The Terrors of Justice
Stans, Maurice H.
BOOK REVIEW The Terrors of Justice Maurice H. Stans /Everest House / $10.95 Baron Von Kannon The excesses of an emboldened majority -it was this phenomenon that worried the Founders. And if the...
...All I ask, Mr...
...And nowmost ludicrous of all-we raise a great hue and cry over the menace of white-collar crime...
...He raised the funds for the last two Nixon campaigns, and he did it with wizardry...
...Stans found himself prosecuted time and again, generally for minor infractions of our bewildering mosaic of laws, but also and catastrophically he was prosecuted along with John Mitchell for allegedly accepting a quarter of a million dollars from Robert Vesco in return for driving the SEC from Vesco's door...
...By this idiotic system the prosecutor informs naive jurors of the nature of the charge, he chooses the facts that they will hear, and, free of the safeguards of an open court system, he sculpts the entire proceeding, deciding when and how he will ask the jury for an indictment...
...Yet in this struggle to become the most virtuous regime of all, we allow the hopelessly one-sided and unfair grand jury proceedings to go on, proceedings that allow ambitious prosecutors to lead uninformed jurors by the nose into destroying men's lives...
...In every area of American life we strive for perfect justice, even going so far as to free butchers and rapists merely because some fumble-fingered cop might have improperly embalmed the evidence...
...We moan and fret over the fate of Joanne Little...
...He spent long and anxious months defending himself and through it all saw his name dragged through the mud by breathless journalists and would-Be muckrakers...
...Maurice Stans was a successful accoun* tant, widely praised for management abilities in the Eisenhower administration, private business, and Republican politics...
...Who weeps for Stans...
...In his last campaign he raised $60 million, an astonishingly large figure, but in real dollars one tends to doubt that it was a world record...
...Yet how stern their faces become when Maurice Stans is the man in question...
...And if the meliorists have persuaded us that the majority of Americans are incapable of cruel enthusiasms that weigh against minorities, we might with edification pick up this volume and read of how one man was for eight years houfided by the government, forced to spend $400,000 in his own defense, harassed by journalists, and scandalized probably for the rest of his life solely because he devoted his public service not to Hubert Horatio Humphrey or Edward Kennedy, but to the hellish Nixon...
...He was a self-made second-generation American who became Secretary of Commerce for Richard Nixon...
...Then how they fret over the composition of a $40,000 donation from Goodyear and over the red tape, or lack of it, involved in a $30,000 transfer to Herbert Kalmbach-a $30,000 transfer from a $60 million budget...
...This is an eminently unjust system...
...And it is as moving as his protest to Sam Ervin during the Watergate proceedings when he said, "You cannot feel the abuse to which I have been subjected because of the associations I fell into...
...And with prodigious worldliness our liberal brethren explain every twist in the financial legerdemain of men like Hubert Humphrey, Charles Diggs, Edward Brooke, George McGovern, and, let us not forget, our presidential family...
...The first step of course was the lurid headlines, and the last steps go on even today as Stans continues to endure the objurgations of his ignorant countrymen...
...Despite the shrieks of Common Cause, there have probably been other presidential campaigns that spent-again in real dollars-nearly as much...
...Maurice Stans was one of the many decent members of the bourgeoisie who were hounded and driven from public life not by voters, but by lawyers...
...The Terrors of Justice is Stans' protest...
...For five years now Stans has pondered his fate, and his rebuttal is massive and sustained against every charge and insinuation...
...Why is it so hard to find simple bourgeois citizens In public service nowadays...
...When it was over he was acquitted, as was Mitchell, but the stain will forever be attached to his name...
...He was also Nixon's money man...
...Chairman and Members of the Committee, is that when you write your report you give me back my good iiame" Of course that was impossible, but it is saddening to recall that no attempt has ever been undertaken...
...All Stans was ever found guilty of were five insignificant technicalities: All serious crimes attributed to him he was acquitted of...
...But it was only the second step in the agony and public humiliation of Stans...
...Whole law school faculties are devoted to proving the unlikely proposition that our prisons are filled with innocent victims of society's rigidities...
...In an age awash with moral relativism, men like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., split every hair to exculpate Edward Kennedy of his foul misdeeds/Academicians resort to sociology and ethical acrobatics to exculpate looters, muggers, and brutes of all sorts...
...Consider the eight-year agony of Maurice Stans...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
