384 pages | 1st February, 1991 | Non-fiction | Law
In January of 1987 Jeffrey Toobin is fresh out of Harvard Law School, and appointed the youngest lawyer on Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s team to investigate and try the leading figure in the Iran-Contra affair—Oliver North. For twenty-eight thrilling months, Toobin served on Walsh’s staff and came of age into his profession.
Toobin’s first book and immersive account of that period is the story of a young man’s awakening to the realities of law and a policial, legal and moral drama on a grand stage. Through this defining case of the 1980s—which featured obstruction of justice, diversion of funds, and personal corruption—Opening Arguments shows the judicial process at work. The Congressional Iran-Contra committees granted the key figures of the trial immunity, so Toobin and his colleagues had to work in the dark, without access to newspapers or television for weeks at a time. The Reagan Justice Department provided difficulties too. On page after page, Toobin illuminates these battles against long odds, portraying the climactic North trial itself with the eye of a novelist.
"Jeff Toobin has given us a valuable account of how politics and law entwined in the Iran-Contra trials. It is also the story of a young lawyer's education in the ways of Washington, where justice can be as elusive as truth. Reading it can be a citizen's education, too."
Bill Moyers
Jeffrey Toobin, the longtime CNN legal commentator, is the author of ten books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, American Heiress, The Oath, Too Close to Call, and A Vast Conspiracy. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, he lives with his family in New York.
US: Anchor