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frame - I told
him
that his opposition was a false one, that I saw
no conflict between my class and concern for the Panthers, that a
mature person had always to bear multiple commitments, that
if
we
were to build a new world, he could learn something about it from
attention to Nerval. I had to get that much said. Then we talked
about the Panthers.
Our debate was all about the possibility of a fair trial. It came
through to me - as it had begun to do with the Chicago Conspiracy
trial- how much my generation had been determined by the War–
ren Court, how much we looked to the judicial branch as our best
guarantee of existential freedom in a country with so many pres–
sures to unfreedom. A younger generation of radicals had no such
image
of
the courts. At their worst, they made no distinction be–
tween John Mitchell and the presiding judge in New Haven, seeing
them as part of the same infernal machinery. I argued with them;
I was and still am an example of what Tom Hayden would call
the fair-trial hangup, in that I couldn't conclude that "the facts"
were irrelevant. But I too had to admit radical skepticism about the
Panthers receiving a fair trial. The actions of the police and the
FBI had created a pattern of nationwide repression that automatically
subverted justice; the origi.nal sin was theirs. How, at the very least,
could an unbiased jury be put together? And how could any verdict
rendered on Bobby Seale not seem political to some part of Amer–
ica? The institution began to look inadequate to the problem.
This
discrepancy would be replayed in many forms in the days to come.
By the end of the class, it was apparent to me that the faculty
should act, should at least express its concern and give it a form
that could usefully channel energies and fears. There happened to
be a Yale College faculty meeting that afternoon. When we finally
got through other business to the crisis, two proposals were made: a
resolution whereby the faculty affirmed its concern for the constitu–
tional rights of the defendants, another establishing a Yale watch–
dog committee on the trial. Neither was voted: they seemed too much
in violation of university neutrality. This simply to give a measure
of how far consciousness would progress in the next week.
There followed a weekend of intense
if
somewhat undirected
activity for those faculty who thought that something
shoul~
be done,
