Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JESSICA MITFORD has written a book about the trial of the Boston Five anti-war conspirators, who also existed in that other time when people did and thought strange things to end a war that was still on the upswing. The days of the Resestance and self-sacrifice rather than confrontation...
...Spock Conspiracy seems to have passed into that shadowy Pete Seeger-Odetta land of forgotten movements. I could barely remember what the issues were when I first picked up the book. To refresh your memory, the defendants: Dr. Benjamin Spock (whose baby book is the second-largest bestseller in the history of mankind if you are interested in superlatives like that); William Sloane Coffin. Jim Marcus Raskin; Michael Ferber; and Mitchell Goodman-were charged by the U. S. government with conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet resistance to the draft. They were tried in the Boston Federal District Court...
...book uses the vehicle of "the court-room drama"-which is always gripping in a Perry Mason versus D. A. way. Miss Mitford uses it only for its natural excitement and writes an impassioned, sympathetic and very original view of both the strange ways of jurisprudence and the anti-war stance of the defendants. This makes for enjoyable and uplifting reading. The Ghandian stance of kindly Dr. Spock-who is in a very real sense the father of us all-is rare in America. Miss Mitford herself seems to speak as an adult resistance supporter and explains the defendants...
...jury as a barely-veiled order to convict. But we later learn that this becomes the grounds for the appeal that set Spock and Ferber free. Why the other two were not also freed is bewildering save with the sensibility to the workings of the law that the book conveys...
...Miss Mitford's previous book. The American Way of Death, she shows that the greatest horror of dying is not death itself, but the sugary coating that we give to it with doggy cemeteries and $20.000 gilt-edge Eternal Rest Coffins. In the same way, the horror of the political trial in this country is not that it tries to exterminate opposition but that it coats it over with gooey legal semantics or refuses to deal with it at all. Clear light and creative action cannot be seen through the democratic quagmire. And thus the logic of preferring a George...