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THE EXCERPT

Introduction

In 1921, Alfred L. Donaldson, author of the two-volume History of the Adirondacks, summed up a wealthy abolitionist’s donation of 120,000 acres in New York’s northern wilderness to three thousand Black New Yorkers with a smirk: “The attempt to combine an escaped slave with a so-called Adirondack farm was about as promising of agricultural results as would be the placing of an Italian lizard on a Norwegian iceberg.” Donaldson was something. In a breath he managed to sectionalize, racialize, and discount the entire story of the Black Woods. So confident was his dismissal that it skewed the public understanding of this story for another eighty years.1

But Donaldson got one thing right: the abolitionist reformer Gerrit Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” of 1846 did not produce the crop of Black farmers Smith hoped for. The great majority of Smith’s Black grantees judged a removal to the wilderness an untimely, unaffordable idea. His deedholders who sampled life on the Adirondack frontier may, at best, have numbered around seventy, exclusive of family members and fellow travelers who brought the head count closer to two hundred. Most would not remain in the region. The descendants of those who did would not recall a family link to an antebellum strategy to win Black voting rights. By the usual yardsticks of success (longevity, prosperity, and local pride), the radical philanthropist Gerrit

Smith had good reason to judge his plan a bust. So, on he pressed to more urgent, less parochial affairs: the campaign for a “Free Soil” Kansas, the battle for the Union, the abolition of slavery, and, toward the end of his life, the defense of civil rights for four million freed Black Americans in the South. Except for the New York City activist Charles Bennett Ray, all of the great reformers who touted Gerrit Smith’s “little colored colony” lost heart. Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Jermain Wesley Loguen, and James McCune Smith all let the coals of their enthusiasm cool to ash.2

And these coals had glowed so hotly, and warmed so many souls! The vision of forty-acre lots of land for thousands, land that spoke for economic independence and the right to vote, once held New York’s Black reform community in thrall. For twenty-five years since the state’s Constitutional Convention of 1821, free men of color in New York had been denied the ballot unless they could show proof of ownership of $250 in landed property. The race-specific property requirement aimed to hobble an emergent Black electorate. With statewide abolition scheduled for July 4, 1827, New York’s proslavery interests hoped to nip the threat of Black political empowerment in the bud. This they did, decisively. Notwithstanding the efforts of equal justice lobbyists to get the racist rule rescinded, it would be endorsed at the Constitutional Convention of 1846 and resoundingly reinstated at the polls.3

Hence the giveaway (my inelegant name for Smith’s land distribution scheme). Gerrit Smith from Peterboro, a small village in upstate New York south of the Mohawk River, had land to spare he did not need. His donation of three thousand Adirondack gift lots would, he reasoned, not only get land into the hands of Black New Yorkers and help them meet an onerous, for-Blacks-only property requirement, but would lure them out of cities and make them citizens of the republic through self-directed labor on their own backcountry farms. How Smith came up with this idea, how it expressed Romantic notions about spiritual regeneration and a conviction that the only hope for Black New Yorkers was to leave urban life behind—all this is taken up in the first part of this book, along with the good work of Smith’s adviser-scouts (“agents”) who vetted thousands of grantees. These Black reformers kept Smith informed about the rampant “Negro-phobia” in metropolitan New York that crushed any hope of Black economic gain. It was their and Smith’s belief that moving to the wilderness would not only ease his grantees’ access to the ballot but fire up their souls. On their own land, Smith’s deedholders would gain economic freedom

alone and dignity, civic pride, community. With their eyes fixed on this prize, Smith and his agents enjoyed an interracial alliance that, while not unprecedented in New York, ranked among the earliest pioneering instances of Blacks and whites collaborating, working toward a shared progressive end.4

In this first section, too, are the first hints and rumbles of dissatisfaction with Smith’s plan from Black activists outside his inner ring of confidantes. Some had their own ideas about what they needed, plans that worked for them. An enterprising grantee from Albany, the activist Stephen Myers, had the temerity to organize a sort of countercolony for free Black settlers west of the Adirondacks in the Tug Hill region north of Utica. Smith’s discomfort with this plan revealed more than he intended about his uneasiness with Black initiative; it was always so much easier to go for Black empowerment when he fixed the terms.

The second section of this book steps down from the high stoop of aspirational rhetoric to the rubbled floor of work and action, and finds the grantees at home in the woods. The land Smith earmarked for his beneficiaries—about forty miles north to south and maybe fifteen miles across, or eight times the size of Manhattan—was not a solid swath. Smith scattered gift lots; he spread the wealth around. Picture the patchy profile of a half-finished Scrabble game, as many squares unoccupied as full. This is how the Smith Lands show up on an Adirondack map. Smith wanted his giftees to range a little, not huddle in defensive clusters. And he may have also wanted to introduce white land reformers to racially distributive environmental justice in action. “Give up your proposition of a separate location for the colored people,” he told the land reformer George H. Evans in 1844, and “identify yourself with the whole human family, and have a heart big enough for every afflicted child of Adam to run into; and then you will have a reforming spirit.” He was preaching to the resolutely unconverted, who were filled “with horror,” as he knew, at “the thought of tessellated, piebald townships.” But Smith would have his Adirondack checkerboard, and white land reformers would learn this could be done.5

The grantees, of course, saw something else: Smith’s scattering of gift lots was a recipe for social isolation and insecurity, and some of them would organize—their deeds be hanged!—Black enclaves that hinted at their old devotion to the memory of towns and cities they left behind. So grantees from Troy stuck tight, as did Brooklynites, and Hudson River Valley families too. Getting to know their new white neighbors would happen when it happened, if it happened, and this would take

some time. (Smith’s Black land agents would not furnish grantees with the names of sympathetic white people until 1848.) Notwithstanding the Adirondacks’ progressive vote on Black voting rights in 1846 (Essex, Clinton, and Franklin Counties all went for equal suffrage), the grantees knew a laissez-faire rural racism was likely. On Election Day, no Black names on the ballot. In schoolhouses, no Black teachers scratching sums on slate. In stores, which doubled as ad hoc banks, no line of credit for the Black farmer looking to enlarge a home or build a business.6

Even so, there were locals who were openhearted and square dealing, who offered shrewd appraisals of the gift land and directed deedholders unhappy with their lots to better land nearby. History has recognized John Brown’s family for its sympathetic dealings with the grantees, but part two notes many more white people than the Browns who were allies and companions of the Black pioneers. White neighbors stood by an elderly grantee a speculator hoped to evict. White neighbors of a Black farmer, once enslaved, scared away a bounty hunter looking to take him back to the South. Black and white North Elbans founded two North Elba churches together, and a library, and a choir. Black and white homesteaders shared town appointments, brought potatoes to the same starch factory, buried their dead in the same cemeteries. Mountain hikes, ball games, Christmas feasts, and field work were shared pursuits. When the Union Army needed volunteers, Black Adirondackers stepped up, and after the Civil War, white Adirondackers supported the military pension claims of their Black neighbors. Several white households made room for Black boarders, and this worked the other way too. In the great commons of the unregulated wilderness, Black people and white hunted, fished, and foraged together, and bridled at new laws that deemed them poachers and their culture of subsistence something thieving and pathetic. The shared work of place making on this frontier was no perfect antidote for racism, but racism was challenged and subverted in a hundred unsuspected ways.

Strongest Champion and Truest Friend

A few days after Christmas in 1874, Gerrit Smith, seventy-seven, died of a stroke in his nephew’s home in Manhattan. Obituaries were long and lavish, praising public work and private deeds alike. Editors who scoffed at Smith’s politics and style while he lived put the barbs away to laud a moral icon. In newspapers and magazines, essays honored

the equal rights reformer who, offered the New York Herald, “was not great, as Clay and Webster and Calhoun were great—[and] was not even so profound a champion of his cause as Charles Sumner, but [who] united the aristocratic bearing of the gentleman with the simplicity of the servant of the bondman, giving to him as a brother, in such equal proportions that he earned for himself a title better than that of gentleman, better than that of philanthropist—that of a man.” The Tribune, long a thorn in Smith’s side, was fulsome: “The possession of great tracts of land makes common men conservative and monopolists. It made of Gerrit Smith one of the most radical and generous of men.” Four articles on Smith’s career and funeral ran in the New York Times. An editorial mourned the end of “the era of moral politics” and reminded readers of the “stubbornness of conviction and moral courage” it took to be an “ ‘out-and-out Abolitionist’ (even worse than the cry of ‘Infidel’ in the Middle Ages) in the antebellum era when so much of New York’s trade and commerce was for slavery,” and “when a ‘nigger’s’ appearance anywhere near a Tammany meeting meant a broken head, if not an ornamented lamp-post.” In Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder tolled the losses: “One by one are passing away the noble band of men who were the nation’s truest leaders through the wilderness of the dark era of Slavery.” Lovejoy, Giddings, Seward, Chase, Greeley and Tappan—all gone, and now, “the prince of them all . . . , Gerrit Smith. Providence could not have given the cause a more efficient ally. He was just the man.”7

Viewing hours at General Cochrane’s home where Smith’s body rested under ferns in an ice shell by a window were brief and little publicized. Still, word sifted out and crowds collected, and the reporter from the New York Times judged that “fully one-fourth of those who called were colored people, whose grief on viewing the remains of their deceased benefactor was intense.” Neither Frederick Douglass nor William Lloyd Garrison attended, but here was Smith’s old friend Henry Highland Garnet, and what the churchman offered spoke for thousands: “The colored people without exception looked upon Mr. Smith as their dearest and even their only friend, such was . . . their affection for him. They know that in him they have lost their strongest champion and truest friend, and they keenly feel their loss.”8

Other Black mourners in the room that day were Peter Porter, the “Railroad Champion for Equal Rights” (his fight for Black access to public transport thrice roused the wrath of mobs), and Charles Reason, a scholar-poet and school head. Elder Ray, Smith’s city land agent,

1869

The Cornell University Press Podcast an interview with MartiN SiEgEl, author of Judgment and mercy

hosted by Jonathan hall the transcript

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Martin Siegel, author of Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. Martin Siegel practices and teaches law in Houston. After clerking for Judge Kaufman, he served as an Assistant US Attorney in Manhattan, and on the staff of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. His writing has been published in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and legal journals. As we mark the 70th anniversary of the Rosenberg executions, we spoke to Martin about their story, as well as that of the young and ambitious judge who sentenced them to death, Judge Irving Robert Kaufman. We learn that in the decades after that fateful decision, Judge Kaufman transformed into one of the most progressive judges of his time, and Martin also shares with us his, and his fellow clerks’, experiences working for the judge. Hello, Martin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Well, I’m very excited to talk to you about your new book, Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. This June 19 of this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Rosenberg executions by electric chair for the crime of atomic espionage. Tell us a bit about their story as well as the subject of your book, the young and ambitious judge who sentenced them to deathm, Judge Irving Robert Kaufman.

Thank you. So so the Rosenberg story came to public attention in 1951 really 1950 When they were first charged, or Julius was first charged, the trial was 1951. And they were the latest and by far the most well known figures in a sort of growing and larger espionage ring. That included a number of people in the United States and also a prominent physicist in England who was apprehended and prosecuted and jailed in England and Klaus Fuchs, who was he’s sort of not all that well known today unless you really a burrowed into this, this sort of slice of history. But he was by far the most valuable member of this espionage relating to the Soviets. He was an actual physicist and knew a great deal more about the atomic bomb than any other member and provided more valuable information to the Russians. By contrast, the Rosenbergs and Ethel Rosenberg whose brother David Greenglass, who was the main witness against them, did not know all that much about the atomic bomb. David Greenglass had been a machinist at Los Alamos, which was an entirely random sort of assignment. He had, he was not terribly well educated. He had a poor scientific background, but he was stationed there at Los Alamos and he was a committed communist, as was his brother in law, Julius and his sister, Ethel. And they had been for many years. And they decided with this sort of

Jonathan

Jonathan Martin Martin

surprising assignment, to put their beliefs into action, so to speak. And so they persuaded David to bring back whatever information he could about what was going on there at Los Alamos to New York. And at first it was the names of scientists and things of that nature. But eventually, David Greenglass brought back and also a courier was sent out to New Mexico, who, who also brought back on a separate ship, information about the atomic bomb, primarily a sketch of the lens mold, which was a key component of the bomb, although the sketch itself as you would expect from a not terribly educated machinist was crude and hand drawn. And there’s there’s debate to this day over how valuable that information was to the Soviets. Now, unbeknownst to of course, any of those people and under the Honorable Judge Kaufman, who presided over their trial, who we’ll talk about in a minute, whom is subject of the book. The United States had broken the Soviets code during World War Two in something called Project Venona, and that’s what led them to the arrest, identify and arrest this espionage ring. That’s how Julius and Ethel came to be suspects and were arrested. Although there was precious little information about Ethel. There wasn’t more information about Julius. And again, that’s something that to this day is debated of the evidence at trial against Julius came from, as I said, David Greenglass, but some other sources as well. Another couple of couriers testified, sort of well known at the time woman who had been part of the Communist Party became almost a mini celebrity Elizabeth Bentley testified and there were a number of minor witnesses, all who reinforcing the case against Julius and his role in this this conspiracy. The only evidence against Ethel came from her brother David Greenglass, who testified that He brought those notes back from Los Alamos. She had typed them up, made them legible. Then the Julius had passed them along to his Russian contacts who, by the way, was also identified, but he’d fled or sorry, identified and dated, but he fled to the Soviet Union. And so that was the sole evidence at trial from David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth Greenglass against Ethel. And in the 1990s, David admitted that that had been perjured that he had essentially made up this story of Ethel typing in order to protect his own wife, who was also involved in this conspiracy, Ruth Greenglass, he insisted that she not be charged. But as trial approached in March of 1951, the government really leaned hard on him knowing they had very little evidence against Ethel and got him to concoct this story. So they were convicted in 1951. And then we come to the second part of your question, which is Judge Kaufman. He sent it to them to death, he presided over their trial. Let me tell you a bit about Judge Kaufman. And he’s the subject of my book. I was a law clerk for Judge Kaufman and one of his last two from 1991 1992. He died during the time we worked for him, and that’s what gave rise to this book. In 1951, he’d only been on the bench about 16 months, and he was one he was the second youngest judge in America federal judge at that time, extremely ambitious. Of course, one doesn’t get to be a federal judge, and probably it’s fair to say the most important federal trial bench in America, New York City, at that time anyway, without being both accomplished and extremely ambitious and political. He was a member of the Democratic Party, he raised money in the Democratic Party. He was sort of a protege of a number of important political and legal figures J. Edgar Hoover was prominent

among them, he’d come to know J. Edgar Hoover, when he was a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office, and Tom Clark, who’s Truman’s Attorney General was a close friend, and Clark was probably more than anyone else responsible for putting him on the bench. Kaufman’s background was very much like the Rosenbergs, which I think is something that fitted into his psyche when it came time to decide what the punishment should be for their portrayal of the United States. He’d grown up quite poor. It’s sort of the classic Jewish American rags to riches in one generation story. His parents were immigrants. He was born six years after they got to America, lived on the Lower East Side eventually moved to Jewish Harlem, educated at Fordham, but but just a truly impressive sort of self made success came to public prominence as a prosecutor in the 1930s. And then in the 1940s represented prominent in private practice media figures and also Milton Berle. Nice client to have but if you’re trying to impress people like Tom Clark and J, Edgar Hoover, you can arrange private audiences after shows and benefits with Milton Berle which which Judge Kaufman did. So. So fast forward to the Rosenberg case, it was a case he wanted, he wanted to try that case. And back then today, it’s a more random assignment system back then there was more play in the joints for both the prosecutors to kind of arrange things so that they were likely to get inserted and get a certain judge, and for judges themselves, who wanted certain cases to reach out and get them down. And Judge Kaufman did that with the help of a family friend and a sort of protege of his Roy Cohn. So he gets the case and he fully appreciates. I think it’s advantageous to him as a vehicle for notoriety and for potential advancement. During the trial, he intervenes in a way that seemed to favor the government, although in his defense, that was a point on appeal, and the appellate courts denied that it was anything unusual or outside the usual discretion of a federal trial judge. He also and this wasn’t revealed until the 1970s conducted secret ex parte discussions with the prosecution, the prosecution team mostly Roy Cohn, during the trial, and although it is true that that was probably not completely uncommon in those days, I think other judges may have done the same, it was a less formal system them nonetheless, even by the rules in place, then it was a violation of legal ethics. And it’s certainly something that today looking back on it, we can see compromises neutrality, that he’s also of course well known for sentencing and Rosenberg’s to death. So what why did he do that? In the book, I argue, a couple of factors. He was extremely anti-communist as a protege of Hoover and also a disciple of Fordham. He was a product of both Fordham college and Fordham Law School. And that was a fairly conservative place in the 1930s and 40s. When Judge Kaufmann or Well, I say 20s and 30s, when he was there, but he remained sort of connected to the institution to some degree. I think that influenced his thinking. And the other factor that aside from his personal ambition that I really argued influence the result is, is just this special disdain he had for the Rosenbergs because they, as I said, started out where he did in life really almost exactly the same place, Lower East Side, Julius was raised in Jewish Harlem as Kaufman had been are a bit later. But you know, America had been so good to Irving Kaufman. He succeeded so thoroughly here he the mass prosperity, he’d achieved this sort of political and legal prominence. And I think when he

came across these two people with his background he could have least arguably succeeded as he did, but who viewed the whole enterprise as corrupt, and not worthy of patriotic support. I think he saw their betrayal and special and very personal terms.

That’s interesting. Yeah, that makes total sense. In your book, you mentioned that there was a Gallup poll in February of 1953, which showed public approval of a death sentence at 76%.

That’s right.

It wasn’t an unusual sentence in that it was it was approved by the public. But then in the 60s and 70s, what happened then?

Right, right. Well, right. So to go back to your to the first part of it, in 53, you know, and certainly a 51. Even more so when they were tried. It’s the Korean War. It’s McCarthyism. Unfortunately for the Rosenbergs, they, their offense was judged, you know, assessed by a jury and then judged in terms of satisfying Josh Kaufman in probably the worst time in terms of the climate and because of his personal blind spots. I think Doug Kaufman might have been one of the worst judges they could have drawn on there. Frankly, I’m not sure he would have been terribly sympathetic, then. Right. But the Rosenberg lawyer made an interesting argument for mercy when he was arguing about the Senate. And so week after the conviction, he said, and he repeated this argument, about a year and a half later, when he was arguing for reduction in sentence, he said, who knows, but that history may turn. And what he’s referring to is that in the war, we’ve been allies with Russia. And of course, by 1951 and 53. It was a very different time, but he was making the point to the judge that, you know, I’m not sure how well this is going to look in the light of history, because who knows if we’re not allies later in time, or if this Cold War has died down somewhat, and that proved to be prophetic. He was a lawyer, who Rosen was lawyer was deficient in lots of ways. And a lot of people have said that not just me, but his his arguments for mercy, especially the second time around in 1952. Were eloquent and compelling. And he was right, that history turned off that we became allies exactly with the Soviet Union, but by the late 60s and 70s, that that sort of atomic terror. It was on the front page of newspapers during the Korean War, there was there was true and real and legitimate fear of an atomic war. And so the Rosenbergs was seen as arch arch beings for having given away our most powerful weapon that was gone, you know, it’s now the late 60s and 70s. And people are used to the Soviets having the bomb, they’re used to this concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. We’re even beginning to get into the world of detente by the 1970s. And, you know, the left had changed by Dan, it was something of a new left in the late 60s and 70s. And they weren’t they weren’t a sort of obsessed with the internees side battles of the Communist Party and Stalinism, versus, you know, other flavors of Bolshevism versus the more progressive, you know, mainstream left all of that a lot of that faded. Instead, when they charged that the Rosenbergs had been framed, a lot of people believed it. And the reason

Jonathan

Martin Martin

Jonathan

they believed it is because there was a whole new slate of government misconduct to base that argument on, for example, lies in Vietnam, you know, by the late 60s and 70s, sort of the official line of the government of Vietnam is shown to be deceptive and hollow, and then there’s Watergate. And so by the mid 70s, to say that the government might lie and frame somebody doesn’t seem as preposterous, as when the Rosenbergs defenders who were mostly communists. Well, I That’s not fair. I mean, they’re hardcore defenders in the early 50s. Were communist. But there were a lot of people who just objected to the sentences who were not communists, of course, by by the late 60s and 70s. There’s little more credence to that argument and the fact that we’ve broken the Soviets code, and we have this sort of information in that secret that we couldn’t reveal at trial. That’s not public yet, either. And the Rosenbergs offenders continue to maintain their innocence and a big catalyst was that their sons then had two small children 10 And I believe six at the time of the executions were obviously very sympathetic. But they after the executions, they sort of disappeared, they were raised by different families. Their name was not Rosenberg it was mere Paul after the family that took them in. And by the late 60s, early 70s, they make a kind of personal decision, that they are going to come forward and say who they are, and make it their cause to clear their parents names. And they were compelling, figures articulate, smart, good looking and just hard to dismiss. And they begin to hammer away at the case and say, you know, look, there was only one witness and this witness was biased. He was on trial for his own life trying to save his skin. And they poked holes and other little bits of evidence here and there. There’s a book that came out I think in 65 Icahn invitation to an inquest by to sort of left leaning science, freelance writers who did a truly deep dive into the evidence and brought out some contradictions and other things. And so this public campaign really takes hold and their rallies all over the country and their newspaper articles, their headlines like, you know, the Rosenbergs, we tried and Rosenberg’s you know, on trial again, 35 years later, and these are in major news outlets. And then something happens that really throws gas on the fire, which is revelation of Judge Kaufman’s misconduct. One of the one of the first Freedom of Information Act requests in the early 70s, after some amendments to FOIA made it easier to get information from the government was from the Rosenberg’s kids, and they began to get these snippets of information from FBI files suggesting that Judge Kaufmann had had these ex parte contacts. So now they’re not able to, they’re able to say noxious look, this case is shaky, or a lot of people may have realized they’re able to say the judge committed misconduct. And that’s that’s powerful. It really did. There were calls for Judge competence impeachment. There were calls for hearings, there was a letter by 100 plus law professors that were articles in the New York Times. And just cop was really under siege. And he had a key was, for example, he was going to give a speech at Pomona College a commencement address. He had to cancel that because it looked like there were going to be demonstrations. It’s a real foreshadowing of of some of the some of the free speech on campus arguments and controversies we see today. There were pickets he would go give a speech and a legal aid, society dinner, that sort of thing. And they were pickets there waiting for him. There it bled

into his social life of the I interviewed the miracles, Michael Meeropol, one of the two sons and he told me that someone had written him a letter saying he’d seen judge Kaufman at a party and spilled wine on him and muttered to himself. That’s where Julius and Ethel. So it affected his social life, he went to a dinner party, and one of the one of the women there, accosted him and said, Why did you give him the death sentence, you know, and he sort of stammered and gave an excellent explanation. So all of this was reminiscent for him of what had happened in 5152 53. He’d experienced back then when it was alive controversy and especially in the months leading up to the executions, when there was a real move for clemency and pickets at the White House and elsewhere. experience death threats, bomb threats, he’d had to flee his apartment, on the eve of the execution because there were so many bomb threats. The FBI was constantly sweeping the apartment, it was under guard, his kids were under guard. So all that went away after 53. But it sort of came back in a fashion in the 70s. And really, it was a real tragedy in a sense for him. I don’t I’m not saying it wasn’t undeserved at some level, it wasn’t undeserved, given how he behaved in the trial. And the view of many that the sentences were excessive, but it was it was a surprise for sure.

Interesting, and what’s fascinating is, so there’s this there’s a backlash, and then there’s a as far as, you know, saving face or clearing one’s name, you have the Rosenberg children trying to clear their family name. Then you have Judge Kaufman trying to save face on his part, and how if you get accosted at party’s, and he’s an upwardly mobile gentleman, which he clearly was, how is he going to square the circle that and so what I think is fascinating is that he became something that few predicted that he became one of the most progressive judges of his time. There’s a great line in your book where you say “Grace withheld from the Rosenbergs overflowed towards others, the weak, the excluded. The unpopular.” Tell us about these pathbreaking decisions that he was responsible for.

Right. I mean, that’s one of the great ironies of this story is that it did become a leading progressive judge in his day. And he got he got very little forgiveness from the Rosenberg oriented critics, or that they viewed as a sort of Sham, you know, cheap attempted atonement, a cheap attempt to stay in the good graces of elite, liberal Jewish Upper East Side society, which he was very much a member of an attempt to remain on great terms with the New York Times he was friendly with the publisher of The Times Salzburger and and the executive editor there A.M. Rosenthal. And so that was that was kind of the theory on as the book on him is that this was this was a facade of atonement. And so I argued in the book, it’s, it’s really deeper than that. So yeah, let me describe some of those decisions. He was the first judge to desegregate a school and the North. That was in 1960-61. It was in New Rochelle, New York and fascinating case. And you know, there have been a number of those cases. And they were growing in the south, of course, but that was the first one in the north, which raised a whole different set of issues because they are that second, the segregation was less based on de jure a law and more on de facto residential patterns and things of that nature. So in some ways, it was sort

Jonathan Martin

of harder case to cut through that then a very crude and obvious segregation and south in prison condition cases, he became quite liberal. So there was a case arising out of the Metropolitan Corrections Center, a whole host of conditions were challenged by defendants, including body cavity searches, which had become socially routine almost, and he invalidated those and found them a violation constitutional rights Supreme Court overruled him. In First Amendment cases, he became a sort of leading proponent of freedom of the press freedom of the individual to descend. So in the Pentagon Papers case, which went through the Second Circuit on its way to the Supreme Court. He was one of the minority who argued for immediate publication, whereas the Second Circuit actually continued to pause on publication for a lot of the items and sent it back to the district judge and they were overruled by the Supreme Court a couple of days later agreeing with Judge Kaufman Kaufman innovated a couple of interesting privileges that again, don’t they’ve been cut back on by the Supreme Court. One was for reporters to be able to discuss and deliberate about their articles among editors and not have to reveal that in a libel suit that arose out of a very well publicized big case, brought against 60 minutes by former officer to Vietnam. He came up with something called the neutral reportage privilege, which has been in the news lately because it was going to be what Fox News was going to rely on. Fox News was gonna say in defense legally anyway, of its of the defamation case, arising out of the voting machines that, look, we’re allowed us reporters to report on this controversy. We’re not endorsing what President Trump might say about voting machines or his acolytes might say we’re just we’re just neutrally reporting well, that you can disagree with that. But that concept that a news outlet or reporter is not liable for the truth or falsity of the thing that reporting on that comes from the case against the New York Times brought the brought by the Audubon Society. The judge Kaufmann decided he was the judge who decided that John Lennon could stay in America John Lennon was the target of a sort of politically motivated, bogus deportation campaign by Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell aided and abetted by Strom Thurmond. They wanted to get Lenin because Lenin leading up to the 72 election was doing going around trying to organize the youth vote, it was the first election where a teen 18 year olds could vote. So they wanted to retaliate. Lenin had been here on a series of visas, and they discovered this sort of old drug conviction he pled guilty to in England. And they argued that that made him ineligible to remain in America on his visa, even though he had been here that had been automatically renewed, you know, period after period and judge Kaufman found that that was unconstitutional. The conviction in England didn’t live up to American due process standards. But government also understood what was really going on. But it was politically motivated. He had a live in the decision saying we take very seriously this idea that the deportation laws would be used as a tool of political retaliation. And then finally, one one last case I’ll mention there are lots of others, but he sort of dusted off a law from 1789, in a case brought by parent Wan family against a Paraguayan police officer who had tortured and killed the son of a leading dissident in Paraguay in the 1970s. Or that that person came to the United States, the the police colonel who did that came to the United States. And when the family of Paraguay learned that

Jonathan Martin

they came to the United States and brought a lawsuit against him under the a what’s called the Alien Tort Statute, passed as part of the very first set of laws governing the judiciary in 1789. That law makes it a tort such that you can sue in federal court for a violation of what’s called the law of nations. Well, in this case, Judge coffin became the first judge to interpret that phrase, the law of nations to embrace all of these growing human rights treaties and human rights norms that sort of grown up after World War Two. So it’s a real landmark decision allowing people who’ve been human rights victims anywhere in the world in theory to sue their oppressors as long as there was jurisdiction over them here in the United States, which in that case, there was because he was here that gave birth to really a whole area of law, like a number of wave of lawsuits in the 80s and 90s. Based on human rights violations, for example, out of the Bosnian war, a lot of the Holocaust remuneration litigation was based on that it was suits against the Marcos family, and then starting in the 90s into the 2000s, a new kind of lawsuit against American corporations and multinational corporations for misdeeds abroad. And like a lot of what Judge Kauffman did that was too liberal for the Supreme Court, the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, which is a series of decisions starting in the early 2000s. And culminating in just the last couple of years, they’ve almost eliminated that whole area of liability but it fascinatingly it, Judge confidence innovation went beyond the US it gave birth to this concept of universal jurisdiction around the world. So for example, in Spain, it was a judge for a long time who would be prosecuted Pinochet, he prosecuted other human rights abusers in places having nothing to do with Spain. And he was calling on this principle of universal jurisdiction, which took cop and and helped innovate in that decision in America in the late 70s. And 80s are such a fascinating transition.

Here he is in the 50s, as you know, the spokesperson for the government, and we’re going to really lay down the law and now he’s going against the government. It’s right. Fascinating. So now, what’s what’s also interesting is that, you know, he was very, obviously a very public figure. And these decisions are very public with long standing ramifications down the line in a very positive way. But you also go into His family life, which was very troubled, and what was the connection between his private life and then these public decisions?

Right, he did have a troubled family life like sad a lot of ways he had three kids. They suffered from substance abuse and mental illness. One of them died at 38 on a hiking trip to Peru, but there was some suggestion that drugs might have been involved. And there’s no question he had a bit of a drug problem. He had another son who had even greater substance abuse and suffered from Munchausen disease and ended up losing the limb because of that, and just being really only partially able to function. You had a third son who was institutionalized on and off and with severe mental illness, that son also predeceased him, his wife had attempted suicide, also substance abuse, alcohol problems, pain, addiction problems seem to suffer from anorexia. So these are all obviously these are these are serious, serious, no doubt deep seated ailments and and it would be facile to trace them, you know, too close-

ly to any one cause. But the relatives I spoke to, did link them to some degree to a couple of things, you know, beyond simply genetics and beyond simply the environmental causes for those kinds of issues that we’re all kind of aware of, they thought the Rosenberg controversy might have had something to do with it. And that’s because the family sort of lived under siege for a long time that it was a quote from his daughter in law and said, sort of paraphrasing here, but basically, what she said was like, how do you have a normal childhood when your father is trying to Rosenberg’s you know, and what they mean is that they were under a guard, a lot, they were sort of special words, almost are projects of the FBI. One of his sons was at Syracuse in 1958 59, when Judge coffin was presiding over a kind of well known mafia case, as a he was still a trial judge at that stage. And that son received a death threat. In college that might have been no one knows what might have been a prank, no one really knows where it came from. It’s hard, it’s impossible to know if it was a serious threat. But of course, given the history was taken seriously, and the FBI immediately, you know, investigated and went and guarded him. And so there was all of that. He also had a quite difficult personality, Josh Kaufman, he was prickly. He was extremely demanding. He was a bit tyrannical go to law clerks, famously so but but also whose kids it didn’t seem very different wasn’t it was kind of father who just wasn’t satisfied and believe that the way for them for his kids to succeed was to drive them towards success. You know, he’d been extremely driven. And so by the time he has kids, the families prosperous, they’re living on Park Avenue, they’re quite well to do. And there’s a sort of sense that since, you know, general circumstances aren’t going to drive his kids the way he was driven by poverty and being second generation here in the US that he had to sort of supply the, the impetus and the incentive, and, you know, as a person who needed to be in control, who needed to be almost to dominate and when things in his life seemed out of control, like this larger controversy that besieged him, you know, he arguably sort of retaliated by tightening the screws all the harder and grandchildren of this, this middle generation who’ve done so you’d had such affliction. You know, they believe that their father’s way of being a dad, you know, couldn’t have helped those kids with their illnesses and their other issues. So, you know, it’s all it’s all sort of armchair psychology. It’s hard to know. But but they the family life was tragic in some ways.

Wow. Well, you mentioned armchair psychology, you but you also have firsthand experience. You were, as you mentioned, you were as his conference, last law clerk, and the book opens up your experience at his funeral. Tell us about some of the experiences you had and your impressions of the judge.

Yeah, so the judge, the judge can be extremely hard. And I had a fairly atypical experience actually, because when I started working for him, which was August of 1991. He wasn’t in the office. He’s coming back from vacation, and then he came back the end of August and within a couple of months, he was declining. In health, and he died in February of 1992. So I only saw sort of glimpses of what we might call the Kauffman treatment, which is like sometimes like his kids clerks couldn’t measure up for, sort of, regardless of what

they did. And some of that, you know, the I interviewed about 50 former law clerks, and some of them thought it was his insecurity. He’d gone to Fordham, he hired clerks only from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford used to call them Harvard, sort of derisively, if you’ve gone to Harvard, he would call you Harvard in a sort of sarcastic way. He had this tradition, every year, when the new courts would start over the summer, he, they would write their first draft opinion for him, and he would look it over, call them back into his office an hour later and be marked up with red pen, and he’d physically throw it at them. And say, in essence, I’m gonna amend this because I assume this is a family podcast and say, this is terrible, except he didn’t use the word terrible. And you know, a lot of clerks were really discombobulated by this, many of them quit over the years, he would have cottonwood erupt, sort of irrationally, fire them, even though you were kind of supposed to know when he fired you that you didn’t really, you know, most of the time, he hadn’t really fired you. Sometimes he’d fire you, and you would not come in the next day, you would think, well, it’s terrible. I’ve been fired by my judge, how do I explain that to future employers? What do I put on my resume? You know, but at least I don’t ever have to see the guy again. And then you get a call from chambers. And he’d be where, you know, the screening and like, where are you? And he’d say, Well, Judge, you know, don’t you remember you, you fire me yesterday? And he said, No, I didn’t get in here, you know, you’re behind get it, you need to get in here. So he was just, he was just sort of impossible to predict that way. And he had he also again, grandchildren told me, he did this in his family, he would play them off against one another. So he, for many years, he had two clerks and then in the 1970s, because he was chief judge, he had three clerks. And the way the the way the office worked is you’ve sat in a kind of anti loom, and he was in a big sort of office and back and he would buzz you in with a buzzer. And the clerk who was in his best graces was cork number one, you get one buzz, and you have to run right in. And I have to tell me, like, you know, I still hear that buzzer in my nightmares, you know that just as because you had to, you had to be in there, within three seconds, whatever you were doing on the phone in the middle of a thought writing a sentence, like drop it in there. If you wanted to talk to the second clerk, there’d be two buses, you need to ask the Secretary and the third clerk was in such a deep doghouse that he didn’t even get plugged in. And in fact, and it was it was you would kind of infer some humiliating treatment if you were the third clerk, because sometimes he wouldn’t talk to you. He would just he would talk to the first clerk and say, Tell him such and such, he would just sort of kind of like freeze you out. So I mean, I just I heard all kinds of crazy stories of one one, the woman who started who was locked up right before me, you know, just couldn’t take this treatment, as long as a lot of people couldn’t. And she would go to the bathroom, and she’d cry a lot. And so eventually, the judge noticed her absence and said to the number one clerk, you know, where is she? And he’d say, well, she’s in the bathroom judge. And he would, he began to think that she must be drinking too much water. So he banned water from chambers for a while. So it’s just, it’s just one of these sort of old school tyrannical, unpredictable grenade waiting to explode sort of bosses. And these days, I don’t think I’m not sure you can get away with a

40 year run of that back then, you know, it was just like your little more unreviewable to use a legal term, right? So he did get away with it. One year, I’ll tell you one last story that one year, embarrassed him. And then in the 1980s, all three of his clerks quit it at the same time, that actually made the papers and it was kind of humiliating for him and the only time that ever happened, because clerks it however badly they’re treated, if it’s a one year job, so and you’re going on to a law firm, and you’re gonna put it on your resume, and it’s kind of feather in your cap to have as a young lawyer and you have every incentive just to stick it out. And just, you know, even if the judge is never going to talk to you again, or give you a reference, like at least you can just get out of there so so for someone to quit just shows you how bad and unendurable and really kind of was. So anyway, difficult guy, but you know, what he wanted, could also be a prince when he wanted to, which usually was dealt with awkward, but he could be funny, he could be charming. Garius and there was that side of him too, for sure. He wouldn’t have gotten where he was if he was just completely No, no, no, not at all. And as I said, he was in his earlier days when he was kind of flattering his way to the top in addition to accomplish it his way to the top, but he did both, you know, he was quite quite warm, quite sociable. And he had, you know, he had like, he had some close friends and to his friends he was he was loyal, and then even to a small number of clerks who kind of managed to graduate the Kaufman bootcamp and get into his good graces for those relatively small number he would add, you know, avidly promote their careers and stay in touch. So, you know, he could he could be that way. He just didn’t want too much of the time.

Well, we’re so glad that you were a clerk under him. You know, I don’t think this book would have existed if that didn’t happen

Absolutely not.

So we’re very grateful for that. You know, you have a personal experience when we’re grateful that you shared that with us as well as in the book but also you did a really deep in depth look at interviewing dozens of people and really getting down to the bottom of his story and and fascinating story that we encourage all of our listeners to read, it was just was given a really glowing review in the New York Review of Books. So it’s a great read - Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. It was great talking with you, Martin.

Thanks very much, really appreciate it.

That was Martin Siegel, author of Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs.

THE EXCERPT

My mother taught me to how to shoot. We had one gun in our house, a musket with a club butt that had three initials and a number carved into it. “This is a gun for a man,” she said, “and you are nearly a man now.” She showed me how to hold the gun and balance it, stepping back with my right foot and putting the left forward, raising the butt high on my right shoulder and looking along the barrel at a stump in the field. My mother was a lean woman, and when she aimed the gun it looked like an extension of her, taut and strong, browned by the sun. She watched me carefully as I rested the gun at an angle on the ground, poured powder down the barrel, and rammed the wadding and ball to the breech. She showed me how to prime the gun, to halfcock and push the hammer, and place enough powder in the pan to catch a spark.

When she shot the gun her fingers gripped the barrel like a vise and she leaned forward, aggressively, taming the fire that blasted from the muzzle while hardly flinching, spraying splinters from the stump by force of gunpowder and determination. When I pulled the trigger the barrel jumped and knocked my arm, bruising the bone in my shoulder, and the power and blast of flame impressed upon me that this was not a thing of innocence. Black haze and the dry acrid smell of sulfur and wood smoke lingered in the air.

When we finished shooting I hacked at the stump with an axe and we pried out the clusters of lead, to melt and remake into new shot.

“Am I good enough to hunt?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Soon.”

When that day came we awoke early before the sun rose and walked beyond the field to the woods, to a place where there were many white-tailed deer, where tracks pocked the soil and you would sometimes hear the deer brush against leaves or snap a twig before

you saw them. There were short hills with rocky banks and clusters of boulders big enough to form small caves, and there were many long branches of laurel trees, and these were good places to sit quietly and wait for deer to come close.

I carried the gun, which was loaded, and my mother carried the axe and a tin water bottle on a cord across her shoulder. We were downwind of the deer run and our steps were quiet; my mother pointed to a cove of lush laurel branches that would give us cover. As she walked toward them a black mass moved from a bank of stones, slowly and close by, not yet aware of our presence. I lifted the gun and pulled back the cock.

“Mother,” I said.

As I stared down the long barrel at my target, I knew she had turned and was looking at the bear.

“Yes.”

The gun kicked back as a blast of fire and smoke shot from the muzzle. For a moment I could not see the bear, but I saw my mother holding the axe with both hands, ready to strike if it lunged at us. Then the bear fell on its front legs, its head against the ground. Its thick hind legs tried to push forward, and it rubbed its snout against the dirt while exhaling a wet guttural groan between gasps for breath.

It was the first animal I killed. We stood there, ready with the axe, and then sat down on some rocks. My stomach was unsettled, and I coughed and emptied it behind a tree. My mother gave me water. We watched the bear for a long time; even after it was dead its belly shuddered. Then we dragged it to the field and got a horse and wagon, and brought it home.

Years later, on the nineteenth day of September in ’77, at the north edge of an open field called Freeman’s farm, I stood partially hidden by a large maple tree adorned with orange and yellow leaves, aiming my musket at a man who crouched behind a tree stump and a pile of stones, whose white breeches were muddied at the knees but whose red coat seemed bright and unblemished. He had fired a shot at a

rifleman to my left, before he saw me, and when his eyes met mine he jumped to his feet and leveled his bayonet. I did not hesitate; and through the fire of the muzzle blast I saw him hit, bending in half at the waist for a fleeting instant, his hands flailing outward, as if, in his final moment, he was presenting himself to the king. At the same time a rapid spatter of shots cracked ahead and to my right, where a band of British skirmishers were met by Major Dearborn’s light infantry amid the tall oak and white pine at the edge of the woods.

On my left one of Colonel Morgan’s riflemen crawled toward me, his brown coat and knee-high green leggings bloodied. Another ran over and stooped beside him. “Pull him back to the log house,” I hollered. The riflemen had no bayonets, but their long rifles were far-reaching and accurate. They hid behind the rail fence and among the trees taking careful aim, looking foremost for the shimmer of a silver or brass regimental gorget hanging on a soldier’s chest, signifying his officer’s rank. Their shots from the fence line cracked loudly, and behind us I heard drum rolls, calling more of our troops to meet the enemy.

Quickly I reloaded and moved forward, passing the British soldier on the ground, certain he was dead and not wanting to see what I had done. At the edge of the clearing British skirmishers emerged from the trees across the field, which was riddled with stumps and fallen timber. They had come up from the river road by climbing the great ravine, lightly equipped but thwarted by the mud on the steep incline and the streams they had crossed. They assembled into their familiar order and moved, seeming ill at ease, toward two farm buildings in front of them. On a signal I did not hear, Morgan’s riflemen opened heavy fire and a torrent of shots rattled the air. The skirmishers quickly returned fire but many of them fell in the field. The riflemen saw this and yelled, rising up from their positions to a full-out charge as the British hesitated and then backed away, some turning and running.

The roll of drums grew louder, and Captain Van Swearingen, a Pennsylvanian, drew up on the left, waving his sword in the air and

directing the fire as more than two hundred riflemen and light infantry scrambled through the trees to the edge of Freeman’s clearing.

I joined with my company from the Third New Hampshire. We quickly formed at the tree line and fired hurried volleys to cover the advance of the riflemen, who were rushing in waves into the field and following the retreat of the British skirmishers. Amid the gunshots there was desperate yelling from some of the fallen redcoats who tried to crawl from the clearing, and much hallooing from the riflemen, all of which was interrupted by the thunderous cough of a British fieldpiece that spit grapeshot into the riflemen’s left flank. Morgan’s men ran for cover among the stumps and timber and looked for the cannon, which revealed its location with a second blast that hit a cluster of men, felling them like crashing ninepins. Still, Morgan’s men fired at the redcoats from positions low and behind cover, but with the third cannon shot came a wave of red uniforms that saturated the woods across the field, revealing Johnny Burgoyne’s massed British line.

Across the clearing the whole tree line exploded at once and the air filled with shot. Many of Morgan’s men spun and fell, dropping their rifles and clutching their bellies and limbs. Both sides unleashed the fury of their arms, and the rhythm of volleys was lost in the loud and fiery crackle of incessant gunfire. Men in the field, both redcoats and riflemen, shouted for help or screamed in pain, while some tried pulling their bleeding comrades through the grass. From a cluster of trees to my left came a loud turkey call, an excited yelp and cackle that I knew was Colonel Morgan’s signal to his riflemen, directing them to fall back.

My light troops continued to fire, giving cover to the scrambling riflemen. British skirmishers also ran to their lines, but on their left a spasm of musket fire commenced, meant for the riflemen but wounding a number of redcoats. Those still standing kept running, but they were unsure where to go. A cannon roared a signal shot, and most of the shooting from the British line stopped. The skirmish had been a full-scale battle for half an hour or longer, but now the cacophony of

gunfire gave way to the scuttle of armies regrouping and the moans and cries from the grassy field.

I looked for Captain Van Swearingen. In the clearing ahead of our far left flank he appeared to be wounded, and was being carried to the British line by a cluster of Indians. The several men with him were also taken as prisoners. We reloaded our muskets and exchanged tense shouting among us, but there was nothing we could do. The midday sun parched the field, and we heard the cries of the wounded begging for water and the pleas of the dying to end their suffering. At opposite sides of the clearing both armies hauled their injured soldiers to safety, but those in the middle were out of reach and we left them there. A few men from Putnam’s Regiment broke ranks and went into the field, taking what they could from the dead. Walking back toward a log hut behind us, I passed a horse lying on the ground with its front legs broken. Its belly twitched, but I knew there was no life in it.

2

All around the log hut the wounded were lying on the ground. Some were being bandaged and some were loaded into wagons and taken behind the lines to the field hospital. Coming up the road were many hundreds of men: the rest of the New Hampshire regiments, the Second and Fourth New York, two units of Connecticut militiamen, and others behind them. We knew the fight was not over, and there was much clamoring to prepare for what was coming.

A rifleman near me pointed to the road that led east toward the river, and called out, “General Arnold!” Several men quickly stood up from where they rested and looked down the line, shielding their eyes from the bright sunlight with their raised hands, as if saluting. On his chestnut stallion, Major General Benedict Arnold had galloped

back from the picket guard of Jackson’s Regiment, where he had gone to summon volunteers to join the battle. Now he cantered alongside some three hundred of them while pointing his sword at the British lines and instructing the soldiers on their objectives.

“They are bringing up artillery,” he called out to them. “That will be our first target. We will take them from the enemy’s hands and make them our own.”

His voice was clear and authoritative, and his own excitement palpable.

“This is our battle!” he hollered, “And today we will conquer!”

A chorus of cheers went up from the men. Arnold spurred his horse and rode ahead to where Colonel Morgan was huddled with Colonel Scammel. He spoke briefly with them from his horse, then galloped farther up the line.

A munitions wagon brought musket cartridges, and we hurried to resupply. Goodwin, a private from my company, was hastily surveying the wounded. He looked up and caught my eye.

“Captain Wheatley,” he said, making his way toward me. “Have you seen Private Sullivan?”

“I have not,” I answered, gazing toward the wounded.

“He’s my cousin, my aunt’s only son. I’m to look after him.”

“When did you see him last?” I asked.

Goodwin was young, and his emotions twisted his face. “Could he be still in the field?”

“Listen to me,” I told him. “The best thing you can do right now is prepare for another fight. Sullivan will take care of himself. Get ready.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he walked back toward a wagon that carried the dead.

Men clustered around barrels of water, filling tin bottles and wooden canteens. The air was warm and the wounded had been placed in the shade, and as they were moved back behind the lines, the soldiers who were readying themselves for the next battle took those spots in the shadows. In the two hours since the skirmish at

Freeman’s farm our numbers had increased by more than a thousand men, and with this came a notion of strength. We were eager to know if we would attack, or await an attack from the British.

The answer came quickly enough. Across Freeman’s clearing, fieldpieces along the British line exploded with a deafening roar. Every man at once took his position. Ahead of us the blasts of artillery shook the earth and clouded the air. Just as we were set to march out from the cover of the trees and return to the field, General Arnold returned, galloping in front of the lines, waving his sword and pointing it toward our foe.

“Providence will give us this day,” he shouted, “for our cause is just!”

The men cheered loudly, and the roar of “Huzzah!” nearly matched the noise of the cannons.

With a preacher’s conviction, Arnold’s voice rose over the soldiers.

“Today we shatter our chains on the anvil of Liberty!”

A volley of musket fire exploded from across the field, but Arnold paid it no heed.

“For this land is ours, men, and no king shall have it!”

Hundreds of troops burst into a cheering frenzy. As his horse pranced anxiously, Arnold pulled the reins and saluted his army, then spurred the stallion and galloped down the line.

Drums rolled and Colonel Scammel gave his command, which ricocheted through the ranks in shouts among captains and sergeants:

“To the front! March!”

The clearing was not large and soon the armies were close enough for the unremitting fire of muskets to reap a crop of men. Officers shouted commands and the men rapidly loaded, fired, and reloaded.

“Front rank! Make ready!”

“Take aim! Fire!”

“Rear rank! Make ready!”

“Take aim! Fire!”

The Cornell University Press Podcast an interview with rachEl DickiNSoN, author of the LoneLiest PLaces hosted by Jonathan hall

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Rachel Dickinson, author of The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief and the Long Journey Home. Rachel Dickinson is a travel writer, essayist, artist, and award winning author. She is the author of six other books, including American Dynasties, Notorious Reno Gang, and Falconer on the Edge. We spoke to Rachel about the physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys She took after the unimaginable and heartbreaking loss of her son to suicide, and how traveling in unfamiliar territory, and spending time deep in nature helped gradually bring some solace to her sadness. Hello, Rachel, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you for inviting me, Jonathan. I’m very happy to be here.

Well, it’s our pleasure. And I look forward to talking with you right now, about your book, The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief and the Long Journey Home. Tell us how this book came to be.

Okay, um, well, now, almost 11 years ago, my son Jack, who was a 17 year old at the time, died by suicide. And it was a shock to everyone who knew him and particularly to his family. And I, prior to that had been a travel writer for quite a while and had written several books. And when Jack killed himself, I thought, I will never be able to write another word, I won’t be able to do anything. And for several years, that was true. I pretty much just sat in a chair, or I ran away from home, I had two modes, and one was to leave. And the other was to just stay but be completely isolated in a chair. But I did start writing. I did a lot of reading of other people’s literature about grief and loss, like Joan Didion, and CS Lewis. So, you know, I just would read widely and I wasn’t reading self-help boos, I was reading memoirs and people who are really trying to grapple with their grief through words. So I decided that I should try to just put down some thoughts and that just kept going and going, until I finally had almost enough for a book.

Well, you had, you had mentioned reading different authors to get their take on grief and you chose one of the greats TS Eliot, in the beginning of your book you state. TS Eliot wrote the line “These fragments I’ve shared against my ruins” toward the end of his 1922 poem, The Wasteland. And while there isn’t agreement on what exactly this line refers to, I like to think that the fragments are bits and pieces of our past we should be collecting to help make sense of the world around us. This is what I’ve done in The Loneliest Places. How did collecting these fragments of your past help you process the incomprehensible pain and grief of the loss of your son.

Jonathan Jonathan Jonathan

rachel rachel

I knew that I felt much more comfortable kind of dwelling in the past, in a way. I live in Freeville, which is a tiny village outside of Ithaca. And five generations of my family have lived here. And but my family goes back in Tompkins County to a Revolutionary War deed, land deed from service in the Continental Army. So my family has been here forever and I, I really feel this place, but I feel it in a fragmentary way myself. And I drive through I recognize things, things remind me of other things in the past things that both I experienced or that my ancestors might have experienced. I am, I feel like the molecules of my very being, are really kind of entwined with the molecules that swirl around in my village. So it’s all fragmentary to me. And I knew that by trying to put some of these things together on the page, past history, family history, geological history, I might be able to make sense of what had happened to me .And then I didn’t know how that was going to work. But my instinct was to just try to write my way out of the whole thing. And so but it started as fragments, and including I spent one year writing really bad poetry. And none of that is included in the book. But it, it did help me with my visuals, I think, because I would sit at Dryden Lake, which is kind of like a big pond really near where I live. And I would just look at the birds and I watch the clouds. And I would sit there and just write down my, my little, these little fragments of things I had seen. So fragments became really a way that I was trying to deal with the past and move forward into the future, hoping they would all just coalesce at some point.

That’s beautiful. And thank you also for sharing your family history. I didn’t, I didn’t know the deep roots that your family has. I think it’s interesting because you there’s this, you mentioned in these deep roots, and every atom and cell in your body is connected to the land. And yet you also describe your father and yourself as peripatetic, which I had to look up, Greek for “walking about.” And I think that that’s interesting, that you learn to see more clearly by leaving your deep roots. And that is something that some people have more than others. You know, I think that in many ways, our, you know, ancestral past deep ancestors, you know, were nomadic. And but there’s also, you know, up until the modern day, there’s also the sense of pilgrimage. And that there’s, you know, the pilgrimage of the Australian walkabout or Homer’s Odyssey, or, you had mentioned you had spent some time on the island of Iona, and that there are pilgrims that go to that island. Tell us how this journey of way allowed you to have a journey back inwards.

I think initially, it started as a way to run away from home. Although I I had always been a very eager traveler and which led me to do travel writing in the first place. I I knew that I felt really comfortable when I was in these, what I call the loneliest places in some ways. So five weeks after Jack died, I found myself in the Falkland Islands, and this is 6000 miles away from home, it’s as far away from home as you can get basically, you know, way down south in the south, the South Atlantic Ocean. And this was a journey I had arranged in November. So like, you know, four months earlier, and all of these moving parts had to be put in place, I had an assignment to write about the 30th anniversary of the Falklands

Jonathan

rachel rachel

Jonathan Jonathan rachel

War. So I was going there, you know, with the intent of really talking to people who had been alive, you know, when the island was invaded by the Argentinians and but I didn’t quite know what I was walking into. And I found that I loved loved the landscape. It was really reminded me of being like in, in the islands of in the Outer Hebrides, you know, very windswept landscape where it was just filled with animals like, you know, elephant seals, and really interesting. Penguins dip five different species of penguins. So it’s like the it was familiar, yet not familiar to me. But the one thing I did realize when I was there, that I would not be seeing jack out of the corner of my eye, I had gone to a place where he had never been, and for some reason, I kind of established this rule in my mind that if I was someplace Jack had never been I would never see him. And so that made traveling, really the only way to feel some relief of the just crushing grief and sorrow that accompany me when I was sitting at home. So but what I also found in Falkland Islands, it was ironic that I was there to really talk to these people who had been invaded. I just found that a whole lot of People going through post traumatic stress syndrome. And I would look at their faces, I’d listen to their stories. And I, my mind would wander as if you’d hear the breaking of the penguin behind you. And I would just think, Wow, I’m looking at someone who I recognize this. Look, this is someone who has been really damaged in some way, by something that happened to them that they will never get over. And I felt like I was looking in the mirror. So I didn’t always feel that way, obviously, when I went other places, but I did have this yearning to just get away. And periodically, and I know that it worried members of my family, I think they’re like, Why is she not home? Why is she insisting on going to the Falklands or to Iceland, or these various places, and I always just went to these very lonely places that had more nature than human habitation. So it made me feel better. That’s why I did it.

Yeah. That makes it makes it makes sense. I mean, it obviously didn’t make sense at the time necessarily, and your family, I read in the book there, what’s going on? Why is Rachel leaving us and it caused a rift within the family. But in hindsight, it certainly makes sense. Particularly, as you were saying earlier, you know, that with your family connection, your family history, the ancestors, that you could feel viscerally of many generations there, you couldn’t, can’t escape it that as you were saying that you could see Jack perhaps out of the corner of your eye, going to a place where Jack has never been reduces the odds of that happening. And that brings up the idea of a spiritual journey as well. And so I was really fascinated to hear of your visits to the spiritual community of Lilydale, which I’ve visited a couple of times myself as well. And I just find that place fascinating. And for those listeners that don’t know Lilydale it’s a community of spiritualists. I think it’s been around since the maybe mid 1800s. Or what was it?

Like? Yeah, probably 1880s

1880s. Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s basically a place where a lot of spirit mediums are psychic mediums who have the potential to communicate to the other side, the veil, the other side. And yet you were connected with a medium name Drew Kali. And in the book, you said that he stated, while he was in trance, that the message I’m getting is for you to stop observing, and be willing to participate. And so I was curious writing in your book is, is doing that you know, you are observing and being self reflective, and participating in detailing your story and detailing your inner world to the outer world. And you’re also participating with a larger community. Now you’re sharing your story to the group rather than just keep it to yourself. And by doing so, you offer a way to help others who are trying to survive tragic events, suicide of a child or even though the individual as you were mentioning, in the Falkland Islands, so anyone that’s experienced a trauma, and you’re trying to live with the intense emotions that come from that. And in that vein, what spiritual insights are you willing to share that helped you or could help others find peace amongst the sadness?

Well, I grew up, I grew up in Freeville, the village I still live in, and I attended the Methodist church there. And when I was older, when I was an adult, I was the choir director. So but I never, I was never baptized, I never embraced it fully. I had this real problem in believing, you know, making that leap of faith, which is embracing faith itself. So I was more interested in kind of the rituals of religion. And I loved the music that was associated with the Methodist Church. But on the other side of my little village was a spiritualist camp, which was occupied in the summer with Mediums who would come and stay in these little cottages. But they would give readings at this tiny auditorium that was on the camps and we would just kind of stand in the back of the room as kids and just listen to what these mediums were saying. And it wasn’t it was just kind of this kind of cool parlor trick in a way when I was a kid. It was fascinating. I was I’m always fascinated with it. But when I got older, and I did have a chance to go to Lily Dale, and I’ve been there several times now like yourself, I, it’s like I can’t get enough of it, there’s something about being able to go from place to place to place in Lily Dale, where you will find mediums who have gathered at these places to give these little public readings, there would be like three mediums who would stand out at the Temple of Truth or the inspiration stump, and hello crowd, we’d be in front of them and a medium would look at someone been pointed at them and say, May I come to you. And then you have to answer aloud so they get a sense of your voice. And I got so I could figure out who were the really good mediums and who weren’t, by the kind of detail they were giving. And, you know, things that made sense to me, there were there were ones who I didn’t think were very good, who really were listening to various cues that they would get from what someone would say. So, you know, I knew to just keep my mouth shut, basically, and listen to what they were saying. But I really got a feeling that some of them just made shivers down my spine, because I knew what they were saying, had come from some place that was not known to me. And when Drew

Jonathan rachel

rachel

Kali, I happened to be in a course taking a course from him on, you know, developing your mediumship as if I had any. I should be so lucky, I think. But he was talking to us about colors and auras and seeing various things. And he just stopped in the middle of this. And he pointed at me. And he said, I just have to tell you, I see this old band standing behind you. And he’s holding his head, and he’s not very tall. And he completely described my father. And, and he, he said, Did he die because of something with his head. And I said, Yes, he had a stroke. So I mean, like he and he gave me these little clues about who this person was. And it kept going. He said, well there other people crowding around, including there, someone I didn’t know the name that begins with J. And I was so thrown off by my father’s appearance. They said, Well, he was married five or six times, and all of the women he married, their names began with the letter J. And he said, That’s not it. This is someone who’s very musically gifted. And I said, Oh, could have been my mother, Jane, you know, completely forgetting that my son Jack was very musically gifted, and was somewhere in in the afterlife. And it wasn’t until much later that my cousin pointed out, he was coming to you to tell you about Jack gap was there and wanted you to participate more in life, basically. And so it was just this shocking revelation that I had been spoken to in some way. So it made me feel better that, like, I, it gave me some kind of proof that there was something beyond where I was, it kind of ripped at that veil that I always kept between myself and faith. It’s so I don’t know, you know, it’s my whole notion of spiritualism. And spirituality really comes from my relationship to nature, and to the land. And I have spent the last 10 years really observing both of those things, and really taking in the landscape of every place I go and noticing what’s around me, and what’s around the animals. And to me that that’s the real touchdown. And that’s the thing that I think really helped me get through this past decade more than anything else was being in so just being able to go outside and look I have a huge walnut tree in my backyard. And I one year I took a photo every single day from the same window of this walnut tree in this little playhouse and I put it on Facebook every day and Instagram. And I the walnut tree had a huge following at that point because and we would watch it go through the whole the change of the seasons and if I became so kind of entwined with this walnut tree. And for me, that’s what gave me kind of a feeling of grace and a feeling of just contentment in a way it was watching closely watching this one tree go through four seasons. So that’s where I turned to. And the spiritualism in spiritualist stuff is just kind of the icing on the top of the cake for me is the yummy part, you know that I get to go and just, I have no preconceived notions about this stuff at all. And I thoroughly enjoy it when I am at Lilydale I thoroughly enjoy it.

That’s great. That’s great. That’s beautiful. Oh, yeah, it’s so much to unpack. But yeah, we don’t we don’t need science to tell us this. But I know that, that there’s this whole idea of nature therapy or florist therapy, I think the Japanese call it forest therapy. And the scientific studies that they’ve done, they show I think they looked at cortisol levels and different indicators of stress. And they said just 10 minutes of being in nature,

Jonathan

radically reduced people’s stress. Just hearing your story I love I love what you did. When you take a picture of the same scene over and over. I’ve seen people do that as well. But to have it tied to nature and seeing the the tree blossom, and then there’s its leaves and then the darkness of winter. Like it. It puts you in. I think why nature one of the reasons why nature is so healing is that you realize that there is this natural intelligence and there’s a natural cycle. And we’re a part we are even though we like to think some of us more so that we are somehow removed from nature. We’re not we are nature, we are part of this, this whole continuum.

Yeah, like watching the life cycle of this tree is very interesting to me. And I’ve watched it grow. We’ve lived in the same house for 20 years. And so I’ve really witnessed 20 years worth of growth on this tree. And I’ve also witnessed 20 years of how it the effects of living with a wall, a black walnut tree in particular, because you can’t grow certain things that are within its range shadow. So I have a garden that I have to keep moving back as the tree grows larger. And that’s been fascinating to me just like okay, you know, it’s doing its thing.

Yeah, yeah.

It has a lot of territory. There’s a lot of territory there at this point. So I’ve just loved that. There’s an I do feel completely at ease. When I’m by the walnut tree. It is my tree. There’s no doubt about it. But I, you know, I’d love walking through any kind of natural environment and always aware that I could break my ankle everywhere, you know, because it’s like, Okay,

We had a black walnut in our yard and the squirrels would Oh, my God, they were some of the biggest squirrels in the area.

Oh, yeah. They would throw walnuts at you.

They could target you. They were like experts. If I was underneath there, they would, they would find a way to try to drop them on me. I couldn’t believe it.

Exactly. It’s like, why are you wasting those? It’s like, up there. Yeah, we I’ve loved watching the squirrels, but we have gray and red squirrels here. And we also have one black squirrel, which has been fascinating. And they all just kind of share this tree during certain seasons of the year. And it’s it’s great to watch. And the birds are amazing as well.

Nice. Nice. One last question I had was, you know, I do think that as you were saying before that you sharing your story has had the opportunity to help others who are going through similar situations. If you had an opportunity to meet someone who has gone through what you have done, gone through or experienced some sort of trauma, and you were handing them your book. Do you have any... what would you say to them?

I would say this is one person’s experience of going through the worst

Jonathan Jonathan rachel

thing that can ever happen to a parent. And I feel like there are things in this book that really touch on universal truths. And that I found that I was soothed by reading other people’s memoirs about their journey through these, through this terrible time, and watching how they grew stronger over a period of time, that’s my hope for this book is that people will pick this up and say, they do say, oh my god, it’s, you know, you start out is just so intense. And then I, as time goes on, the writing gets a little looser, their humor comes into it, you know, a, you could, it’s literally like watching me unfurl from being, you know, tight, like a pine cone for a lot of it. And I finally they just kind of relax the little things on the pine cone, and I let more of the world interact with me and me interact with the world. And I think this is something that everyone goes through this just I have a different way of saying it. And so there are a lot of books on grief out there. But each one has its own little way of talking about it. And I’m hoping that the way I describe grief and my journey will be helpful to someone else.

That’s great. That’s great. Thank you for sharing your story bringing us on your journey. And I know your words have helped bring healing to yourself, and they will certainly will do the same for the many readers of your book.

Thank you, Jonathan. I really appreciate your kind words about the book.

That was Rachel Dickinson, author of the Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief and the Long Journey Home

THE EXCERPT

Deep Dive

The craft arrived at its destination on a summer day in 2016 guided by science, folklore, and intuition. Tim Caza pulled back the throttle, and his twenty-five-foot research vessel, Voyager, powered down and began idling toward the coordinates. The water that day was calm, making the task somewhat easier. So, too, did the help Caza had enlisted for the mission: John McLaughlin, a retired volunteer fire chief and body-recovery diver, who was climbing around the cuddy and onto the bow. Caza, with an eye on the GPS, shifted into neutral. As the boat drifted over the designated point, he signaled to McLaughlin, and a moment later the anchor was overboard, the rode running from the chain locker. Caza cut the power, and the engine noise gave way to the patter of wavelets against the hull and a general sense of stillness. They were within sight of the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario in only ninety feet of water, even though generations of conventional wisdom placed the object of their search somewhere to the west and in much deeper water.

Caza and McLaughlin, both broad at the shoulder, moved about the crowded little boat with practiced steps, the conversation turning to the task at hand. Caza ducked below and reappeared a moment later with his diving kit. McLaughlin, in his mid-seventies, was still a capable diver but knew well the hazards of uncharted wrecks, even for individuals in their physical prime. The plan was for McLaughlin to remain in the boat and spot Caza, who was twenty years younger, with a drop camera. McLaughlin had gear if the need arose, but he was happy to leave the frogging to a younger man. Above all he was there to witness the discovery. For the occasion he had brought an American flag, pristinely folded and sealed in clear immersible plastic.

It was early July, and along the shoreline, some miles off, occupants of seasonal cottages were in the midst of a weeklong celebration of Independence Day. Flags were in abundance, both those stirring languidly in the offshore breeze and the dollar-store variety that seemed especially suited to the clutches of small children. Though it was still only midmorning, the heat was building, and youths were dragging inflatables down to the water, over pebbly beaches, past remnants of campfires where on previous evenings parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors had set off fireworks. Adults—those not joining the children on the beach—would now be drawn to porches and lawn chairs with coffee or iced tea or maybe a bloody Mary.

The cottages—locally known as “camps”—were for the most part built in the post–World War II boom years, some of them styled after twostory beach houses but most little more than bungalows or trailers with decks and awnings. Harking to an era when waterfront property could be bought on a working-class salary and developed on fifty-foot lots by a generation flush with victory, they remain remarkably unchanged to this day, sharing an eclectic charm, general mustiness from being shuttered from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and an unbroken view to the horizon. That view—as sensational as the camps are modest—is an ever-changing flourish of light on water: fireworks, sunsets, lightning storms, constellations parading around the North Star or, on days like this, the sun burning colors from a vast empty sky into ponderous depths. It’s this stunning view—sometimes serene, sometimes sensational—that captivates generation after generation, though few are aware of the wreckage it conceals. Caza’s boat, roughly the size and shape of a sport-fishing charter, might

have been observable on this clear day for anybody who cared to look through binoculars. Still, it would have registered as no more than a speck on the horizon, its singularity of purpose lost on the observer.

It was at this point on the horizon, on a previous outing, where the long train of empty lakebed visible on Caza’s sonar screen had yielded to something of impressive dimensions. As the image scrolled into view, Caza had known immediately it wasn’t a shipwreck. And while ill-defined and obscured by sediment, it was too uniform to be a natural feature of the lake’s bottom. Geometric shapes amid shadowy features suggested parity of form. With much to cover that day, Caza had taken several screen shots, logged the coordinates, and continued with his survey.

It wasn’t until after Caza had returned home that he began to fully grasp the potential of his discovery. McLaughlin, a friend and neighbor, had stopped by to have a look. After examining the sonar image, McLaughlin produced a folder with diagrams of a four-engine aircraft. He placed one illustrating the aircraft’s proportions viewed from above next to the sonar image. As he rotated one image to align with the other, the confusion of shapes depicted in grainy monochrome on the lake’s bottom took on sudden coherence. The exposed section of its centerpiece and, most vividly, a lattice pattern on its top matched the nosepiece and cockpit canopy of the aircraft in the diagram. McLaughlin pointed out shapes protruding from the sediment—engines at the leading edge of the wing.

“Looks like the Twenty-Four,” McLaughlin had said, returning his reading glasses to his shirt pocket. Discoveries did not tend to inspire demonstrative enthusiasm in the body-recovery diver. A find isn’t a find, he is fond of noting, until “a diver can reach out and touch it.”

The object they were trying to reach was a B-24 Liberator bomber that had vanished with a crew of eight after taking off from the Westover Army base in Massachusetts at the height of the Second World War. “The Twenty-Four” was last heard circling low over Oswego County in a snowstorm in the early morning hours of February 18, 1944. For seventy-four years it had defied searches from the Adirondack Mountains to the depths of Lake Ontario, first by the US military, later by recreational divers, and, in an apparent attempt to exhaust all possibilities, a group of dowsers and mystics enlisted by private parties to channel the aircraft’s whereabouts.

The Liberator is fabulous both for what it was and what it represents. There is arguably no item that more singularly illustrates the country’s rise

Figures 1.1–1.3. A sonar image recorded by Tim Caza in 2016 matches outlines of the front section of a B-24 possibly buried in sediment in eastern Lake Ontario. Sonar record courtesy of Tim Caza, collage by Mike Bechthold.

to engineering and manufacturing prominence while leading, in more than a figurative sense, the war effort.1 Engineered by Consolidated Aircraft under urgent deadlines for a war where, for the first time in history, air supremacy was counted as a deciding factor, the Liberator could go farther, faster, with more payload than other bombers of its day—attributes that would carry the fight in Europe and the Pacific well behind enemy lines. “It would be an exaggeration to say the B-24 won the war for the Allies,” writes historian Steven Ambrose. “But don’t ask how they could have won the war without it.”2

The plane’s capabilities were unique, though its legacy ultimately rests with an unprecedented manufacturing feat. As the American home front tooled up for war, the Liberator became the centerpiece of aircraft development. Between 1941 and 1945, some 18,500 were produced, more than any other military aircraft in history. Rosie the Riveter rolled up her sleeves and got busy on B-24 lines, including a Ford Motor Company

Figure 1.4. At the height of the war, Liberators roll off the line at Willow Run, the converted Ford Motor Company assembly plant in southern Michigan. More Liberators were produced than any other military plane in history, but few exist today. National Archives and Records Administration.

factory a half mile long and a quarter mile wide near Detroit where Henry Ford’s auto assembly line was scaled up for production of the thirty-sixthousand-pound bomber. To be sure, the Liberator was not the only famous warplane to carry the day.3 But if the war was said to be won in the factories, the B-24 was exhibit A.

With so many of them rolling off the line back then, it is striking how few exist now. Like most of the country’s prodigious surplus arsenal that survived the war, the B-24s were valued mostly as scrap. Only thirteen are known to still exist; of those, two are airworthy.4 Yet the story of the unrecovered plane in upstate New York, no more than a dusky memory at best, was possibly less preserved than the plane itself by the time Caza and McLaughlin prepared for the dive. Few possessed reliable knowledge of the circumstances under which it disappeared, and fewer still pretended to know anything about its crew.

McLaughlin had seen a lot of things and people who had come to a tragic end at the bottom of rivers, quarries, and lakes, but the TwentyFour remained in a league of its own. The plane itself, however, was the lesser part of an ambition—a pilgrimage may be a better way to put it— that he had been pursuing for close to forty years.

The military had called off the search over upstate New York on March 3, 1944, two weeks after the airmen were last heard from and by which time it was all but certain, wherever they ended up, they had not survived. None of the bodies of the craft’s eight crew had been recovered. At the time, many tens of thousands of men were dying and disappearing on multiple fronts of the war, and tens of thousands more were urgently needed to replace them. All those men required training. The military had neither time nor resources to continue the search then, and apparently lacked incentive to do so later. The lost airmen, but for one exception, were young and single; they left behind grieving mothers and fathers from all regions of the country, but no direct descendants to pursue their precise fate and final resting place. Now the mothers and fathers of the crew were long dead and gone. So were sisters, brothers, and cousins. McLaughlin and Caza, returning to the site on that July day with a folded flag, were, in a way, surrogates.

As Voyager tugged at her anchor, Caza prepared for the dive amid an assortment of gleaming tanks and regulators. The air bore the aroma of

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