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He remains on good terms with his two former wives. When the eldest of his three sons was married last summer, all the Bailey women showed up and cheerfully posed with Lee for a group snapshot, each of them holding up one, two or three fingers to indicate their sequence in the This Was Bailey's Life marital tableau. He is a lavish Christmas gift-giver, distributing houses, cars, a house trailer and trips to his parents, wife, ex-wives, in-laws and children. But he sees few of them regularly—except for Lynda, who travels almost everywhere with him and sometimes serves as his personal secretary.
There is, however, one other group of people that he is close to, at least for the run of their cases: his clients. "He gets too close to his clients," complains a colleague. There is a big-brother tone of genuine concern when he talks about the infamous men he has defended. On the other hand, once a trial is over, Bailey is characteristically the first man out of the courtroom.
"What makes me run?" Bailey has written. "I burn, dammit, that's why. I like to run." It is the same with flying. Bailey almost never delays a flight in his own aircraft. "It goes no matter what," and the "what" may be rain, snow, ice, fog, turbulence, thunderstorm or some combination thereof. One white-knuckled regular on these flights reports that Bailey invariably ends the hairiest trips by chortling: "Well, we've defeated the grim reaper once again."
It is that intense drive that stirs the most important and complex question about Bailey. Does his kind of all-out advocacy represent a strength or a weakness in the U.S. judicial system?
Bailey has no betters at his specialty of defending those accused of heinous crime; perhaps he has no equals. But there are now many more lawyers in the criminal field than ever before because of Supreme Court decisions that dramatically expanded the right to counsel. And, taking advantage of the expanded rights of defendants, the criminal lawyers are swamping courts with every motion and maneuver conceivable—thereby increasing already heavy administrative pressures to plea bargain.
To many, change seems inevitable. Columbia Law Professor Abraham Sofaer believes that the increase of plea bargaining, no-fault insurance, smaller juries and non-unanimous verdicts are all signs of an erosion of "classical notions of Anglo-Saxon justice." Chief Justice Warren Burger seeks higher educational and other standards for those admitted to the trial bar in the hope of eliminating frivolous, time-consuming contentiousness. New York Federal Judge Marvin E. Frankel points to a much deeper problem in the procedural games that adversary attorneys play. Because they often use the rules to trample the truth, Frankel has gently proposed thinking about such startling changes as requiring attorneys to disclose anything they learn from a client that clearly bears on his guilt, encouraging judges to call their own witnesses and requiring the defendant to face a judge's questions in front of the jury—which could then draw conclusions if he exercised his Fifth Amendment privilege to remain silent.