Friday, Oct. 03, 1969

One Disappointing Trial

THE TRIAL OF DR. SPOCK, THE REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR., MICHAEL FERBER, MITCHELL GOODMAN, AND MARCUS RASKIN by Jessica Mitford. 272 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

In May 1968, Boston was the scene of a long-awaited confrontation. The Government was pitted against "the peace movement" in open court. The charge was one of conspiring "to unlawfully, knowingly and willfully counsel, aid and abet" draft resistance. To make the conflict sharper still, the five defendants were all extremely reputable, particularly Benjamin Spock, the world's foremost and beloved baby doctor, and William Sloane Coffin, Yale's conscience-driven chaplain. They were, in fact, precisely the kind of men whose voices are supposed to be heard on key issues in a free society. Yet their voices had allegedly been jointly raised in support of violations of the law.

The watching public and reporters awaiting the showdown fully expected a landmark trial that would probe the right to dissent under the First Amendment, examining the morality and legality of political conscience exercised as a conspiracy to encourage defiance of the law. Not least among the reporters was Jessica Mitford. A voluble supporter of liberal causes and noted gorer of sacred cows, she arrived in Boston with her pro-Spock sympathies clearly showing, and she joined the defendants in hoping that the legality of the Viet Nam war could be exactingly explored. The hope was dashed when Judge Francis Ford quickly ruled that any discussion of the war's legality --or the draft's--would be irrelevant.

The result was a verdict of guilty (for all but Raskin) and a trial in which few of the larger issues were discussed. That these proceedings later resulted in a reversal by a court of appeals helped Dr. Spock and his fellow defendants.

But Miss Mitford was left with a hollow and partisan book.

Nevertheless, she handles the surface facts with clarity and crispness. Huge, amiable Dr. Spock is warmly real in her prose. With apparent balance, she also shows how defense lawyers, instead of helping to cut through to moral essentials of the defendants' arguments, too often sowed confusion and sought the protection of sophistry and technicality. The least attractive result was Coffin's testimony to the effect that he was really helping, not hindering the draft, "because," as he explained, "turning in a draft card speeded up a man's induction and in no way impeded his induction."

Generally, however, the book lacks the searching view that would have deepened our understanding of the trial's meaning. Moderately contemptuous of the law, the author is also, unfortunately, only moderately knowledgeable about it. She has obviously relied on the expertise of her lawyer husband, but she seems only to have asked him specific questions. There is no deep exploration of the law's underlying rationale. Kittenish phrases crop up--"for some unfathomable reason known only to lawyers and judges"--which would be acceptable enough if the fathoms of the law were not clearly the business of a book about a trial and the functioning, or malfunctioning, of the legal system.

Jessica Mitford does ultimately raise some provocative questions. She wonders, for instance, whether all trials could be abolished in which--whatever the technical charge--the underlying issue is the political view of the defendants. Juries, she feels, should be encouraged to ignore the literal mandate of the law when its enforcement will produce unjust results. Such suggestions, though, would encourage more thought if they did not seem to spring so narrowly from the experience of one disappointing, dismally conducted trial. Or if they had been presented in a less disappointing book.

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