(part 2/3)
So, exactly what connection do Ms. Clinton and Mr. Lee have to the Black Panthers? The piece quoted above claims:
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How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial.
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We'll begin with the last part, and it's simply ludicrous. Yale University was not "shut down" during the trial. Classes were made optional when 12,000 Panther supporters swarmed the campus in protest, and the president of Yale University himself, Kingman Brewster Jr., announced: "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." To lay the entire responsibility for this massive, widespread protest on the shoulders of two Yale students is just silly, all the more so because nobody has offered evidence that either one of them led, or even participated in, any student demonstrations or protests in support of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, even if they didn't actually lead or take part in any demonstrations they're still guilty by association, we're told, because they "defended" the Black Panthers.
One of the elements often employed in political screeds such as this one is the ambiguity of the word "defend." It can be used in the sense of providing legal aid to a person accused of a crime, or in the sense of supplying moral justification for a person's actions. Sometimes these two concepts go hand in hand; but often they don't. We often find it necessary, in order to preserve and protect our rights, to defend (in a legal sense) those whose actions we consider morally wrong, and to defend (in a moral sense) those who actions we find legally wrong. We sometimes let criminals go free because constitutional safeguards were violated in the process of bringing them to justice. That doesn't mean we condone their crimes; it means we're willing to "defend" their rights in order to preserve a higher moral principle (i.e., the rights that protect all of us).
What has been overlooked (or deliberately ignored) in the piece quoted here is that even though fourteen Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in connection with the murder of Alex Rackley, only two of them were put on trial (the others plead to lesser charges, or the charges against them were dropped): Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins. Why only these two? Seale wasn't present at either the torture or murder of Alex Rackley; he maintained that he knew nothing about any plans to kill Rackley and wasn't even aware that Rackley was suspected of being a police informant. (Panther George Sams did claim he had told Seale about suspicions Rackley was an informant, however.) Erika Huggins wasn't present when Rackley was killed, either. She was accused of having taken part in the "interrogation" of Rackley, boiling the water used to scald him and kicking him while he was tied to a chair. Certainly her actions were both criminally wrong and morally reprehensible, but several other Panthers took a far more active hand in the torture and murder of Rackley (such as those who actually poured the boiling water onto him, beat him, and shot him in the head). Why were only these two people put on trial while the other Panthers were allowed to plead out or weren't even prosecuted at all?
Many people genuinely believed, at the time, that the government was deliberately prosecuting for murder people whom it knew full well were not guilty of murder in order to discredit a group it perceived as a threat, and that perhaps the government had deliberately sacrificed Rackley by planting him in the Panthers' midst and then leaking his cover in order to provoke a showdown. (The fact that neither of the accused was ever convicted is taken by some as proof of the correctness of this theory; others dismiss it as irrelevant and maintain that the case was far too politically controversial to allow for a fair verdict.) If Bobby Seale, the head of the Black Panther party, could be convicted and sent to prison for murder, the Black Panthers would lose a great deal of public support and credibility and be disarmed as a threat to the government. This, it was widely held, was the government's real motivation for prosecuting only Seale and Huggins while other Panthers who were more directly involved in Rackley's murder went free or were allowed to plead to lesser charges (in exchange for turning state's evidence against Seale and Huggins).
The key point here is not whether this notion was ultimately right or wrong. The key point is that many people believed it to be true at the time, and they therefore "supported" the Black Panthers during the subsequent trial (in a legal sense) -- not necessarily because they condoned the (alleged) actions of the two people on trial (or the Black Panthers in general), but because they felt it was morally wrong for the government to prosecute murder charges against only two people, neither of whom was directly involved in the murder of Alex Rackley, all for political purposes. So, one cannot simply tar everyone who "defended" the Panthers with the same brush of moral outrage; many found the Panthers and their actions odious but still "defended" them because they honestly believed the government's attempts to prosecute only a select two of questionable guilt (while letting confessed torturers and murderers off with a comparative slap on the wrist) to be the far greater injustice.
So, what exactly did Mr. Lee and Ms. Clinton do to "defend" the Panthers in a legal sense? In Mr. Lee's case, he did absolutely nothing. He wasn't a lawyer, or even a law student; he was simply another Yale undergraduate who had nothing to do with the Black Panthers' trial. Ms. Clinton wasn't a lawyer then, either; she was a Yale law student. The sum total of her involvement in the trial was that she assisted the American Civil Liberties Union in monitoring the trial for civil rights violations. That a law student's tangential participation in one of the most controversial, politically and racially charged trials of her time (one that took place right on her doorstep) to help ensure it remained free of civil rights abuses is now offered as "proof" of her moral reprehensibility demonstrates that McCarthyism is alive and well -- some of us apparently believe in rights but don't believe everyone has the right to have rights.
Of course, neither Mr. Lee nor Ms. Clinton had anything to do with "defending" the other twelve Panthers, who never even stood trial because the government declined to prosecute them or allowed them to turn state's evidence. The flimsy "evidence" typically mustered as "proof" of their "support" for the Black Panthers is that Hillary Clinton was co-editor of the Yale Review when it printed a derogatory cartoon depicting police as decapitated pigs, even though no one has demonstrated that she approved (or even knew) of it, and that in order to join a student group, Bill Lee once "acquiesced when pressed to write a statement expressing solidarity with the Panthers who were on trial." (If Mr. Lee was such a wholehearted supporter of the Panthers, one has to wonder why he had to be "pressed" into making such a statement.)
In a woefully bad piece of "journalism," Insight magazine writer John Elvin tried his best, despite his lack of any real evidence, to huff and puff and assert as true the claim that Hillary Rodham was leading campus protests in support of the Black Panthers. His conclusion was a model of disingenuousness:
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Can there be any doubt, based on the foregoing facts, that Rodham and Lee indeed were student leaders during the Panther protests at Yale? The correct answer is no.
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Sure, the answer is "no," because the wrong question has been asked. That Hillary Rodman could fairly have been described as a "student leader" is something no one would dispute. The question being asked here is "Was Hillary Clinton leading campus protests in support of the Black Panthers?" -- a question Elvin dishonestly avoids answering because he can't demonstrate the answer to be "yes." The "foregoing facts" he refers to can be summarized thusly:
