 New York Times-bestselling author Alan Dershowitz tells a remarkable story about how his passion for collecting led him to a discovery of tremendous historical and present-day importance. On September 8, 2006, in a dusty old Manhattan bookstore, he found an 1801 letter written by his hero Thomas Jefferson that speaks directly to the issue of intentionally harmful or dangerous speech.

Dershowitz, writing with the ardor of a collector, the energy of an advocate, and the rigor of a scholar, verifies the letter's authenticity, explains its importance within the context of Jefferson's writing, and, in true Dershowitzian style, takes his hero to task, point by opinionated point.

Finally, Dershowitz applies his extensive knowledge of Jefferson to the question of whether to restrict free speech in an age of terrorism and suicide bombings, when deterrence is rarely an option. Quoting freely from Jefferson's many writings on law, rights, and national survival, and citing his actions during the Aaron Burr treason trial, Dershowitz presents a compelling case that, today, Jefferson would probably opt for some narrow restrictions against speech intended to incite violence but would insist on protecting all other types of speech.

Engaging and passionately written, Finding Jefferson is compelling reading for anyone interested in free speech, American history, and the conflict between individual rights and national security in the face of terrorism.

From the Inside Flap

Freedom of speech, the right to voice one's opinions without fear of government reprisal, is one of America's most dearly held principles--championed by the founding fathers, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and exercised with passion and frequency by Americans of every persuasion. What happens, however, when a speaker publicly exhorts others to violent acts that threaten to cause injury or death? Can a line be drawn between speech that incites violence and that which does not, or is all speech protected under that Bill of Rights? Even Thomas Jefferson himself was silent on the subject--until now.

In Finding Jefferson, #1 New York Times-bestselling author Alan Dershowitz tells a remark-able story about how his passion for collecting led him to a discovery of tremendous historical and present-day importance. On September 8, 2006, in a dusty old Manhattan bookstore, he found an 1801 letter written by his hero Thomas Jefferson that speaks directly to the issue of intentionally harmful or dangerous speech.

Dershowitz, writing with the ardor of a collector, the energy of an advocate, and the rigor of a scholar, verifies the letter's authenticity, explains its importance within the context of Jefferson's writing, and, in true Dershowitzian style, takes his hero to task, point by opinionated point.

Finally, Dershowitz applies his extensive knowledge of Jefferson to the question of whether to restrict free speech in an age of terrorism and suicide bombings, when deterrence is rarely an option. Quoting freely from Jefferson's many writings on law, rights, and national survival, and citing his actions during the Aaron Burr treason trial, Dershowitz presents a compelling case that, today, Jefferson would probably opt for some narrow restrictions against speech intended to incite violence but would insist on protecting all other types of speech.

Engaging and passionately written, Finding Jefferson is compelling reading for anyone interested in free speech, American history, and the conflict between individual rights and national security in the face of terrorism.

"Alan Dershowitz lives and breathes history. The book is both a warm personal insight into Dershowitz, the grown-up whiz kid still fuming because his mother threw out his comic books and baseball cards, and a great lesson on democracy from one of its wisest and most articulate advocates."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson

A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of TerrorismBy Alan Dershowitz

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 Alan Dershowitz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-16711-3

Chapter One

My Passion for Collecting

I'm a collector. I've always been a collector. As a kid I collected Brooklyn Dodger autographs, baseball cards, comic books, stamps, coins, bottle tops, and anything else that could fit into one drawer in the bureau I shared with my younger brother (and even some things that couldn't, like tropical fish). I never threw anything away (except the dead fish), much to my mother's chagrin.

"What are you gonna do with all that junk?" she asked imploringly.

"It's gonna be valuable someday," I responded, pointing with pride to my neatly organized treasures.

And they would have been valuable someday-at least, the comic books and the baseball cards-had my mother not thrown them out the minute I left home for law school (I lived at home while attending Brooklyn College). I once found a T-shirt that well summarized my plight (and that of an entire generation of young collectors). It said, "Once I was a millionaire ... then my mother threw my baseball cards away."

My mother, who was a frugal survivor of the Great Depression, didn't throw away my stamps or coins. Those she gave to my brother and younger cousins, who kept them until they left home, when these collections were promptly recycled to yet younger relatives. Because I was the oldest among my more than thirty first cousins, the recycling went only one way, with me being the involuntary recycler and never the recyclee of any good stuff. Where my treasures are now, no one knows, and I suspect that the statute of limitations has long since passed on any repleven action (a lawsuit for return of property) I might have had against cousin Norman. The comic books, the baseball cards, and the autographs my mother simply threw into the garbage, because-unlike the stamps and the coins, which were currency-they had no intrinsic value. The remainder of my tchotchkes (Yiddish for inexpensive collectibles) went to some deserving neighborhood kid or to tchotchke heaven. All I know is I never saw them again.

Nor did I really care. After all, I was going to law school-Yale, to boot. (My mother never forgave me for turning down Harvard. For years she told people, "He got into Harvard, but he went to Yale.") I was on to bigger and better things. The Dodgers had abandoned Brooklyn for Los Angeles, and I had abandoned baseball (at least until I moved to Boston and joined "Red Sox Nation"). Who needed comic books when I could read Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law?

My penchant for collecting didn't abandon me, however. It just went in a different direction. I'd managed to find three volumes of an early American edition of Blackstone. (I'm still looking for the fourth to complete my set-the 1791 edition. If anyone has it for sale, please be in touch.) I started to collect autographs of Supreme Court Justices, Vanity Fair prints, and old books. I have found first editions of books by Lewis Carroll, Theodore Herzl, Anne Frank, and others. When I became a full professor at Harvard in 1967 (that's when my mother finally stopped complaining that I had chosen Yale), Professor Henry Hart gave me an original copy of the complete transcript of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial that had been owned by Felix Frankfurter-who had been one of the lawyers in the case-and had been given to him by Frankfurter when Hart became a professor. These volumes are part of a large collection of historic trial transcripts, many from England, that I have accumulated over the years.

I also collected old newspapers with contemporaneous accounts of significant historical events, such as the assassination of Lincoln, the death of Hitler, the establishment of Israel, and the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. It was fascinating to read how these events were reported at the time. It helped me to better understand why journalism is called "the first draft of history." When Harvard Law School put its vast newspaper collection on microfilm, I bought several volumes of old editions of the New York Times. The ads are an especially interesting window to the past.

I did not have much money when I was young, so I was always searching for bargains. I went to the used book stores that lined Fourth Avenue in Manhattan and to flea markets, garage sales, library de-acquisitions, and junk shops. This was before eBay, Antiques Roadshow, and magazines dedicated to the art of collecting. To me, collecting was not an art; it was an addiction.

"What are you looking for?" my friends asked. "What do you expect to find-the original Declaration of Independence?"

"No," I assured them, knowingly. "The original is in the Archives. But an early copy?"

There is an urban myth-maybe even a true story, who knows?-of someone who found an early copy of the Declaration in an old frame behind a print of dogs playing poker that he had bought for five bucks at a flea market. He sold it for a fortune. I have never sold anything. For me, collecting is a one-way street. I collect. I don't distribute. I also look behind every print I buy. So far, no luck. The best I've come up with are some interesting old newspapers-one that announced Hitler's death. But I did manage to find a beautiful nineteenth-century facsimile of the Declaration that hangs behind my desk in my home office.

My wife, Carolyn, who is the opposite of a collector, is known in the family as "Swoop," because she throws away anything that's not bolted to the ground. Opposites do attract. Carolyn tolerates my passion for collecting as long as I keep my stuff in my home office, which is overflowing with tchotchkes, books, old newspapers, art, and antiques. She is thinking about imposing a new rule: for every new purchase, I have to get rid of something of equal size. I can't. I won't! Off-site storage seems like a reasonable compromise.

My wife and I do share a passion for collecting real antiques and art. In general, we have to agree on an object before we buy it, but we each have the right to buy art for our own home offices, based on our individual tastes. Several years ago, my wife and I were in Los Angeles visiting my son, Elon, who is a film producer. As usual, I was looking for antiques and my wife was exploring one of her many passions-shoes. I walked down Melrose Avenue and saw a store with old amusement park gizmos on the sidewalk. (We have an old Coney Island bumper car in our living room.) When I went in, my eyes were drawn immediately to the rear third of an old Cadillac from the late fifties-you know, the ones with the enormous fins and shiny chrome. Some enterprising artist had turned it into a couch, with the trunk as the seating area. It was beautiful.

It was also nostalgic, reminding me of my teenage years, when I and several friends chipped in to buy an old Caddy that barely worked. It went a mile on two gallons. Our interest was not in a driving machine, however, but in a place to make out with our girlfriends. We were more interested in the backseat than in the front. We made up for the cost of the car by renting out the backseat to friends. (Fortunately, nobody ever got beyond second base, so we could not be charged with operating a house-or a car-of ill repute.)

The Cadillac for sale on Melrose Avenue was a lot nicer and shinier than our beat-up old one, but it still evoked fond memories. I had to have it. But would my wife approve? I couldn't find her, and the salesman warned me that there had been a lot of interest in the car-sofa. So I bought it, rationalizing the decision by thinking that I could always shoehorn it into my home office. To my delight, Carolyn loved it as much as I did, though she pleaded the Fifth to my rigorous cross-examination about her teenage experiences in the backseats of cars. The Cadillac now sits proudly in our living room (next to the bumper car) and has frequently been photographed for magazine spreads about our home.

Carolyn and I do not always agree, however, about my large acquisitions. Following the Cadillac coup, I became overconfident and bid at an auction on an enormous painting by the mid-twentieth-century French-Jewish artist Man-Katz. It shows a young Talmud student trying to study a sacred text but becoming distracted by the image of a voluptuous nude woman hovering over him. That was me in elementary school, and I thought Carolyn, who loves art from that period, would share my enthusiasm. Boy, was I wrong. She hates its "cartoonish" look, and she isn't crazy about the theme. So into my office it went, on a back wall where Carolyn doesn't have to look at it when she pops in to say hello. (If anyone is interested in buying the Man-Katz, I suggest that you call my wife when I'm not home. She might offer you a really great deal!)

I never thought I could afford to collect great art, since I had always lived on a budget. But I bought my first piece of real art for $25 in 1965, when I was a twenty-six-year-old assistant professor. I was sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris by the dean of the law school. His pretense was that he wanted me to look at schools of criminology, but I have always suspected that he really wanted to expose me to European culture, since I was probably the only Harvard faculty member who had never traveled abroad. Although I still spoke with a Brooklyn accent and certainly didn't exude culture, I had always loved classical music and opera (as evidenced by the fact-for which my wife and kids have never forgiven me-that I turned down a chance to see the Beatles in concert during my Paris trip and instead went to a mediocre performance of Rigoletto at the Paris Opera House, where the Chagall paintings on the ceiling were better than the singing on the stage). I also have always loved art and spent considerable amounts of time in museums-once for a sustained period of time when I was suspended from high school for throwing a dummy of myself off the roof. (I tell the full story in my book The Best Defense, on page 12.)

While in Paris, I went to a number of art galleries. At one of them I saw a Kandinsky lithograph with which I immediately fell in love (see the illustration on page 10). The asking price was the equivalent of $50 (the franc was quite weak then), but I bargained the owner down to $25. It still hangs proudly in our home and was recently appraised for considerably more than I paid. (So what? I'm never going to sell it!) In Paris I also bought an oil painting by a Lithuanian artist named Vytautas Kasiulis, who I thought would be the next Picasso. It, too, hangs in obscurity in my home office. I paid an immense sum for it-at least by 1965 standards: $200. It's now worth at least half that.

The Kandinsky purchase was the first of many. Some turned out to be what we refer to in my family as "Kandinskies"-bargains that became far more valuable. Others turned out to be "Kasiulises." Not all of our art is great, but each piece reminds us of something we experienced. I'm reminded of the bon mot by the director of a French museum, "Certainly we have bad paintings, [but we] have only the `greatest' bad paintings." I have at least one "bad" drawing; it is a signed series of sketches of faces drawn by Picasso on the back of a French menu. I suspect he paid the bill-39 francs-with the drawing. Today we own more than a hundred pieces of art-none very valuable, but most of them fine works that we treasure. (Because of their sentimental value to us, we have a top-of-the-line security system to protect them, so don't get any ideas!) Some of our art now hangs in the homes of my children, which gives us great pleasure.

Over the years I have found a watercolor by the late-nineteenth-century impressionist Paul Signac in an old frame at a flea market (I paid $75 for it), an early pen and ink Rockwell Kent drawing at a book fair, a Dal lithograph in a California junk store, and an alleged drawing by Egon Schiele in a rural French flea market. The Schiele is probably a fake or a student drawing (I paid $50), but I also have a real Schiele, which I bought at an auction (for considerably more). We own four related pieces of art-all bought separately-by four Jewish artists who lived in the same house in Montmartre during the second decade of the twentieth century. When we purchased them, we were not aware of the connection. The first is a painting (a self-portrait) by Chaim Soutine, the second a drawing by Amedeo Modigliani, the third a painting by Mose Keisling, and the fourth a sculpture by Ossip Zadkine. Although their styles are quite different, they were called the "emotional school," probably as the result of some Jewish stereotype. After we learned of the connection, we bought a drawing of Soutine by Modigliani. Keisling was also sketched by Modigliani, but I was outbid for it at a recent auction.

I always buy items of Judaica that I come across in Germany, Poland, and other European countries, since I consider it almost a sacred obligation to liberate these remnants of the Holocaust and return them to Jewish hands. I intend to donate the ones that my family doesn't want to keep to Jewish museums. Once, on a visit to Munich, I saw in an antique shop window a Jewish pocket watch with Hebrew numerals and the words Shana Tova (a good new year) engraved on the back. When I bought it, the store owner asked me in broken English whether I was interested in "more items like that." Thinking that he was referring to Jewish items, I said yes. He then took me to a back room and retrieved a box from the closet. He opened it and showed me dozens of items of Nazi memorabilia, some with Jewish stars-armbands, ID cards, and the like. This is what he meant by "items like that." Nazi memorabilia cannot be sold or displayed openly in Germany, so he kept these objects in the back room, displaying only the "Jewish" items. I bought a small doll of Hitler with a movable arm that performed the "Fhrer salute." I wanted people to see what some Germans are still buying. I display it in a corner, facing an American World War II Hitler doll whose large rear end is a pincushion. If only voodoo had worked!

I have a considerable collection of old and not-so-old anti-Semitic posters and hotel ads that exclude Jews, but my prized possession within this genre is an actual blood libel leaflet from Nuremberg dated 1492 that portrays a Jew "bleeding" a Christian child for Passover matzoh. It calls for revenge against the Jews.

I have a large collection of Yiddish postcards-particularly, New Year's cards from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many are remarkably secular, featuring new inventions like the airplane, the phonograph, and the radio. I also collect photographs, drawings, and books relating to the French trial, conviction, and ultimate vindication of Alfred Dreyfus. I have a prayer book from the Polish city of Przemysl, where my grandfather once lived. It was published there on the eve of the Holocaust and managed to survive, though its owners almost certainly did not. It has a wine stain on the page with the Kiddush (the blessing over wine). I often think of the child, now long gone, who spilled the wine while making Kiddush, as I intone the same prayer seventy years later. When I visited the city of Przemysl in the 1990s, the official who showed us around denied that a Jewish community had ever been there. I sent him a Xerox of the first page of the prayer book showing that it had been published by a Jewish publishing house in Przemysl in 1936.

I used to own a valuable collection of "Responsa" volumes by eminent Jewish legal scholars dating back to the sixteenth century. These books contained legal opinions given in response to questions put by members of the community on the widest range of religious and secular issues. They constituted the "common law" of the Jewish people. Recently, I donated my collection to the Harvard Law School. I kept one volume of responses from the Holocaust written by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry.

My Judaica collection includes a remarkable Marrano chalice with a fascinating history. When the Jews of Spain were required, on pain of death, to convert to Catholicism, many merely pretended to do so but secretly continued to practice Judaism. The converts were called "Marranos," which means "pigs," and those who continued to practice Judaism were called "crypto-Jews." From the outside, the Marrano chalice appears to be an ordinary silver decorative object, but when it is taken apart, it contains secret compartments that hide Jewish religious objects, such as a scroll of Esther, Sabbath and Chanukah candelabras, a mezuzah, a Kiddush cup, and a spice box. It tells an important story of Jewish persecution and resilience. It is among my most prized possessions, and it became a "character" in one of my novels (Just Revenge, published in 1999). I lend it out to schools to bring alive the history of the Inquisition.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jeffersonby Alan Dershowitz Copyright © 2007 by Alan Dershowitz. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470167114
• ISBN 13: 9780470167113
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256