Crazy Rhythm

Book excerpt: 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."