Full Service

By Richard Lacayo

THE MAN TO SEE by Evan Thomas

Simon & Schuster

587 pages; $27.50

Influential Washington attorneys are like political parties, one of those essential institutions of government that the Constitution doesn't mention. In a town where access is power, they have their hands on all the best doorknobs. They also keep the workings of justice supple enough to accommodate Washington's many influence peddlers, fixers and shifty politicians, who can go about their business secure in the knowledge that in a pinch, they can always phone their lawyers.

Those who could afford it used to phone Edward Bennett Williams, who until his death in 1988 was one of the most effective lawyers Washington had ever seen, the attorney of choice for malefactors of great wealth or high profile (among them Senator Joe McCarthy, Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Mob boss Frank Costello, the model for Mario Puzo's Godfather). Evan Thomas, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, tells the Williams story as it should be told, with due attention to the man's boozy, backslapping charm, his genius for the law, and his untiring willingness to place his gifts at the service of dubious characters.

An Irish Catholic from a modest Connecticut family, Williams was a courtroom spellbinder with a photographic memory and an endless bag of trial-winning tricks. The powerful took notice. In time Williams' client roster would feature fewer names like "Nutsy" Schwartz and more like former Treasury Secretary John Connally. With his controlling interest in the Washington Redskins, Williams made the owner's box a showplace for Washington's elite. By 1974 he had become treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, a job that didn't keep him from voting for Gerald Ford, who had once offered him the job of CIA director. Williams turned it down. For one thing, he couldn't afford the pay cut.

Williams never quite comes off as admirable in this book. But Thomas makes you see the man's rough charm in his role of Mr. Fixit, first courtier at various thrones and, as Thomas calls him, "a full-service favor bank for his friends."