Johnnie Cochran’s ‘Journey’ An Exercise In Self-Aggrandizement

Let us conclude this above all else: Johnnie Cochran’s autobiography, “Journey to Justice,” (Ballantine; $26) is truly worthy of the fast-talking, media-manipulating, jury-hornswoggling lawyer who got O.J. Simpson off of double-murder charges.

In other words, it’s a lot of hot air that still will impress its share of the empty-headed among us.

The author is a man who believes there are many wonderful things to say about Johnnie Cochran, and he takes this opportunity to say them all himself. Think you’re going to read anything substantial about Simpson and “The Case?” Heck, no. Cochran gets around to it on page 225, two-thirds of the way through “Journey to Justice.”

Even then, he mostly wants to use that particular forum to take shots at fellow O.J. legal eagle Robert Shapiro

On the subject of O.J.’s supposed innocence, we read nothing. Cochran blathers on about how Simpson is actually a nice guy, a bright fellow, yap yap yap, but even Cochran can’t stoop to pretending he thought that the former football star really was practicing chip shots on his pitch-dark lawn while two people were being savagely killed nearby.

But Cochran devotes many words to protesting that he never, ever played the “race card” to sell Simpson’s alibi to a jury composed predominantly of African-Americans. It all sounds convincing from the man who probably has had the most effect on race relations in America since George Wallace tried to face down the National Guard on that university campus.

Any reader with an IQ in double digits or higher will especially exercise the gag reflex during the book’s final section, which is nothing more than a Cochran press conference in which he both asks and answers the questions. Is it any wonder he has glib, pat responses to everything?

If there were any justice associated with this book besides its title, nobody would buy it. But Cochran wouldn’t have to care. He got a $4.4 million advance from the publisher; he gets to keep that no matter how many copies of the book get remaindered.