A Generation on Trial by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke [Cooke, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, True Crime, Espionage, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism
ISBN: 9781497639966
Google: mjgaBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-08-19T04:16:39+00:00

* And at various times in the Trials as Clytie and Claudia.

* Her own home there, that is.

* It had no gilt eagle; that was another mirror.

* This was to be a great issue with the Government in the Second Trial. See page 291.

THE REBUTTALS

IT is one of the penalties of the comparatively loose rules of evidence in American courts that they allow counsel to elaborate an issue almost into oblivion; so that instead of deepening in the jury’s minds the main impression you want to leave, there is a good chance that at the end of the trial the jury may be thrashing in so many crosscurrents, none of which seems to lead upstream to the source of the trouble, or downstream into the broad ocean of truth, that the jury will seize at the end on any floating log that might bring them safely to shore. I think this is proved by the enormous length of time it takes American juries to make up their minds. And veteran jurymen often say that the first few hours in the juryroom are spent sloughing off the welter of counsel’s rhetoric, the strangling flotsam and jetsam of introduced “evidence.”

This Trial was now in its fifth week, and the jury had taken on that look of bewildered and ghastly neutrality which might have come from what the judge had called their “experience of life” or from the dyspepsia of chronic indecision. The parade of rebuttal witnesses is the last chance for the counsel to rescue the “issues” from the riot of speculation, rhetoric, documentary detail, and hearsay that the American system encourages. And Mr. Murphy was quick to seize it. For his purpose seemed to be to damage three main parts of the disputed testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Hiss: the condition and disposal of the typewriter; Hiss’s relations with the Carnegie Endowment; and his whereabouts during his 1937 summer vacation.

The Government’s first witness was one that many spectators must have longed to hear from: Burnetta Catlett, the sister to whom in the end the typewriter had gone.

She now lived in Detroit, a married woman with four children, a status that emphasized how unreal a mystery this whole affair must have been; for the part she played in it was “in another place and long ago”: in Washington when she was a little girl. She was in high school, living with Dr. Easter, when she got the old typewriter. And she had used it, she said, to type up her homework in biology, hygiene, and chemistry.

“And did you have it fixed before you used it?”

“No.”

When she had finished her schooling, she put the typewriter “in the attic of the house where I was living,” and then she got married and moved to Detroit. Mr. Murphy asked her if before the trial one of the defense lawyers had come out to Detroit to see her. She said he had. And had he asked about the typewriter? Yes, he had. And did he say she would be called as a witness? He said she might be called.

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