J.B. Easterly, Southern Gentleman No. 1, is a spike-haired, square-bifocalled, heavy-necked man of sixty-one, alternating explosions of laughter and indignation. His grandchildren call him “Pop-Pop” and he’s totally impossible to dislike.

The Southern Gentlemen are Louisiana’s militant symbol of the counter-attack against racial integration. As such, they maintain warm fraternal relations with a brotherhood of resistance ranging from the Citizens Councils of Mississippi to the Apartheid Bund of South Africa.

Its Mississippi and Capetown brothers are, of course, the government; in Baton Rouge at least, J.B. Easterly commands a ragged outpost in the shed next to his bungalow which serves both as home office of the Southern Gentlemen and his own modest, pre-fabricated concrete step business.

As tycoon and opinion-maker, J.B. Easterly is his own secretary, turning from time to time to assault the typewriter with his thick fingers and render his accounts. As opinion-maker, J.B. Easterly’s expression is somewhat inhibited by his two youngest grandchildren who toddle around the office step and have to be shooed out of hearing whenever he want to advert to the prime subject of miscegenation.

“I’m a very illiterate man,” says J.B. Easterly. “My daddy went broke when I was in college. I was raised on a cotton and cane plantation; when I was a boy, I hardly knew what a white child was.

“We have no secrets here; all we want to do is maintain segregation by legal means. We’re definitely opposed to rough stuff. We believe the Negro race should advance. Look, boy, it’s an accident you’re a white man. We think the Negro should be proud to be a Negro and be just as good as God gave him the brainpower to be. If we got rough on them, we feel we’d be doing an injustice to 95 per cent of the race.

“But we’re definitely goin’ to apply economic pressure to white people who contribute to the white Communist NAACP. There’s a lot of ‘em. They don’t come out openly – these rotten politicians slip ‘em cash, no checks. We got them people down here. Look at this.”

He fished among his papers and came up with a leaflet headed “The White Sentinel – official organ of the National Citizens Protective Association” and pointed to a picture of shadows purporting to be the vice president of the Falstaff Brewing Co. presenting a $500 check to the NAACP.

“See that. We’re putting that all over East Baton Rouge. We’re not gonna buy their beer. Let the niggers buy it.”

The finger poked around and found another paper. It was the South African Observer, a magazine for realists, featuring the news that the message had reached the States and, for spiritual comfort on the lonely veldt, an article called “A Christian View of Segregation” by a Mississippi college president emeritus.

It costs 10 shillings a year. Realist Easterly asked his visitor how much that was in dollars so he could subscribe, and the visitor thought it might be $1.60.

“You know there’s a lot of science in this. They’ve found out that there’s a difference in the blood. There’s no one smarter than a little nigger kid. But, when they get to be sixteen, they just stop. You don’t see the AP, the UP and the NAACP printing that.

“That northern press is still fighting the Civil War. We forgot it down here. But our sentiment is gonna be all over the United States. There’s Citizens Councils in twenty-three states. I get letters from up there saying that, if we lose, the North is lost. A woman from Illinois told me” – he looked to see if his grandchildren were out of hearing – “that in her child’s school, the little nigger boys were always pulling up the little white girls’ dresses.”

W.L. Lawrence, secretary of the Southern Gentlemen, came into the office carrying membership applications decorated with the stars and bars. (This, like the Southern colonel, is stock for mimeograph stencils and turned out in some commercial art saltmine on our own West Side.) This was fortunate, because just after Lawrence, there came a recruit.

He was R.B. Davidson who said he had reached the shotgun stage. “We don’t want none of that,” said J.B. Easterly. R.B. Davidson wanted to know what we were gonna do about our parks and playgrounds now that the niggers were coming in. “Turn ‘em over to the weeds and dogs,” said J.B. Easterly.

R.B. Davidson said he liked a nigger if he stayed a nigger.

“It’s all in the Bible. The Lord said of the children of Cain that he’d put a mark on ‘em and all their children would be the servants of servants. We’re God’s servants and they’re our servants.”

“Sign this,” said J.B. Easterly. “It says you never were a Communist. You couldn’t be a Communist; you talk too much.

“And don’t forget our big parade. We’re going to drive up to L.S.U. and let ‘em see how we feel about those nigger graduate students they have. We gonna roll this thing back. Put any sign you want on your car, so long as it’s not obscene or anything.”

The militant Mr Davidson said that he didn’t know about no parades; he had to worry about civil service. “But, civil service or no civil service, I’m with you in the showdown.”

Secretary Lawrence said, no, he couldn’t say how many members he had. “That’s one of the strengths of our organization,” said J.B. Easterly, “we have ministers; we have school superintendents.”

There would be dangers in making membership public, Lawrence pointed out. “If a member was known, these agitating Negroes might do something to him.

“They do put economic pressure on our boys.” But the Southern Gentlemen exact no reprisals. “When a Negro signs a school petition, we just try to persuade him he’s wrong. Sometimes, we get his employer to talk to him just to encourage him to take his name off.”
Lawrence handed over a mimeographed letter. “I just got this up; do you think it will work?” It was a protest to Philco against a recent television play about a Negro married to a white woman. “I have a number of appliances in my home manufactured by your company.” The visitor said it had worked in Queens.

“The worst thing was,” said J.B. Easterly, “the girl was from New Orleans.” He was looking through the yellow pages for a cab. “I got a lot of right talking about niggers,” he said, “I can’t even read.” He found a number and called a cab, and struck his huge hand out to the invader. “I’m glad you came; this sort of thing is real educational.”

So silly, all that fuss about the memorial. Whatever else Vietnam was, it was not the kind of war that calls for some “Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima” kind of statue. She was not prepared, though, for the impact of the memorial. To walk down into it in the pale winter sunshine was like the war itself, like going into a dark valley and damned if there was ever any light at the end of the tunnel. Just death. When you get closer to the two walls, the number of names start to stun you. It is terrible there in the peace and the pale sunshine.

The names are listed by date of death. There has never been a time, day or night, drunk or sober, for 13 years she could not have told you the date. He was killed on Aug, 13, 1969. It is near the middle of the left wall. She went toward it as though she had known beforehand where it would be. His name is near the bottom. She had to kneel to find it. Stupid clichés. His name leaped out at her. It was like being hit.

She stared at it and then reached out and gently ran her fingers over the letters in the cold black marble. The memory of him came back so strong, almost as if he were there on the other side of the stone, she could see his hand reaching out to touch her fingers. It had not hurt for years and suddenly, just for a moment, it hurt again so horribly that it twisted her face and made her gasp and left her with tears running down her face. Then it stopped hurting but she could not stop the tears. Could not stop them running and running down her face.

There had been a time, although she had been an otherwise sensible young woman, when she had believed she would never recover from the pain. She did, of course. But she is still determined never to sentimentalize him. He would have hated that. She had thought it was like an amputation, the severing of his life from hers, that you could live on afterwards but it would be like having only one leg and one arm. But it was only a wound. It healed. If there is a scar it is only faintly visible now at odd intervals.

He was a biologist, a t.a. at the university getting his Ph.D. They lived together for two years. He left the university to finish his thesis and before he could line up a public school job – teachers were safe in those years – the draft board got him. They had friends who had left the country, they had friends who had gone to prison, they had friends who had gone to Nam. There were no good choices in those years. She thinks now he unconsciously wanted to go even though he often said, said in one of his last letters, that it was a stupid f—in’ war. He felt some form of guilt about a friend of theirs who was killed during the Tet offensive. Hubert Humphrey called Tet a great victory. His compromise was to refuse officer’s training school and go as an enlisted man. She had thought then it was a dumb gesture and they had a half-hearted quarrel about it.

He had been in Nam less than two months when he was killed, without heroics during a firefight at night, by a single bullet in the brain. No one saw it happen. There are some amazing statistics about money and tonnage from that war. Did you know that there were more tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1971 than in all of World War II? Did you know that the war in Vietnam cost the United States $123.3 billion? She has always wanted to know how much that one bullet cost. Sixty-three cents? $1.20? Someone must know.

The other bad part was the brain. Even at this late date, it seems to her that was quite a remarkable mind. Long before she read C.P. Snow, the ferociously honest young man who wanted to be a great biologist taught her a great deal about the difference between the way scientists think and the way humanists think. Only once has she been glad he was not with her. It was at one of those bizarre hearings about teaching “creation science.” He would have gotten furious and been horribly rude. He had no patience with people who did not understand and respect the process of science.

She used to attribute his fierce honesty to the fact that he was Yankee. She is still prone to tell “white” lies to make people feel better, to smooth things over, to prevent hard feelings. Surely there have been dumber things for lovers to quarrel over than the social utility of hypocrisy. But not many.

She stood up again, still staring at his name, stood for a long time. She said, “There it is,” and turned to go. A man to her left was staring at her. She glared at him resentfully. The man had done nothing but make the mistake of seeing her weeping. She said, as though daring him to disagree, “It was a stupid, f—in’ war,” and stalked past him.

She turned again at the top of the slope to make sure where his name is, so whenever she sees a picture of the memorial she can put her finger where his name is. He never said goodbye, literally. Whenever he left he would say, “Take care, love.” He could say it many different ways. He said it when he left for Vietnam. She stood at the top of the slope and found her hand half-raised in some silly gesture of farewell. She brought it down again. She considered thinking to him, “Hey, take care, love,” but it seemed remarkably inappropriate. She walked away and was quite entertaining for the rest of the day, because it was expected of her.

She thinks he would have liked the memorial O.K. He would have hated the editorials. He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just or noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.

Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at Eighty-second Street and Columbus Avenue and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, One West Seventy-second Street.”

Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.

Another patrol car was there ahead of them, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.

“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.

“In the back,” one of the cops said.

Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood.

Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car.

Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Avenue, and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.

Now responding to the call, “Man shot, One West Seventy-second,” Jim Moran, a forty-five-year-old policeman, pulled up in front of the Dakota and Tony Palma and Herb Frauenberger put this guy with blood all over him in the backseat.

As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”

Moran was driving with Bill Gamble. As they went through the streets to Roosevelt Hospital, Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in the back nodded and groaned.

Back on Seventy-second Street, somebody told Palma, “Take the woman.” And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the backseat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital. She said nothing to the two cops and they said nothing to her. Homicide is not a talking matter.

Jim Moran, with John Lennon in the backseat, was on the radio as he drove to the hospital. “Have paramedics meet us at the emergency entrance,” he called. When he pulled up to the hospital, they were waiting for him with a cart. As Lennon was being wheeled through the doors into the emergency room, the doctors were on him.

“John Lennon,” somebody said.

“Yes, it is,” Moran said.

Now Tony Palma pulled up to the emergency entrance. He let the woman out and she ran to the doors. Somebody called to Palma, “That’s Yoko Ono.”

“Yeah?” Palma said.

“They just took John Lennon in,” the guy said.

Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.

Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.

“Here various news we tell, of love and strife,
Of peace and war, health, sickness, death and life…
Of turns of fortune, changes in the State,
The falls of favorites, projects of the great,
Of old mismanagements, taxations news,
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.
New London (Conn.) Bee March 26, 1800

GREAT court cases are made by the clash of great principles, each formidable standing alone, but in conflict limited, “all neither wholly false nor wholly true.”

The latest legal battle, The United States v. The New York Times, is such a case: The Government’s principle of privacy, and the newspaper’s principle of publishing without Government approval.

This is not essentially a fight between Attorney General Mitchell and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. They are merely incidental figures in an ancient drama. This is the old cat-and-dog conflict between security and freedom.

It goes back to John Milton’s pamphlet, Areopagitica, in the seventeenth century against Government censorship or, as he called it: “for the liberty of unlicenc’d printing.” That is still the heart of it: the Government claim to prevent, in effect to license, what is published ahead of publication, rather than merely to exercise its right to prosecute after publication.

Put another way, even the title of this case in the U.S. District Court is misleading, for the real issue is not the New York Times versus the United States, but whether publishing the Government’s own analysis of the Vietnam tragedy or suppressing that story is a service to the Republic.

It is an awkward thing for a reporter to comment on the battles of his own newspaper, and the reader will make his own allowances for the reporter’s bias, but after all allowances are made, it is hard to believe that publishing these historical documents is a greater threat to the security of the United States than suppressing them or, on the record, as the Government implies, that the Times is a frivolous or reckless paper.

The usual charge the New York Times, not without some validity, is that it is a tedious bore, always saying on the hone hand and the other and defending, like The Times of London in the thirties, “the Government and commercial establishment.”

During the last decade, it has been attacked vigorously for “playing the Government game.” It refused to print a story that the Cuban freedom fighters were going to land at the Bay of Pigs “tomorrow morning.” It agreed with President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis that reporting the Soviet missiles on that island while Kennedy was deploying the fleet to blockade the Russians was not in the national interest.

Beyond that, it was condemned for not printing what it knew about the U.S. U-2 flights over the Soviet Union and, paradoxically, for printing the Yalta Papers and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers on the organization of the United Nations.

All of which suggests that there is no general principle which governs all specific cases and that, in the world of newspapering, where men have to read almost two million words a day and select a hundred thousand to print, it comes down to human judgments where “all [is] neither wholly false nor wholly true.”

So a judgment has to be made when the Government argues for security, even over historical documents, and the Times argues for freedom to publish. That is what is before the court today. It is not a black-and-white case – as it was in the Cuban Missile crisis when the Soviet ships were approaching President Kennedy’s blockade in the Caribbean.

It is a conflict between printing or suppressing, not military information affecting the lives of men on the battlefield, but historical documents about a tragic and controversial war; not between what is right and what is wrong, but between two honest but violently conflicting views about what best serves the national interest and the enduring principles of the First Amendment.

The Washington Post’s Timothy Smith calls DA2 a “Wonderful Addition” to the series.

In 2011, Overlook Press came out with “Deadline Artists,” one of the greatest collections of newspaper articles ever compiled. The volume included Bob Considine’s breathless account of Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling, Thomas Boswell’s tally of why baseball is so much better than football and Mitch Albom’s searing account of a teenager’s murder and its impact on a small Michigan town. I read the book in a day. Now John Avlon of the Daily Beast; Jesse Angelo, recently named publisher of the New York Post; and Errol Louis of NY1 News in New York have put together an equally superb sequel, “Deadline Arists: Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs.” Read More…