POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
Fialka., Preston Lerner, Michael J. Ybarra, E. Joshua Rosencrantz, John J.
Political Booknotes Fighting Injustice by Preston Lerner Ic rime is more prevalent than crime itself, capital punishment is a growth industry. Nearly 3,400 Americans reside on death rows,...
...In his book, Sen...
...The Venona tapes show that Soviet spying was extensive and effective, hardly the plot trumped up by conservative forces in the U.S...
...That is why we give federal judges life tenure and why we make it hard to remove judges...
...Success had granted Moscow a monopoly on revolution and Lenin wasn’t about to give away the farm...
...I am convinced that our party can be an important factor in slowing down, stopping, and reversing the present reactionary policies of the Reagan Administration,” he wrote to Moscow in 1981, pleading for more cash...
...Blame judges...
...Omar Bradley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had determined that the matter was too secret to give to his commander- in - chief...
...Unfortunately the party’s slavishness was not limited to propaganda...
...Other than the death penalty itself, no issue vexes critics of capital punishment more than the specter of inadequate representation...
...During the purges of the late ’30s, perhaps more than a thousand of these idealists were arrested as spies...
...Now the suspect has filed a report on US...
...Presumably intelligence officials convinced Bradley that providing the information to the White House might, somehow, reveal the breaking of the code...
...Well, why not...
...His is a book that: gives rise to interesting questions...
...What shook most of the rest loose was Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956, which most party members, of course, read in The New York Times...
...But the case for racism being the cause of this miscarriage of justice is never made beyond a reasonable doubt...
...Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism became the party’s rallying cry...
...JOHN J. FWKA ir a reportwfor The Wall Street Journal and the author ofwar By Other Means: Economic Espionage in America...
...intelligence...
...Oliver Stone would transform it into an indictment of the entire legal profession...
...He uses the new evidence to suggest that there is much fertile ground for research...
...Six years later, he was still grubbing for more money...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scholar, writer, politician, and, as long-term member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a man with a ringside seat on the slow unveiling of the troubling performance record of the $28-billion-a-year US...
...Crime may pay, but judicial leniency is not the main reason...
...Instead, Out of Order reads more like an overstuffed tabloid...
...During the Popular Front, for example, the talk about workers seizing the means of production and the bourgeoisie drowning in its own blood had given way to muted rhetoric that emphasized the CPUSA’s congruity with America’s own revolutionary pedigree...
...This nation’s founders understood a critical lesson of history: An independent judiciary is often all that stands in the way of tyranny...
...And while mistakes are rare, no fewer than 75 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973...
...Blaming the Judge By E. Joshua Rosenkranz HAVE YOU HEARD ANY GOOD judge jokes lately...
...Since the beginning of the movement, American Communists had worn special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that rendered all else invisible...
...At the time the suspect was working in a low-level civilian position at a U.S...
...It seems time to prune some branches from the huge intelligence tree...
...And, of course, no indictment of judges is complete without the complaint that activist^' judges have flouted the democratic process...
...But in his tirade, Boot unwittingly furnishes Exhibit A of the case for insulating judges from public pressure...
...Yet although the insistence of American Communists that the news was a revelation was literally false, it was psychologically true...
...When it comes to prescriptions, again, Boot disappoints, largely sorting through tired proposals long ago offered by others...
...read their instructions in the New York World...
...A few pages earlier, though, Boot provides a flurry of statistics that disprove him: Because of the low rate of arrest (7 percent of all burglaries, for example), the number of arrests that don’t get prosecuted, and the prosecutions that end in acquittal, only 5 percent of crimes even get before a sentencing judge...
...And so it’s left to Dennis Williams-the voice of bitter experienceto propose a plan of his own to “restore justice to our criminal justice system!’ Speaking to legislators in Washington, Williams strikes a note of passion that’s oddly lacking in a book that should overflow with outrage...
...Soon there were three American Communist parties...
...A report was quietly tucked into the suspect’s FBI file: “Moinyhan was either a communist or a communist sympathizer...
...stopped jailing Communists after an adverse Supreme Court ruling, although there were not many party members left to arrest...
...TV producers could (and probably will) turn this tale into a sweeps-week docudrama...
...Early on, Dennis Williams, lingering on death row, blames his predicament on “powertripping racists...
...agents in the Soviet Union who were fingered by Aldrich Ames...
...Among the Cold War documents beginning to pour out, he suggests, there may be more support for what amounts to Moynihan’s Law: As U.S...
...it’s a shame to see Klehr, et al unnecessarily contribute to this wastage...
...Secrets and Lies by John J. Fialka .s...
...One weakness, he suggests, is that the shroud of secrecy is way too big, covering matters far beyond these crown jewels...
...Unfortunately, the book falls short both as entertainment and prescription...
...As a matter of fact, he had one...
...They might have been expecting a short hitch: After two years Lenin’s Bolsheviks were still in power and revolutionary rumblings could be heard throughout Europe...
...And in an adversarial system based on the notion that justice is the product of a clash between evenly matched advocates, second-rate representation can translate-literallyinto a death sentence...
...Which is not to sav that they followed them very well...
...its own members, which is to say real people, often found themselves being run over by the train of history without so much as an audible gasp from the leaders of the CPUSA...
...Was Hiss guilty...
...Boot demonstrates as much by citing higher-court reversals or disciplinary proceedingsthough his intention is to prove that the judges he vilifies were wrong...
...pilots found they were unable to see weather reports during the Gulf War because they lacked the necessary security clearances...
...Communist Party was dominated by immigrants who felt a greater bond with the international working class than with most of their putative fellow -. Americans...
...Although capital punishment may be justified in particularly heinous cases, even its strongest supporters can’t help but worry about the possibility of executing an innocent person...
...In 1920 the second world congress of the Comintern adopted requirements for membership, subservience not least among them: “In reality and in action the Communist International must be a single universal Communist Party, the parties in each country acting as its sections...
...The politics of the Hiss case paralyzed the Democrats and reinvigorated the Republicans, who found a young congressman, Richard M. Nixon, eager to probe the case...
...pointed to the bodies of Stalin’s victims littering the Soviet landscape, American Communists saw those bodies as well...
...In the decade after the Russian revolution, more than 10,000 members of the American Communist Party, mostly immigrants to the US., returned to the Karelian region of the USSR, near the Finish border, to help build a worker’s paradise...
...If so, what should be cut...
...Because defendants in capital cases are disproportionately black, often indigent, they are rarely represented by trial wizards and legal scholars...
...government that many suspected at the time...
...Because our Party works in the decaying heart of imperialism,” the ever-optimistic Hall reported, “whatever we do in influencing events in the United States has an impact on world developments...
...Once again the Comintern laid down the law, this time printed on a thin swatch of silk that the Soviet messenger could presumably tie into an ascot to slide by the authorities, if not the fashion police...
...To their credit, the authors scrupulously avoid glorifying themselves...
...The framers of our Constitution understood that the majority is sometimes a bit too eager to sweep away our individual rights when convenient...
...Nearly 3,400 Americans reside on death rows, and their numbers increase daily despite our declining murder rate...
...To Max Boot, the question is a metaphor for what’s wrong with our system of justice...
...But as the authors point out: The charges leveled against these Finns were lies...
...He is giving them failing grades for matters that go well beyond the misspelling of his name...
...This frenzy, which Boot fuels, presents a potentially devastating threat to the independence of the judiciaryand, hence, to our rights...
...But the “evidence” against the Ford Heights Four seems so marginal that any competent defense attorneys should have been able to win an acquittal...
...But when Moscow finally opened its own eyes, when Khrushchev...
...True, once appointed, lifetime judges are not accountable to us, but that does not mean they are free to do whatever they want...
...The Soviets keep doling out the secret subsidies, although never enough to please Hall...
...And its conclusion was dead wrong...
...then there were two again, although the fact that they had the same name and each published a journal called the Communist makes one feel sorry for the poor Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to the FBI) agents who had to try to keep all of this straight...
...The defendants were convicted mice largely because they were represented by attorneys who possessed neither the skill nor the experience to try capital cases...
...soldiered on, some falling off after the Hitler-Stalin pact, others dropping by the wayside, or wishing they could, when the US...
...Judges are at fault...
...Four black men with no history of violent crime were arrested after a perfunctory police investigation...
...The upshot: While the Kremlin knew about Venona, the president and the American people were kept in the dark until 1995 when the National Security Agency released the files...
...in fact, American Communists took active measures to silence the voices of those Finns who were able to escape...
...Political Booknotes Fighting Injustice by Preston Lerner Ic rime is more prevalent than crime itself, capital punishment is a growth industry...
...Nor, for that matter, does it have any real villain...
...MICHAEJL YBARRrAsw rrtrnga bookaboutSen Pat McCarran and anti-New Deal consmatism...
...It serves as the main theme under which the Party claims and carries forward the revolutionary and democratic traditions of America...
...They had been among the most devoted Communists in North America and had enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to help build a socialist state in Karelia...
...Don’t get me wrong...
...government and its contractors “may be the largest single project in the social science research ever undertaken...
...But the tone of Boot’s book is illustrative of the recent escalation of vitriol and disintegration of accepted norms of conduct toward judges...
...He was once observed to be reading the Daily Worker...
...Thus the Soviet Union became not just the model and inspiration for would-be revolutionaries around the world...
...Alas, when the American Communist Party finally did stand up to the Soviets it was, once again, on the wrong side of history...
...In a supreme irony, the “eyewitness” who recanted was charged with perjury for telling the truth...
...Boot, a Wall Street Journal oped editor, insists that: judges, not lawyers or legislators, are responsible for almost every problem that afflicts our system of justice...
...This finding, according to Moynihan, was the result of an amazing amount of analytical work...
...To the contrary, without so much as a hint of irony, he begins his diatribe by identifying judicial independence and judicial review as “the basic problem...
...Characters rarely come to life...
...Just “shame judges into doing their duty” by publicizing their failures...
...In the end, this ragtag collection of amateur investigators not only proved the innocence of the Ford Heights Four but also wrangled confessions out of the real killers...
...Boot’s favorite solution by far, though, is to expose the malfeasors...
...So he aims to change that by exposing the “arrogance, corruption, and incompetence on the bench,” to quote the subtitle of his new book...
...Moynihan’s book is a refreshing antidote to the academic mush and axegrinding left-wing criticism that make up much of what is a thin literature on the effectiveness of U.S...
...Before they were authors, first they were heroes...
...Clearly, there was a rush to judgment, and it’s doubtful that the death penalty would have been sought if the victims had been black...
...1919 in Chicago (with government agents taking notes) the U.S...
...While it’s hard to overestimate the value of the series, it could have been edited better...
...Even at its height of influence in the US...
...Higher courts sit to ensure that judges apply the law correctly...
...Nevertheless, it’s a significant service for Yale University Press to finally publish Moscow’s actual marching orders, as it has done in a recent volume of documents culled from the Comintern’s archives...
...The Comintern, sort of a Russian housemother of the worldwide revolutionary movement, ordered the two squabbling groups to merge and even decreed a name, more hopefully than realistically: the United Communist Party...
...But no one jokes about judges...
...To be sure, the book illustrates that intelligence and counterintelligence are not empty crafts...
...It would have been a godsend for President Harry S. Truman if he had had an agency that could give him a definitive answer...
...The American section of the party could not be accused of not trying to please...
...Knowledge is power, and Moynihan shows how the CIA and other intelligence agencies generated it and used it during the Cold War to present annual, hair-curling revelations to Congress about how the Soviet economy was growing so rapidly that it would overtake the United States by the late 1990s...
...intelligence services...
...Boot, supposedly a libertarian, never mentions this history or even the role judges play in protecting our rights...
...Air Force base in England...
...Too many criminals at large...
...The US...
...A judge who worries that an unpopular ruling will yield a pink slip is more likely to trade in our constitutional rights for his own job security...
...Moreover, the authors write with a sense of vengeance, overreacting, I would say, to the rampant and often foolish revisionist scholarship on American Communism, which has often portrayed the party as the moral equivalent of the Boy Scouts...
...Again, judges...
...The Soviet World of American Communism is the second installment of this ongoing project...
...But the authors choose to limit themselves to the particular rather than the universal...
...But the Comintern did not like the slogan, so the CPUSA dropped it...
...government started prosecuting Communists during the cold war...
...But Gen...
...Party’s Over by Michael J.Ybarra N 1920 GRIGORYZ INOVIEV, head of the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, dispatched a secret diktat to the two fledgling American parties that had registered competing claims to the Bolshevik franchise in the U.S...
...While A Promise of Justice is a shining illustration of the power of an unfettered press, it also spotlights the failings of conventional, resolutely objective journalism in an age when celebrity is measured in minutes and attention spans in seconds...
...Take, for example, his pronouncement that “soft-on-crime judges’’ are “responsible for making crime pay,” by which he means that judges’ lenient sentences encourage criminal behavior because criminals know they are unlikely to go to the slammer...
...Instead of offering suggestions for preventing more miscarriages of justice, they close their account with the Ford Heights Four’s predictably troubled return to civilian life...
...But can the government do that...
...Sure, we yuck it up about lawyers going over cliffs in busloads and lying whenever their lips move...
...Because we hold them in high esteem...
...For the suspect was Sen...
...Their doggedness in the face of repeated disappointment is inspirational...
...A Promise of Justice, the latest entry in the subgenre of miscarriageofjustice chronicles, documents a crime that horrified suburban Chicago in 1978: A white’couple was abducted from a gas station and driven to the decaying black neighborhood of Ford Heights...
...Boot is at his best as a raconteur of wacky judicial antics, but don’t expect rigorous analysis...
...Might cuts in the $28-billion-a-year overall budget actually improve U.S...
...The Army’s Signals Intelligence Service had quietly broken a Soviet diplomatic code and found messages implicating Hiss...
...Readers will come away with contempt for the police, who botched the investigation, and the prosecutors, whose performance was at best overzealous...
...Preston Lerner ir a Los Angeles-based journalist...
...The further postponement of the unification of the two Communist groups is a crime against the Communist International,” the scarf commanded...
...And, yes, like any collection of humans, the legions of federal and state judges-over 30,000 in allinclude some bad apples who are corrupt or incompetent...
...Too many frivolous suits filed...
...As to what Boot calls “activism,” thoughtful scholars and jurists-from Robert Bork to the late William Brennan-will debate forever whether the Constitution’s meaning changes over time and how much judges should defer to popular will...
...Three of them, in fact, would have their licenses to practice law suspended...
...Judges have the sacred and daunting task of enforcing those rightseven when those rights compel unpopular results...
...it became revolution itself, a star too bright to look at directly but one that would light the hopes of legions who had no other light...
...They developed a Bill of Rights to protect each of us from the unbridled will of the public...
...This is one of our popular slogans which has influenced large masses,” one American party functionary explained to Moscow...
...the American party was willing to sacrifice success to keep Moscow happy...
...the lucky ones got hard labor in Siberia, the unlucky were shot...
...Boot is no Bork...
...Moynihan argues that the case shows the “essence” of the misfit existence of the intelligence establishment in Washington, how it had its analytical capability numbed and dumbed by politically correct “group think,” and how its nuggets of knowledge were debased by a bureaucracy that sometimes determined that its needs were more important than the president’s...
...Last year alone, the death toll was 74-a modem record...
...For the next 35 years the party hobbled along with about 3,000 members led by the indefatigable Gus Hall...
...Still, the authors’ judgements strike me as unfailinglv correct and insightful...
...Add to this dozens of hapless victims-Sacco and Vanzetti, to name the most notorious examplewhose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...Scenes lack a sense of place...
...More than 400 inmates have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment a quarter-century ago...
...It might not be the greatest of Soviet crimes, but someone should mourn all of the forests felled to print Communist drivel...
...But they needn’t have worried...
...But Protess and Warden, determined not to sensationalize, give us facts when we want drama...
...Yet, in a telling passage decrying a litany of jury awards that Boot considers outrageously generous, he adds, “It doesn’t much matter that most of these stratospheric sums are reduced on appeal...
...But despite their innocence, their loyalty, and their American connections, the CPUSA allowed them to go to imprisonment and death without a protest...
...The authors write: But the facts disclosed were not revelations . . . . For more than 20 years, both the mainstream press and scholarly books had carried hundreds of stories, refugee accounts, and exposes of the nature and horrors of Stalin’s regime...
...intelligence agencies...
...Some of Boot’s complaints are worthy of sober discussion...
...There, the woman was raped, and she and her fiancC were killed...
...Founded i...
...intelligence budgets went up, “the overall quality of American intelligence may well have declined over time...
...Not just tyranny of the despot, but tyranny of the majority...
...All were convicted of murder, and two were sentenced to death, largely on the basis of testimony that was later recanted...
...But the hapless Soviet courier fell into the arms of the police and most aspiring Leninists in the U.S...
...And this vision offered a shattering revelation...
...There is, of course, nothing wrong with exposing judges’ decisions to public scrutiny...
...Just like the Comintern’s confidential instructions turning up in a newspaper, the American party’s fealty to Moscow was no great secret...
...E. JOSHUA ROSENKRANZe,x ecutive director of the Brennan CenterforJustice at NYU School of Law, is author of Buckley Stops Here: Loosening the Judicial Stranglehold on Campaign Finance Reform...
...Another part of the problem was that, right or wrong, the answer projecting the Soviet economic colossus as a growing beast was right for the agencies’ budgets...
...It specialized in vaudeville skits of a pinkish cast...
...Too high, for Boot’s taste...
...The two extant volumes are not without overlap, redundancy, and padding...
...But by 1989 even Mikhail Gorbachev had basically given up the ghost of Communism, and after Hall badmouthed him the Soviet leader cut off the American leader’s allowance...
...Even during times of high alert, it is not easy to protect against the theft of secrets that can prove damaging to the U.S...
...While maybe more than a thousand American party members disappeared in the purges, their comrades in the U.S...
...The only new idea Boot presents is that Congress should pass a law prohibiting the Supreme Court from striking a state law except by a twothirds majority-a vote of 6 to 3. The merit of this proposal, he claims, is that Congress could “arguably” accomplish it without a constitutional amendment...
...Written by David Protess, a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and former Chicago Lawyer editodpublisher Robert Warden, the book recounts the authors’ 15-year struggle to free the so-called Ford Heights Four...
...In short, under cover of a working-class movement, these people became the advance agents of fascism aiming at the destruction of socialist economy,” the Comintern informed the American party, which adopted the line without a quibble...
...After a second set of convictions, Protess enlisted the aid of his journalism students...
...Here was the perfect opportunity for Protess and Warden to broaden their perspective from one courthouse in Illinois to death rows across the country...
...The secret analysis of the Soviet economy by the U.S...
...intelligence establishment during the Cold War...
...Consider the little-known tragedy of the Karelian Finns...
...Too much time spent in the airless archival world of American Communism can make anyone’s prose more blunt and accusatory than need be...
...The code-breaking project, called Venona, had been tipped to the Kremlin four years earlier by a Soviet spy who had infiltrated it...
...The list of charges is not particularly fresh...
...But that is precisely what he does not deliver...
...With its clipped rhythms, shorthand descriptions, and one-sentence paragraphs, the book reads like a 241-page newspaper feature...
...Jury awards shooting through the roof...
...This is one of the troubling questions left bobbing in the wake of a powerful and timely book...
...House Majority Whip Tom DeLay demands the impeachment of any “activist” judge who issues a decision he dislikes...
...Well, maybe, but only in the same sense that Congress could “arguably” abolish the judiciary outright...
...Stories in the muckraking Chicago Lawyer prompted new trials...
...In 1996, Moynihan notes, the number of officials with power to create secrets declined, but the total number of actions declaring information to be classified rose by 62 percent...
...As the nation stumbles into a multipolar world and tests its policies in regions that went almost totally unanalyzed during the Cold War, does the existence of huge agencies and their huge stockpiles of secrets help or hurt...
...And for every controversial judicial ruling, it seems, there is a politician prepared to introduce a bill to prevent any judge from ever ruling that way again...
...Part of the problem, according to Moynihan, was that too many pieces of the puzzle were kept from analysts by higher levels of secrecy...
...As a former public defender, I have too many judge-inflicted battle scars to deny that some judges can be vicious and arrogant...
...Or, I should say, especially then...
...INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES first became aware of an American with “possible communist ten - dencies” in the fall of 1951...
...Judges have long been preferred targets, especially for politicians...
...We are by far the most open, inviting target for spies on the planet, and Moynihan provides a laundry list of what has been lost: the Norden bomb site, designs of the first nuclear weapons, the cracking of Soviet codes, and the lives of key U.S...
...Ideologically driven senators throw the federal courts into crisis by refusing even to vote on qualified judicial nominees for years...
...But perhaps Protess and Warden expended all their anger where it mattered-fighting the good fight...
...Moynihan asks you to consider this: In 1950 nearly every thinking American was caught up in a dispute over whether Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was a Communist spy...
...Rarely has the pen seemed mightier...
...But as a result, the book has no central hero...
...Our constitutional structure, notes Boot repeatedly, grants judges power without accountability...
...This is great stuff, and it ought to make for compelling reading...
...He was known to f r e q u e n t London’s Unity theater, run by communists...
...On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer,” John Reed, who helped found one of the American parties, reported from the world’s first people’s republic...
...If Europe’s most backward country could leap into the future where the workers could stand like men instead of stooping like beasts, think of what could happen in the world’s most forward-looking country...
Vol. 30 • September 1998 • No. 9
