Leonard Boudin, RIP - obituary

National Review, Dec 22, 1989

LEONARD BOUDIN, a reasonable man would guess, was pro-Communist. Granted that everyone charged with a crime is entitled to a lawyer; still, the clients he sought out were distinctive, In case after case, he defended those whose work helped the Communist movement. As recently as last year, he addressed a conference gathered at Harvard to inquire not into the causes of Communism, but into the causes of "Anti-Communism in the United States." The planted axiom of that meeting was that anyone who had engaged in anti-Communist activity was a crypto-fascist. When Washington Post correspondent Carl Bernstein got up to assert that in fact the press in the United States was free, and was not engaged in anti-Soviet conspiracy, he was roundly booed. The grand irony of it all is that that meeting, denouncing antiCommunism, could not now safely be held in the capital cities of Eastern Europe.

And Leonard Boudin certainly suffered for his cause. His daughter Kathy evidently over-learned from her father, because, instead of merely defending Communism, she became a Weatherman, dynamiting and burning, and ending up in a federal prison, sentenced to twenty years, leaving in the wake of her activity one dead Brink's guard.

Leonard Boudin will be missed by his friendseveryone has friends-and missed by his professional clients. Granted, the Communist Party, U.S.A., may grow up morally one of these days, taking lessons from home in Moscow. But that won't happen until Gus Hall dies or retires to Cuba or Albania. Hall-an old friend and admirer of Leonard Boudin-deplores the changes going on behind the shredding Iron Curtain.