The case was being tried in the small town of Okanogan, Wash. (pop. 2,001), but it had a big-city price tag: the plaintiffs asked $225,000 damages for libel and conspiracy. The cast of characters read like the line-up for a movie: an admitted ex-Communist, an organizer for the John Birch Society, two former state legislators (one a Democrat, the other Republican) and a dapper weekly newspaper publisher. Bit parts were to be played by a Hollywood star and an ex-U.S. Senator.
The lead was played by John Goldmark, 46, a Harvard law graduate with a prosperous Okanogan Valley wheat, beef and quarter-horse ranch he bought after getting out of the Navy in 1945. He had been handily elected three times to the state legislature in Olympia, where he rose to chairman of the house ways and means committee. His wife Sally had been a Communist Party member from 1935 until a year after their marriage in 1942, a fact that became public during Goldmark's 1962 re-election campaign.
The Grounds. That's where the case began. Ashley E. Holden, 69, publisher of the weekly Tonasket Tribune (circ. 1,013), ran a news story pointing up Goldmark's membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, which he said was "closely affiliated with the Communist movement in the United States." A Holden editorial called Goldmark "a tool of a monstrous conspiracy to remake America into a totalitarian state."
In a publication widely distributed to voters, Albert F. Canwell, 57, a former state representative and now a freelance investigator of Communism, identified Sally Goldmark as a Communist and the A.C.L.U. as a Communist front.
Goldmark ran fourth in a field of five in the Democratic primary that September. Just two weeks later he and his wife filed suit against Canwell and against Holden and his paper, along with a couple of local John Birchers who had joined the campaign against them.
The Case. In court, the defendants went all out to amplify their campaign charges against the Goldmarks. "We will show evidence which will convince you that Sally Goldmark never got out of the Communist Party," said Defense Attorney E. Glenn Harmon. The defendants tried to show that the Goldmark marriage itself was dictated by the Communist Party.
For the Goldmarks, former U.S. Senator Harry Cain (Rep., Wash.), who had served three years on the Subversive Activities Control Board, testified that the A.C.L.U. has never been a Communist front. And in a lighter moment, Actor Sterling Hayden, in full beard, testified that leaving the Communist Party is easy (he himself left in 1946 after six months) and the discipline only as tough as one makes it: "I was the only person I know to buy a yacht and join the party in the same week."
The drama reached a climax of sorts when white-haired Defense Attorney Joseph Wicks in his closing plea quoted the First Commandment in ringing tones, then stared at the Goldmarks to demand, "Would a Communist say there is no other God? What is God to an atheistic Communist?" Mrs. Goldmark, tears streaming down her face, rushed out of the crowded courtroom.