The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left: 40th Anniversary Edition

Chapter 2: Jury Selection

Jury Selection Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. -F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby 1 "You're number thirteen," I am told, coming up to the short queue. It is six thirty in the morning and a cobalt blue band rings the horizon. "Someone has been here since four." "Get his name; it should be recorded for posterity." "You're number fourteen," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the number-giver, tells another. "Two more to go; then that's it. The press section of the courtroom can hold only forty-two people." Those who were not given permanent seats were left to line up to get in on a first-come-first-served basis, for the remaining six­ teen unassigned seats. Hence, this dawn shape-up of the Fourth Estate. "When they open the doors to give us our passes, let's all keep our places; if we can't maintain order and a gentlemanly spirit, who can?" Last Monday, the prcss scction was sparsely filled; it was only necessary to wait for court to open. Sketch artists, TV cameramen, commentators, passed the time waiting in the Federal Building 26 JURY SELECTION lunchroom. It looked like the commissary of a film studio. Passes act on the guards like laminated electric messages. Flash one, the elevator starts up. Without it nothing works. "Ten till seven," a crier sang out, reading the clock face on a building across the street. "We can't do this each morning; they couldn't make us do that." Media derelicts waiting in the information soup line. Print addicts hustling their daily fix. "That's it," the Post-Dispatch says as fifteen and sixteen file on. Sixteen, the New York. Daily News, says, "Tell me I'm too late so I can go back to bed." The sky brightens. Early morning passers-by stare at the tail of people hanging out from the Federal Building's front door. Lights come on inside the foyer of the building. Uniformed guards swim up out of the inner darkness like tropical fish peering out of the glass of an aquarium. "Aren't you going to let us in?" They shake their heads somnambulantly. The door cracks open and the end of a long stepladder appears. Two guards carry it like a battering ram. Another follows with a wedge of flag. They lean the ten-foot ladder against an aluminum flagpole anchored to a marble ledge. One guard holds the ladder steady. The other struggles on his perch to fastcn the flag, while it covers most of the ladder like a dustcloth. The original location of the tie-off cleat has been moved up­ wards. Two bolts that once held it where a standing man could reach it were still there, but it had been raised, so that a ladder is required. The flag jerks up the pole. Two reporters simultane­ ously begin to hum "America the Beautiful." The hoisting completed, the ladder is removed. The cleat had been raised out of fear that demonstrators would be able to reach it and molest the flag. The reporters fll c in, receive a daily pass, and then disperse as quickly as birds when the crumbs are gone. Two spectators have arrived and begin their own wait till court opens at nine thirty. 27 JURY SELECTION 11 From the floor referred to as the "Penthouse," atop the building at 100 Pine Street that houses the law firm of McNees, Wallace & Nurick, of which J. Thomas Menaker is a partner and out of which the defense lawyers conduct their legal business, all of Harrisburg is visible. At seven thirty in the morning, traffic is an unbroken chain coming across the river on the Taylor bridge. There is a cleft in the mountains that encircle Harrisburg through which the ice-filled Susquehanna flows. Mist is parted by a comb of trees that ridge the hills. Church spires and cupolas are green with the patina of public places. The secular rooftops are low; they and the buildings that support them are Mediter­ ranean colors, pinks, yellows, olives, made luminous by the low winter sun. The room has small tables and two women who will prepare you breakfast. Ramsey Clark and Leonard Boudin are sitting here. They are talking about judges. Clark uses adjectives of ap­ probation like a diamond cutter announcing the number of carats a...