Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn And Jazz To Nixon's White House, Watergate, And Beyond

by Leonard Garment

Leonard Garment was a successful Wall Street attorney when, in 1965, he found himself arguing a Supreme Court case alongside his new law partner—former Vice President Richard Nixon. It was the start of a friendship that lasted more than thirty years. In Crazy Rhythm, which the New York Times Book Review called "an eloquent memoir," Garment engagingly tells of his boyhood as the child of immigrants, and the beginning of a life-long love affair with jazz. After Brooklyn Law School, Garment went on to Wall Street, where encountering Nixon changed the course of his life. Crazy Rhythm allows us a rare, intimate look at Nixon's extraordinary tenure in the White House. More than that, the book tells stories from a life that has included close encounters with characters such as Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday, Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat, Giovanni Agnelli and Marc Rich, and moves like the best jazz, in a writer's voice that is truly one-of-a-kind. To quote former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "A century from now, I cannot doubt Americans will still be reading Crazy Rhythm. This is a story of our time, written for the ages."

Genres: Memoir, Biography

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Leonard Garment was an American attorney, public servant, and arts advocate. He served U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the White House in various positions from 1969 to 1976, including Counselor to the President, acting Special Counsel to Nixon for the last two years of his presidency, and U.S. Ambassador to the Third Committee at the United Nations.

Reviews

[Robert K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always knew that Richard Nixon was a mixture of light and dark, as are all people. Len Garment really helped me grasp why President Nixon accomplished so much and struggled so much at the same time--a really insightful, intriguing book. I highly recommend it to all Nixon haters and those who have grown up simply accepting what they've been taught...that Nixon's was a failed Presidency. For open-minded readers this is a must! I finished reading it on the 40th anniversary of his resignation...glad I read it! You will be too!

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

The consummate insider, Leonard Garment's role in history might at first seem to barely warrant a memoir. Why bother with this, one might ask, when so many other, more consequential members of Nixon's administration have written their own books? The answer lies in the writing. Lenny Garment could write about paint drying and it would be a page turner. Drawing on his skills as a jazz saxophonist who played with heavy cats like Stan Levey and Woody Herman, Garment weaves complex ideas into compact phrases and makes it sound effortless. I'm still puzzling over which cat's playing to liken his writing to, but I think Clark Terry, with his impeccable articulation and ever-present wry humor, might make a good comparison. Then again, I generally take Terry in small doses, and I could read Garment all day long, so I would add Stan Getz for smoothness, ease of engagement, and perfect taste.

Garment's adventures in jazz are what brought me to the book. I wrote about him in my book “Stan Levey: Jazz Heavyweight.” Levey and Garment played in a band that also featured the artist Larry Rivers and future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, of all people. Lenny's early life is representative of a whole generation of working class Jewish boys from Brooklyn who went on to make their marks at the highest levels in a variety of professions, and this book is an excellent case study of that time, place, culture, and experience. As for the Nixon Administration, Garment's tour of those years and events held my interest from start to finish. His descriptions of famous and historically consequential people are exquisite portraits of physical nuance and psychological idiosyncrasy, and I always felt like I was in the same room with them. When Garment ends up in the thick of history, as he did with Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, he skillfully downplays his own presence without sacrificing any of his unique perspective.

Now (the Trump era) is a good time to read this book, because, well, history repeats itself. The Watergate and Russian Collusion investigations certainly have some similarities and the media vendetta against the president also sounds familiar. In one incident described by Garment, The New York Times quoted Nixon as being on tape describing two SEC investigators as “a couple of Jew boys.” Garment reviewed the tapes and discovered that it was not Nixon, but John Dean, who had referred to them as “a couple of Jewish boys.” The Times, said Garment, “went through every dodge known to journalism and the law to avoid retracting their extremely damaging mistake...The Times did nothing.”

One highlight is Garment's analysis of the Holocaust, which is a blunt indictment of the collective German psyche. It's a departure from his narrative, but it connects to the non-German anti-Semitism that Garment witnessed in his time at the United Nations, when the “Zionism is Racism” resolution was passed. One is left with the sad realization that Germany - in it's efforts to atone, and despite it's progress in ridding itself of it's native anti-Semitism - is now importing new waves of anti-Semites; continuing, rather than ending, the scourge that has plagued it for hundreds of years. Other interesting post Nixon elements of the book are Lenny's relationship with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his take on the Bork nomination to the Supreme Court.

At the end of the book, Garment compares himself to other “failed jazz musicians” like Ralph Ellison and Philip Larkin: “ I sometimes wish I could've transmuted jazz into another art the way they did.”

Well, Lenny, you did.

[Chris Schaffer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes a person isn't important enough to write a book..