Word: spock
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...TRIAL OF DR. SPOCK, THE REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR., MICHAEL FERBER, MITCHELL GOODMAN, AND MARCUS RASKIN by Jessica Mitford. 272 pages. Knopf...
...scene of a long-awaited confrontation. The Government was pitted against "the peace movement" in open court. The charge was one of conspiring "to unlawfully, knowingly and willfully counsel, aid and abet" draft resistance. To make the conflict sharper still, the five defendants were all extremely reputable, particularly Benjamin Spock, the world's foremost and beloved baby doctor, and William Sloane Coffin, Yale's conscience-driven chaplain. They were, in fact, precisely the kind of men whose voices are supposed to be heard on key issues in a free society. Yet their voices had allegedly been jointly raised...
...under the First Amendment, examining the morality and legality of political conscience exercised as a conspiracy to encourage defiance of the law. Not least among the reporters was Jessica Mitford. A voluble supporter of liberal causes and noted gorer of sacred cows, she arrived in Boston with her pro-Spock sympathies clearly showing, and she joined the defendants in hoping that the legality of the Viet Nam war could be exactingly explored. The hope was dashed when Judge Francis Ford quickly ruled that any discussion of the war's legality -or the draft's-would be irrelevant...
...result was a verdict of guilty (for all but Raskin) and a trial in which few of the larger issues were discussed. That these proceedings later resulted in a reversal by a court of appeals helped Dr. Spock and his fellow defendants...
...Justice Department displayed an unwonted sense of history-even of theatricality-in selecting the defendants. They represent the total spectrum of dissent and ordinarily, observes Author Michael Harrington, "they would find it difficult to agree on the time of day." As in the conspiracy trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock and four other antiwar activists, some of the Chicago "conspirators" had not met one another before they were indicted...