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Word from Moscow. McGohey presented his first witness. He was ex-Communist Louis Budenz, a reformed Red. In most of his previous public appearances, Witness Budenz had destroyed much of his value as an expert on communism by going off half-cocked every time the word was mentioned. But this time Witness Budenz, directed by the prosecution, testified icily and directly.
Doggedly the defense lawyers worried him with objections. His testimony was frazzled with interruptions, but what he managed to get out ran like this:
He was editor of the Daily Worker in 1945 when the party shifted from its wartime policy of getting along with capitalism to a postwar policy of trying to overthrow the U.S. The shift was dictated by Dmitry Z. Manuilsky, Ukraine delegate to the U.N., who at the time was in San
Francisco helping to write the U.N. charter for world peace.
In a letter from a Daily Worker correspondent, said Budenz, he was told that "Manuilsky was indignant at the American party for not criticizing American officials more severely." The result was French Red Jacques Duclos' now famous Paris article castigating Earl Browder, then chief of the U.S. Communist party. Browder, who still stands ready to testify for the defense, was the fall guy of the Communist policy shift dictated by Moscow.
Head-Scratching. As the trial lumbered on, the ideological gobbledygook of communism poured in full flood into the ears of Court and jury. Browder, among other things, was accused of the Communist sin of "tailism." "It sounds like some kind of special jargon," the judge said plaintively, and pleaded for an explanation of terms.
Budenz obliged. In committing tailism, Browder was riding the ideological coattails of such "bourgeois" thinkers as Franklin Roosevelt. Opportunistic error, said Budenz, was failing to follow the Marxist-Leninist line. Revisionism was erroneously believing in peaceful progress towards socialism. And just plain Browder-ism: being guilty of all the other errors in one big lump.
Defense attorneys also had some definitions of their own for what they considered errors committed in Judge Medina's courtroom. As Attorney Richard Gladstein saw it, certain of the judge's remarks did not fit the Court's own definition of fairness, were prejudicial to the case. Gladstein wanted him to declare a mistrial. "I won't do it," said the judge. "If you expect me to sit here like a bump on a log you're making a big mistake."
Attorney Harry Sacher said the judge tried to "negate" defense statements by his gestures. The way Sacher described them: "You scratched your head and pulled your ear." "When I scratch my head I'm just plain scratching my head," laughed Medina. "I have a habit of doing that and I'm not going to change it just because you don't like it."
Defense counsel had its own habit, too. Its members missed no pettifogging chance for objection, argument, delay. By such tactics they had held off the actual start of the trial for ten weeks. Now that it had been begun, delay for confusion's sake was still one of their favorite legal weapons.