OPINION: The N

Senator Robert Taft, a hairsplitter to his enemies, a Blackstone to his friends, exploded a bomb under his fellow Americans. Before a somewhat startled conference of assorted intellects at Kenyon College last week (see EDUCATION), he denounced the Nürnberg trials:

“They violate that fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute. The hanging of eleven men convicted at Nürnberg will be a blot on the American record that we shall long regret.”

Taft, in effect, could see no basic difference between international and civil law. He indicated that little was gained at Nürnberg and much was lost. He doubted “whether the hanging of those who . . . were the leaders of the German people, will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win.”

Vengeance hung over the whole trial, he said. “And vengeance is seldom justice. … In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials—government policy and not justice—which has little relation to our Anglo-Saxon heritage. … I pray that we do not repeat the procedure in Japan.”*

The question had been argued before.

U.S. Prosecutor Robert Houghwout Jackson had declared at the beginning of the trials: “International law … if it is to advance at all, advances at the expense of those who wrongly guessed the law and learned too late their error. I am not disturbed at the lack of judicial precedent for the inquiry.”

* Major Eugene P. Boardman, U.S.M.C., an official interpreter at last winter’s trial of Lieut. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, reported later in the Marine Corps Gazette: “[A military commission] was directed to follow rules of procedure created specifically for the trial of war criminals. . . . Acceptable as evidence was hearsay and sworn statements unsupported by witnesses. Further, the commission was both jury and judge.”