The senator with the longest and steamiest past is of course Strom Thurmond, a man so legendary in his satyriasis that Lyndon Johnson's daughter Lynda once said that when Thurmond, then almost 60, asked her to go bike riding with him in the Washington suburbs, her father-for the only time in her dating years-said no. This story comes from a biography of Thurmond, Ol' Strom, written by Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson and published last year. It has plenty of good stuff in it, not least concerning Thurmond's fervid pursuit of women, which once prompted Sen. John Tower to make the famous remark-often attributed to Thurmond himself-that "When he dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat in order to close the coffin lid".
In the early 1940s, when Thurmond was a judge in South Carolina, the state was convulsed by the saga of Sue Logue, a woman whose husband, J. Wallace Logue, was shot dead by his neighbor Davis Timmerman in a dispute over the price of a calf. Logue brooded and vowed revenge. She retained the services of a family friend who was also a local cop, who in turn hired a man to kill Timmerman. With Timmerman dead, it wasn't long before the killer told all, and police cars were mustered outside Sue Logue's farmhouse. It was a standoff until Thurmond arrived at the scene, turned out his pockets to show he was unarmed and was admitted into Logue's house, where he duly persuaded the denizens, include Sue, to give themselves up.
The local view was that Logue had reason to trust Thurmond, not least because they had been having an affair for some time. Three weeks after Thurmond escorted Logue out of her house, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Thurmond volunteered for duty. One view in South Carolina, cited by Bass and Thompson, was that he was eager to escape the rumors now circulating throughout the region. As the authors write: "The stories still whispered in Edgefield tell of Strom's long affair with Sue, who campaigned for him when he ran for county superintendent of education and whom he allowed to teach in the county schools despite unwritten rules generally excluding married women from teaching positions. Her reputation for sexual prowess was such that men told stories of her reputed vaginal muscular dexterity. The lore includes a tale of her and Strom found flagrante delicto in the superintendent's office."
By the time Thurmond got orders to report for active duty in April 1942, Sue Logue and her associates had been convicted and sentenced to death. The three were killed in the electric chair on Jan. 15, 1943, Sue Logue being the first woman ever electrocuted in South Carolina. Bass and Thompson write, "Randall Johnson, a black man who supervised 'colored help' at the State House and often served as driver and messenger, drove Sue from the women's penitentiary to the death house at the main penitentiary in Columbia. In the back seat with her, he said many years later, was Thurmond, then an Army officer on active duty. They were 'a-huggin' and a-kissin' the whole day,' said Johnson, whom Thurmond later as governor considered a trusted driver... In whispered 'graveyard talk'-the kind of stories not to be told outsiders-the word around SLED (State Law Enforcement Division) was that Joe Frank said his aunt Sue was the only person seduced on the way to the electric chair."
So much for Strom, only minutes away from necrophilia. His sexual escapades make Bill Clinton look like a piker.
In the wake of the impeachment drama, it might be useful to refresh our sense of presidential dignity by consulting Ron Kessler's book Inside the White House: "Lyndon Johnson was furious. Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, had caught him having sex on a sofa in the Oval Office with one of the handful of gorgeous young secretaries he had hired. Johnson blamed it all on the Secret Service, which safeguarded the Oval Office and the rest of the White House. He said, 'You should have done something,' recalled a Secret Service agent. "We said, 'we don't do that. That's your problem.'" Eventually LBJ arranged for a buzzer to sound in his office when Lady Bird left the domestic sector of the White House and headed his way.
Ask us who are the salt of the earth, and we will tell you, criminal defense attornies. For many an unfortunate they are the first and last line of defense, and even though the criminal bar has its share of frauds and dead-beats, the criminal defense bar is packed with selfless types who work extremely hard for not much money. They see the system in all its arrogance and cruelty, and fight it every day.
One of the best defense attornies on the west coast is Tony Serra, famous for defending native Americans. He defended Bear Lincoln, charged with killing a sheriff's deputy in Mendocino county, California. Serra got Bear off the capital charges.
At that time Serra gave a striking account of what he called the KGB-ing of America. From time to time, in speech or print, he reprises the theme, and it is worth repeating.
Problem number one: snitches. Ever since torture ("the Third Degree") was phased out in the early 1930s as the prime investigative tool of law enforcement, the culture of snitching has metastasized. As Serra says, "we probably have more nomenclature for informants than does any other culture. We have citizen informants, confidential informants, informants who are percipient, informants who are participatory, informants who are merely eyewitnesses, informants who are co-defendants, informants who precipitate charges by reverse stings. Our system is permeated by the witness or the provocateur who is paid by government for a role in either revealing or instigating a crime."
If defense attornies went out and bought witnesses they'd be hit with charges of obstructing justice. But prosecutors routinely slide witnesses wads of cash and hold out that infinitely potent bribe, freedom, or the prospect of freedom on an accelerated schedule. Ask yourself, how great is the power of a bribe to knock ten years off a prison term? What's that worth in cash? What cash is the equivalent of ten years' liberty?
And so the texture of criminal justice is that of snitching, of confecting false testimony, of bearing false witness. The beating heart of the criminal justice system today is the snitch.
Serra's next complaint is about grand juries, whose use has grown at a staggering rate over the past generation.
"Today," Serra points out, "99.9 per cent of all federal cases involve indictment by grand jury. That means no preliminary hearing, no discovery prior to indictment, no confrontation, no lawyer present on behalf of the accused." (Unless you happen to be Bill Clinton, president of the United States.) "The accused isn't there, and doesn't see, hear, confront, cross-examine his or her accusers." It can be a felony to disclose anything that happened or what your testimony actually was. We were giving a lurid illustration of the abuses this secrecy can engender when Monica Lewinsky's actual grand jury testimony was made public. We were able to compare her words with independent counsel Ken Starr's misrepresentation of them in his report to congress.
Serra rightly indicts the grand jury system - originally developed in English common law as a means to go after the rich and powerful, and now used as "an instrument of oppression... another secret tool of an expanding executive branch."
Next: mandatory sentences, which are an obvious abuse of the constitutional principle of separation of powers, since the law enforcement agencies now stipulate the sentences and the judiciary has to go along. Serra defines this abuse well: "When mandatory sentencing occurs, the legislative, actualized by the executive, has swallowed up the judiciary, which becomes a rubber stamp."
Serra finally points his finger at the eroding of bail. These days there's a presumption against bail, and consequently an onslaught on the fundamental presumption of innocence. The jails are filled with unconvicted people.
And finally, there is the constitutional right to a "speedy trial" - a right fast becoming a joke, as people languish behind bars for a year or more, with no more legal representative speed than a drowsy snail.
There you have it. The cops abuse your fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and arrest you; you are either denied bail or find bail set at a prohibitive level; so you sit in jail for a year, after which a jailhouse snitch tells the prosecutors you confessed to him; you go up before a jury and are convicted on the basis of false testimony, and mandatory sentencing puts you away for fifteen years.CP
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