RALPH GINZBURG, MIDDLESEX, N.J., AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100470030-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 1, 2004
• Sequence Number: 30
• Publication Date: April 30, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

*ffi~ 88-01314R0
M
:. By f LE MILLER
FEW days before Ralph Gmz-
burg was sent off to jail for
being "a leering sensualist" and
"a panderer," Melvin L. Wulf, legal
director of the American Civil
Liberties Union, said that his con-
viction had been "one of the great
crimes of the century." And while in
this criminal century that may be
something of an exaggeration, there
is no doubt that putting Ralph Ginz-
burg in prison was, as Mr. Wulf said
a few days later, "... a great anach-
ronism ... a crime ... an enormous
blunder."
It - would seem therefore that
Ginzburg, who is now serving a
three-year term in a minimum-secu-
rity Federal prison in Pennsylvania
called Allenwood Farm Camp, ought
to be emerging as something of a
martyr, with speeches in his behalf'
on the floor of Congress, marches
outside Allenwood, and at least one
rally in or near Madison Square Gar-
den, or at the very. least in Bryant
Park or Union Square. But that has
not happened.
And people like Bella Abzug and,
say; Abbie Hoffman or the 'Daniels
?Berrigan and Ellsberg-who are ever
ready to take on an unpopular or
even, sometimes, a popular cause-
have been strangely silent so far as
Ginzburg is concerned. His imprison-
ment was deplored in a mild sort of
way the week it happened, but since
then most people have seemed de-
lighted to forget all about it.
I'm afraid Ralph Ginzburg is just
not a proper martyr. In the first
'place, his appearance is against him.
The mustache he wore until he went
to prison was, to state it kindly,
preposterous. It always looked as if
it were something he had picked up
hurriedly and in the dark at a shabby
'Times Square costume 'shop; surely it
had been on sale, a remaindered
item. The glasses he wore were
utterly without distinction. They
were neither proper executive horn-
rims nor the kind of steel-rimmed
granny glasses that are so popular
with the young. The rims were thin
and black, somehow menacing; be-
hind them, one felt, the man might
indeed be leering sensually; he cer-
tainly looked, as it said in all those
ads for Moneysworth, as if he were
a skinflint, possibly a dealer in dirty
:postcards as well.
And the way he dressed. The day
I first met him he had on an aging
corduroy suit ("I've gone for as long
as seven years without buying a new
suit"), a faded blue denim shirt, a
stringy blue tie that could have been
inherited from a distant relative, and
work shoes. Ginzburg took me to
jail Ginzburg said, somewhat wist-
fully, "I have no criticiser of my
lawyers; they've been great, but I
sometimes think I'd have been better
off if I'd argued my own case before
the Supreme Court. You can do that,
you know." My own feeling is that
if he had done that, the decision
against him would have been. 9-0
instead of 5-4.
The day he went 'to Lewisburg,
Pa., to turn himself in, the man who
is possibly his oldest friend said, "If
The former publisher of Eros is a
most improbable martyr, but his
conviction touches the busies of what
freedom of the press is all about.
lunch in a kosher restaurant where
the'food was edible, but barely. He
referred to it as "a long lunch;" it
lasted 25 minutes. I had never before
encountered "a pornographer" or
"a smut king," and I didn't really
know what to expect I had been
told by a former associate of Ginz-
burg's that in his publications he had
..an uncanny ability to go straight
for the vulgar." Another one-time
friend said, "Ralph is without a single
redeeming social feature. He is a
loud and obnoxious man, and the
reason he is going to jail is that he
acts badly in courtrooms."
About that last. It isn't so much
that Ginzburg tries to outrage judges,
the way the defendants did in the
Chicago conspiracy trial, for in-
stance; his ability to annoy seems to
come quite naturally. In Philadelphia,
during his trial for "sending obscene
matter through the mails," Ginzburg
showed up in court wearing a flat
straw hat and a black pin-striped
suit with a white carnation in his
lapel. Something about his outfit
seems to have incensed the Honor-
able Ralph C. Body, who was heard
to demand of a clerk, "Where does
he think he's going, to his wedding?"
When one of Ginzburg's lawyers sug-
Ralph doesn't meet the warden, he'll
be out in a month. If he does, it'll
be life plus 99 years."
UINZBURG'S accent is pure
Brooklyn, and he is an insistent man.
He considers himself a pioneer, a.
crusader freeing inhibited Americans
from their sexual hang-ups. "I'm be-
ing punished for being ahead of my
time, for being too outspoken. Any-
body who comes on strong these
days pays the price.... They're put-
ting me in jail because by doing
that, they think they are locking up
the national libido."
Mostly, though, his conversation,
which is laden with cliches,. might
be that of an aging Eagle Scout
(Ginzburg is 42) or a Methodist Sun-
day school teacher. He spent a good
deal of time explaining that he
worked out three times a week in
a gymnasium, that he is a jogger, a
hiker, a climber of an occasional'
mountain, that he is a member of the
Audubon Society, and that he neither
smokes nor drinks. Indeed, before
going to lunch, the only bottle he
brought out was a bottle of vitamin
pills, and I noticed that on his desk
was a list of things he was planning
to take to prison: ". . . vitamins E
gested that more subdued apparel and C, white wool socks, heavy knit
MERLE MILLER is wo- iR,Pe)\7JZ't o F'ebb@i21 O W,11Pe: ~s~F' -RDP88-M@t4ROftiW4ftQ3Ot4by Dick,'
fiction book about Mars own, owe, body's going to tell me how to dress. _ Proust's 'The Captive,' harmonica?"
where he was born and raised, and where This is a free country, isn't it?" His conversation is very much like
he expects his novel, "What Happened," n- a.,,,