Seven-Year Justice

Seven years ago, John Henry Faulk was making $36,000 a year as a radio and television monologuist and comic chatterer. Suddenly, his radio-TV income dropped to zero. He had been blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer in a pamphlet published by AWARE, Inc., a private group of lawyers, professors, businessmen and actors whose declared objective was "to combat the Communist conspiracy in entertainment communications."

Faulk brought suit for libel against AWARE, Inc., and against Vincent Hartnett, writer of the pamphlet, and Laurence Johnson, a Syracuse supermarket operator and AWARE, Inc. member, who energetically circulated Hartnett's pamphlet to TV sponsors. The case finally came to trial last April.

AWARE, Inc.'s shadowy terrorism once had the entire television industry quivering in fear, but until the Faulk case no one had ever had the courage to bite back. Faulk's attorney was Louis Nizer, who had earlier helped Quentin Reynolds win a $175,001 verdict in his 1954 suit against Columnist Westbrook Pegler, the highest award ever made by a jury in a libel case.

The trial was a painful reminder of the era when Joe McCarthy was riding high, and suspicions, half-truths and innuendoes could ruin a man. As evidence of Faulk's "Communist" sympathies, for instance, Hartnett had cited the fact that Faulk had appeared "at a function" with Composer Earl Robinson, an often blacklisted leftist. That was all the pamphlet had said.

The function, Nizer told the jury, was a first-year salute to the United Nations, endorsed by such organizations as the American Bar Association and the Y.M.C.A., and attended by U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the ambassadors of France and England. On the stand, Hartnett agreed that this was the "function" he was talking about. Nizer asked why he had left out all names but Robinson's. ''Well," said Hartnett, "I wasn't discussing the United Nations."

In an absorbing sidelight into his character, Hartnett admitted that he had once written an article criticizing the Borden Co. for sponsoring a show that employed Red-lining personnel; before publishing it, he showed it to Borden. The result was that the article was amended, and Hartnett was put on the Borden payroll as a "talent consultant."

Nizer asked for a heavy award to Faulk "to let the world know that in America we won't tolerate these private vigilante groups." As the trial reached its climax last-week, it was momentarily confused by the death of Defendant Johnson, but the judge declared that Johnson's estate was still liable. The jury then awarded Faulk compensatory and punitive damages that set a new record for libel suits: $3,500,000.

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