"I Ain't No Mastermind"

The small, bald, bespectacled man in the brown suit, who was freed on a technicality in London last week, looked like a Hearst cartoon of a New Deal scholar. He was no such thing: he was Gerhart Eisler,

German national, onetime resident of Sunnyside, L.I., onetime Communist ringmaster in the U.S., who had been jailed in Britain since he was carried, kicking and screaming like a child in a tantrum, from the Polish motor-ship Batory, bound for Gdynia (TIME, May 23).

Eisler had been convicted in Washington in 1947 for swearing to false statements on a passport application. He had appealed from this verdict and was awaiting a Supreme Court decision when he jumped his $23,500 bail and boarded the Batory. The U.S., in asking Britain to extradite him, said that Eisler had been convicted of perjury, a crime specifically covered in the Anglo-U.S. Treaty of Extradition. Eisler's British lawyer contended that the treaty did not cover Eisler's conviction because in British law a false oath is not perjury unless it is taken in connection with a judicial proceeding. After a two-hour courtroom argument, softspoken, gentlemanly Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sir Laurence Dunne agreed, and turned the little man loose.

Roundly cheered by a mob of Communists and fellow travelers in London, Gerhart Eisler said he would proceed to the Russian zone of Germany and take a teaching post at Leipzig. Although jubilant, the little man seemed somewhat puzzled by his release. In his Red dream world, the British court which ruled on his case should have functioned as a docile tool of U.S. imperialist terror. Said Eisler, whimsically: "I ain't no mastermind, but I'm an average good Communist. I try to be a better Communist every day."

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