Another radical who adopted a strategic decorum in court found that it paid. Last October, Brian Flanagan, 23, a New York City carpenter, was arrested in the thick of the Weatherman "Days of Rage" in Chicago. He was charged, among other things, with aggravated assault against the city's assistant corporation counsel, Richard Elrod, who had been paralyzed from the neck down in the street fighting.
For the trial, Flanagan had his shoulder-length hair shorn, donned a neat jacket and, unlike Abbie Hoffman and the rest of the Chicago Seven, behaved like a perfect young gentleman. It helped, of course, that the weight...