REYNOLDS-PEGLER SUIT BLOW TO HATE-MONGERS

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27425, 11 August 1954, Page 10

REYNOLDS-PEGLER SUIT BLOW TO HATE-MONGERS

A V.S. LIBEL VERDICT

[By

ALBERT J. ZACK,

in the “Nation")

(Reprinted by Arrangement)

At 1 a.m. on June 29, in a stuffy little Courtroom nine floors above the deserted streets of lower Manhattan, a big, rumpled-looking man with a wide grin, saw his faith in American institutions justified. Quentin Reynolds, war correspondent, author, T.V ana radio personality, is a man well accustomed to thrills, but he had probably never had a greater one. He had proved that the American system of justice was able to meet and beat that phenomenon of present-day journalism, the hate columnist; and at the same time he had won one of the largest single awards for damages ever given in a libel suit. His antagonist was missing when the curtain fell. When the jurors retired to consider the more than 4000 pages of testimony and the hundreds of exhibits, Westbrook Pegler took his bulging brown briefcase, his scowl, and? the first elevator away from what had been his public whipping post. There will certainly be more whippings. Others whom Pegler has attacked will now go to Court. Drew Pearson has already filed an 850,000 dollar suit, which may come to trial next fall. As the first suit ever pushed by a Pegler victim and the first major defeat suffered by the smear and hate writers, Reynolds’s suit was highly newsworthy; yet a self-imposed newspaper censorship hid the facts from the general public. Only the New York “Post, Editor and Publisher,” and the “C. 1.0. News” gave the trial complete coverage. Associated Press and United Press and Courthouse reporters filed thousands of words which wound up in city-room wastebaskets or on publishers’ desk. Few of them got into type except in England, where Reynolds is still a hero of the bli'-. It was not because the trial lacked the ingredients which gladden the hearts of tabloid editors and gossip columnists. Both sides engaged in name-dropping, and stories of nude swimming, wartime scandals, and charges of procommunism were tossed around.

But the defendant’s name was Pegler. Only after the judge, in a masterful charge to the jury, found him, guilty of outright libel, and the jurors fixed the penalty at 175,001 dollars, were the Tacts printed. The public did not see the naked picture of hate, the persecution by the press of a man whose sole crime was that he incurred the dislike of a Hearst columnist. That was the real story of the ReynoldsPegler case. It all began in the fall of 1949 when the New York “Herald .Tribune Book Review” asked Quentin Reynolds to review Dale Kramer’s new biography of Heywood Broun, the noted liberal columnist of the thirties, whom Pegler had always hated. Reynolds had been ,a close friend of Broun and wrote a sympathetic review, mentioning Kramer’s comments on the role Pegler had played in Broun’s last hours. Nine days later, Pegler devoted an entire column to Reynolds, the column that Federal Judge Edward Weinfield •was to declare, nearly five years later, as a matter of law . . . libellous and defamatory.” Reynolds, Pegler wrote, was a coward with an “artificial reputation” for bravery, who had a “yellow streak” in his ‘mangy hide.” He engaged in public displays of nudifcm and aped Broun s manner, dress, and political views, vfhieh Pegler insinuated were pro-Communist.” Reynolds was such a low character, Peeler added, that he nad proposed to Broun’s widow en route to Broun’s burial place, and had later “snubbed her publicly.” Pegler also slapped at the Tribune" which he called “leftist” in its choice or books for review and of reviewers Heynolds promptly retained the New York attorney, Louis Nizer, and filed a libel and slander suit for 500.000 dolJars. Co-defendants with Pegler were the Hearst Corporation, which syndica.tes his column to 186 newspapers i?nnnnon tota l .! 1949) circulation of 12.000,000, and the corporation’s New York affiliate, which publishes the Journal-American.” For the first time Pegler had to defend his mast prized possession—a more than 20-year-long record of never being sued for libel. Before the tedious task of picking a jury was completed, the defendants had . exhausted their challenges, knocking off prospective jurors with Jewish-soffnding names and those who were active trade unionists.

Record as War Correspondent _ Reynolds was his own first witness. Testifying in the deep, resonant voice familiar to radio and TV fans, he traced his career as a war correspondent identified hundreds of articles and books he had written, and quickly demonstrated the losses he had suffered as a result of Pegler’s attack. For more than 17 years he had been a Collier s staff writer, selling that magazine 311 articles for about 350,000 dollars. After Pegler’s column appeared Collier s” did not buy a single line written by Reynolds. Nizer skilfully led Reynolds through a description of the battles he had covered for “Collier’s.” He had been on the Dieppe raid, was with the French forces when the Maginot line flanked, left Paris just before the city fell, was in London during the

worst of the blitz. In all he spent 3® months in combat areas. Many of hi* fellow-correspondents, testifying in person or by deposition, swore that Reynolds’s reputation for “accuracy, integrity, courage, objectivity, and loyalty” was “of the very highest.” Hundreds of Reynolds’s pieces were admitted as evidence before Pegler’* attorney, Charles Henry, chief Hearst trial lawyer, made his first serious objection. When Nizer introduced a postwar book which clearly displayed Reynolds’s anti-Communist views, Henry argued that the defendant was not obliged to be familiar with every- . thing Reynolds had written. The judge overruled him. In his cross-examination of Reynolds, Henry, in a hard, drumming voice, shot hundreds of questions across the courtroom, all implying that the military and political strategy of those years had been wrong. Nearly every dispute of the Hearst papers with Franklin Roosevelt, other New Deal leaders, or war-time generals was recalled, with the insinuation that Reynolds was the villain of the piece. Time after time Judge Weinfeld stopped Henry. “No correspondent is responsible for war programmes or planning,” he noted in one long lecture. The issue, he said, was whether or not Reynolds had been libelled by Pegler. Various Reynolds witnesses, including Mrs Connie Broun, widow of the columnist, completely denied the statements Pegler had made. Reynold* never proposed to her, she said, or snubbed her. He was just a good friend, then and now. No-one practised , nudism at the Broun home, she sharply told the jurors. Colonel Jock Lawrence, General Eisenhower’s press aide during the war and at NATO, testified that only a handful of correspondents had combat records approaching Rey. nolds’s. Ed Murrow, John Gunther, and Captain Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide and post-war biographer, all testified that Reynolds was not « coward and was an accurate, honest writer. Defendant Cross-Examined

When Nizer began his cross-examina-tion of Pegler, the defendant was angry and sneering, but in less than three minutes he was squirming and on the defensive. Nizer forced him into open contradiction of testimony he had given the previous day. A stack of photostats which had been admitted after Pegler testified he had “relied upon them” in preparing the 1949 column set the trap. Nizer showed him two photostats and asked if he had “relied” on them. “No,” snapped Pegler. Then Nizer revealed they were exact duplicates of two introduced the day before. Repeatedly Nizer demonstrated that the Hearst columnist had given contradictory testimony in court and during sworn pre-trial examination. Pegler comlilained he had been “trapped” by miseading questions. He admitted having gone personally to organisations which ad booked Reynolds as a banquet speaker, and given them “derogatory information.”

Just before Pegler stepped down from the witness stand, Nizer read him this quotation: “Communism i* the reaction to poverty, oppression, and the exploitation of the masses by the few, and represents the demands of the masses for a strong central authority to curb their enemy.” What did he think about that? Nizer asked. “Utter nonsense pro-Communist propaganda ... very familiar in the Communist line ... it is false/’ Pegler answered promptly, forgetting that he had written that very sentence in 1937. A Punitive Award It took the jury 10$ hours and seven trips back to the courtroom for legal guidance to reach its verdict—one dollar in compensatory damages and 175,000 dollars in punitive damage*, levied against the three defendant*. Reynolds had won a clear victory. There were legal battles yet to be fought: appeals would be taken and higher courts would make decision*; But a judge and jury had found the leading hate journalist guilty of libel ' and had set the verdict high “tb : punish the defendant, to set an ex* ample to him, to deter him from re* petition, and to warn others.” A court of law had proved an adequate weapon against such as Pegler, i However, and this is a big qualification, it is an adequate weapon only for those who, like Reynolds, have the financial resources to carry on a long legal battle. In his brilliant summingup Judge Weinfeld said: “Civilised society has always recognised a man’i reputation as a precious, thing.” It is no less precious to a man without Reynolds’s prestige and resources. hhn’ We m »de justice too costly for Pegler attacked in the open. Because he did, Reynolds could bring nim before the bar of justice. But what of the McCarthy*, who hide behind the cloak of Congressional immunity? And what of the free press, which reports countless court cases of* far less significance but ignored this case b«cause the defendant was Pegler?