[Marxism] John T. McTernan - New York Times obituary

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"In 1967, the Supreme Court agreed with his argument that 
a person with an up-to-date passport could travel to any 
country that had not been specifically prohibited by the 
State Department. (There was then no criminal statute 
barring travel to Cuba.")

WALTER NOTES:
McTernan was the attorney for Helen Travis, whose famous
case reached the US Supreme Court and upheld the rights of
US citizens to travel to Cuba. Thus, the term "travel ban"
which is often used to describe US government policies is
utterly inaccurate. There is no travel ban. There are now
in effect policies which deny the right of US citizens to
spend US funds in Cuba outside of certain defined circum-
stances. And as you can see from this obituary, McTernan's
record was a long and distinguished one and Cuba travel is
but one of the many good causes for which he successfully
argued in court. After leaving membership in the CPUSA, 
McTernan never renounced his left-wing political views.
He will be truly missed.

In actual fact, there is no actual ban on travel to Cuba.
Read the Supreme Court decision in the Travis case (not a
long complicated document) here:
(http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=385&invol=491
>


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com 
==========================================================

April 16, 2005
John T. McTernan, Prominent Defense Lawyer 
in McCarthy-Era Trials, Dies at 94
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

John T. McTernan, a left-wing legal gunslinger who prowled
the nation to defend people accused of being Communists in
the McCarthy years and who aided unpopular clients like
Angela Davis and Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, died
on March 28 at a nursing home in Santa Monica, Calif. He
was 94.

His son, Garrett, announced the death.

In a book about the McCarthy years, "The American
Inquisition: 1945-1960" (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), Cedric
Belfrage listed Mr. McTernan as one of a dozen or so
leftist lawyers who professed not to view the American
justice system as a capitalist charade. These lawyers, Mr.
Belfrage wrote, battled in many courtrooms and legislative
chambers for scant remuneration to defend people and
principles, almost always defined on constitutional
grounds.

Mr. McTernan, who for some time was a member of the
Communist Party himself and won four of the six cases he
took to the United States Supreme Court, was known for
several high-profile cases. One was his defense of 14 of 16
Communist leaders tried in Manhattan in 1952 on charges of
plotting violent revolution.

The Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper, said Mr. McTernan,
who lived for most of his life in the Los Angeles area,
took the case after 200 local lawyers refused it. The Daily
Worker and mainstream New York newspapers covered the trial
extensively.

Former Communist Party members testifying for the
government told of "Aesopian language" in party documents
that they contended was code for overthrowing the United
States government, The New York Times reported. For
example, they said, the phrase "material progress in the
Soviet Union" meant forcible revolution.

Mr. McTernan countered that the party advocated peaceful,
not violent, overthrow, and he ridiculed the notion of
secret codes, Aesopian or otherwise. The judge directed
verdicts of acquittal for two defendants, and said the
performance of Mr. McTernan and his legal team made him
"proud of his profession." The others were convicted.

In 1954, Mr. McTernan defended Clinton Jencks, a union
organizer accused of falsely signing an affidavit saying he
was not a Communist. The star witness in the trial, in El
Paso, was Harvey Matusow, a paid government informer who
after this trial and others admitted falsely accusing
people of being Communists in about 200 cases. The main
issue was whether the government was compelled to share
with the defense an informer's statements to prosecutors.

In his confessional book, "False Witness" (Cameron & Kahn,
1955), Mr. Matusow wrote that he respected Mr. McTernan's
ability to embarrass him. But he bragged it had not been
easy.

"It was my job to checkmate him," Mr. Matusow wrote. "Only
this was dirty chess, and there could be no rematch if I
won."

Mr. Matusow did win. But Mr. McTernan prevailed over the
federal government's lawyer, John V. Lindsay, the future
mayor of New York, when the case reached the Supreme Court
in 1957.

The resulting greater difficulty in trying people accused
of being traitors was later cited by the Justice Department
as a reason it was abandoning prosecutions under the Smith
Act, the principal law it used to hunt Communists.

Another influential case Mr. McTernan took to the Supreme
Court involved three men in Pennsylvania who possessed
books that the state, under its own sedition law, deemed
dangerous. None of the 1,400 lawyers in Allegheny County
would take the case, so Mr. McTernan was summoned from
California. He could not stop the men from being convicted,
but his appeal to the Supreme Court won their release by
overturning the law.

In 1959, he convinced the Supreme Court that a lawyer had
been wrongly convicted of violating legal ethics for making
a speech about her client, who was accused of being a
revolutionary, while the trial was going on. In 1967, the
Supreme Court agreed with his argument that a person with
an up-to-date passport could travel to any country that had
not been specifically prohibited by the State Department.
(There was then no criminal statute barring travel to
Cuba.)

John Tripp McTernan was born on Nov. 25, 1910, in White
Plains. His father was a trust deed officer and his mother
a schoolteacher who instilled in her son a love of
education. He graduated from Amherst College and Columbia
Law School, paying his way by winning scholarships and
working odd jobs.

Mr. McTernan's son said he did not know when his father
joined the Communist Party nor exactly when disillusion
with Stalin's Russia provoked him to leave the party. Mr.
McTernan's first job was with the United States Shipping
Board Bureau, an agency in the Commerce Department, and his
second was with the United States Maritime Commission.

He then worked for the National Labor Relations Board,
rising to regional counsel for Northern California. He
moved on to the Office of Price Administration, then joined
a private law firm in 1944.

At the firm, he teamed up with Ben Margolis, who won fame
by spiritedly defending movie-industry figures who had been
blacklisted. The firm paid its bills with labor, personal
injury and product liability cases, but the passion of Mr.
Margolis and Mr. McTernan was defending the needy and the
leftist.

One case they won together involved Anna and Henry Laws, a
black couple in Los Angeles who were evicted from the house
they owned because of a covenant saying it could be
occupied only by whites. The Supreme Court in 1948 ruled
against such restricted covenants.

Another case involved overturning the murder convictions of
23 Mexican-American youths in what were popularly known as
the Sleepy Lagoon killings. Another involved 15 leaders of
the Communist Party in California whose convictions the
Supreme Court reversed on the ground that their subversive
talk was more abstract than dangerous.

Mr. McTernan succeeded in winning Angela Davis, the black
militant and avowed Communist, reinstatement as a professor
at the University of California. He also won an antitrust
case against lettuce growers and Teamsters that paved the
way for the United Farm Workers to represent field workers.

In addition to his son, who lives in Pacific Palisades,
Calif., Mr. McTernan is survived by his wife of 53 years,
Anne, whom he met while defending accused Communists in
Pittsburgh; three daughters, Kathleen McTernan of San
Anselmo, Calif., Deborah McTernan of Felton, Calif., and
Karla K. McTernan of Santa Cruz, Calif.; a granddaughter;
and a great-grandson.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Daily Journal in 2000,
Mr. McTernan said, "I'm still what I'd call a left-winger."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


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