A progressive NY A-G recounts battles on behalf of environmentalism

In The Luckiest Guy in the World, Abrams reviews the main events of his career. His account is intelligent, earnest, and infused with Abrams’s progressive political values.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Updated: JUNE 3, 2021 15:02
A PERMANENTLY fenced-off section of the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, 2003, the site of a notorious toxic dump. Abrams fought to hold the perpetrators accountable (photo credit: MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS)
A PERMANENTLY fenced-off section of the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, 2003, the site of a notorious toxic dump. Abrams fought to hold the perpetrators accountable
(photo credit: MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS)
Robert Abrams was born in 1938, in the Bronx, New York. His parents, Dotty and Ben Abrams, were culturally, but not religiously observant Jews, and left-leaning Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrats. As a kid, Robert worked in his parents’ luncheonette on Pelham Parkway. A good student, he was elected president of Christopher Columbus High School, with a campaign slogan, “Vote for Bob – He’ll Do A Good Job.”
It was the first of many political campaigns. In his six years in the New York State Assembly, nine as Bronx Borough president, and 14 as NYS attorney general, Abrams did, indeed, do a good job.
In The Luckiest Guy in the World, Abrams reviews the main events of his career. His account is intelligent, earnest, and infused with Abrams’s progressive political values. The Assembly, Abrams reveals, was “a very controlled place,” in which leaders kept most members “in the dark a lot.” He acknowledges as well the limited powers of the Bronx Borough president to effect meaningful change. And so, his memoir puts his tenure as attorney general front and center.
Not surprisingly, Abrams’ narrative of the A.G.’s activities in the 1980s and early ‘90s, accentuates the positive. Often, but not always, with good reasons. Abrams indicates that he played a pivotal role in sharing resources, launching investigations, and pursuing prosecutions with his fellow state attorneys general. Many of them also followed his lead in establishing parens patriae, the right of each state to represent its citizens in the areas of the environment, civil rights, and consumer protection.
Abrams used this enhanced authority to force Occidental Chemical to clean up the toxic site at Love Canal (a neighborhood in the city of Niagara Falls) and four other locations; radically change its procedures for disposing of hazardous waste; pay damages of $20 million to 1,400 residents and $129 million to cover the costs of evacuations of homes and an elementary school. Abrams subsequently brought an additional 65 lawsuits involving illegal dumping.
He implies, less persuasively, that the Reagan Administration won its battle against state attorneys general to curtail anti-trust prosecutions but lost the war.
Abrams did submit more pro-choice briefs than any prior attorney general and prevented anti-abortion groups like “Project Rescue” from intimidating women from visiting clinics and hospitals; filed appellate briefs to chip away at sodomy laws; and defended laws prohibiting discrimination in public places against belated and disingenuous claims that organizations were “private clubs.”
And Abrams provides a fascinating account of his investigation into 15-year-old Tawana Brawley’s allegation that she had been kidnapped by six men, one of whom wore a badge, taken into the woods, raped, sodomized and marked on her body with the letters “KKK.” After amassing a mountain of evidence demonstrating that no such assault had occurred, Abrams tells us, he publicly condemned C. Vernon Mason, Alton Maddox, and Al Sharpton, the Brawley families’ “advisers” for engaging in reckless, disgraceful and destructive conduct.
Throughout the book, it’s worth noting, Abrams apparently feels obliged to reaffirm his progressive credentials.
“It is my fervent hope going forward,” he writes, that the Supreme Court preserves “a woman’s most sensitive right to control her body.”
After demonstrating that Tawana Brawley’s charges were fairly investigated, Abrams adds, African Americans “continue to be subjected to the routine use of excessive force and unjustified shootings have led to many tragic deaths.”
At the end of 1993, a year after he was defeated by incumbent Alphonse D’Amato in a close race for a seat in the United States Senate, Abrams resigned as attorney general and accepted a job with a private law firm. Among the many public service activities he took on is membership on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an organization that assists Jewish communities around the world. Abrams has led a delegation of state attorneys general each year on a visit to Israel under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the America-Israel Friendship group. He mediated a controversy concerning use of the names of Jews murdered in the Holocaust in Mormon proxy baptisms.
Abrams has been devoted to Jewish causes throughout his adult life. At the request of his wife, Diane, who grew up in an Orthodox family, Abrams has kept a kosher home and declined all Friday night invitations so that he could celebrate Sabbath rituals with his family. He helped establish Jewish Heritage Week in the New York City School System. He played an active role in the movement to force Soviet authorities to allow Jews to leave the country.
Abrams lavishes unqualified praise on Israel. The Jewish State, he writes, “provides unparalleled diversity of opinion publicly displayed.” The economy provides benefits “for a full life open to all.” Israel “is safe,” and contrary to reports by hostile media, “there is a sense of normalcy that currently exists in Israel, whereby Jews and Arabs work together, go to school together and respectfully coexist.”
In an undoubtedly unintended contrast with his assessment of Israel, Abrams concludes his memoir with blistering criticism of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian” assault on America’s “strong, admired and vibrant democracy,” including civil rights and its “bedrock credo that a flow of new immigrants is what our country is all about.”
After lauding progress in America against racial and religious discrimination, Abrams gives advice that is applicable to all nations: “We can do more and be even greater if each of us would engage in the fight to become better.”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
THE LUCKIEST GUY IN THE WORLD: MY JOURNEY IN POLITICS, by Robert Abrams, Skyhorse Publishing, 277 pages; $28


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