The Goldmark Case
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The Goldmark Case

An American Libel Trial

William L. Dwyer

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eBook - ePub

The Goldmark Case

An American Libel Trial

William L. Dwyer

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In 1962 John Goldmark, cattle rancher, Harvard Law School graduate, and distinguished three-term state legislator for a lightly populated area in north central Washington, was overwhelmingly defeated in his bid for reelection. He and his wife, Sally, had been accused of being communists by a small group of right-wing extremists. The Goldmarks sued their accusers for libel and when their case came to trial in the winter of 1963-64 it has become a cause celebre throughout the country. Witnesses of national reputation crossed the country to testify, the eastern press covered the case, and issues of civil liberties, the communist challenge to the values of American society, and the radical right movement were fought out before a rural jury. The charge that the American Civil Liberties Union was a communist front, among other issues, was litigated for the first time. Today the Goldmark trial can still tell us much about democracy, civil liberties, and trial by jury. William Dwyer was the Goldmarks' chief counsel. His gripping story of their nightmare and ultimate vindication is a classic of American trial court history. He provides a vivid picture of the political climate and its effect on everyone involved--plaintiffs, defendants, and counsel for both sides. In addition he gives us a fascinating description of the courtroom drama itself, revealed in the extensively quoted testimony, and a fascinating account of the way trial lawyers plan the strategy of a case: from jury selection, the questioning and cross-examination of witnesses, to final arguments.

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Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9780295806372
Topic
Law
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS a brilliant summer day in 1962 at a far western cattle and wheat ranch. With my family I was visiting John and Sally Goldmark, who owned the place and lived on it. Set on high land in Okanogan County, a remote part of Washington State, the ranch offered a city visitor the chance to exhaust himself with a day’s real work and then enjoy the evening in exceptional company. I was a thirty-three-year-old lawyer from Seattle, and I enjoyed the open country, the hot sun, and our friendship with the Goldmarks.
John, a tall and sun-tanned rancher of forty-five, sat down to talk to me in the ranch house. Through the window we saw horses grazing near the house, a tiny lake shrunk by summer drought, grain bins and barns, a rolling plateau beyond them, and in the far distance, across miles of lower country, the crestline of the Cascade Mountains. The wheat would soon be ripe, and it was a season of heavy work.
It was also approaching election time. Goldmark, a three-term state legislator of great distinction and a respected leader of the Democratic Party, was up for reelection. This was what he wanted to talk about.
He showed me an article from one of the county’s weekly newspapers. It reported his announcement that he would run for reelection. Then, incredibly, the article went on to make a backhanded attack on him as a communist sympathizer. It said that Goldmark, powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was running on a platform “which advocates repeal of the McCarran Act, a law requiring the registration of all Communist Party members”; that his son Charles was a sophomore at Reed College, “the only school in the Northwest where Gus Hall, secretary of the Communist Party, was invited to speak”; and that he was “a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization closely affiliated with the Communist movement in the United States.”
The story was startling in the usually decent atmosphere of Northwest politics. John asked me if it was libelous. I answered that it was; the article charged him with membership in a communist-affiliated organization, and insinuated that he was either a communist or a fellow traveler. Either charge would be libelous in the cold war climate of the United States. To call a man a communist, directly or by innuendo, was to brand him a traitor, a renegade, and a criminal.
Goldmark was undecided about what to do, and our talk passed to other subjects. We did not know that we were at the threshold of a long ordeal for him and his family. Vicious rumors, anonymous mailings, and tape recordings would be used in the coming campaign. A public meeting sponsored by the American Legion’s “subversive activities” unit would be turned against him. Right-wing Republicans would lead the assault in a Democratic primary, and in the September election Goldmark would lose his legislative seat to a fellow Democrat by an overwhelming vote.
The campaign was to be a classic of political slander. Beginning in a distant region of ranchland and wilderness, it would ignite a libel case of national dimension. The Goldmarks would endure months of anxiety and public revelation. The national press would cover their trial, and people would come from all over the United States to testify in the small county courthouse. “The cast of characters,” Time magazine would say, “read like the lineup for a movie.”
But even more than a courtroom cause célèbre, the Goldmark trial would become an arena of combat between conflicting views of loyalty and government, communism and freedom. The country’s recent history—the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Hiss case, McCarthyism, the cold war—would be the battleground. The far right’s claim that a communist conspiracy pervades American life would meet its first full test in court. Sophisticated liberalism would be pitted against flag-waving patriotism, and the issue decided by a jury of rural westerners. In a trial whose content inflamed people’s fear of subversion—and during which the President of the United States would be assassinated by a self-proclaimed Marxist—the American jury system would face a profound challenge.
All this lay ahead as John and I talked at the ranch house. Behind lay a family history which made these events possible.
The Goldmarks were unique in Okanogan County. John was a city-bred easterner with an Ivy League education, an exotic rarity among western farmers. His wife Sally was originally from Brooklyn. Their presence still seemed strange to many of the people among whom they had settled fifteen years earlier.
John had grown up near New York City. His father, an engineer, came of a distinguished family of Austrian Jewish descent. The great Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court was John’s uncle by marriage. His mother, Ruth Ingersoll, a descendant of the eighteenth-century clergyman Jonathan Edwards, had died just after the birth of her only child.
As a boy Goldmark was sent away to Quaker schools. Brilliant and versatile, he finished first in his class at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, and went on to the Harvard Law School, where he served on the Law Review and was graduated with honors in 1941.
Goldmark was an athletic, intense young man, restless, curious, and blessed with a remarkable coolness of judgment. In him a scientist’s logic meshed with a politician’s interests. There was a cutting edge to his personality; demanding of himself, he could be impatient with others. Making money held no attraction for him despite his family’s moderate means. He hoped for a career in public service.
World War II had started in Europe, and Goldmark wanted to enlist. Months before Pearl Harbor, he applied for a commission in the United States Navy. While awaiting word he went to Washington, D.C., to work for the agency later called the Office of Price Administration.
On his first night in the capital, at a friend’s house, John met a young woman named Sally Ringe. Slender, brown-haired, and vivacious, she was a New Deal employee who worked in programs to aid the poor and unemployed. Sally was older than John but her joie de vivre at once banished the difference.
Sally lived with her disabled sister, whom she supported, and another young woman in a house at Accokeek, Maryland. Getting acquainted, she and John found they shared a love for unspoiled countryside. The Maryland place “was in the only real country around Washington,” John recalled later. “It was real farming country.” He became a frequent visitor.
The house was a lively meeting place for a large group of friends: New Deal employees, writers, artists, and teachers. By the spring of 1942 John and Sally were in love and planning to marry. Their courtship was filled with the company of friends and the excitement of wartime Washington. There was much enthusiastic talk of politics. In the Depression’s wake a wide range of views, some of them radical, was current.
Then Goldmark learned a fact of Sally’s life that she had been afraid to tell him. One evening among friends he made an especially harsh remark about communists. “And after that evening was over,” John recalled, “she took me aside and she said, ‘I think you should know that I am a member of the Communist Party.’” Perhaps, Sally suggested, he would not want to marry her after all.
To Goldmark the news was surprising but not shocking, as it would have been ten years later. Being a communist at the time meant being a radical, not a traitor. John himself was a Democrat who, even as a student, had rejected communism during its Depression vogue. But the Communist Party of the time was large and relatively popular, having attracted thousands of members during the 1930s and the wartime alliance with Russia. To John it seemed that Sally, like many other well-meaning people, had made a regrettable but understandable mistake. He thought he knew enough about her to understand why.
Sally Ringe, the fourth daughter of an immigrant German family in Brooklyn, had grown up in a strict Protestant household. She was christened Irma, a name she dropped in childhood. A girl of immense energy and spirit, she hoped to become a doctor, went to the University of Wisconsin, and got through the first year of medical school. Then she could not go on; the Depression wiped out her family’s means.
Returning to New York, Sally was shocked by the mass unemployment, the breadlines, the hardship and despair. Values she had taken for granted all her life seemed to have collapsed. “Unemployment in New York City at that time,” she said later, “was a horrible thing, and I was both curious and appalled at my own lack of information.”
For the first time, her interest turned to public affairs. Out of curiosity she enrolled in classes at the Workers’ School, which was openly run as a communist-sponsored institution in New York. She found a job with an agency that arranged cultural exchange conferences in Latin America. The work took her to Mexico and Cuba, where she saw still worse poverty.
In 1935 Sally moved to Washington and worked first for the WPA, later for the National Youth Administration. She was well liked in her government jobs. “She has a sort of genius for making friends and for creating good atmosphere,” one of her supervisors wrote. She was also the kind of young woman for whom injustice was a call to action. Sally could have been a great social worker of the Jane Addams type, for righting the world’s wrongs was as essential to her as breathing.
The Depression dragged on—no one knew when it would end, if ever—and Germany and Italy sank deeper into fascism. Sally, like millions of others, looked for answers. The American Communist Party of the time was seeking a mass following. Having begun its “Popular Front” policy in the summer of 1935, the Party openly solicited members throughout the country and portrayed itself as a democratic organization. “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism” became its motto.
Sally Ringe accepted at face value the communists’ pledges of full employment and equality at home and effective opposition to fascism abroad. She joined the Party in late 1935, and by the time she met John Goldmark she had paid dues and attended communist study group meetings for nearly six years.
John now answered Sally’s confession by saying he wanted to marry her regardless of her politics. He decided not to ask her to leave the Party or to press for details. Obviously she had an emotional involvement; once married, he thought, she would end it of her own accord.
In the summer of 1942 the Navy called Goldmark to active duty as an apprentice seaman. After several months of training he was commissioned an ensign in December, returned to Washington, and married Sally.
John volunteered for bomb disposal, the hazardous specialty of disarming unexploded enemy missiles. The Navy sent him to school in Washington, then kept him on as an instructor through 1943.
As Goldmark predicted, Sally’s interest in the Communist Party waned quickly after her marriage. “My husband was not sympathetic with it,” she said later. “He was a person with whom I could talk about it. He was both reasonable and logical, and I agreed with him.”
Sally quit the Party after a few months of marriage and never went back. “I had absolutely no feeling about having done anything wrong,” she said, “except that I felt that I had made a mistake.”
Neither of the Goldmarks could foresee how that mistake would injure them years later.
In January 1944 the Goldmarks’ first son, Charles, was born. A few days later John shipped out for the South Pacific. Sally moved with the baby back to New York for the balance of the war.
John served in New Guinea and Australia, and then was loaned to the Army during the reconquest of the Philippines. In the Manila street fighting he disarmed Japanese bombs and shells while under heavy enemy fire. When the fighting moved north he stayed on to disarm live missiles embedded in the earth and ruins.
In the hot Pacific nights John lay awake thinking about his future. City life and working for the OPA had both failed to satisfy him, and he felt a growing urge to move west.
From Cavite he proposed to Sally that they take up a new life after the war as ranchers in the Pacific Northwest. “People from there seem less twisted up in tradition, class, and inhibitions,” he wrote. The way west “will be a break with both our pasts, but … we’ll have more happiness following it than clinging to past enjoyments.”
Why would Goldmark make such a break? As his attackers would say later, a man of his ability and connections could have joined almost any of the East’s leading law firms. Yet it was Goldmark’s nature not only to spurn “past enjoyments” but to carve out for himself the fiercest challenges. He had tasted such challenges in the Navy and could not forgo them for a city career. He sought not recognition and comfort but hardship and adventure.
Sally was willing, and when John came home after the Japanese surrender they packed up a few belongings and their son Charles, not yet two years old, and drove across the country.
The Goldmarks knew no one in the rural West. Near the Columbia River town of White Salmon, Washington, John found work as a hired hand for an orchardist. Running farm machinery, stacking hay, spraying the apple trees, he found he liked the work. A second child, a boy named Peter, was born to the Goldmarks in 1946. John spent days off looking for a place of their own. After a long search he bought a spectacular one: a sprawling, dusty, isolated ranch on a high plateau in Okanogan County. He could have chosen a settled farming community. Instead he had picked one of the most rugged and thinly populated regions in the West.
CHAPTER 2
WASHINGTON STATE is divided by the Cascade Mountains, running north and south from Canada to Oregon. The range forms a high watershed—Mount Rainier, the highest peak, surpasses 14,000 feet—and profoundly determines climate. To the west, along the Pacific and the quiet reaches of Puget Sound, the weather is damp and mild and the land was once thick with evergreen forests. Sizable cities have grown up. The largest, Seattle, is the metropolitan center for two million people.
The rain clouds stop at the Cascades, and eastward stretches a dry country of big hills and brown flatlands, wheat and sagebrush, rough weather and isolation. Through it winds the great Columbia River, now slowed by a series of dams including the famous Grand Coulee. There are few cities; the people tend to distrust city power.
Okanogan (pronounced Okan-ah-gan) County lies east of the Cascade divide and borders Canada on the north. Bigger than the state of Connecticut, it has mountains, timber, and vast range land. John Jacob Astor’s fur company built a fort and trading post there in 1811, at the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia rivers. But settlement did not begin until decades later, and has remained slow. The early settlers let their livestock overgraze and kill off most of the native bunchgrass, admitting the sagebrush in its place. The Indians were placed on reservations.
Today there are still only about 30,000 people, 2,700 of them Indians, in the county. The largest towns are Omak, with about 4,000 people, and Okanogan, the county seat, with 2,300. Two-thirds of the region remains forest land, although “forest” here can mean steep hillsides of scattered pine. Some areas are reached only by horseback. Irrigated fruit orchards line the few rivers and spread to the benchlands, but most of the usable ground is fit only for livestock grazing or wheat.
The Colville Indians, holders of a large domain in the highlands, have leased or sold parts of it to ranchers. John Goldmark found a ranch in Indian country about twenty-five miles from Okanogan by a rutted, climbing road.
The drive from town took an hour and ended on a high and almost treeless plateau. Lava rocks, some as big as small houses, jutted through the thin soil. There were groundhogs, hawks, pheasants, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. Anyone who farmed would be a virtual pioneer. But there was still bunchgrass there, and a chance to raise cattle as well as wheat.
The Goldmarks moved in, set to work, and grew to love the hard country. For the first few years they had time only for ranching. They had to learn quickly all that farm-bred people know from childhood about crops, animals, soils, and machinery. The work was endless: cultivating and harvesting; dragging rocks from the fields; stringing barbed-wire fences; putting up hay; tending the cattle through the wildly changing seasons.
In the winter a freezing wind heaped snow in deep banks, often cutting off the ranch from the outside world. Sally wrote to her sister in the East during a storm on New Year’s Day, 1950: “Long icicles hang from [the cattle’s] nostrils, and their eyes are frozen shut…. John makes the decision that while the sun is at its best at noon, with enticement of hay in the wagon, the cows should be brought in to get the protection of the barn a...

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