Court Opinion

ID: 9421314
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:57:48.628799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:29.634054
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
The statement that President Eisenhower made in 1953 on the American code of fair play is more than interesting Americana. As my Brother Frankfurter says, it is Americana that is highly relevant to our present problem. The President said: “In this country, if someone dislikes you, or accuses you, he must come up in front. He cannot hide behind the shadow. He cannot assassinate you or your character from behind, without suffering the penalties an outraged citizenry will impose.” 1
*375That bit of Americana is relevant here because we have a question as to what a “hearing” is in the American meaning of the word. Fairness, implicit in our notions of due process, requires that any “hearing” be full and open with an opportunity to know the charge and the accusers, to reply to the charge, and to meet the accusers. And when Congress provides for a hearing, as it implicitly has in § 244 of the present Act, it should be assumed that Congress has the same lively sense of the requirements of fair play as the Eisenhower code demands.
The philosophy of the full hearing, especially as it involves the right to meet the accusers, has been put in classical words by Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., in his recent book The Blessings of Liberty (1956), p. 35:
“One important benefit from confronting the suspect with his accusers is the opportunity to cross-examine them and rigorously test any dubious statement. As old Sir Matthew Hale says, it 'beats and boults out the truth much better.’ Add to that the old-fashioned value of putting people face to face out in the open. Accusers who secretly confer in private with an official or two and a couple of clerks may, as in Hale’s time, 'oftentimes deliver that which they will be ashamed to testify publicly.’ An honest witness may feel quite differently when he has to re*376peat his story looking at the man whom he will harm greatly by distorting or mistaking the facts. He can now understand what sort of human being that man is. As for the false witness, the tribunal can learn ever so much more by looking at him than by reading an F. B. I. abstract of his story. The pathological liar and the personal enemy can no longer hide behind a piece of paper.”
And see Peters v. Hobby, 349 U. S. 331, 350-352; O’Brian, National Security and Individual Freedom (1955), pp. 61-63.
Harry P. Cain, member of the Subversive Activities Control Board, recently joined the President in endorsing this code of fair play: 2
“In all of our traditional efforts to protect the individual against oppression and false conviction by the state, we have relied basically and primarily on confrontation and cross-examination. By no other means can those who must judge their fellow man minimize to the fullest and desired extent the mistakes which humans make. Without recourse to these means, it is impossible for anyone accused of anything to protect himself fully against enemies whose evidence may consist of nothing more than malice, vindictiveness, mistaken identity, intolerance, prejudice, or a perverted desire to destroy.”
A hearing is not a hearing in the American sense if faceless informers or confidential information may be used to deprive a man of his liberty. That kind of hearing is so un-American that we should lean over backwards to avoid imputing to Congress a purpose to sanction it under § 244.

 The entire statement made at the B’Nai B’Rith Dinner in Washington, D. C., November 23, 1953, reads as follows:
“Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend — or his enemy; and he does not feel that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.
“I was raised in a little town of which most of you have never heard. But in the West it is a famous place. It is called Abilene, Kansas. We had as our Marshal for a long time a man named Wild Bill Hickock. If you don’t know anything about him, read your Westerns more. Now that town had a code, and I was raised as a boy to prize that code.
“It was: meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree. You *375could not sneak up on him from behind, or do any damage to him, without suffering the penalty of an outraged citizenry. If you met him face to face and took the same risks he did, you could get away with almost anything, as long as the bullet was in the front.
“And today, although none of you has the great fortune, I think, of being from Abilene, Kansas, you live after all by that same code, in your ideals and in the respect you give to certain qualities. In this country, if someone dislikes you, or accuses you, he must come up in front. He cannot hide behind the shadow. He cannot assassinate you or your character from behind, without suffering the penalties an outraged citizenry will impose.”

 Address before New York Civil Liberties Union, New York City, February 22,1956.