01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 |
Arrested, Questioned, and Charged
Most of the people who had been brought to that police station with Mailer were released. But after many hours of waiting in a cell, word finally came through to Mailer that he was to remain in prison for at least a night. He resigned himself to his fate, and chose a bunk. Mailer recounts these events in the third person, but they are based on his own experiences. He found himself next to Noam Chomsky, a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity. Friends. . . had wanted him [Mailer] to meet Chomsky at a party the summer before-- he had been told that Chomsky, although barely thirty, was considered a genius at mit for his new contributions to linguistics but Mailer had arrived at the party too late. Now, as he bunked down next to Chomsky, Mailer looked for some way to open a discussion on linguistics he had an amateur's interest in the subject, no, rather, he had a mad inventor's interest, with several wild theories in his pocket which he had never been able to exercise since he could not understand what he read in linguistics books. . . [Mailer] cleared his throat now once or twice, turned over in bed, looked for a preparatory question, and recognized that he and Chomsky might share a cell for months, and be the best and most civilized of cellmates, before the mood would be proper to strike the first note of inquiry into what was obviously the tightly packed conceptual coils of Chomsky's intellections. Instead they chatted mildly of the day, the arrests (Chomsky had also been arrested with Dellinger), and of when they would get out. Chomsky by all odds a dedicated teacher seemed uneasy at the thought of missing class on Monday. (180)One month later, Dr. Spock, along with Coffin, Marcus Raskin, Michael Ferber, and Mitchell Goodman, were all indicted by a grand jury. They were charged with advocating resistance to the draft law, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Chomsky, in Radical Priorities, doesn't fail to point out the absurdity of this case. "As becomes perfectly obvious when you look at the latest government list of co-conspirators, of whom I am one, this is a group of people who did exactly one thing in common: namely, they appeared at a press conference on October 2 to state independently their views against the war and in support of resistance, and then separated, many of them never to meet again" (193). It is, of course, ironic, given the events of the time, that this peaceful gathering intended to demonstrate resistance to authority and to inform the public about the reality of the war was considered a conspiracy. It is even more ironic that it was these specific individuals who were singled out for their participation. "But this is the government's concept of `conspiracy," Chomsky remarks, "and it's quite possible, I don't know if it's likely, that a number of them will face several years in jail for their participation in the conspiracy of which this was the central event and in fact the only event that unites all conspirators" (Radical Priorities 193- 94). Chomsky's own involvement with the indictment stemmed from his having signed a statement, along with 560 others (including Norman Mailer), "implicating themselves legally to aid and abet draft resisters" (Radical Priorities 286).
The trial of Spock and the others attracted national media attention
and, according to Chomsky, the entire focus of the news reports was
purposefully misdirected. "The idea that Spock and Coffin were
involved in forming Resist was invented by the FBI, and lent a comical touch to the Spock-Coffin
trial. In fact, Ben Spock and Bill Coffin were very decent and honest
people, who were willing to appear at our press conferences and
meetings to try to draw some press and a crowd. Neither of them had
anything to do with Resist, apart from that" (31 Mar. 1995). The FBI had overestimated the role of Spock and Coffin,
but they nonetheless put the two on trial. Chomsky maintains that they
initiated the proceedings "by announcing publicly that I was next in
line, and if the FBI had even a clue as to what
was going on, I would have been a defendant, not a named
co-conspirator, at that trial and Spock and Coffin would have been
reading about it in the papers. But one can only speculate about what
would have happened" (13 Feb. 1996). |
