Trial's End

The biggest and noisiest sedition trial in U.S. history ended last week. On the evening of the 102nd day, U.S. District Judge Edward Clayton Eicher, 65, went home, died of a heart attack. No one in Washington doubted that a ludicrously undignified trial had hastened the death of a scrupulously dignified judge. An ardent New Dealer, a onetime Iowa Congressman (1933-38) and SEChairman (1941-42), Judge Eicher had done his amiable best with a clumsy Justice Department mass indictment which accused 30 defendants of conspiring to Nazify the U.S. For more than seven .months he had banged a tireless, ineffectual...