The "Chilling" of John P. Roche
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Perspectives THE 'CHILLING'OF JOHN P ROCHE BY JOHN R ROCHE Recent libel suits have led to a great furor among media pundits about the "chilling effect" of defamation actions. True, General...
...I was thoroughly chilled—years of work down the drain, and drudgery at that...
...Yet 1 had nowhere to go...
...Two commercial publishers in succession had already sat on the manuscript for almost three years and then reached the same decision, although they were reluctant to explain the rationale...
...I suppose hadlwaitedfour years New York Times v. Sullivan would have provided additional protection to publishers threatened by libel actions, but by 1960 the material was getting pretty dated...
...After reading Lewis on the subject (or was it Tom Wicker that day in the Times...
...Ping" Ferry, then the two top executives of the Fund for the Republic, sponsor of the Communism in American Life Series for which it was done...
...I had picked up some rumblings about the book that originated with Robert M. Hutchins and W.R...
...The work, entitled Studies in Infiltration, consisted of 10 scholarly case histories of operations by the Communists and their allies in various organizations...
...Several were subsequently published as monographs, and others have been used as sources by recent students of the Communist Party and its activities—for example, Harvey Klehr, author of The Heyday of American Communism (1984...
...The university press was at least candid: "Our lawyers tell us there are two libel actions per page...
...John, the publication of that book, whatever its merits, would hurt you, it would fan the fires of McCarthyism...
...The rub was that the author indicated Roger's about-face was triggered by his ego and a set of personal considerations, rather than principle...
...Which leads me, in my perverse way, to wonder whether the scribes whose teeth are at present chattering would warm up if, say, Geraldine Ferraro were to sue a network for $50 million for reckless and malicious distortion of her marital fiduciary relations...
...I knew the book was good...
...What I did not know was that one of the publishers had sent the manuscript to a reader for evaluation, and the reader—whose identity I never learned—passed it around to various characters featured in the text...
...A number of un-friendlies were delighted that their egregious Stalinism would not be documented, including some of the most frenetic advocates of "freedom of speech" and opponents of "censorship...
...At a time when to refer to someone as a "Communist" was per se actionable, I went over each of the contributions with an eagle eye—after all, truth was a full defense...
...Other precincts began to report though...
...And the jury in essence told General Ariel Sharon that Time magazine had lied about his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres—it was merely Time's normal modus operandi, nothing personal...
...Nonetheless, as the lawyers pushing wheelbarrows headed for the bank, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times and the coven of apocalyptic columnists got out their thermal underwear...
...This I found out from my old friend Roger Baldwin in the summer of 1958...
...letters started to arrive threatening legal action on one case study or another...
...I got up to find a sweater and raise the thermostat when it suddenly occurred to me that 1985 is the 25th anniversary of the chilling of John P. Roche...
...In fact, the emphasis in the ACLU piece was on how Roger's shift from his early Popular Front posture to militant anti-Stalinism had been decisive in keeping the organization out of the party's solar system...
...Would that be a chill...
...well, it would be expensive...
...My own study, "The American Veterans Committee," ran to over 250 manuscript pages and was documented to the hilt...
...We have been blackmailed, we know it, and there is not one damn thing we can do...
...Is there any worse fate than taking a 200-page manuscript by an extremely talented illiterate and translating it into English prose...
...Young and simple, I thought I could trump that ace: "Truth is a full defense and every controversial allegation is documented...
...The market is limited...
...Several friends were relieved on my behalf...
...I had put a substantial part of eight years of my scholarly life into getting the contributors to finish their sections, editing them (often to the point of rewriting), and generally polishing the final product...
...Sadly, I sent the chapters back to their authors to do what they could with them...
...Or would it be a long overdue affirmation of Women's Rights...
...The First Amendment was thus construed to protect not only the right to lie, but the right to lie without fear of any consequences...
...True, General William C. Westmoreland canceled out his charge of inaccuracy against CBS with little except legal fees to show for his pains...
...So the publishers would still have been chilled...
...The university press' decision was actually the third strike...
...We had hardly arrived on Martha's Vineyard when Roger, who lived down the block, so to speak, turned up breathing fire...
...In each instance, I was assured that the work was a real contribution to human knowledge, well-written, indeed, a work to be proud of...
...The Fund was unhappy about the whole multivolume Communism project, run by the late Clinton Ros-siter of Cornell...
...Maybe you should try a university press...
...We don't doubt that for aminute," replied the director of the press, "but we can't afford to defend ourselves even assuming, as I do, that we would win...
...These ranged from outright fronts such as the International Workers Order and the American Leaguefor Peace andFree-dom, through slightly cosmetized capers such as the American Youth Congress and American Writers Congress, to groups they failed to dominate such as the American Civil Liberties Union...
...In 1960 a university press returned an accepted manuscript of over 1,500 pages, fully copy-edited, with a letter regretting that its lawyers had barred publication...
...I realized that the publishers must be getting the same flak—hence the delays, the negative final decisions and the ambiguity of their provenance...
...The two lawsuits, we were told with varying degrees of hysteria, were sheer harassments designed to head off fearless investigative reporting and terrify media magnates...
...Curiously, I had been through this same duet with Baldwin about five years earlier when I persuaded him to drop hisplantosue Dwight Macdonald for libel on the basis of Macdonald's acidulous profile of the old rascal in the New Yorker\) In any event, Roger grumbled and no more...
...Moreover, Clark Foreman of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare— one of the most vigorous potential litigants (who phoned Rossiter to threaten an instant libel suit on the technically correct ground that legally the distribution of mimeographed copies constituted "publication")—would doubtless have claimed that calling a full-time fellow-traveling "public figure" an apparatchik was a reckless and malicious distortion of the truth...
...He had seen the essay on the ACLU and felt it was "outrageous, positively libelous...
...they catch colds easily...
...What is interesting in retrospect is the total lack of concern aroused by the chilling of John P. Roche & Co., except for a small group (Sidney Hook and "the usual suspects...
...it had agreed to the financing in an effort to placate enemies on the "Right...
...Hutchins cheerfully suggested to Rossiter that I should be sued for the funds that had been expended, but Rossiter killed that...
...However...
Vol. 68 • May 1985 • No. 7
