After a federal jury in Manhattan awarded Journalist Quentin Reynolds $175,001 in a libel suit against Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler. Hearst lawyers took their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Their argument: what Pegler had written about Reynolds (TIME, May 24, 1954, et seq.) was "innocuous and susceptible of innocent and harmless interpretations."
There was nothing wrong, said the Hearst lawyers, with Pegler's writing that "Reynolds went nuding along the public road [with] a wench." After all, "perfectly honorable people are nudists, and . . . nudism [is] not a crime." Pegler's charge that Reynolds proposed marriage to Heywood Broun's widow...
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