||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
HOW THE SPECTER JURY REALIZED IT WAS HUNG
DOMINIC DUNNE VANITY FAIR - I found it interesting to learn that the
vote, in which 10 of 12 jurors voted to convict, at one time had been
11-1. At that point the single vote to acquit was the foreman's [#10],
but he was able to change the mind of one other juror, No.1. According
to notes taken at the voir dire, No. 10 is a civil engineer, 32, with
three sons, and lives in Alhambra, about a block and a half from Phil's
castle. He said in voir dire that he had once seen Phil in the Target
store in Alhambra. He owns a gun. He had a friend who shot himself, but
it may have been an accident. It is usual but not obligatory for the
foreman to take a vote on the first day of deliberations to see what the
breakdown is before discussion begins. For the first 3 days of the
12-day process, no vote was taken. After the third day, Juror No.9
threatened to ring the buzzer to the judge if a vote was not taken. . .
In an effort to persuade his fellow jurors to convict Spector, and to
avoid the prospect of a hung jury, Juror No.6 gave an impassioned
prosecutorial closing argument. . . They broke for the weekend to think
it over. On Monday, everyone still had the same feeling, except No. 10,
the foreman, which was certainly his right. Juror No.6 asked another
juror if he thought No. 10 could ever be brought around. No, replied the
other juror, who then recounted a story that the foreman had told about
himself during the deliberations. One of his sons, who is very stubborn,
refused to eat his broccoli. His father told him he had to stay at his
place at the table until he had eaten his broccoli. After 12 hours at
the table, the son finally gave in. When they heard this story, the
jurors gave up and told the court that they were hopelessly deadlocked.
So unpopular was the foreman's stand that, after the trial ended, he
received what. he called threats, and has asked the Alhambra police for
protection.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BOOKSHELF
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A MAN YOU COULD LOVE
John Callahan
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - The former running mate of Eugene McCarthy, Callahan
makes his fiction debut with a political drama that collapses under the
weight of minutiae. Mick Whelan, a displaced Connecticut Yankee finds
himself on the slopes of an American volcano, Mt. Loowit, when it erupts
and devastates the landscape and, not incidentally, kills Mick's secret
lover, Rebecca. Rescued by Jonas and Martin, a father and son, who prove
to be uncannily ubiquitous for the rest of the novel, Whelan parleys his
notoriety into a congressional seat. Aided by the novel's narrator, Gabe
Bientempo, Whalen's career develops over the next 17 years along a
populist agenda as he moves from the House to the Senate, where his
oratorical powers and acute knowledge of Roberts Rules of Order gain him
primacy, and position him for a presidential bid.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1555916201/progressiverevieA/
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[Your editor (Sam Smith) recently celebrated with some old friends, the 50th
anniversary of covering his first story in Washington. An excerpt from
his remarks]
Sam Smith
I actually started in journalism more than fifty years ago. At the age
of 13 I began a family newspaper - first handwritten, then typed, that
lasted some 20 issues and dealt with everything with my mother's
predilection for yogurt and wheat germ to UFOs, the H-bomb and the
shocking fact that my youngest sister was allowed to ride her tricycle
in the house while none of her five siblings had been.
I was further encouraged towards the trade when as news director of the
Harvard radio station, I asked a reporter to interview Cambridge city
councilman Alfred E. Velucci which helped cause the only riot of our
time there. Velucci suggested "paving Harvard Yard and making it into a
parking lot" and turning Harvard into a separate state "like the Vatican
in Rome" The story made the front page of the Boston Globe. That
evening, after someone threw a typewriter out of a window at the
Lampoon, 2000 student gathered - quickly taking sides on whether
Harvard should become a separate state like the Vatican in Rome as well
as letting the air out of all four tires of Mayor Eddie Sullivan's car
when he came to quell the disturbance. Clearly journalism was where the
action was.
A few other snapshots from my early days in journalism:
Being one of a handful of broadcast news reporters in town with battery
operated tape recorder - so new that the engineers union wanted to send
someone out with us to make them work.
Learning in a matter of months that America wasn't quite as I had been
taught, as I covered the Jimmy Hoffa, U2 and TV game show stories as
well as some of the first sit-ins and civil rights filibusters.
Interviewing Louis Armstrong in a hotel room on 16th Street and John F
Kennedy right after he announced for president.
Working for Roll Call newspaper, where editor Sid Yudain let me be the
resident poet, including writing a Christmas poem that took a whole page
printed over a background image of Santa Claus and included the names of
all 435 members of the House of Representatives
Covering the attempt by police to shut down DC's only coffee house -
Coffee n Confusion - which was being ably defended by Texas lawyer
Harvey Rosenberg who told us: "Personally, I must admit that I have very
little knowledge of poetry, or the bohemian atmosphere that is found in
Coffee n Confusion. But I have been informed by personages who have
visited Paris that this is the way that numerous writers and poets have
reached the French scene."
Being told by the Saturday Review of Literature that they couldn't run
my ad because my publication was too radical.
Being mistaken at four different demonstrations for an undercover cop,
the one pleasant confrontation being as I sat smoking a pipe near the
Reflecting Pool and a long haired guy next to me said, "FBI?" and I
said, "Nope" and he said "CIA?": and I said nope and he said "Smoke
much" and I said, "Half and Half all day long," and he said "Cool" and
gave me his love beads.
Having half our circulation department in jail and finding needles
hidden behind stacks of papers in the office.
Having one of my advertisers - ex-CIA agent Harry Lunn, then running an
photographic gallery, tell me in the aftermath of the riots that if
anyone burned down his store he was going to burn down my house. And
another advertiser, Len Kirsten of the Emporium telling of a woman who
came in and saw the stack of Gazettes on the floor. "Isn't that a
communist paper" she asked and Len replied, "No, the editor is a
communist but the paper isn't"
Being visited at my office by a 9th precinct cop who would occasionally
drop by to talk politics. Officer Donald Graham listened to me better in
those days than he would later on.
Taking part in a day-long Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
boycott of DC Transit buses.
After my article on the action appeared, having the local chair of SNCC
- another 20 something named Marion Barry - come over to my apartment to
seek help dealing with the press.
Later, sitting in the SNCC headquarters as Stokely Carmichael announced
that whites like me were no longer welcome in the civil rights movement.
Getting a call from an angry young guy who was working in a car wash,
complaining about me running one of his photos without credit. I pointed
out that it had been sent with a news release from a community
organization and added, "You wanna be a real photographer? I'll tell you
how. Get a rubber stamp marked 'Photo by Roland Freeman. All rights
reserved" and I won't run any more of your friggin' photos without
credit." Two weeks later, Roland became the Gazette's photo editor later
becoming an associate of Magnum, author of a number of books, the first
photographer to get a fellowship from the NEH and subsequently three
from the NEA, the most recent last June.
Sitting in our smoky living room, watching the TV coverage of the riots,
including what was going at that moment just four blocks north of us on
H Street. Going the next morning through the neighborhood and feeling -
as troops marched past the rubble - like I was in World War II Europe.
Two of the four major riot strips were in our circulation area - 150
businesses and 52 homes in our neighborhood had been damaged and things
would never be the same.
By the time all this had happened I had just hit 30 years of age. I
thought, this is kind of an interesting life and so I just kept going.
It has been fascinating and fun but doing something different in this
town can also be quite lonely. In my case, some people have taken it
personally, as though I did what I did simply to annoy them. Or as
though I were a mugger of the mind, come to rob them of that most
precious possession: comfortable certainty. But it was really more like
Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:
"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take
up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances."
In a nation ablaze with struggles and divisions, we are too often forced
to choose between being a participant in the arson or a member of the
volunteer fire department. But, as best as I can tell, my real impetus
has not been so much duty, anger or virtue - but a truly manic,
grandiose and cockeyed optimism - a child's dreams and an adult's faith
pounding tide after tide on the rocks of reality, thinking that maybe
this time I'll float off.
Saul Alinsky was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his
values as he made his way through the church, "That's easy," replied
Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be a cardinal or a
priest."
Mark Plotkin started his interview with me on WTOP this way: "How do you
respond to those who say you're just outrageous, off the wall, beyond
normal?" Here's part of what I told him: If you go back and read what I
wrote ten, twenty or thirty years ago it's hard to see what the problem
was. The FBI, in a rare of moment of literary eloquence labeled those
who fought in the Spanish Civil War as "premature anti-fascists." In
this town timing is everything. Phil Hart once described the Senate as
place that does things 20 years after it should have. I think I was like
a bad comedian; I knew the punch lines, I just couldn't get the timing
right. I came to think of myself not as a radical, but as a moderate of
an era that had yet to come.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Washington's Most Unofficial Source
1312 18th St NW (5th Floor)
Washington DC 20036 202-835-0770
Editor: Sam Smith
REVIEW E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
REVIEW INDEX: http://prorev.com/
LATEST HEADLINES: http://prorev.com
NEWS BY TOPIC: http://prorev.com/heads.htm
UNDERNEWS: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
LATEST HEADLINES & INDEX: http://prorev.com
UNDERNEWS: http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm
XML FEED: http://prorev.com/feed.xml
FREE UPDATES VIA TOPICA: prorev-subscribe@topica.com
OR JUST SEND NAME & EMAIL TO: mailto:news@prorev.com
HOW THE SPECTER JURY REALIZED IT WAS HUNG
DOMINIC DUNNE VANITY FAIR - I found it interesting to learn that the
vote, in which 10 of 12 jurors voted to convict, at one time had been
11-1. At that point the single vote to acquit was the foreman's [#10],
but he was able to change the mind of one other juror, No.1. According
to notes taken at the voir dire, No. 10 is a civil engineer, 32, with
three sons, and lives in Alhambra, about a block and a half from Phil's
castle. He said in voir dire that he had once seen Phil in the Target
store in Alhambra. He owns a gun. He had a friend who shot himself, but
it may have been an accident. It is usual but not obligatory for the
foreman to take a vote on the first day of deliberations to see what the
breakdown is before discussion begins. For the first 3 days of the
12-day process, no vote was taken. After the third day, Juror No.9
threatened to ring the buzzer to the judge if a vote was not taken. . .
In an effort to persuade his fellow jurors to convict Spector, and to
avoid the prospect of a hung jury, Juror No.6 gave an impassioned
prosecutorial closing argument. . . They broke for the weekend to think
it over. On Monday, everyone still had the same feeling, except No. 10,
the foreman, which was certainly his right. Juror No.6 asked another
juror if he thought No. 10 could ever be brought around. No, replied the
other juror, who then recounted a story that the foreman had told about
himself during the deliberations. One of his sons, who is very stubborn,
refused to eat his broccoli. His father told him he had to stay at his
place at the table until he had eaten his broccoli. After 12 hours at
the table, the son finally gave in. When they heard this story, the
jurors gave up and told the court that they were hopelessly deadlocked.
So unpopular was the foreman's stand that, after the trial ended, he
received what. he called threats, and has asked the Alhambra police for
protection.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BOOKSHELF
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A MAN YOU COULD LOVE
John Callahan
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - The former running mate of Eugene McCarthy, Callahan
makes his fiction debut with a political drama that collapses under the
weight of minutiae. Mick Whelan, a displaced Connecticut Yankee finds
himself on the slopes of an American volcano, Mt. Loowit, when it erupts
and devastates the landscape and, not incidentally, kills Mick's secret
lover, Rebecca. Rescued by Jonas and Martin, a father and son, who prove
to be uncannily ubiquitous for the rest of the novel, Whelan parleys his
notoriety into a congressional seat. Aided by the novel's narrator, Gabe
Bientempo, Whalen's career develops over the next 17 years along a
populist agenda as he moves from the House to the Senate, where his
oratorical powers and acute knowledge of Roberts Rules of Order gain him
primacy, and position him for a presidential bid.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1555916201/progressiverevieA/
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[Your editor (Sam Smith) recently celebrated with some old friends, the 50th
anniversary of covering his first story in Washington. An excerpt from
his remarks]
Sam Smith
I actually started in journalism more than fifty years ago. At the age
of 13 I began a family newspaper - first handwritten, then typed, that
lasted some 20 issues and dealt with everything with my mother's
predilection for yogurt and wheat germ to UFOs, the H-bomb and the
shocking fact that my youngest sister was allowed to ride her tricycle
in the house while none of her five siblings had been.
I was further encouraged towards the trade when as news director of the
Harvard radio station, I asked a reporter to interview Cambridge city
councilman Alfred E. Velucci which helped cause the only riot of our
time there. Velucci suggested "paving Harvard Yard and making it into a
parking lot" and turning Harvard into a separate state "like the Vatican
in Rome" The story made the front page of the Boston Globe. That
evening, after someone threw a typewriter out of a window at the
Lampoon, 2000 student gathered - quickly taking sides on whether
Harvard should become a separate state like the Vatican in Rome as well
as letting the air out of all four tires of Mayor Eddie Sullivan's car
when he came to quell the disturbance. Clearly journalism was where the
action was.
A few other snapshots from my early days in journalism:
Being one of a handful of broadcast news reporters in town with battery
operated tape recorder - so new that the engineers union wanted to send
someone out with us to make them work.
Learning in a matter of months that America wasn't quite as I had been
taught, as I covered the Jimmy Hoffa, U2 and TV game show stories as
well as some of the first sit-ins and civil rights filibusters.
Interviewing Louis Armstrong in a hotel room on 16th Street and John F
Kennedy right after he announced for president.
Working for Roll Call newspaper, where editor Sid Yudain let me be the
resident poet, including writing a Christmas poem that took a whole page
printed over a background image of Santa Claus and included the names of
all 435 members of the House of Representatives
Covering the attempt by police to shut down DC's only coffee house -
Coffee n Confusion - which was being ably defended by Texas lawyer
Harvey Rosenberg who told us: "Personally, I must admit that I have very
little knowledge of poetry, or the bohemian atmosphere that is found in
Coffee n Confusion. But I have been informed by personages who have
visited Paris that this is the way that numerous writers and poets have
reached the French scene."
Being told by the Saturday Review of Literature that they couldn't run
my ad because my publication was too radical.
Being mistaken at four different demonstrations for an undercover cop,
the one pleasant confrontation being as I sat smoking a pipe near the
Reflecting Pool and a long haired guy next to me said, "FBI?" and I
said, "Nope" and he said "CIA?": and I said nope and he said "Smoke
much" and I said, "Half and Half all day long," and he said "Cool" and
gave me his love beads.
Having half our circulation department in jail and finding needles
hidden behind stacks of papers in the office.
Having one of my advertisers - ex-CIA agent Harry Lunn, then running an
photographic gallery, tell me in the aftermath of the riots that if
anyone burned down his store he was going to burn down my house. And
another advertiser, Len Kirsten of the Emporium telling of a woman who
came in and saw the stack of Gazettes on the floor. "Isn't that a
communist paper" she asked and Len replied, "No, the editor is a
communist but the paper isn't"
Being visited at my office by a 9th precinct cop who would occasionally
drop by to talk politics. Officer Donald Graham listened to me better in
those days than he would later on.
Taking part in a day-long Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
boycott of DC Transit buses.
After my article on the action appeared, having the local chair of SNCC
- another 20 something named Marion Barry - come over to my apartment to
seek help dealing with the press.
Later, sitting in the SNCC headquarters as Stokely Carmichael announced
that whites like me were no longer welcome in the civil rights movement.
Getting a call from an angry young guy who was working in a car wash,
complaining about me running one of his photos without credit. I pointed
out that it had been sent with a news release from a community
organization and added, "You wanna be a real photographer? I'll tell you
how. Get a rubber stamp marked 'Photo by Roland Freeman. All rights
reserved" and I won't run any more of your friggin' photos without
credit." Two weeks later, Roland became the Gazette's photo editor later
becoming an associate of Magnum, author of a number of books, the first
photographer to get a fellowship from the NEH and subsequently three
from the NEA, the most recent last June.
Sitting in our smoky living room, watching the TV coverage of the riots,
including what was going at that moment just four blocks north of us on
H Street. Going the next morning through the neighborhood and feeling -
as troops marched past the rubble - like I was in World War II Europe.
Two of the four major riot strips were in our circulation area - 150
businesses and 52 homes in our neighborhood had been damaged and things
would never be the same.
By the time all this had happened I had just hit 30 years of age. I
thought, this is kind of an interesting life and so I just kept going.
It has been fascinating and fun but doing something different in this
town can also be quite lonely. In my case, some people have taken it
personally, as though I did what I did simply to annoy them. Or as
though I were a mugger of the mind, come to rob them of that most
precious possession: comfortable certainty. But it was really more like
Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:
"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take
up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances."
In a nation ablaze with struggles and divisions, we are too often forced
to choose between being a participant in the arson or a member of the
volunteer fire department. But, as best as I can tell, my real impetus
has not been so much duty, anger or virtue - but a truly manic,
grandiose and cockeyed optimism - a child's dreams and an adult's faith
pounding tide after tide on the rocks of reality, thinking that maybe
this time I'll float off.
Saul Alinsky was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his
values as he made his way through the church, "That's easy," replied
Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be a cardinal or a
priest."
Mark Plotkin started his interview with me on WTOP this way: "How do you
respond to those who say you're just outrageous, off the wall, beyond
normal?" Here's part of what I told him: If you go back and read what I
wrote ten, twenty or thirty years ago it's hard to see what the problem
was. The FBI, in a rare of moment of literary eloquence labeled those
who fought in the Spanish Civil War as "premature anti-fascists." In
this town timing is everything. Phil Hart once described the Senate as
place that does things 20 years after it should have. I think I was like
a bad comedian; I knew the punch lines, I just couldn't get the timing
right. I came to think of myself not as a radical, but as a moderate of
an era that had yet to come.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Washington's Most Unofficial Source
1312 18th St NW (5th Floor)
Washington DC 20036 202-835-0770
Editor: Sam Smith
REVIEW E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
REVIEW INDEX: http://prorev.com/
LATEST HEADLINES: http://prorev.com
NEWS BY TOPIC: http://prorev.com/heads.htm
UNDERNEWS: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
LATEST HEADLINES & INDEX: http://prorev.com
UNDERNEWS: http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm
XML FEED: http://prorev.com/feed.xml
FREE UPDATES VIA TOPICA: prorev-subscribe@topica.com
OR JUST SEND NAME & EMAIL TO: mailto:news@prorev.com
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