Jim Brown Uses Book to Shape History

Sunday, December 5, 2004

Reprinted from the Monroe News-Star

Jim Brown didn’t flinch about the comparison to Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, two men who left the presidency after serious mistakes of judgment in the White House, and then spent years trying to rehabilitate their images and historical legacy.

Just as they used their pens to shade their place in history in a more flattering light, so has Brown now self-published his own effort at historical rehabilitation, writing his version of the events that sent the former insurance commissioner to federal prison. But that’s where Brown politely ends the comparison.

Brown, who stopped by The Times last week, says he has nothing to be pardoned for. Instead, he makes a compelling case in Justice Denied that he was simply the innocent bystander in a drive-by political shooting engineered by federal prosecutors against Edwin Edwards. His federal trial involving a failed insurance company was marked by a gag order that blocked him from public comments about the case and the seating of an anonymous jury, a protective measure "only given for the trial of a Colombian drug lord.’’

The biggest issue for Brown was being blocked from seeing handwritten notes about his interview with an FBI investigator that didn’t jibe with the typed version given the jury. When the big fish, EWE, escaped prosecution, Brown’s alleged lying was all prosecutors were left with. So Brown did six months in prison.

Justice Denied is part diary, part indictment, part punditry. It’s focused on the trial to "unjustly convict me of false criminal charges," but with 30 years as legislator, secretary of state and insurance commissioner, Brown has a wealth of political anecdotes and commentary. It’s not William Manchester, but it’s readable, featuring fireside chats with former Gov. John McKeithen, campaign strategy sessions and oddities like the stranger at a Florida church who said "the Lord told me to tell you that this is all going to work out.’’

Whether or not Brown got a "bum rap,’’ as a security guard at FBI office in New Orleans told him, he is making a good run at shaping his corner of history.