William Kunstler: The Lawyer Who Disturbed the Universe

In 2009, filmmakers Emily and Sarah Kunstler unveiled a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival about their father attorney William Kunstler which is finding its way into some theaters this year. This fascinating film deserves a wider audience as it engages the historical legacy of the 1960s over which Americans continue to clash. Kunstler was called “the most hated and most loved lawyer in America” by the New York Times, and his clients during the 1960s and 1970s included civil rights activists, the Catonsville Nine, members of the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground, inmates at New York’s Attica prison, Russell Means and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement, and the Chicago Seven (initially eight). In the 1980s and 1990s, Kunstler seemed to retreat from his activism and radicalism; defending such figures as crime boss John Gotti, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, El-Sayyid Nosair for the murder of Jewish Defense League leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, Larry Davis accused of shooting six police officers in the Bronx, and Yusef Salaam for the 1989 Central Park jogger rape and assault case. It is these later trials which introduce an element of ambiguity into what is for the most part an admiring portrait of their father by the filmmakers.

Emily and Sarah Kunstler were a product of Kunstler’s second marriage to attorney Margaret Ratner (who agreed to be interviewed for the film) after the flamboyant attorney had gained national prominence in the Chicago Seven trial. It appears that this film project began when Emily and Sarah were school children, interviewing and photographing a parent whom they recognized was a famous person. By all accounts, Kunstler was a loving father whom the girls adored for his dedication to the struggle for civil rights and justice during the 1960s. The girls, however, began to doubt their father during the 1980s when his choice of unpopular clients seemed to depart from this radical politics of the 1960s, while placing the family under considerable strain and stress from angry demonstrators outside the Kunstler home. The young women could not understand why their father was defending murderers and rapists rather that civil rights activists and political prisoners. Had their father succumbed to a cult of personality as one of his critics Alan Dershowitz suggests in an interview? To answer this question Emily and Sarah Kunstler traced the life of their father in the documentary Disturbing the Universe.

Kunstler was born in New York City on July 7, 1919 to a middle-class Jewish family. His father was a physician, and Kunstler was educated at Yale and Columbia Law School. During the Second World War, he served with the Army in the Pacific and was decorated for action under fire. While he often entertained his friends and family with war stories, his World War II experience convinced Kunstler that he could never support U. S. military intervention in another war. But overall, Kunstler’s post World War II career was unexceptional. He married and began a family in the suburbs of Westchester County, New York, practicing small business law and offering some support to liberal Democratic Party politics. He was involved with the American Civil Liberties Union and challenged segregated housing.

His life, however, was changed by a 1961 trip to the South and his defense of Freedom Riders and other civil rights activists. Kunstler was an outspoken critic of American racism, who constantly challenged himself and his daughters to be aware of their white privilege in a fundamentally racist society. Kunstler’s growing reputation as a defender of radical causes led the Chicago Seven, accused of crossing state lines to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention, to tap him as their attorney. The trial further radicalized the attorney. The decision of Judge Julius Hoffman to have Black Panther defendant Bobby Seale gagged and bound to his chair led Kunstler to assume a more activist role both inside and outside the courtroom. The sparring between Kunstler and Judge Hoffman culminated in Kunstler being sentenced to four years for contempt of court—a sentence which was overturned on appeal. Following the trial, Kunstler was an influential figure on the national stage; speaking at college campuses and earning the ire of J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He could not go home again to Westchester County and took up residence in Chicago, starting a second family in the 1970s.

Kunstler’s reputation and negotiating skills, however, could not prevent the massacre of prisoners and guards during the 1971 Attica prison uprising. The attorney pleaded in vain for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to negotiate rather than storm the prison, and the filmmakers describe Attica as one of their father’s greatest disappointments. He enjoyed greater success defending leaders of the 1972 American Indian Movement take over of the Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota; gaining dismissal of the charges against Russell Means and Dennis Banks due to governmental misconduct. Making clear their admiration for their father’s role in defending the Attica and Wounded Knee uprisings, the filmmakers made pilgrimages to these sites to honor the struggles of William Kunstler. Emily and Sarah Kunstler also celebrated the father’s arguments before the Supreme Court in the Texas v. Johnson case (1989), which upheld flag burning as protected free speech.

But as young girls, the filmmakers struggled to understand their father after the family moved to New York City in the 1980s. Kunstler’s success in securing an acquittal of El-Sayyid Nosair in the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane produced angry demonstrations by the Jewish Defense League in front of the Kunstler family apartment. Emily and Sarah also wondered why their father would defend a gang rapist such as Yusef Salaam who was convicted in the notorious 1989 Central Park jogger assault.

The film, however, concludes on a less ambiguous note when in 2002, seven years after Kunstler’s death, the state of New York moved to overturn the conviction of Yusef Salaam and others following the confession and DNA confirmation of the true assailant. The innocence of Salaam led the filmmakers to reevaluate their father’s last years, perceiving a degree of continuity in Kunstler’s belief that every defendant deserves a vigorous defense and that we cannot always trust the government to fairly administer justice.

Thus, the film concludes on an affirmative note of reconciliation and appreciation for the courage of Kunstler in defending many of society’s outcasts. Most of the witnesses interviewed for the film are supportive of Kunstler; including many of his former defendants such as Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Russell Means, Gregory Lee Johnson, and Yusef Salaam. For much of the film, the chief voices of dissent are the filmmakers questioning whether their father tainted his legacy in his final years. After expressing such doubts throughout the film, Emily and Sarah Kunstler embrace the legacy of their father, concluding that he challenged a universe which needed disturbing. It would be interesting to observe how Kunstler would react to arguments that accused terrorists be prosecuted outside the traditional legal process and not be allowed access to the courts.