Personality

(Since the famous trial of the eleven top U.S. Communists in 1949, over which he presided, Judge Medina has been much in the public eye. His personal appearances, to receive an honorary degree, make a speech or grace a platform, have kept him there. He is still having to hold his temper in check during the Government's antitrust suit against 17 investment banking houses, now in its 14th month.--ED.)

HAROLD RAYMOND MEDINA was born in 1888 in Brooklyn.

His father came from Mexico, where his forebears had been Spanish conquistadors, established in New York a prosperous importing firm, and married Elizabeth Fash, an American of old Dutch stock. Their son Harold was sent to public school in Brooklyn, then to a small private school on the Hudson, and thence to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1909. He took his law degree at Columbia.

He and his handsome wife, the former Ethel Forde Hillyer, were brought up as Episcopalians. Their two sons, who are also lawyers, are married, have children of their own, and in summer live in houses on the 56-acre family country place at Westhampton, L.I. Until 1938, the Westhampton place was known as "To Windward." After the hurricane of that year, the place was re-christened "Still to Windward." The main house was rebuilt in ampler proportions, two houses for the sons, a house for Judge Medina's mother, a remodeled library, a boathouse and numerous outbuildings. It is a family playground, now less elaborately maintained than it was, for in 1947 Harold Medina gave up a law practice of $100,000 a year to serve as federal judge at a salary of $15,000.

In such a happy but conventional record of achievement Judge Medina's whole character is built. Beneath his brilliance, industry and Latin temperament lies a confidence in the success of normal human life and the possibility of its acquisition by anyone who will honestly work for it. It may be the combination of Spanish and Dutch blood that makes him so mercurial on the surface and so profoundly steady.

In spite of his classical learning, which he still pursues with delight, he lards his speech with outmoded slang and zealously drops the g's of his present participles. He is a jester, a moralist, a preacher and--even off the bench--a judge. Socially he is unpredictable. A tall story, for example, may find him just politely receptive, with a sideways turn of the head, a half-attentive smile, and a "Well, you don't say." Or it may immediately detonate an incredulous guffaw, ending with a murmured "Well, by golly! Can you beat that!" It may be pounced on frowningly and all its details subjected to legalistic analysis. It may even elicit a rebuke for exaggeration. But if the judge is in an uproarious humor, he will take the tall story and run it up several degrees higher into Gargantuan fantasy, rolling with laughter at his own verbal extravagance.

His FACE is long, sallow and melancholy, but when it is animated, his dark eyes flash, even his long, straight nose quivers, and the high-arched eyebrows, raised in perpetual astonishment at the world, climb yet higher. His grey hair and mustache seem to hold together the various parts of his face that might otherwise fly off into the corners of the room. But when the judge is pensive, his whole person droops into downcast repose--except for the eyebrows. When he is annoyed, his face never comes to life with sudden anger; it freezes. When at last he speaks, his voice is slow and controlled, and what he has to say is reasonable beyond cavil. His slightest point is sustained with enough logic to swing the fate of an empire.

The physical resemblance between the judge and Adolphe Menjou has often been remarked, but the supple expressiveness of his face is more like Charlie Chaplin's. This is especially true of a certain browbeaten look he sometimes puts on, as though he were just a poor old gaffer at the mercy of all comers. This martyred look will break up into a smile if it is challenged, but sooner or later it will be resumed with a distant glance at nothing and a sighed "Well, well, you never can tell." The look has definite functions. In his New York apartment, it is a signal that the judge is bored with the conversation. At his country place in Westhampton, it means that he is preparing to make his escape.

The library lies about 80 yards from the house at the end of the walled garden, and escape is comparatively easy. "Well, well, you never can tell," the judge will murmur, looking into the sunset over the heads of the family group seated on the terrace. He gets up as if to flick his cigar ash into the shrubs, strolls, aimlessly for a moment, and then unobtrusively ceases to be among those present.

THE JUDGE'S private life is, to an extent, exclusively masculine. His relations with his father, who died some years ago, were tender and mutually understanding. The bonds in the new generation repeat the pattern of the old. When Judge Medina and his sons are together, the ladies of the three households leave them to their own mysterious dimension. His friendships with men are touched with high seriousness. While the rest of the family are at the beach, the judge, who does not like surf bathing, will play golf or, on rainy days, a game of billiards. Next to his relations with his sons and his brother (all of whom are Princeton men), his closest bonds are with his classmates of 1909.

The judge regards women with indulgence and treats them with decorum, but he takes them with entire seriousness only in their spheres as wives and mothers. He would no more interfere with his wife's household or garden than she would attempt to influence his judicial decisions. They have conducted a successful marriage through 40 years of mutual regard for boundary lines, with only superficial border clashes from which the judge retires mournfully appealing to high heaven and abstract reason. His relations with his mother, who is 93, are as affectionate as were those with his father, but quite different. There is something almost ceremonious in his attitude toward her. He has built her a house on his property sufficiently far away from his own to give her a feeling of independence. When she is in residence, the judge visits her every day, consulting her on family matters.

Judge Medina's character and habits give an effect of virtues and customs that are still called old-fashioned but are beginning to be recognized as worthy of revival. In a cynical age, cynicism has not found one chink in his character to take root in. He positively and quite instinctively believes that manifestations of evil and stupidity are passing phases, whereas God, the Republic as our forefathers dreamed of it, and the family are enduring. He finds no embarrassment in speaking of faith as the fruit of religion.

THE PUBLIC is fickle, and sooner or later it may turn on Judge Medina as it has usually turned on its favorites. Cynicism will point out that he would be most happy in a world made up of Princeton men, preferably of the Class of '09, that he is too quick to ascribe other people's failure to personal weakness rather than circumstance, that he is at times obstinately legalistic and literal-minded, that he would decline an invitation to the Judgment Day if the date conflicted with that of his class reunion in June. But cynicism could seriously discredit him only if it discredited the loyalties that sustained--and may still sustain the American republic in its best days. They are vulnerable now. But not in the judge's house.

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