Stop the Draft Week was of permanent significance in American
history and, specifically, legal history, because, among other
things, it marked the high point in a jury's understanding of
what the First Amendment protects. I describe this in Saying No
To Power because my son Bob was one of the defendants:
"The one thing I didn't find time to do that year was to
attend the eleven-week trial of my son Bob and the other Oakland
Seven defendants who had organized the week-long roving
demonstrations of some ten thousand people that sought to shut
down the U.S.Army Induction Center. Those demonstrations were the
climax of five years of protests against the Vietnam War, which,
in our area, began with the mass attempt to stop troop trains.
Our Bob had quit an accelerated-Ph.D.-track program in History
that U.C. had put him on, to become a full-time anti-war
activist. Both my father, then seventy-five, and my wife, took
part in the demonstrations outside the induction center. I was
out of town on a lecture tour organized through the contacts
established by my public activism.
"The defendants, their friends, associates, and families,
including myself, were convinced that the Seven would be
convicted. Only two people thought differently: defense attorney
Charles Garry and my father. Garry, now deceased, was a marvel at
the questioning of prospective jurors, which is always helped by
advance scouting of the persons summoned to be on the panel from
which the jury is selected. My father retained a faith in the
fairness of Americans that I thought was misplaced given the
evidence.
"When the jury was selected, I thought the defendants were
finished. There was a retired U.S.Marines colonel, who at one
time had been second-in-command of the Corps. In his time the
Marines were very sparing with the rank of general. The jury
foreperson was a young man with top security clearance at
Lawrence Livermore Laboraotry, where nuclear bombs are designed
and laboratory-tested. But Garry called a stunning array of
character witnesses to present the defendants' motivations. Garry
actually convinced that jury that assembling massive crowds to
block access to the induction center was a legitimate exercise of
freedom of speech under the First Amendment! Hatred for that war
certainly ran deep.
"Tanya [my wife] attended every day, for the nearly three
months of the trial. She phoned home one day so say that a
verdict was expected. I dropped my translation [work] and drove
down. The scene when I entered the courtroom was conceivable only
in the Berkeley area and only during the '60s. As the jury was
out, court was not in session. Bob's then wife was playing with
another defendant's young child on the judge's bench. Lawyer
Garry, bald, in suit and tie, was standing on his head in a
corner doing yoga. The defendants, with years of their lives in
the balance, were outside, playing touch football, barefoot, in
the park across from the courthouse.
"When the jury announced 'not guilty,' and the judge declared
court dismissed, I rose, unplanned, to thank them and the judge,
saying that perhaps it would restore the defendants' faith in the
workability of American justice. It did not: they all became
radical opponents of capitalism. Downstairs we waited quite a
while for the jurors to emerge to thank them personally.
Meanwhile the defendants sent someone shopping. Judge Phillips, a
small man, eventually came out of the elevator carrying a huge
jig-saw puzzle, and said, 'Look what the kids gave me!' He had
been very much against them in his early rulings, but Garry's
brilliant line of defense, and the clergy and professors called
as character witnesses changed his mind." (pp. 415-417)
William Mandel
Ted Morgan wrote:
>
> Sigh... I'd like to respond to Jeff Apfel's post, which I think is very
> useful. Jeff puts his finger on a phenomenon that occurred with great
> frequency in the late 60s-early 70s: namely, the militant wing of the
> Movement (New Left/ antiwar) acted out their rage and a willfulness to
> either "force an end to the war" --or more likely, and less justifiably I
> think, "tear down the system." In the process, having exactly the kind of
> impact on the larger audience that that protest had on Jeff. I'm reminded
> of some of the responses to Stop the Draft Week
You may find of interest website www.BillMandel.net
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