PCGUIA 10/PC Guia 10.iso/database/body/spock.txt

Text File | 1996-03-11 | 36KB | 738 lines

1.5
Dr Spock is known throughout the world for his books on
bringing up children, especially his Common Sense Book of
Baby and Child Care (1946). He became a paediatrician in
1933, and from then on his views on child-rearing influenced
several generations of parents. Before Spock, child-rearing
had been over-disciplined; he gave parents the confidence to
listen to their children and to act more instinctively. His
books had a vast influence: he taught that each child should
be treated not according to specific and rigid rules but with
complete flexibility, so allowing the child's innate character to
develop. Critics have since argued that Dr Spock was
responsible for a generation of spoiled children brought up
expecting to have their every wish satisfied instantly. Spock
has lately acknowledged that he may have erred on the side
of flexibility and that perhaps more discipline is required. In
the second half of his life, Spock became intensely involved in
the peace movement, initiated by America's involvement in
Vietnam. Backwoods politicians blamed him for "a generation
of spineless pacifists", and he was charged with conspiracy to
help young men evade conscription. Spock was sentenced to
two years' imprisonment, but won on appeal. He helped form
the People's Party and ran as its candidate for president of
the US. Baby and Child Care, which he revises every 10 years,
has sold more than 30 million copies in more than 30
languages, and is still selling
@
2.2
Dr Spock's somersault has caused less of a sensation in Britain
than the United States, because in British homes his name
first evokes an interstellar traveller with pointed ears on
television rather than the prophet of permissive parenthood
and author of the children's Magna Carta.

His bible of common sense about bringing up children Baby
and Child Care, is widely sold around the world as well as in
America: more than 25 million copies have been bought and
it has been translated into more than 30 languages since it
was published in 1946.  It has the largest sale of such a book
in Britain; but non-Americans seem to use it for its medical
and hygienic advice rather than the psychological guidance
that Dr Spock has now had second thoughts about, after 30
years as the guru of American parents.

Icelandic and Japanese mothers turn to Dr Spock to learn how
to clear their babies' noses.  British consult him for
reassurance about the appropriate time scale for potty
training.  The Russian mother whose baby cries itself blue can
turn to page 212 and read in Russian that this "seldom means
anything except that the baby has that kind of temperament".

It was chiefly American parents who turned to Dr Spock for
emotional and psychological advice about how to deal with
those alarming new strangers in their homes, and it is chiefly
to them that he has now recanted and apologized for
undermining their natural self-assurance.

A leading British child psychiatrist said yesterday: "Spock's
psychological approach caught on more in the States than
here.  There is greater mobility and a greater cultural shift in
the States then here, so people are more likely to feel the
need of someone to tell them what to do.  Spock's psychology
is based on a not very accurate reading of Freud, roughly that
you produce conflicts by repressing developments of all sorts.
Therefore you must never frustrate a child.  Freud, who was
an authoritarian person, would probably not have approved. "

Another consultant psychiatrist said: "Spock has never been
mentioned to me by a parent in all my years of clinical
practice.  But when I was in general practice it was quite
common for mothers, at any rate in places like Hampstead
and Highgate, to refer to Spock and call for the doctor because
Spock said that they should.  I think that the important point
is that what you do as a parent is less important than how
you do it.  A very rejecting permissive parent is no better
than a very rejecting authoritarian parent.  What matters is
the feeling of warmth that a parent gives to his children. "

Dr Hugh Jolly, a consultant paediatrician, said he saw no
reason for Dr Spock to apologize or recant or take upon
himself the troubles of the world.  "I admire him a great deal
and he has done an enormous amount to help parents of all
countries to understand their children.  I never felt that he
was handing down authoritarian wisdom from on high.  But
Americans expect to be led.  Perhaps the way they do things
has made it possible for Spock to lay down the law over
there. "

The good doctor who taught the world to treat children as
people said it himself 30 years ago in the opening chapter of
his famous book: "You know more than you think you do.
Don't be overawed by what the experts say...We know for a
fact that the natural loving care that kindly parents give their
children is a lot more valuable. "  British parents evidently
took him at his word.  As a result, whatever may be
happening in the States, few British parents will be tearing up
their bibles, stained with tears and talcum powder and years
of trial and error.
@
2.3
The vicissitudes of Benjamin Spock's public image have been
curious, and if one day the biography of this conventional,
honest, and humane pediatrician is written they may prove to
be of some sociological interest.  Like royalty, psychoanalysts,
and other public and private parent-figures, he has been a
target for the arbitrary projection of good and bad qualities
that have little to do with his own quite modest
achievements.  John Bowlby is another who has attracted -
and is still attracting - violent hostility for recommending
that children be treated as valuable and fragile during their
early years, but this has been on the basis of a large literary
output rather than one popular handbook of child care.  It
must be saddening for Dr Spock, specialist though he is in
infantile behaviour, to know that most of the praise and
blame he has received has been quite irrelevant to what he
has actually written.

To some mothers of my own generation, reacting against the
rigidities of the mothercraft manuals that ruled their own
childhoods, Dr Spock played the role of motherly father, like
the heroes of those sexy doctor-and-nurse romances.
Mummy's ideas about bringing up children had obviously
been all wrong; Dr Spock was just the Daddy that was needed,
wise, reliable, and altogether nicer to take advice from.  The
subtle aura of envy and spite that pervades maternity wards,
woman-to-woman advice, and everything to do with
procreation was absent from his book: "You know more than
you think you do" was the opening sentence (though some
found, like Priss of The Group, that being spontaneous could
be quite a worry).  If Spock was permissive it was not so
much towards children - he has never advocated that they be
spoilt or idealized - as towards their mothers, who had been
blinded by science and lost their nerve.

It was not until he took up this stand against the Vietnam
War that the stereotype of the apostle of arch permissiveness
gained currency; Spiro Agnew, he points out in his preface to
Bringing Up Children in a Difficult Time, was the most vocal of
the critics who put it about that he was personally
responsible for a whole generation of spineless, pacifist
youngsters.  An outbreak of press nonsense occurred more
recently when Spock was reported to have "recanted" his
soft-centred views on children; in fact, by examining his
conscience over where "we" (the experts) had gone wrong in
their guidance to parents, he was being generous to the
colleagues with whom he allied himself; if there is any book
in this touchy area that is likely to remain relatively immune
to the swings of fashion, it is his own.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead related in her recent
autobiography how in 1939 the only doctor to support her
fight to keep her baby in her hospital room and feed her on
demand was a young firebrand called Ben Spock (she failed
anyway).  The same dangerous fellow was severely told off
by reviewers last year for suggesting that little boys and little
girls often have different interests.  The libertarian who
turned a generation of all-American boys into softies has
become the authoritarian who is preventing the next lot from
realizing their true bisexual potential.  Yet as author of the
century's best-selling American book he devoted a paragraph
there to an elaborate apology for calling the baby "he"
because he needed the feminine pronoun to refer to the
mother; at the same time there are enough references in it to
high moral ideals to satisfy the most conservative.  Father-
figures can't win.

This third book is a predictably sensible collection of
magazine articles, more general than the down-to-earth Baby
and Child Care and with more emphasis on later childhood
and adolescence.  It is a bit fuzzier, less crisp, than classic
Spock, but has a nice enlightened elderly squareness and, of
course, a total lack of jargon or condescension.  I turned to "Do
Parents Cause the Problems?" to see how he deals with the
sixty-four dollar double bind (everything depends on our
doing things right, but we make it worse if we blame
ourselves for doing them wrong).  He manages it fairly well,
when one considers how much easier it is to write
interestingly about threadworms or Adding Solids.  There is
an excellent and useful chapter called "Idealism is as Real as
Materialism".  "Parents should be respectful of their son's and
daughter's inhibitions about sexuality and their inclination to
idealize the opposite sex."  Whatever next?
@
2.4
"I still say to parents: don't doubt yourselves. "  The words
have a familiar and comforting echo, and the tone has
changed not at all in four decades.  Dr Benjamin Spock, the
paediatrician whose views have shaped the young lives of a
generation (or two), is alive and well and living for the most
part these days on his boat off the Virgin Islands.

He is the grand old man of child-rearing whose cradle-
shattering tome, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child
Care, transformed the lives of a post-war generation of
newly-weds and their unsuspecting offspring.  For the first
time mothers were reassured, not hectored.  Grandma
thought that she had known best: keep baby regular on the
bottle and potty, disciplined and germ-free.  Not so.  Baby
was now to be treated as an individual from birth; cuddling
(not godliness) was next to cleanliness, and discipline was a
naughty word.  "You know more than you think you do," we
were told.  "Trust your own common sense. "

Last week Dr Spock came ashore to reassure us that parental
common sense was still quite common.  But what of his
"babies" who now have children of their own, and some of
whom feel driven to taking a firm hand?  "The question of
discipline has been a sore point with a lot of parents, " he
explained, "and many have been inhibited by professional
paediatricians and child psychiatrists who have all muscled
into the child care field.  Many parents have assumed that
only the professionals know how to raise children, and this
isn't true at all. "

In 1974 an unfortunate thing happened.  In a humdrum
article for Redbook, an American magazine, Spock wondered
why so many children were "balky, pesky and bratty".  He
blamed "paediatricians like myself" for having persuaded
parents that the experts knew best, and he urged a return to
the parental guidelines of his own boyhood.  It was widely
interpreted as Spock recanting.  But he was being unfair to
himself.  He had never suggested that children be allowed to
run riot.  "On the other hand, I don't think the answer is to
become severe.  I disbelieve in physical punishment.
Children are reasonable people who don't need smacks on the
behind; they don't need to be humiliated. "

Spock was a timid and lanky child, and the butt of much
teasing.  At Yale, however, he was a social success, and his
6ft4in frame helped send him to the 1924 Olympics as one of
the best oarsmen that Yale ever produced.  It was a summer
working with physically handicapped children which finally
turned him to medicine, and he was among the first doctors
to train in both paediatrics and psychiatry, later undergoing
psychoanalysis as part of his training.

He started a practice in 1933, filling his Manhattan office with
children's games, and wearing a lounge suit instead of a white
coat which, he felt, might frighten a child.  Baby and Child
Care was the fruit of these years.  In 1943 he began dictating
his ideas to his wife Jane, who sat patiently at a battered
typewriter, waiting for the words to come - a slow process,
but it gave the book a conversational tone.

He finished it after a term as a naval psychiatrist.  Published
in 1946, it was an instant bestseller.  The timing was perfect.
Thousands of "helpless" young wartime mothers, far from
home, turned to Spock's "substitute for granny" and its
countless Spockisms:  "Your baby isn't a schemer.  (He) is a
reasonable, friendly human being.  If you treat him nicely, he
won't take advantage of you."  It was not Spock who
pioneered this new attitude, but he explained it better than
anyone else.  "Relax - love and enjoy them," mom and dad
were advised, and at first they did.

But Spock believes that much misunderstanding subsequently
attached itself to the book and to himself.  "I have the
reputation of being a permissivist, which most people think
means letting children do what they want.  That was never
my view." It was not until he took up his stand against
Vietnam that the stereotype of the apostle of permissiveness
gained currency.  Spiro Agnew, then Vice-President, was
among the most vocal of his critics and accused him of being
personally responsible for a generation of spineless, pacifist
youngsters.  The conservative camp virtually en masse
branded him "the man who wet-nursed the permissive
society".

"But I was not accused of advocating permissiveness until 22
years after the book came out, not until two weeks after I
was indicted for my involvement in the Vietnam war, " says
Spock.  "The accusation was enthusiastically taken up by
editorial writers and columnists, and I was made a
scapegoat."

He has found that some "Spock babies" who are now parents
themselves still feel insecure.  Just as Spock reared his own
children differently from his mother, so it has been with his
children when they became parents.  They have told him that
he was a strict, no-nonsense father.  "It was clear by the time
my son had his children that he and his wife thought what I
did to him was cruel and old-fashioned.  I say parents should
be sure, and I still encourage them to have confidence in
themselves".

The modern family is, he feels, subject to unprecedented
strains.  "The rate of divorce in the United States, for instance,
has doubled in the last 15 years which means there are a lot
more stepfamilies.  But I'm not one of those who think that
the family is done for.  Most children are brought up in some
semblance of a family, preparing themselves to be like their
parents.  That is why they spend so much time at what they
call playing house."  Spock himself is now a stepfather
following the dissolution, after 48 years, of his first marriage
to Jane Cheney, in 1975.  There were two sons of that union,
and he acquired a step-daughter by his second, to Mary
Morgan (some 35 years his junior), the following year.

Mothers, he insists, have just as much right to a career as
fathers.  "It merely emphasizes that men have as much
responsibility as their wives in who is going to take care of
the children."  But he is critical of a lack of proper nurseries
to ease the lot of working mothers.  "In America, a lot of
children are getting inferior care, and it's a shame that the
richest country in the world is not subsidizing the children of
working mothers. "

Today, when not answering an enormous correspondence, he
lectures on child care when asked, and on politics (although
asked for that less often).  He will probably celebrate his 85th
birthday afloat. Since its publication, Baby and Child Care has
sold more than 30 million copies (three-quarters of a million
in the first year alone) and has been translated into at least
30 languages, including Japanese and Urdu.  It is still selling -
"so young modern mothers must still know of me.  I
thoroughly revise it every 10 years, but the general
philosophy of respecting children and asking for respect from
them is still the same.  That will never change. . . "
@
3.1
Dr.  Benjamin Spock, the child psychologist, and four other
people were indicted today for conspiring to aid, abet, and
counsel persons who wished to avoid being drafted into the
United States armed forces.

Mr Ramsay Clark, the Attorney General, said the indictment
had been returned by a federal grand jury in Boston,
Massachusetts.  The maximum penalty for conviction on the
charges is five years in prison and a 10,000 dollars fine.

It was stated that the conspiracy called for a national
programme of draft resistance, including the organization of
programmes to interrupt the induction process at draft
centres, telling resisters how to avoid induction, and helping
them to surrender their draft or classification cards. Specific
instances of the alleged conspiratorial activity took place on
October 16 in Boston, and four days later in Washington at
the opening of the anti-war march on the Pentagon.

The others indicted with Dr. Spock were Michael Ferber, a
Harvard University graduate student; Mitchell Goodman, an
author from New York; Marcus Raskin, the co-director of the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington; and the Rev.
William Sloan Coffin, the Yale University Chaplain.

In a deposition, Dr. Coffin said that he and others had
delivered more than 500 draft cards to authorities at the
Justice Department at the time of the Washington march, and
asked that they be arrested.

The charges of conspiracy brought against the five men were
based on sections of the Universal Military and Training Act,
which make it unlawful for anyone to conspire to violate any
of its provisions.  They are the first indictments under the
selective service law since 1954, and the first against persons
active in the protest movements in opposition to the Vietnam
war.

In a strongly worded joint statement issued last month, the
Attorney General and General Lewis Hershey, the selective
service director, promised that the Justice Department would
ensure prompt prosecution of any violation of the selective
service law and related statutes.
@
3.2
Dr.  Benjamin Spock and his three co-defendants each
received a two-year prison sentence in a United States
district court in Boston today for conspiring to aid, abet, and
counsel young men to avoid the draft.  Judge Francis Ford
granted stays of execution and the lawyers for all four men
announced that they would appeal.

"Be they high or low, intellectuals as well as others must be
deterred from violating the law.  These defendants should not
escape under the guise of free speech", the judge said.
"Almost every week in this court young men are sentenced to
three years for evading the draft.  Where law and order stops
obviously anarchy begins. "

Immediately after the sentencing the defendants went to lead
a procession of draft protesters through the centre of Boston
to a rally.  About 200 young people had picketed the
courthouse, carrying signs reading "Bust the draft".

Dr Spock declined to address the court but Mr. Michael
Ferber, aged 23, a Harvard graduate student, said he felt he
had been "part of no conspiracy, but of a movement forced of
two things - fear of what our country was doing and love of
our country.  I will continue working in that movement. "

Dr Spock, who is 64; the Rev. William Coffin, aged 43, a Yale
University chaplain; and Mr. Mitchell Goodman, aged 44, a
writer; were also fined 5,000 dollars each, and Mr. Ferber
1,000 dollars.

Commenting afterwards on the sentence Dr.  Spock said: "I
certainly intend to go on working against the war in
appearances round the country. "
@
3.3
Spock is a revered American figure: indeed, almost a national
institution.  The court has done something akin to
condemning everyone's favourite uncle.  It took the all-male
jury more than seven hours to decide and, as if to make
amends, they amazed everyone by acquitting the fifth
defendant, Marcus Raskin, a former White House defence
aide.  All four men said they would appeal.  Sentence was
postponed until July 10.  Five years and a $4,000 fine is the
maximum sentence they can receive.

The Boston trial was a running battle between the US
Government and its intellectual community.  America has
seen nothing like it since the late Senator Joe McCarthy's
Redhunting sub-committee.

The five defendants were selected with care.  Together they
constituted what a pollster might call "a weighted sample" of
American liberal thought.

Spock, as chief scapegoat, provided the focus of interest.  The
lanky, whiskery paediatrician sat throughout without losing
his benign smile.  Those gigantic brown hands, ideally
constructed for baby-hefting, remained placidly folded.  He
looked like the unlikeliest conspirator in the world.

Dr Spock's anti-Vietnam activities became most widely
known in October when he was one of the leaders of massive
anti-war demonstrations in Washington and was quoted as
saying that the American Peace Movement was entering a
new phase of action against the war.

He was arrested in December in anti-Vietnam war
demonstrations outside the main US Army induction centre in
New York when he went through a police barricade to sit
down in front of the centre.

The next defendant was William Sloane Coffin Jnr, the Yale
University chaplain.  The "Rev. Coffin," as the lawyers called
him in a slightly macabre way, has an upper crust New
England background; even at 43, there is a public school look
about him.  He is a model white Anglo-Saxon cleric. Next was
Mitchell Goodman, aged 44, teacher and polemicist and
everyone's idea of an American Jewish intellectual. Fourth
was Marcus Ferber, only 23, a dishevelled cherub spouting
Camus, and there to stand for the students. And finally
Raskin, 34, who resigned as a White House defence and
disarmament specialist over Vietnam.

The defendants then were a kind of symbolic cross-section.
Very soon, the scene in the white-tiled, a vaguely lavatorial
court house took on the appearance of a microcosm, mirroring
American society and its deep divisions.  Educated against
ignorant; young against old; the tolerant against the bigots.
The groups were oil and water.

Stone-faced US marshals prowled the room, ready to quell
unofficial smiles or any other subversive acts which the
mainly collegiate, spectators might devise.  The lawmen
stared at the students, hostile and uncomprehending.  Less
threateningly, but with equal incomprehension, the students
stared back.

They were in mini skirts, or kaftans with beads.  To a man
the marshalls wore grey two pieces of artificial fibre, heavy
shoes, white nylon shirts.  One group favoured hair at least
ear-length; the other went for that corn stubble look.

The respective allegiances could have been no clearer had
they been wearing the uniforms of opposed armies.  The
spectators, queuing to support Spock, were almost exclusively
under 30; the marshals, judge and, most significantly, jury
were middle-aged or over, and evidently un-enchanted by
the arty young.

Spock, however, related to the young and they to him, after
all he had, by proxy, weaned and pot-trained them along with
two generations of Americans.  Perhaps his methods, almost
universally adopted by enlightened middle class mothers,
have contributed to the present generation of unaggressive
anti-militarist college children.

The idea would appeal to the John Birch Society who believe
that the Russians tried to subvert all American toddlers by
circulating cut-price gramophone records playing subtly anti-
capitalist nursery rhymes.

John Wall, the Government prosecutor, omitted to advance
this theory as part of his criminal conspiracy case, but he did
try almost everything else.  (At one point a witness was
summoned to testify that he had seen two defendants
applauding an anti-Vietnam war speech.)

The arguments were repetitive, Wall claimed that by
attending peace rallies, making speeches, and taking part in
anti-draft induction protests, they had conspired to violate
the Selective Service law, and encourage others to do so.

The defence lawyers, 16 in all, replied that all the activities
had been public, and publicised-the reverse of conspirational,
Spock, and what he called "the other peace people," had
simply exercised fundamental American liberties of free
speech and assembly as guaranteed under the First
Amendment.

This was their line, and they stuck to it, but given the
American conspiracy laws they made little progress.  Criminal
conspiracy is a charge used fairly sparingly but it has been an
effective one for dealing with Mafia luminaries and gangster
bosses.  The prosecution burden of proof is so wide ranging it
is almost open-ended.

As long as the court is satisfied that at least two people have
made an agreement to further an unlawful end the
prosecutor is virtually home.  The agreement does not have to
be written, or even spoken: it can be implied or even deduced
from a certain kind of conduct.

Criminal conspirators do not even necessarily have to know
each other.  (Before the Boston episode Spock and Ferber, for
instance, had never spoken with each other.  Coffin and
Goodman had met, briefly twice.)  They do, however, have to
be aware that the end product is unlawful.

Conspirators are also vicariously liable: that is, once they have
joined the club they can be punished for misdemeanours by
any other member.  Because of past difficulties involved in
convicting members of criminal rings organised along big
business lines the rules of evidence are also wide open.
Hearsay is perfectly acceptable.

Over four weeks, defence counsel struggled to demonstrate
the absurdity of the benign Spock, or "Reverend Coffin," in a
conspiratorial role.  Right at the end of the trial the
prosecuting attorney explained, with unexpected candour,
what the case was really about.

"In the affairs of families," said Wall, glancing sidelong at the
hairy spectators, "and also of nations, a situation can arise
where permissiveness goes beyond the bounds of reason,
Collaboration magnifies the risk to society and increases the
quantum of harm".

He then added, in effect, that the five defendants were only
symbols, heads on the spike to encourage the others.  He told
the jury a story about police patrols and speeding motorists
on a dangerous road - throughout the trial he lent heavily on
homespun image and simple parable, apparently to some
effect.

"You don't need to catch every motorist in the trap," said
Wall.  "You just have to have enough so that the others know
the law is being enforced".

The lawyers called each other "brother" according to the
convention but Wall evidently inspired a strict minimum of
fraternal affection.  His Perry Mason-style interruptions -
"objection, your honour" - came out as parade ground barks.
His Boston twang, wrenched from the sinus, drowned the
genteel Ivy League tones of the defendant's defendants.

Wall is a self-made man, a former paratroop officer, the
epitome of Right-wing rectitude.  He chose to present his case
on a sustained level of extreme moral outrage and it was
highly effective.

In his final speech to the jury he managed to make such mild
words as "writer" and "intellectual" sound like a catalogue of
abuse.  He launched a particularly savage attack on Raskin,
and referred to him throughout, with heavy irony, as "The
Great Thinker".

Raskin had drawn the fire on himself under cross-
examination by saying the Vietnam war was illegal, and the
use of napalm immoral.  Wall argued that Raskin had failed to
grasp that the United States was probably in Vietnam "For
the same good reason" as they had been in Korea.

He made some play with the fact that Raskin had been
medically unfit for military service and apparently did not
understand that napalm and flame throwers, as used in the
second world war and Korea, are both in the same family.

"If you napalm a village with children it's horrible but what
difference does it make if you burn them from a tank?" Wall
asked the jury.  Then he concluded that none of the
defendants, including Coffin - "This great man who knows
what's legal and illegal" - was capable of thought at all.

"They feel, it's all belly feel, or gut reaction.  Are we going to
have our society tied to the strings of Coffin's conscience?...
What about the collective conscience as passed by Congress?"

It was crude but at least the bemused, patently bored jury
were in no danger of misunderstanding the message.  Wall
had selected the most amenable subjects.  When the trial
began the Government objected to two women jurors,
presumably to counteract any vestigial Spock worship.  Wall
also refused anyone under 35, or with the faintest trace of
unconventionality.

Eventually 12 satisfactory white male Bostonians took the
stand, six blinking behind heavy glasses.  They were solid
citizens from the upper reaches of the working class or just
above.  Only one had been to college: only three had
graduated from high school.

During the trial they were sequestered in a Boston hotel, and
were forbidden contact with their families.  Newspapers and
television were also banned in case the terse flashes on the
trial, slipped in occasionally between the avalanche of
commercials, might bias their judgement.

So after four weeks and 15 volumes of evidence they wanted
their message simple.  Wall obliged.  Judge Francis W.H. Ford
also eschewed ambiguity.  He told them the charge was "very
grave."  And he announced, as he had at the beginning, that
the original Spock defence had been excluded and was
irrelevant.  (The defence had sought to claim burning C draft
cards was "symbolic speech," and so constitutionally
guaranteed.  They had also tried to plead the Vietnam conflict
was unconstitutional because Congress had not declared war,
because it was contrary to the UN charter, and also in
violation of the Geneva Convention.)

District Judge Ford is 85: he attended Harvard Law School
with Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He is tiny, irrascible, and deaf.
And when he leans forward in his black robes to croak an
order at a witness to speak louder he can be very menacing.

Spock and his fellow defendants did not expect much
sympathy from this Dickensian figure.  They were right.  Ford
opened his summing up by telling the comatose jury: "You
must apply the law as that I lay down."  He then warned
them against acquitting a defendant "merely because he is a
person of good character."

From there it should have been all over but to everyone's
astonishment after the jury had shuffled out it took them
more than seven hours, and two meal breaks, to come back.

Their verdict, in keeping with what had gone before, turned
out rather eccentric.  As expected they had convicted Spock,
plus three of the others.  Perversely Raskin was cleared.
Perhaps attorney Wall's attack on him as "The Great Thinker"
had been so vicious that it rebounded.

The unlucky four can now do nothing except hope for a
successful appeal on a legal technicality.  At least 4,000 other
teachers, clerics and youth leaders who have been advising
draft-age boys to turn in their cards and refuse to fight are
wondering how far the Government is prepared to go to limit
dissent.  Autumn could bring, in the words of dissenting poet
Robert Lowell, "a new reign of piety and iron."
@
3.4
In a significant ruling today, a United States appeals court
held that individuals are entitled to express condemnation of
the Vietnam war and to express moral support for those
whose conscience compels them to disobey military
conscription laws.

The circuit Court of Appeals in Boston reversed the
convictions of Dr. Benjamin Spock, the child care expert, and
three other men, found guilty last year of conspiring to
counsel young men to avoid the draft.

The court found that the convictions were not consistent with
the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
guaranteeing free speech.

The court's decision drew a distinction between expressing
moral support for draft evasion and actually counselling such
evasion.

The American Civil Liberties Union, welcoming the decision,
said today: "It is a pleasant realization of our anticipation. "
Mr. Melvin Wulf, the union's legal director, said that many
legal experts believed that the prosecution had been based on
very tenuous grounds.

However, the union contested the distinction the judges made
between the expression of moral support for conscription
evasion, and actual counselling.  In its view all counselling
was constitutional, even the act of persuasion.

Dr.  Spock and three other members of Resist, an organization
describing itself an "adult" support group for conscription
resisters, were indicted before a federal grand jury in Boston
in January, 1968, and charged on the basis of four separate
incidents.

The alleged incidents were: the distribution in New York of a
statement entitled "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority"; a
press conference in New York at which youths were
encouraged not to serve in the armed forces and where the
organizers told of their opposition to the war; a meeting in
Boston at which conscription resisters allegedly burned their
draft cards at a church alter; a demonstration in Washington
at which resistance to conscription was urged.

Attempts by Dr. Spock and the other three men to challenge
the legality of the Vietnam war at their trial were rebuffed
by the judge who said the legality of the war was not a
relevant issue.

Before the trial, Dr. Spock explained his role by saying: "We
gave young men moral and financial support to end this
illegal war and commit acts of civil disobedience because we
are so absolutely convinced that this war is illegal and
immoral. "

Informed of today's decision, Dr. Spock said: "Its a big
moment. "  He added: "We ought to work all the harder to
remove ourselves from Vietnam.  The tragedies are that the
war is still dragging on and that young men have been
imprisoned for being opposed to it and doing as their
consciences dictated. "

The appeal court agreed with the defendants' contention that
"vigorous criticism of the draft and of the Vietnam war is free
speech protected by the First Amendment, even though its
effect is to interfere with the war".

By a majority decision of the appeal judges, Dr. Spock and one
other defendant, Michael Ferber, a Harvard graduate student,
were freed from further prosecution.  The remaining two, the
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale University, and
Mitchell Goodman, an author and teacher from Maine are to
be retried because of legal technicalities.

The question now being asked by those who fought the
convictions is whether the Government will, in fact, hold a
retrial.  Should they do so, the issue of the free speech rights
in the First Amendment will be even more microscopically
examined.