by Philip Roth
Scrupulous and honest and dedicated to the principles of justice as ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the lawyers in this country are, there is in my profession, as in any other, I’m afraid, that tiny percentage who will do and say anything if the stakes are high enough or the price is right. In law school our professors used to call them “ambulance-chasers” and “shysters.” Unfortunately, these men cling not only to the bottom rungs of the profession, which would be bad enough, but on rare occasions manage to climb to the very top—yes, even to positions of great responsibility and power.
Now I needn’t remind you of the scandal that took place here in Washington during the tenure of the last administration. You all remember that a lawyer appointed by my predecessor to the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the entire land, had to resign as a justice of that court because of financial wrongdoing. Horrifying as that incident was to every decent American, there seems to me nothing to be gained now by reawakening the sense of moral outrage that swept the nation at that time.
As some of you will be quick to point out, there were actually two men who found it necessary to resign from the Supreme Court, after they had been appointed justices of that court by my predecessor. But whether there was one, two, three, four or five, I simply do not believe it is in the interests of national unity to harp upon the errors, grievous though they were, of an administration that you voters, in your wisdom, repudiated three years ago.
What is past is past; no one knows that better than I do. If I recall to you now the names of these two men who found it necessary to tender unprecedented resignations to the highest court in the land, it is only to answer, as forthrightly as I know how, your question, “What kind of lawyer would represent Curt Flood?”
The two men who resigned from the Supreme Court were Mr. Abe Fortas and Mr. Arthur Goldberg. My fellow Americans, the name of the lawyer representing Charles Curtis Flood is Arthur Goldberg. G-o-l-d-b-e-r-g.
Now, before I am accused of trying to shock or alarm the American public, let me say that I myself am not the least bit shocked or alarmed by this turn of events. Having served on the highest court of the land, Mr. Goldberg undoubtedly now knows the ins and the outs of the law as well as the most devious lawyer in the country. Moreover, none of us should be surprised to discover a man who has fallen from the pinnacle of his profession, willing to try just about anything to get back into the public eye. Before the Flood case is concluded, I would not be surprised to find Mr. Abe Fortas joining forces with Mr. Arthur Goldberg in defense of Charles Curtis Flood.
Now you may say to me, “But surely, Mr. President, any man who wishes to destroy the game of baseball, and enlists such attorneys as these in his attempt to accomplish that end, is not even entitled to a hearing in court. Not only is he making a mockery of our entire judicial system, but in order for him to go ‘up against the system’ we, the American taxpayers, have to pay for the upkeep of the very system he is working to annihilate. If we allow that, then we might as well allow self-confessed Communists to teach our children in the classrooms. We might as well throw down our arms right now in the battle for freedom, and hand over our schools and our courtrooms without a fight to the avowed enemies of democracy.”
Well, let me assure you that I couldn’t agree more. In fact, we are right now studying ways of restoring the dignity and majesty and sanctity of old to the courtrooms of the land. As you know, one experiment that we have tried with some success here in Washington is the “Justice in the Streets Program.” This is a program whereby sentencing and punishment, for capital crimes as well as felonies and misdemeanors, is delivered on the spot at the very moment the crime is committed, or even appears to have been committed. Through J.I.T.S.P. and related methods of expediting the judicial process, we hope to be able not only to unclog the court calendars but to wind down the whole trial system by Election Day 1972.
Now, winding down the trial system will of course be a great boon to the dignity of our judges, who will no longer be forced to demean themselves by dealing with the most undesirable elements in the population. Our judges, so terribly overworked as they are today, hopefully will not have to deal with any elements of the population once the trial system is completely phased out. This will leave them free for the reflection and reading that is so essential to maintaining a high level of judicial wisdom.
The second benefit to be derived from replacing the archaic and slow-moving trial system by more modern judicial methods is this: the courtrooms of this land will once again be a wonderfully inspiring place for the schoolchildren of America to visit. I see a day, in fact, when parents will be able to send their children off to visit a courtroom without fear that they will have to witness anything inappropriate or unsettling to the eyes or ears of a growing youngster. I see a day in which not only schoolchildren, but mothers holding their babies, will be able to walk through the halls of justice to observe the judges in their wonderful black robes, relieved of the time-consuming burdens of the courtroom, gathering the wisdom of the ages from their thinking and their lawbooks. I see a day when schoolchildren and mothers holding their babies will be able to sit in the jury boxes, just as though a real trial were underway, and in this way experience at firsthand the age-old grandeur of a legal tradition that has come down to us in all its glory from Anglo-Saxon times.
But of course we cannot undo overnight the judicial mess that we have inherited from the previous administration, and the thirty-five administrations before his. As a result, even as we are winding down the trial system that has caused this country so much expense and confusion, we have still to deal in the courtroom with the likes of Charles Curtis Flood and his team of attorneys.
Now fortunately two different courts have already found against Charles Curtis Flood in his attempt to destroy the game of baseball. These decisions made during the tenure in office of this administration, have gone a long way, I am sure, to restoring the confidence of a public only recently so disappointed by the verdict reached in Mayor John Lancelot’s New York, to free thirteen members of the Black Panther Party.
Of course I have no more right to tell the Mayor of New York how to run his city than he has to tell me how to run the country or the world. But I must, in all honesty, say that I was as startled as the great majority of Americans, first by that verdict, and second, by Mayor Lancelot’s decision, following the verdict, to allow these thirteen Black Panthers to resume their political activities in his city. All I can say as President is that I trust this will not become the model for the treatment of the acquitted in other cities around the country.
Now I have no doubt that if the Mayor of New York were in my place he would not hesitate to declare a hands-off policy where Charles Curtis Flood is concerned. If self-confessed Black Panthers are to be left free to stalk the streets that are no longer safe for our wives and daughters, why bother to bring to justice a man who has not confessed to being a Black Panther? So, I am afraid, the logic would run, if another man were in my shoes.
But so long as he is not, so long as I am the duly elected President of the United States, I can assure you that there will be no mollycoddling of any fugitive who, after twice being prevented by the courts from destroying baseball and undermining the youth of this country, decided that he, Charles Curtis Flood, had had enough of law and order and life within the system. There will be no mollycoddling of a man who undertook to subvert and corrupt the youth of this country by the most insidious means imaginable, with a recklessness and a viciousness equalled not even by the most hardened drug pushers and the most loathsome pornographers.
No, it was not to the dissolute, unprincipled and overindulged on our college campuses that Charles Curtis Flood turned with his plan to destroy America. Nor was this yet another call to violence to the dropout and hippies and flag-defilers of the left.
Who then, you ask, did he seek to corrupt? The answer, my fellow Americans, is the Boy Scouts of America. Not only did Charles Curtis Flood incite them to riot, and tamper wit
h their morals, but what is even worse, it was he and he alone who drove the Boy Scouts headlong into the tragedy that occurred here yesterday in Washington, D.C.
Surely the great majority of Americans will agree that it is a tragedy in every sense of the word when the brave fighting men of our Army are called upon to risk their lives in the streets of Washington, D.C, instead of in a foreign country. But that is what happened here in the nation’s capital, when, through a long day and a long night, our brave soldiers, armed only with loaded rifles, fixed bayonets, tear-gas canisters and gas masks, faced a mob of Boy Scouts, numbering nearly ten thousand.
I am sure you all know by now the nature of the chants and the songs that these ten thousand Boy Scouts were singing in the streets of the nation’s capital. I am sure you are familiar with the kind of placards they were waving before the television cameras. I do not intend to repeat to you the wording of those posters. It should suffice to say that they did justice to the language and interests of Charles Curtis Flood, whose favorite city, according to his own writings, is Copenhagen, Denmark, the pornography capital of the world.
The posters are presently in the hands of the FBI, whose laboratories have already begun the painstaking job of fingerprinting each and every poster, and submitting them to blood tests so as to determine the correlation between the obscenity printed on an individual poster and the blood type of the Boy Scout bearing the poster containing those objectionable words. If such correlations can be established with a reasonable degree of accuracy—and we think they can—it will of course be of great assistance to our law enforcement agencies. Under our program of “preventive detention,” we will be able to round up those with suspect blood types before such demonstrations as this even get under way, thus preventing them from violating community standards of decency, and the ordinary everyday rules of courtesy, decorum and good taste that are sacred to the great majority of Americans.
As you all know from the headlines, of the approximately ten thousand Boy Scouts who assembled here in Washington during the two-day uprising to threaten the lives of our brave fighting men, it was necessary to kill only three in order to maintain law and order. That breaks down to one and one-half Scouts dead per diem, while nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight and a half Scouts continued to live full and active lives the first day, and nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven the second.
Now I would think that by anyone’s standards, a mortality rate in a crisis of this kind of .0003 is a wonderful tribute to the very great restraint with which we were able to confront what could have been a terrible tragedy for our soldiers. Certainly it should give solace to all of those who detest bloodshed as much as I do, and put the lie once and for all to the vicious charge that it was the military and not the Scouts who were responsible for the violence. On the other hand, I think the fact that we did have three Scouts dead by the end of the second day is a good indication of the necessary firmness with which we always try to balance off our very great restraint.
Of course, I am sure the great majority of Americans realize that there is always going to be a small, vocal minority of cavilers and critics, who are never going to be satisfied, no matter how perfectly balanced the restraint and the firmness with which we deal with civil disruptions of this kind. Even if there should be only one person dead over a two-day period, or as little as half a person a day; even if over a two-day period there should be only one person who is slightly maimed—these critics will begin to talk as though the tragedy wasn’t the overwhelming danger to which tens of thousands of our brave soldiers were subjected, but the maiming of one person out of only ten thousand, and what is more than likely, an out-of-towner who, unlike our brave soldiers, had only to remain at home to stay out of harm’s way.
Well, to this small vocal minority, let me make one thing very clear.
I too have great sympathy for the families of the three Boy Scouts who were killed here in Washington. I am a father, and I know full well how important children can be to a man’s career; and incidentally, in that connection, a wife. As a matter of fact, my wife and I and our wonderful children had condolence messages prepared for far more than the three who died here, and were prepared to dispatch them on a moment’s notice. Throughout the crisis I was in continuous touch with the morgue here in Washington, as I am with the morgues around the country, by a special “hot line,” and had it been necessary to wire not three, but three thousand such messages, I assure you that my family and I would have seen that those words of sympathy had left the White House before the bodies were even cold. I am proud to say that my wife and my daughters were prepared to work far into the night in order that families less fortunate than our own might have some small comfort in their hour of need. Nor do we intend to forget these people when Christmas time rolls around.
But let there be no mistake about it: quick on the trigger as I may be with compassion for the innocent families, I am equally swift in my condemnation of these three guilty Scouts. And I say “guilty” because if they were not guilty they would not be dead. That is not the kind of country we live in.
Now I know there are those apologists for the Boy Scout uprising who have attempted to arouse sympathy for the three guilty Scouts by pointing out that while one had attained the rank of Eagle Scout, the other two were “only” Tenderfoots. If pressed they will concede that an Eagle Scout is a highly trained and disciplined youngster, capable of functioning as a guerrilla insurrectionist because of the various survival tactics he has had to master in order to attain his key position in the Scout infrastructure. But what of the two Tenderfoots, they ask. How could two little Tenderfoots pose so serious a threat to our national security as to make it necessary to kill them?
Well, let me answer that question, my fellow Americans, by showing you the weapons that were found concealed, hanging from the belts, of these “two little Tenderfoot Scouts” when their bodies were searched by the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, the Military Police, the Shore Patrol, the Attorney General’s office, the Capitol Police Force, the Police Force of the District of Columbia, as well as by law enforcement officers’ summoned from around the country, to guarantee the probity and thoroughness of this investigation.
Now I am sure that we all still remember with a sad and mournful heart the 6.5-millimeter Italian carbine rifle purchased for $12.78 from a Chicago mailorder house by President Charisma’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with James Earl Ray and Charles Curtis Flood. In the mail-order catalog that rifle probably did not appear to be any more sophisticated than the weapon I am about to show you now, or any more capable of changing the course of history. And yet none of us will ever forget the impact it had upon President Charisma’s career and my own. I know that to many of you this object that I am holding in my right hand looks as innocent and harmless as that $12.78 mailorder rifle undoubtedly did in the mail-order catalog. But let there be no mistake about it, it is just as effective, if not more so.
Firstly: whereas the rifle that destroyed President Charisma’s political career measured forty inches overall, this knife that I hold here in my hand measures, with the blades sheathed, only four and five-eighths inches. This makes it an ideal weapon to use in public places, as opposed to a forty-inch rifle which might arouse suspicion on a school bus, or in a supermarket, or any of the hundred places where you and your loved ones find yourselves in the course of an ordinary day.
Secondly: it is a far more vicious weapon than an ordinary rifle and, needless to say, does not even begin to approach in humaneness a simple thousand-pound bomb, let alone a nuclear explosive. As one who was raised as a Quaker, you know, I have a particularly strong interest in being humane. That is why, since coming to office, I have done everything I can to get Congress to appropriate money for a weapons system that would make us number one in the world in that department. Surely there is no reason why a country with our scientific and technological resources cannot develop weapons with destruc
tive powers so total and immediate as to guarantee to every man, woman and child on this planet what until now has been reserved for those few fortunate people who die in their sleep, and that is the comfort of passing unknowingly from this life into the next. Now that is the type of death people have dreamed about for themselves since time immemorial, and let it not be recorded that Trick E. Dixon lacked the moral and spiritual idealism to address himself to that dream.
But now let me ask you this, my fellow Americans. What could be further from the kind of painless death for men everywhere that this administration is working so hard to bring about, than that which is experienced by the victim of a knife such as I am holding in my hand? Not only is it necessary to deliver as many as five to ten horrifyingly painful stab wounds in order to kill somebody with a weapon this small, but in order to accomplish this the murderer must exhibit a sustained viciousness, a cold-blooded determination to kill, that, I assure you, would shock and appall a combat-tried B-52 bomber pilot no less than it does you and me.
And let me tell you how they manage that sustained viciousness: Unlike our pilots in Vietnam, whose satisfaction consists solely in getting the job done as quickly and thoroughly as possible, and who have no interest at all in whatever cries and moans may happen to arise from those who do not die instantly in the blast, the people who use weapons like these are obviously sadists of the sort who enjoy watching the blood run out of their victims, and, incidentally in that connection, hearing the cries of a person in physical torment Why else would they use a weapon that takes up to half an hour to do the sort of job our pilots accomplish in a split second, and without the groaning and the gore?
Now let’s look at the knife closely. I am going to open out the blades one by one, and describe to you the purpose and function of each. You should not be misled by its four-and-five-eighths-inch exterior into imagining that it is simply an instrument designed to kill. Like so many of the weapons carried by guerrilla revolutionaries around the world, it has multiple uses, of which murder of the agonizing and sadistic variety is but one.