COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

(8 of 8)

The Climax. Dead in the center of the battery of defending lawyers, he sat last week. So that he could make speeches, a right denied to a mere defendant, he had elected to be his own lawyer. He lounged in a red leather swivel chair, made a business of taking notes, glowered at Federal Judge Harold Medina, scowled at the back of the neck of U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey, stared at the Government witnesses, two FBI agents, who took the stand to add their testimony to the mounting evidence.

It was doubtful whether the charge—that he and the ten others were guilty of conspiring since 1945 to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the U.S. Government—weighed too heavily upon him. The legal battle stretched interminably ahead. There was even a chance that he might achieve, finally, a kind of martyrdom. In a perilous sort of way, the Government's attack had given his Communist Party a new prestige at the moment when its light was the dimmest it had been in over two decades.

Outside the courtroom he stood around smiling but narrow-eyed, shaking hands and receiving the adulation of the party faithful. No matter whether he was acquitted or convicted this was the triumphant climax of a career of 20 years. Whatever he felt in his innermost heart, like his father, he kept his own counsel. At each court day's end, he stepped along the marble corridor, hulking and heavy-footed, walking down his own dark tunnel.