E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Right.”

“Well, you see terrible error in that argument. It admits there was a crime.”

“What?”

“By arguing this way Ascher grants the government the one premise he shouldn’t have. That any crime was committed at all.”

“But Mindish confessed!”

“Yes. And Ascher’s one chance was to discredit the confession. I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s not what you’d call ordinary procedure. But everything was loaded against them and something extraordinary was required. There was a very slim chance — for all the massive righteousness and fear of the time, and the relentless federal machinery — there was still a way to bring in the other verdict. And that was to prove the Isaacsons innocent by proving Mindish innocent,”

Technology is the making of metaphors from the natural world. Flight is the metaphor of air, wheels are the metaphor of water, food is the metaphor of earth. The metaphor of fire is electricity.

“I know, I know. It goes against the grain. But the more Ascher attacked Selig Mindish the more he led to the governmerit’s strength. After all it finally boils down to which testimony the jury is going to believe. If the defense tacitly joins the prosecution in assuming a crime of espionage was indeed committed, where shall the distinction be made as to who was and who was not involved? Do you believe the prosecution witness who confesses or the defendant who denies? You see, in this light even testimony developed by the defense, Mindish’s questionable citizenship, operates for the prosecution. If he is not a citizen, he is a foreigner, with foreign loyalties. His own testimony tends to be supported. You see my point? Ascher was asking an American jury to believe that a man would be evil enough to put the finger on his innocent friends of fifteen years, practically a father to them by his own characterization. Closer than family, as he also described the relationship. They were closer than family. It is easier to believe in an offense against the state.”

“But why would Mindish confess if he was innocent? What would his motivation be for that?”

“Well, it’s hard now through everything that’s been written to remember some of the facts about Dr. Mindish. But he was an ignorant man. He never learned to speak English properly. He got his degree from some second-rate dental college when dentistry was not a full-fledged branch of the medical profession. Mindish was a simple mechanic. He affected a continental sophistication that could not stand up under five minutes of conversation. I feel about him that he was not a man given to political passion, but a very ordinary, very crude man perfectly capable of joining the Communist Party for no more than a satisfying social sense of himself, a kind of club life for a lower middle class Bronx dentist. So you ask what is the motivation for an innocent man to do what he did: Well, one motivation is to believe or to have been persuaded to believe in his own guilt. And to live in mortal fear of the consequences. Another is to believe in his own innocence but to believe or to have been persuaded to believe in the guilt of his friends. And to live in mortal fear of the consequences.”

om om om omm omm omm om om ommmmmm

ohm ohmm ohm ohm ohm ohhmm ohm ohmmmmm what is it that you can’t see but you can feel

what is it that you can’t taste and can’t smell and can’t touch but can feel

ohm ohm ohm ohm ohm

what is it that you can’t feel but you look as if you do

ohm

what is it that can’t move unless you put something in its way

What is it that moves through others, comes from the sky and is invisible, can only be detected after it’s gone — not God, not the Lone Ranger.

ohm ohm ohm ohm

What makes you smell when you touch it, blacken when you feel it, die when you taste it.

ohm

What is it that lightens the life of man and comforts his winters and sings that he is the master of the universe; until he sits in it.

ohm

Interesting find is a review of the trial record by law students at Univ Virginia pub in their review in Apr 54, or two months or so before the end. Adviser of these students none other than asst professor Lewin. The law students find no less than seventeen abuses of due process as grounds for retrial. The assumption is that the original trial was exceptionally and not structurally inadequate. Yet we may ask how after a judicial process of three years, involving the highest levels of American jurisprudence, if these students were able to find these errors of due process, no one in the judiciary was capable of this minimal perception. Or to phrase the issue differently, if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?

Robert Lewin is still at work on a way to reverse the verdict. I am beginning to be intolerant of reformers. Ascher depending on the appellate courts. I am beginning to be nauseated by men of good will. We are dealing here with a failure to make connections. The failure to make connections is complicity. Reform is complicity.

It is complicity in the system to be appalled with the moral structure of the system.

I have before me on this table the six books written about my parents’ trial. Two support the verdict and the sentence, two support the verdict but not the sentence, which they find harsh, and two deny the justice either of the sentence or the verdict. All possible opinions are expressed, from Sidney P. Margolis famous Hearst philosopher (SPIES ON TRIAL) to Max Krieger liberal bleeder (THE ISAACSON TRAGEDY). Here is a statement from each. “For all the hysteria drummed up by the commies, their fellow travelers, and their dupes, the Isaacsons received a fair trial…. Who but the very ideologues committed to overthrowing our democratic way of life can dare claim in view of the defendants’ use of every legal dodge available under due process, that justice was not done?”—Margolis. “History records with shame the persecution and infamous putting to death in the United States of America of two American citizens, husband and wife, the father and mother of two young children, who were guilty of not so much as jaywalking, for their proudly held left wing views.”—Krieger. There is no substantial difference in these positions. To say nothing of their prose.

I am prepared to accept the idea that to the extent Ascher bought the premises of the cold war he made mistakes. I am prepared to accept too the idea that Dr. Selig Mindish was innocent. It is an idea they themselves were not prepared to entertain. I hated Mindish long before there was any trial. I hated his smell, his smirk. I hated his accent, and the merry death in his oyster eyes. Nevertheless I am prepared to accept the idea that he too was innocent. But only because he would have suffered more at the time. But only because he has suffered more since.

Innocence is complicity.

After the sentence was passed there was a big party. At the party, drinking champagne, was Judge Barnet Hirsch, defense attorney Jacob Ascher, Robert Lewin the son of Ascher’s former law partner, the writers Margolis and Krieger (who got drunk and sang the Internationale) , the Jewish prosecuting attorney Howard “Red” Feuerman, the President of B’nai B’rith, Thomas Flemming known as Talking Tom because he testified for the government at no less than four different spy trials, Boris Brill the famous anti-Communist expert, Mindish, and my parents. A late arrival who came to pay his respects was V. Molotov.

The Judge called Ascher to the bench. He conferred with Ascher, standing up from his chair and propping himself on his forearms. From his black robe his two hands extended like the claws of a bird from its black feathers, and gripped the edge of his desk. He was leaning into Ascher’s ear, like a great bird pecking at the old lawyer’s cheek. Ascher nodded vigorously. Then he shook his head and turned, looking up, to dispute what had just been told him.