The Rush of History

The New York Herald Tribune daubed a swastika on its front page and led a guided tour through the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The New York Daily News bought a full-page ad in the competitive Trib to deliver "an urgent message about the Eichmann trial to every responsible person in the United States." The message: read all about the trial in the News. EICHMANN is INNOCENT, proclaimed New York's radio station WNEW in a full-page teaser ad in the New York Post and the Journal-American. Then, having hooked the reader, the ad continued in small print ". . . until proven guilty"--and announced that WNEW was sending Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials in Nuernberg, to watch the proof unfold.

More than 500 correspondents from 40 countries flocked to Jerusalem last week for the decade's most publicized trial. From West Germany came Europe's largest single platoon: 45 newsmen. Japan and East Germany each sent six, Russia two, Nigeria one. Among the arrivals were many who had turned journalist just for the occasion: U.S. Novelist Irwin (The Young Lions) Shaw, whose "incisive understanding of the Nazi mentality" was under contract to Hearst; Indian Poet Dom Moraes, representing Encounter, a British magazine; U.S. Banker Ira Hirschmann for Look.

Short of granting interviews with Eichmann, the Israeli government outdid itself to accommodate the visitors. Censorship was lifted on all trial copy. In and around the courtroom building gleamed $350,000 worth of new transmission facilities, including banks of teletypes staffed by Jerusalem housewives hastily recruited and trained. Each guest was equipped with a headset radio on which he could follow the trial in four languages--French, English, German, Hebrew. If a reporter missed anything, he could refer to a daily mimeographed record of the court proceedings--also in four languages, plus a summary in Yiddish. Even the trial's stern security measures were gracefully applied: one radio newsman who surrendered a broken tape recorder for police inspection got it back repaired.

All the Stops. Long before the press corps actually got in to the courtroom to cover the trial, the Eichmann case was heralded, exploited, rehashed and explored with exhaustive thoroughness. In the U.S., papers that did not serialize Eichmann's life or revisit the Third Reich ranged far afield to fill space. Some went hunting for concentration camp survivors; the Denver Post interviewed 25-year-old Robert Kaye, who served when he was seven as Eichmann's orderly in a camp near Mannheim. Hearst's tabloid New York Mirror interviewed a bevy of teenagers in Queens, among them an 18-year-old rock-'n-roll singer who felt that death for Eichmann "might be letting him off too easy." From "J.C.," a man who spent 15 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, Gossip Columnist Hy Gardner solicited the "worst punishment" for Eichmann: isolation for life, with nothing to read but the Bible. Gossip Columnist Walter Winchell coined another word: "Eichmonster." Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's TV Columnist Terence O'Flaherty: "I am waiting with a kind of cold horror, for fear that Dorothy Kilgallen and Jack Paar will announce they are attending in person."

Particularly in New York City, where there are as many Jews as in all Israel, editorial writers pulled out all the stops. The World-Telegram and Sun felt frustrated because "there is no punishment to fit the crime he is charged with." While the New York Times questioned Israel's jurisdiction ("It would have been better to have had this trial in Germany"), the New York Journal-American harbored no doubts at all: "It is the opinion of The Hearst Newspapers that the legality of the Eichmann trial is substantiated by the precedent of the Nuremberg war criminal trials." To the New York Mirror, Eichmann was "a degenerate scrap of flesh." The New York Post darkly predicted that the trial "will bring a detailed, documented recital of the ghoulish depths of systematic sadism to which men can sink."

Consuming Trivia. In contrast to the trial's turgid advance notices, much of the torrent from Jerusalem--280,000 words the first day--seemed pallid and anticlimactic. A few seasoned workhorses, notably the New York Times's Homer Bigart and the Associated Press's Relman ("Pat") Morin, resisted the temptation to manufacture excitement, stuck to dispassionate, undoctored and starkly impressive fact. But with little sensational to work from--the formal charge, the opening statements of the prosecution and the defense had already been covered or anticipated at length--many trial correspond ents dredged tip such consuming trivia as what Eichmann did in stir (the Herald Tribune reported he spent his time reading Desiree, the Reader's Digest and Gone With the Wind), and how he looked as a prisoner under glass. Harry (For 2$ Plain) Golden, accredited to the McClure Syndicate, thought Eichmann looked like a "window cleaner";* to the New York World-Telegram's Richard Starnes he was a "worried suburbanite waiting his turn at the dentist's office"; to Novelist Shaw he was "a clerk in the grip of a perversion." Observed Author Meyer (Compulsion) Levin, attending the trial for London's Jewish Chronicle: "Eichmann sits in his surgical box like a patient in a germ-proof cell waiting to be operated on by journalists wearing transistors around their necks like stethoscopes."

But even while they organized their overblown prose, some of the correspondents wondered vaguely if they were not working against themselves. "The trial of Adolf Eichmann has only begun," wrote the Chicago Daily News's David M. Nichol, giving voice to this concern, "but the supply of superlatives is being exhausted rapidly. Adjectives that once seemed strong and vigorous, and labels like 'monster,' are losing their meaning. In a few days' time they will have depreciated even more."

The world did not have to wait that long. Suddenly, on Eichmann's second day in court, his trial was no longer the big story of the week. And as every headline turned toward Russian Major Yuri Gagarin, the first man shot into orbit (see SCIENCE), Eichmann trial coverage began to move to inside pages. Ironically, the swift rush of history had caught up with Adolf Eichmann a second time.

* Golden himself had his own identification trouble. Fat, bespectacled and benign, he looked enough like Eichmann's defense counsel, Robert Servatius, that he was on occasion besieged by other newsmen and photographers.

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