William H. Ginsburg with Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Mr. Ginsburg was a friend of Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, her father.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Laura Yudell Ginsberg, said.
Mr. Ginsburg had spent three decades practicing law in Southern California when a friend and client, Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, a radiation oncologist, asked him to help his daughter. Ms. Lewinsky, 24, was embroiled in a stunning scandal over accusations that she had had an affair with President Bill Clinton and that he had urged her to lie about it.
In the five frenzied months from Mr. Ginsburg’s arrival in January 1998 to his departure in early June, his public image evolved from fresh-faced truth teller in a truth-challenged town to publicity hound lacking the necessary legal skills. Mr. Ginsburg failed to secure an early plea bargain or immunity agreement with prosecutors. His public statements sometimes prompted questions about whether he had his client’s best interests in mind.
“No one ever lies,” he told one interviewer. “People often do what they have to do to make their story sound right.”
At one point he wrote a letter to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel, accusing him of prosecutorial misconduct.
“Congratulations, Mr. Starr!” Mr. Ginsburg wrote. “As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults.”
That assertion appeared to threaten Ms. Lewinsky’s legal position; she had denied that there was a relationship. After the letter was made public, another lawyer for Ms. Lewinsky, Nathaniel Speights, quickly asserted that “nothing has changed” in her position.
Mr. Ginsburg once appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same day, setting a standard sometimes referred to as “the full Ginsburg.” He reveled in being courted by television anchors seeking the first interview with Ms. Lewinsky, though he never delivered it. Barbara Walters won the contest, in March 1999, long after he had left the scene.
He was replaced on June 2, 1998, by two lawyers with extensive Washington experience, Jacob A. Stein and Plato Cacheris. The Lewinsky family said in a statement that day that the parting was by mutual agreement, but Ms. Lewinsky later railed against Mr. Ginsburg in her memoir, saying he cared more about publicity than her case and had tried to divide her family.
Supporters of Mr. Ginsburg said he had been in an impossible position, trying to protect both his client and the president, and that he deserved some credit for the fact that Ms. Lewinsky was never prosecuted.
“She was a pawn in all this, and Bill went out there and dropped everything for his friend and really put himself in the line of fire and drew it away from Monica,” George J. Stephan, who worked with Mr. Ginsburg for 25 years, said in an interview on Wednesday. “If I were Monica’s father, I would have been very happy.”
Mr. Stephan emphasized that Mr. Ginsburg had represented Ms. Lewinsky for less than five months, and that he had been successful in many high-profile cases.
Mr. Ginsburg was involved in a 1984 case in California that established a patient’s right to refuse medical care. He spent many years successfully representing swimming pool manufacturers against injury claims, defended a cardiologist who had examined the Loyola Marymount University basketball player Hank Gathers shortly before he died during a game, and defended a doctor accused of concealing that Liberace had died of AIDS.
William Howard Ginsburg was born on March 25, 1943, in Philadelphia. His father worked as a lawyer for Lyndon B. Johnson when he was a senator from Texas. Mr. Ginsburg graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his law degree from the University of Southern California in 1968.
In addition to his wife, his survivors include a daughter, Sasha Gutstein; two sons, David and Maxwell; two grandchildren; his mother, Sylvia; and his brother, Kenneth Gibbs.
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