The Book of Daniel (32 page)

“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.

The bench was of light varnished oak, like the chairs and the spectator benches. It was school furniture. A round-faced school clock with large black hands ticked on the wall, A flag grey with dirt stood in its stand in the corner of the courtroom. There was a picture of the President behind the bench, and a New York State flag in the other corner.

The courtroom was almost empty. A cop stood under one window with his arms folded. He was unarmed and wore no hat. He yawned. A woman with thick legs and low-heeled shoes who was dressed in the same blue color as the policeman’s uniform sat directly behind the couple. There were for this momentous occasion no reporters present. The few people in the spectators’ section were there on their own business with the Judge. They were nervous and sharp with one another. They whispered urgently and told each other to be quiet.

Ascher came back from the bench and addressed his two clients: “Stand up, please, come up here with me. The Judge wants to ask you some questions. Come, come, he won’t hurt you.”

Daniel and his sister Susan stood up and slid along the pew and came out into the aisle. Susan held his hand tightly.

“Come. Quickly, this is a busy place.”

They stood in front of the bench looking up at the bird on his perch in his black feathers and white crest. “Is this Daniel?”

He nodded. “And this is Susan?”

She stared at him making no sign of having heard.

“Isn’t that who you are? Susan Isaacson, don’t I have that right?”

“You must answer the Judge,” Ascher said.

Susan swallowed. He could see her swallowing. He shook her hand, attached to him as if glued, shook it till she nodded.

“Very good. Now I want to ask you children a question, and I want each of you to answer. It is a very simple question, it is an easier question than any you have to answer in school. All right?”

“All right,” Daniel said.

“My question is this: Do you like living at the Shelter? Don’t look at Mr. Ascher. You will have to answer this question for yourself.”

The boy was terrified. He didn’t know what to say. The little girl continued to stare up at the Judge. She was not capable of making a sound.

“Well, surely you can tell if you like a place or not. Are you well treated there? Are you happy there? Or would you rather be somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else,” Daniel said. “We want to go home.”

Ascher was shaking his head. He said something in Yiddish and then he and the Judge began to argue. The Judge’s eyes were brown but around the circumference of the pupils was a rim of light blue. His eyelids lay over the tops of his eyes like hoods. As he talked to Ascher he looked at the children. And they looked at him.

Suddenly, he disappeared.

“We’ll go into the chambers,” Ascher said, holding us before him and shuffling us forward to a door.

We were in an office that had a soft grey carpet and a big desk and black leather chairs and a black leather sofa. There were books in bookcases that had glass doors. We sat on the big leather couch, Ascher sat in one of the chairs facing us, and the Judge sat in another. The Judge had taken off his black robe
and he looked smaller. He had a white tuft of hair that stuck out of each side of his pink head. He wore a light tweed suit with a vest that was too tight so that it pulled away from its buttons and made elliptical gaps that showed the white of his shirt. He was a tiny man, and when he crossed one leg over the other, he helped it with his hand, lifting his leg under the knee and pulling it over his other knee.

“Ah, here we are,” he said.

A grey-haired lady had come through another door and approached us with two bottles of soda in her hands. Eyeglasses hung from a chain around her neck. She handed the bottles to us and then put some change in the Judge’s hand. Then she left the room. The Judge had to unfold his legs again to get the change into his pocket.

It was Coca-Cola. My father had once told me that it rotted the teeth. That if you put a tooth in a glass of Coca-Cola it would rot away. At home we never drank it.

“Now this is better, isn’t it? Where we’re all talking together like this instead of out there? Now has Mr. Ascher told you my name?”

“Judge Greenblatt,” Ascher mumbled.

“That’s right, Judge Greenblatt,” the Judge said as if we had said his name. “And I am appointed by the State to be the Judge of the Children’s Court to see to it that children in difficult straits for one reason or another have the best possible chance. You know that.”

“They understand,” Ascher said. “They are both intelligent children.”

“I can see that,” the Judge said. “I can see that very clearly.”

The bottoms of Susan’s thighs were sticking to the leather cushion. She kept lifting her legs and the sound was like adhesive tape coming away from the skin.

“So we have this problem,” the Judge said. “And it is whether, in view of the present cicumstances, it is better for you to stay at the Shelter facility, or to be placed in a private home to live privately with a family the way children are supposed to live. And to be as fair as possible I wanted to know how you children feel about the matter.”

“Excuse me,” Ascher said. “They should be told, Your Honor, of their parents’ opinion on the matter.”

“We will not lead them, Mr. Ascher,” the Judge said, staring at me with his hand tucked between his crossed knees.

“I agree to that,” Ascher said. “To tell them neither how anyone thinks they’re supposed to live. Not even justices of the Federal District,” he added after a moment’s thought.

“Well, children, I am waiting for your answer,” the Judge said. “You understand,” he said turning to Ascher again, “my sole concern is here in this room. There is in your attitude what I detect as a presumption of my brotherhood with a certain Justice of the Federal Court.”

“Oh no, not so,” Ascher said. He seemed genuinely aghast.

“I do not feel obligated to defend the judiciary for that man,” the Judge said. “And I resent the pressure I feel from you.”

“It has been a long and frustrating trial,” Ascher said. “I’m not well. I would like to hear one ruling out of all of this that favors a defense motion.”

“My dear Ascher, these children are not on trial!”

“They most assuredly are,” Ascher said, rising to his feet. He began to pace the room. “Their parents are still alive. They have hope. They have hope of being all together again.”

“I am merely asking a question.”

“It has been answered. May God in Heaven forgive me, if you cannot give these children their mother and father, do not force on them other mothers and other fathers.”

“According to your own words a dozen families have offered their homes. They are all presumably sympathetic?”

Ascher sighed and slapped his arms against his sides.

“Do you know what life is like in a public facility?” said the Judge. “Do you think it can be any good in a city barracks for children for not months but perhaps years? At best? And there is a history here of running away.”

“Once.”

“It is enough. No, you are being melodramatic.”

“The parents—”

“I am not concerned with the parents. Their mental health is not the province of my court. It is the children I must consider
and it is for the children’s welfare decisions must be made. You have to make that clear to them.”

The Judge closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “There is such a thing as too much hope,” he said.

TRUE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR: A RAGA

    
Cold War
is a phrase given to Bernard Baruch, a non-officeholding adviser to presidents and one of the architects of the Baruch plan for the international control of atomic energy. This plan, which was presented to the UN in June 1946, proposed that for the sake of mankind, the United States—the only country that had atomic bombs—would continue to build its stockpile and sophisticate its bomb technology until a system of foolproof international inspection and control had been established to its satisfaction all over the world, including internally in the Soviet Union. While its plan was under discussion the United States exploded another atom bomb in the South Pacific, on the island of Bikini. We may tentatively define
Cold War
as a condition of incipient bomb-falling hostility by which the United States proposed to apply such pressure upon Soviet Russia that its government would collapse and the power of the Bolsheviks be destroyed. Citations available from Kennan (also known as Mr. X), Acheson, Dulles.