The American legal profession lost one of its most colorful and flamboyant lawyers when Michael Kennedy died in New York on Monday, January 25, 2016. The obituary in The New York Times read, "Michael J. Kennedy, Lawyer for Underdogs and Pariahs, Dies at Age 78."
The headline might also have read that he defended criminals, or at least men and women accused of committing crimes. In his obituary for The Times, reporter Sam Roberts wrote that, "In 1980 he negotiated the surrender of Ms. Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground leader, after she eluded the law for more than 10 years. Federal charges against her had been dropped. She pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and bail jumping stemming from violent antiwar protests and was fined $1,500 and placed on probation for three years."
Dohrn delivered a eulogy for Kennedy at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan just days after his death. She took a page from her own personal history and told the mourners at his funeral service, "As I was preparing to go to jail for an uncertain term by resisting a federal grand jury subpoena in 1982, with three small sons at home, Michael first tried to talk me out of it, and then told me how to survive it. "Make yourself small, just now," he said, "small enough to go through the eye of the needle. Then you will go back to your family and the revolution." He was right."
Michael Kennedy gave good advice to all his clients, whether they were members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, or smugglers and pornographers.
Beginning in the late 1960s, when I met him I also had the opportunity to meet and to get to know, as client and friend, a dozen or so hot-shot radical lawyers, including William Kunstler, Gerry Lefcourt, Lenny Weinglass, Gustin Reichbach and Barry Wildorf. My first wife Eleanor Stein was also a lawyer and so was my own father, Sam Raskin.
But Michael Kennedy, who practiced law in San Francisco and New York, was the only one in the group, whom I thought of as a blood brother, though he was a religious Catholic who regularly attended mass and a fiery Irishman who loved the Irish Republican Army and everyone who fought for Irish freedom and independence.
He reinvented the law and redefine the role of the criminal defense lawyer.
Many of Kennedy's clients, including Bernardine Dohrn, Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton, were, like me, self-proclaimed cultural and political revolutionaries. I always felt that no matter what charges the government might file against me -- treason, murder or bigamy -- Michael would be in my corner and that he'd defend me to the end no matter what.
What I liked about him was his whole manner -- his warmth, smile and laugh -- and his willingness to go on the offensive before his opponents in the courtroom had the opportunity to move against him. So, it seemed in keeping with his own inimitable style that friends and family wrote and published in The Times a notice of his death before the paper had a chance to print its own.
The paid death notice, described Kennedy as a "Civil rights lawyer who fought for the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights informed nearly everything he did as a lawyer.
It's a challenge to describe his long, active career as a lawyer, but now is probably the best time to do so, while memories are still fresh and before total nostalgia sets in.
Once, in his office on Pine Street in San Francisco, I told him that I wanted to do something, but didn't know if it was legal or not. I don't remember what it was I wanted to do, but I do remember his reply.
"You tell me what it is," he said, "and I'll find a way to make it legal."
On another occasion, a few days before I was scheduled to fly from San Francisco to Mexico, and didn't have a passport or even a driver's license to prove my identity, I showed up at his office. His secretary notarized a statement in which I swore that I was an American citizen born in the USA. For years, that document enabled me to move back and forth across the border safe and sound.
For several decades, beginning in the 1980s, I wrote articles for High Times, the magazine for which he served as the publisher, under the pseudonym Joe Delicado. I sent my articles to Michael, they appeared in print in the magazine under the Delicado byline and he sent me checks made out to Jonah Raskin. Then, I deposited them in my bank account and felt that I'd made easy money, even if the writing had been difficult.
I would also mail him small packages of marijuana, and, on the phone, tell him to be on the look-out for a parcel with a curious name and address in the upper left hand corner. Invariably he would say, "I never received your package."
Whenever I was in New York, he'd find marijuana for me to smoke, without a price tag and no questions ever asked. We'd see one another at events sponsored by High Times. Moreover, thanks to Michael, High Times published my book, "Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War," which was translated into French and published in France under the same title.
In the acknowledgments at the back of the book, I wrote, "To Michael, for comradeship," and truly meant it. My French translator explained that French readers would recognize and understand the word, "marijuanaland" as readily as Americans, a fact that was due in no small part to High Times and Michael Kennedy who argued that marijuana ought to be legal, had to be legal, and who believed that one day it would be legal.
In the 1980s, two of his clients, both of them marijuana smugglers showed up at my house in California and said Michael sent them and that they wanted me to write their story, then sell it to Hollywood.
They had led wild lives, indeed, transporting tons of weed from Colombia to Florida, with the help, they assured me, of the Colombian military and American DEA operatives. I never did write their story, though I learned a great deal about smuggling and smugglers. D and D as I'll call them were arrested in New Mexico for selling marijuana to undercover agents in what Michael called "a self-financing operation."
The DEA operatives, he explained, bought marijuana from the smugglers, stored it in a warehouse they rented, then sold it and used the funds to finance further operations, ostensibly to work their way up the corporate ladder and nab the heads of the organization. In his view the cops were the biggest criminals.
Years ago, High Times sent me to southern California to interview Dr. Timothy Leary, the 1960s apostle for LSD who told his followers, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out." Leary was on his deathbed, and this time, unlike the proverbial cat with nine lives, it was clear that he would not escape death.
In 1970, Kennedy had helped Leary escape from minimum-security prison. Years later, when Leary turned himself in to authorities and then co-operated with them, he provided information about Kennedy's role in his escape that almost led to his, Kennedy's disbarment.
Leary inhaled nitrous oxide from a canister close to his bed. Then, he said, "Tell Michael I forgive him." I repeated those words to Kennedy and watched him shake his head disapprovingly. Leary had given trouble galore.
I watched Michael in action just once, when Jimmy Mitchell was on trial in San Rafael, in the courthouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, for the murder of his brother, Artie. Against the odds, he succeeded in having the charge against Jimmy reduced from murder in the second degree to manslaughter.
In New York, we'd eat and drink at Patsy's on West 56 Street and talk about Michael's cases, as well as his feelings about the law. I remember not long ago that he told me he didn't have the same enthusiasm and excitement that he once had. I heard him, but didn't believe the report of my ears, and said, "What did you say?"
"You heard me," he said. "I don't have the same enthusiasm for the law." Still, it didn't feel right. I didn't want to believe it.
Maybe he wasn't "the peoples lawyer," in the sense that some 1960s lawyers, including the Old Left/ New Left attorney, Arthur Kinoy, clearly had been. Kennedy was too elegant and suave and sophisticated to wear with comfort the label "peoples lawyer."
Still, I always thought of him as "my lawyer." Indeed, of all the lawyers I've known, I always knew that it was Michael I'd want to defend me in court. Now, I don't know what I'll do, except I know I'll miss him so.
Jonah Raskin is the author of "For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman" and a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University.