In a Budapest courtroom, seven anti-Communists stood trial, and went from accusation to judgment in five days (see FOREIGN NEWS). In Manhattan, eleven cocky Communists, also accused of conspiring against their own country, were in their fourth week of pretrial maneuvering, and a jury had not even been chosen. All the privileges of U.S. justice, including the opportunity of delay .and the doubtful right of sheer dallying with the court, was being given to them in its fullest measure.
"Old World Charm." U.S. justice, in the person of Federal Judge Harold Medina, listened patiently, though patience was tried to the breaking point. Justice had lent its ear while the Reds' lawyers tediously cross-examined 24 jurors, trying to prove that New York federal juries discriminated against Negroes, Jews, the poor. Rocking back & forth in a high-backed chair, Jurist Medina now & again pleaded with the Communists' shouting, ranting lawyers to remember where they were. Justice was also debonair and deft, so that even Party-Liner Howard (Citizen Tom Paine) Fast, writing in the Communist Daily Worker, acknowledged Medina's "old world charm," and recognized that "like many other good performers, he knows the understress is of more value than the bludgeon ... It is quite apparent, even through the charm, that he does not like the Communists, who go in not only for bickering, but for much more overt forms of opposition."
Actually, for all his old-worldliness, Medina was raised in Brooklyn, was called a "greaser" at public school because his father was Mexican (his mother is a D.A.R. of Dutch descent). He made the water-polo team and Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, and was earning $100,000 a year as a lawyer before President Truman appointed him to the federal bench in 1947.
For three weeks, Justice had leaned over backward, while Medina had heard his orders defied, his rulings disregarded and his court criticized. Finally, Justice became mildly annoyed. Medina said to the Communists' battery of lawyers: "I can hint, I can suggest, I can be pleasant about it, but you go right on ... you just keep it up and up."
"If You Keep This Up." Loud-mouthed Communist-line Congressman Vito Marcantonio took the witness stand. He was offered by the defense as an "expert," but he did none of his usual screaming; he was bothered by a cold. No such ailment handicapped pint-sized Lawyer Harry Sacher, who looks like a Dead End Kid. In a bullfrog's voice he insinuated at one point that Judge Medina was prejudicing the trial. Medina said icily: "You and your colleagues have obviously adopted new techniques by which, instead of the defendants being tried, the court and all its members are the ones who must suffer excoriations and accusations of counsel. But I think perhaps with patience there will be an end."