The Girard Case

Outside Washington, it might have been difficult last week to scratch up an argument on such momentous subjects as H-bomb fallout or trade with Red China, but nearly every mother's son and every son's mother had an opinion about the case of an American soldier facing trial in a Japanese court. It was not the first time a G.I. faced trial in a foreign court, nor would it be the last. Nonetheless, this was the case that caught the public ear and prompted the rumbling of the Public Voice on Capitol Hill.

Last Jan. 30 Army Specialist Third Class William S. Girard, 21, fired an empty cartridge case from a grenade launcher to scare off several Japanese who were scavenging for metal on a U.S. rifle range near Tokyo; he struck one woman in the back and killed her (TIME, May 27). The Army insisted that Girard fired while on duty (technically he was guarding a machine gun between target practice sessions) and was therefore subject to the primary jurisdiction of U.S. military courts under the status-of-forces agreement. The Japanese held that because Girard did not fire during official exercise, he was subject to Japanese justice. Last week, in a joint statement issued at the Pentagon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson finally ruled that Girard's specific action "was not authorized," was subject to the primary jurisdiction of Japan.

"Remember Pearl Harbor!" "For the sake of good relations between Japan and America we shall conduct a fair trial," said the Japanese chief district justice slated to try Girard. But the voice of Tokyo was soon drowned out by the growing uproar in the U.S. "Sold down the river," cried the Veterans of Foreign Wars; TO THE WOLVES, SOLDIER, cried the New York Daily News. In Girard's home town, Ottawa, Ill. (he lived there in the family trailer one year before enlisting in 1953) relatives and friends got up a 182-ft. petition protesting "a clear violation" of the U.S.'s duty to stand up for its fighting men. "You have traded the loyalty of the mothers of America for the treacherous yeses of a country that has proven its sneakiness," one of the ladies of Ottawa protested to Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Remember Pearl Harbor, Mr. President."

Soon letters were pouring into newspapers, heavily backing an American trial for Girard. Congressmen, from left to right, were hammering at the Dulles-Wilson ruling; e.g., Ohio's Senator John Bricker accused the Government of "sacrificing an American soldier to appease Japanese public opinion." Girard's defense attorney, who was recommended for the job by the Hearst New York Journal-American, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington to have Girard brought back to the U.S., announced plans to subpoena Dulles, Wilson and Army Secretary Wilber Brucker. The counterblasts were soon rolling in from all over Asia, where the Dulles-Wilson ruling had been hailed as a declaration that the U.S. was not a lordly, imperial-minded power. Amid the U.S. uproar, this new Asian good will, said the Times of Indonesia, was now "considerably nullified."

"You're a Hero!" Into the uproar stepped the President. "Actually, the Japanese courts have been eminently fair," said Dwight Eisenhower at his weekly news conference, "and our legal people have reported that . . . Japanese legal procedures [are] based upon very great concern for the rights of the individual and justice to him. [And] if any possible injustice happened to that man, it would be a case that would be taken up diplomatically, of course."

But the uproar roared on. Colorado Republican Senator Gordon Allott proposed a bipartisan congressional investigation. District Court Judge Joseph C. McGarraghy directed U.S. authorities to show cause why Girard should not be returned to the U.S. "You're a national hero," Girard's brother told him by transpacific telephone from Ottawa. Whereupon Specialist Girard, who had won considerable public sympathy in Japan by virtue of having a Japanese fiancee, sacked his Japanese lawyer (selected by him and paid for from U.S. funds) and flirted with the idea of playing to the hilt the new role that his brother and the headline hunters had mapped out for him.

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