Alan Dershowitz, Goofball: The professor's progress.

Alan Dershowitz says he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of going a little overboard in his analysis of the Florida presidential fight. Yes, he accused George W. Bush of staging a "legal coup d'etat" and called secretary of state Katherine Harris a crook. But Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, says his statements-made during a seemingly endless succession of television appearances-are part of his role as an educator. "I defend my positions," he says. "My job as a teacher is partly as a public provocateur."

Likewise, Dershowitz says he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of going a little overboard in support of Bill Clinton throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yes, he accused Republicans of attempting a "legislative coup d'etat" (there's another coup d'etat). And yes, after Clinton gave his angry speech in August 1998 denouncing independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Dershowitz showed up at the Martha's Vineyard airport to give the president a hug. But that doesn't mean he lost his perspective. "I'm not a Clinton lover," he says. "Check my book Sexual McCarthyism. It includes repeated attacks on Clinton. I criticize his personal behavior. I think I stand for principle." Finally, Dershowitz insists he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of betraying his calling as one of the nation's leading law professors by joining the O. J. Simpson defense team. Yes, he played along with legal tactics that many experts found outrageous-he even held his tongue when fellow lawyer Johnnie Cochran compared Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. But he says taking the case was the right thing to do. "My involvement in the Simpson case is a proud moment in my life," Dershowitz explains. "There were very important issues involved. Well before it came up, I had been a big critic of police misconduct in search-and-seizure cases. This case proved my point. I'm very proud of my role."

For all his non-defensiveness, Dershowitz has to defend himself a lot these days. But the issue is bigger than elections and impeachments and O.J. Whatever the specific criticism, what Dershowitz is really fighting is the sense that in the past few years his career has taken a strange and, for some, sad turn. Dershowitz has always been a publicity hound and a self-promoter; there's an old line among reporters that "Alan Dershowitz was unavoidable for comment." But some Dershowitz-watchers-not the ones who see him as the raving lunatic they love to hate on television, but the ones who respect his extraordinary intellect and ability-believe that somewhere along the way he stepped over a line. For all his self-promotion and love of publicity, Dershowitz was at one time more respectable than he is today. The man who was once viewed as a flamboyant but solid civil libertarian has now taken on an almost clownish public persona. What happened?

For most of Dershowitz's critics-and even some of his admirers-the answer begins with two letters: O.J. Even though Dershowitz had defended plenty of lowlifes in the past, many of them-the socialite Claus von Bulow, for example, who was convicted and later acquitted of attempting to kill his wife-might at least conceivably have been innocent. Others were indisputably guilty murderers whom Dershowitz saved not from prison but from the death penalty. But Simpson was something different-a man guilty beyond any reasonable doubt in a hyper-publicized case in which all of America saw the evidence in extraordinary detail. And Dershowitz helped him get off.

The public condemnation after Simpson's acquittal was enough to test even Dershowitz's appetite for controversy. He remembers the day the verdict came in. It was Yom Kippur, and he took his family to synagogue near his home in Boston. "Nobody would talk to me," he recalls. "Nobody would look at me. People were just furious with me." When the service got to the part about coming to terms with one's own sins, he got the distinct feeling that everybody, including the rabbi, was thinking of him. "I was a pariah," he says.

A pariah, yes-but also the center of attention. And for Alan Dershowitz, that was the legacy of the Simpson case. Yes, he had made news in earlier years when he demanded freedom for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and when he came to the aid of Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky. But neither case-nor any other that Dershowitz had ever been associated with, not even von Bulow-attracted the white-hot attention the Simpson trial did.

Still, notoriety didn't do much good for the professor's reputation, among either the general public or opinion-makers. "I think that was an important turning point," says one Harvard Law alum who has had friendly relations with Dershowitz. "Von Bulow had been so exotic it made Alan more interesting without making him appear to be an ambulance-chaser. But his defense of O.J., and the way he did it on television, seemed to be unprincipled and a caricature of what's wrong with the bar, that they will say anything for money."

Part of the problem had to do with the fact that Dershowitz is not just a lawyer but a teacher at the nation's most prestigious law school. Was joining the Dream Team something a Harvard Law professor should do? "If you're a defense lawyer in the business of doing it for money, that's one thing, and I wouldn't criticize Cochran for taking on the case," says Stuart Taylor, a Harvard Law graduate who has covered legal affairs for the New York Times, The American Lawyer, and now National Journal. "But if being a law professor is your main job, and you're trying to teach students and have an educational impact on the larger world, it seems to me that acting simultaneously as a mercenary, either for money or for publicity, on behalf of people you know are clearly guilty of horrible crimes, is inconsistent with your teaching obligations. He's forfeited the right to be taken seriously as anything other than a very smart and talented hired gun."

That's the high-minded version of the Dershowitz critique. After O.J., Dershowitz found himself the target of far more scathing assessments: "Did you see who they brought in to speak for Clinton yesterday?" Jay Leno asked in a Tonight Show monologue after Dershowitz testified before the House committee considering the Clinton impeachment issue. "Alan Dershowitz. Is that a good idea? It's seems pretty sad when your only character witness is the same guy who defended O. J. Simpson."

Others might be crushed by such ridicule, but Dershowitz seems to thrive on criticism. He has always maintained that he takes ugly cases in order to teach the public about the law; the more they don't like what they hear, the more he feels he has succeeded. "I knew I would get criticism, including from my mother," he says of his decision to defend Simpson. "But I'm proud of my work in that case, particularly because it was so unpopular. I see that as being absolutely consistent with being a Harvard professor. That's precisely the kind of case that a Harvard Law professor should be in."

The Simpson case may have started Dershowitz's reputation on its downward slide, but it wasn't solely responsible. Perhaps just as important was another factor: the rise of talk TV. When Simpson was in court, CNN was the country's only cable news network; the trial was its last hurrah as an all-news monopoly. By the next year, 1996, CNN had competition, and people like Dershowitz had new opportunities to talk nearly non-stop on television. In addition, it was also a time of tight news budgets; the cable networks, long on time and occasionally short on material, came to rely heavily on talk to fill the air.

And there's no better talker than Alan Dershowitz. Last year, the Boston Globe profiled a business called VideoLink, located in Watertown, Mass., just minutes from Dershowitz's home. VideoLink is a television studio that can hook up to any network, enabling a guest in the VideoLink studio to do consecutive live interviews with different networks without ever leaving his chair. "Alan Dershowitz practically lives here," VideoLink's manager told the Globe. Dershowitz didn't disagree. "It's the best hangout in town," he said of the studio. "Where else can you bump into Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Reich, and Alan Simpson all on the same day?"

The Globe went on to describe the time-not all that rare, really-when Dershowitz "scored a fourfer," meaning that in a single day he performed on four shows. (The issue was the effort to disbar Bill Clinton in Arkansas, an idea Dershowitz didn't like at all.) Impressive as that was, it wasn't a record; two years earlier, when the issue was the Lewinsky scandal, Dershowitz managed five appearances from VideoLink in one day.

Of course, it's not the sheer quantity of Dershowitz's talk that attracts attention. It's the inflamed-sometimes almost goofy-rhetoric that he seems compelled to provide when the camera light goes on. His comments on the election controversy in Florida are almost a case study in what's wrong with talk TV:

"This is Dred Scott of the 21st century," he said on Good Morning America after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case.

"Alan, Dred Scott is a decision that led us to the Civil War," host Charles Gibson interjected.

"Well," replied Dershowitz, "this has led us to a delegitimization of the authority of the Court."

A few weeks earlier on the same program, Dershowitz was similarly agitated by George W. Bush's announcement that he had begun working on the transition even though the election battle was not yet settled. "His speech last night sounded almost like the beginning of a legal coup d'etat in suit and tie," Dershowitz said, "defying the rule of law and saying, 'I am anointing myself as president.'" And a week after the election, Dershowitz, appearing on CNN, seemed to fly off the handle when asked a question about Katherine Harris. "She's corrupt," he said. "She's had all kind of corruption allegations about expenditures of money. She's a crook. She's a crook and an operative of the Bush campaign."

Talk of Dred Scott and a coup d'etat and crookedness was characteristic of the fringes of the election debate-and might well have left viewers with the impression that the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University was a little . . . out of control. TV producers love it; Dershowitz throws off sparks and keeps argument going. But doesn't he worry that such hot rhetoric might cheapen the debate?

"No," he says, barely stopping to consider the question. "It was a bloodless, political coup d'etat. What happened was James Baker basically took the position . . ." And he's off and running, picking up the argument where it left off on Hardball or Crossfire or Geraldo. The larger point, Dershowitz says, is that he's proud of the work he does on TV. And besides, he likes it. "I can't deny that it's fun," he says. "I think a lot of the sniping about it comes from jealous people who call me two days later and ask how they can be on television. But the TV stuff is very much an extra. If I spend, say, two hours a week on television, and 50 hours a week doing my work quietly, it's the two hours that people see."

And one more thing. Contrary to what his critics might say, he does have standards. For example, he explains, "I have a policy of never, under any circumstances, being on Fox [News Channel]. I feel they have lowered the level of discourse so much that I won't support that."

Of course, Dershowitz has heard these criticisms before. And as much as he seems to relish confrontation, he doesn't take them lightly. When the subject comes up, he begins a lengthy and thoughtful-and courteous-defense of himself that boils down to one point: I'm a very serious man. "Since the Simpson case, I've published five books, all of which have gotten phenomenal reviews," he says. "My Just Revenge book has gotten rave reviews all over the country. . . . Take a look at Genesis of Justice. You'll see it's a very serious, scholarly book. My novel, The Advocate's Devil, is used in law schools. . . . My book [Reasonable Doubts] about the Simpson trial received a lot of praise for helping to explain a complex case. William F. Buckley said, and I'll just read it to you, 'Dershowitz is a deeply thoughtful man.' Here you have your own founder learning something from a book I wrote about the case. And that's what I try hard to do with any case I take."

And he's not finished. "The ABA Journal said, 'Nobody does it better,' that nobody explains complex legal issues better than I do. I've been praised for precisely that, for taking cases that are high visibility and using them to explain the complexities of the legal system. . . . I am a very good citizen. My teaching ratings are always very, very high. If you speak to TV producers, you'll hear them say that I turn them down all the time, that I have class obligations."

While there's no shortage of Dershowitz's famous egomania in those words, there's also something almost endearingly insecure about his defensiveness. Here is a man who has accomplished many, many things in his life, a man who started out in Brooklyn without any particular advantages and who, by his own talent and energy and hard work, reached the top of his profession. By any measure of success, Alan Dershowitz, 62 years old, long ago arrived, and yet he still seems to worry that you don't believe it.

Then he makes one final plea. "Take a look at the actual record of what I've done while I've been on TV," he asks, "and don't make my life appear to be the one percent of my time that is most visible." It's an odd request. Yes, Dershowitz has written a lot. Yes, he is a popular professor who doesn't miss classes. And yes, he does a lot of unpublicized pro bono legal work for needy clients. But the sense remains that he knows there's a problem, that he knows his reputation, damaged terribly by his association with the Simpson case and his addiction to being on television, will never be what it once was.