Lakoff recounts the slow building of Lerner's academic career: Having impressed his MA thesis adviser, Isaac Lippincott, as "the most capable graduate student I have had," Lerner transferred to the Washington, DC-based PhD program of what is now the Brookings Institution, then boasting such faculty as Charles Beard, Carl Becker and Franz Boas. Again, Lerner proved so impressive that the school granted him a PhD solely "on the strength of the papers he had written." One professor wrote that the general opinion of faculty and students at Brookings held Lerner to be "the most brilliant student" they'd seen.

If Lakoff overdocuments his subject's academic excellence, it's to compensate for the condescension Lerner's later journalistic career invited. Indeed, he shows that Lerner could match credentials with Lippmann, who traded mightily on his onetime philosophy assistantship with Santayana at Harvard, then eschewed the academic career Lerner pursued. After receiving his PhD in 1927, Lerner quickly became the managing editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, then drew teaching offers from Sarah Lawrence, Harvard and Williams College, where he became the first Jew appointed to the faculty. From that point on, Lerner combined careers as professor and political journalist.

Lakoff starts to flesh out Lerner at this stage, converting him from walking CV to overachiever in both lust and work. Throughout Lerner's professional life, Lakoff explains, this wiry, 5-foot-7-inch man with the broad face, flat nose and powerful pompadour felt unattractive. To compensate, he wooed "daughters of the conquerors": beautiful, non-Jewish establishment women. After an unfaithful twelve-year first marriage to fellow Brookings student Anita Marburg, he left her (and three young daughters) to marry one of Anita's Sarah Lawrence students, Edna Albers. Lakoff characterizes the resulting nearly fifty-year marriage as passionate and happy, while adding that even after remarriage and three sons, Lerner "remained intent upon sexual conquest and adventure."

Over the sweep of his life, Lerner managed an affair with Elizabeth Taylor (she called him her "little professor") and more flings than Lakoff can chronicle. Instead, the author seeks to establish a parallel between Lerner's sexual energy and his prodigious capacity for academic and journalistic work. According to Lakoff, Lerner felt that "his erotic adventures and his efforts to gain literary celebrity were mutually reenforcing, as if the desire to court women and the desire to court readers arose from the same erotic impulse."

Lerner's intellectual career, unlike his sexual one, underwent principled evolution rather than madcap expansion. Building on his early admiration for Veblen, Lerner came to feel around 1930 that "collectivism was destined to replace individualism" in the United States. At the same time, watching the New Deal era unfold, he began to consider Roosevelt's "level-headed American pragmatism" the best thing for both democracy and whatever part of capitalism was worth retaining.

The thirties saw Lerner build his two careers simultaneously, publishing articles in Ivy League law reviews and journals while also writing for the New York Herald Tribune, The Nation and The New Republic. During his year as a lecturer in Harvard's government department, Lerner was introduced by Harold Laski, already a friend, to another future friend, Felix Frankfurter. Years later, according to Lakoff, Frankfurter would lobby the president of Brandeis to improve Lerner's position and draw him away from the habits of mind that journalism "begets in its practitioners."

For the most part, however, Frankfurter provided the sterling intellectual company that enabled Lerner to develop clear views on charged issues of the thirties: the New Deal, the Supreme Court's so-called judicial restraint, Roosevelt's court-packing scheme. Lerner's primary view, expressed in an influential 1933 law review article, was that "the Constitution had been made into a weapon for the defense of economic inequality and used against all attempts to modify property rights for the sake of economic democracy."

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