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Afterword Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), late in his life, leafing through an early work he had written (A Tale of the Tub), exclaimed, “What a wit I had then!” When I look back at my Harrisburg book forty years later I realize not that I was once so full of wit but how I was certainly the right author for the right subject. I was, in the early 1970s, a friend of Diane Schulder (now Abrams), who was one of the lawyers involved in the case. Diane is Jewish and I was raised Catholic, and she kept asking me about her Catholic clients and their motives. I would supply answers, and she kept saying, “You should write a book about them,” and I did. The book, as they say, was well received. I was only twenty-six when I wrote it, quite naive, though I didn’t think so at the time, and its reception then didn’t surprise me. You write a good book and people pay attention was my attitude. What could be strange about that? Well, at the time, the New York Times Book Review was edited by John Leonard, now, unfortunately, deceased. Leonard was interested in books concerning the Vietnam War, then being waged at high heat, including books about the antiwar movement that was trying to bring the war to a halt. So the TBR gave my book, and another volume on the trial, a substantial review by Garry Wills. And, eventually, the Times put my book on its “New and Recommended” list and in its notable books of the year compilation . Garry and I had sat side by side for a number of weeks in the windowless courtroom in Harrisburg; we were in a small pool of writers who weren’t writing on daily deadline. We were writing for so-called journals of opinion and were an eccentric bunch: Garry, myself, Francine du Plessix Gray, Paul Cowan (also, alas, deceased), and Ed Zuckerman, editor of the Harrisburg Independent Press, a creation of the Harrisburg defense committee. 265 I had never taken a journalism course, and for my first week in the courtroom, I just sat and listened. There was a long period of jury selection going on. It is often remarked that the Harrisburg case was the first time experts were employed by the defense to study the jury pool to help select a favorable panel. I don’t recall a team of experts around, but there was Jay Schulman, a rumpled sociology professor, on the scene; nonetheless, he did spawn a lucrative new business, though Jay seemed to be working on his own (he may have shanghaied a few of his students ), a large, bearded, bear of a guy, with an easy laugh and definite opinions. But the jury still ended up with some ringers. I knew I was there to do journalism, but I thought of myself coming out of the eighteenth-, nineteenth-century essay tradition, someone in the mode of, say, William Hazlitt. The Harrisburg trial, for the three months it went on, was the biggest thing happening in the States, so newspapers and magazines had sent their best people to cover it. Homer Bigart, the famous World War II reporter, Champ Clark, and other senior members of the country’s press corps were there. It was quite an education for me, being a member of that distinguished corps of forty members of the national press. Finally, I noticed that everyone else in our section of the courtroom seemed to be taking notes, so I found a stationery store and bought a number of stenographer’s notebooks. Each had an ad for pantyhose as the first sheet of paper. That was a sign of the times. I filled over fifty of them. Back in 1972 I was living on roughly $300 a month. That now seems fantastical (and it seemed fantastical then, too.) A $2,000 advance from my publisher, Thomas Y. Crowell, funded me. I had bought a trench coat before I left New York and wore it more or less every day, looking like my idea of a foreign correspondent; and I had found a hundred-dollar apartment downtown within walking distance of Harrisburg’s federal building. Those were the days. I was two years out of graduate school and had been living on a tiny fellowship at the newly begun Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, from which I bolted in January and to which I returned...

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