Free Trotsky by Bertrand M. Patenaude

experience and in possibilities.”
     
    D EWEY, LIKE F INERTY, probed Trotsky but never seriously challenged him, and the other commission members followed suit—all, that is, except for Carleton Beals, the Latin Americanist. Beals treated Trotsky as a hostile witness, and he provided the hearings with their one moment of contentious drama and scandal. From the beginning, Beals had behaved like the commission’s odd man out. He was absent from its pre-hearing meetings held in Mexico City and then missed the opening session. When he spoke, he exhibited a prickliness toward his fellow commission members, especially Dewey.
    During the hearings Beals was often seen huddling with The New York Times correspondent on the scene, Frank Kluckhohn. Kluckhohn’s reporting from Mexico City made it apparent that he had an ax to grind. He wrote a hostile profile of Trotsky and insinuated that thehearings were a whitewash. Even before the commission protested to the Times, Kluckhohn’s editor had wired him to say that he should do more reporting and less editorializing. This he managed to do for a few days, then he was absent for two more before returning in time for the Beals affair.
    On April 16, the penultimate day of the hearings, Beals’s questioning veered into provocation when he asked Trotsky whether, as Soviet war commissar in 1919, he had sent a Soviet agent to Mexico to foment revolution. Everyone in the room recognized that the question was intended to jeopardize Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico. There was a suspicion that Kluckhohn, who had a habit of posing similarly provocative questions at Trotsky’s press conferences, had inspired Beals. His question led to a testy exchange with Trotsky, who bluntly told Beals that his informant was a liar. The next day, Beals informed Dewey by letter of his resignation from the commission. The hearings had proved to be a waste of time, he wrote, and “not a truly serious investigation of the charges.”
    That same day, April 17, Trotsky delivered his closing statement before the commission. Its text was so long—Dewey called it “a book”—that Trotsky could read only a portion of it at the hearings, the rest being added to the record. He began speaking toward five o’clock in the afternoon and finished close to 8:45.
    Most of his presentation was an exhaustive analysis of the Moscow trials, which he called “the greatest frame-up in history.” He made the case for his own impeccable Marxist-Leninist credentials and assured his audience of “my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind.” He closed with a diplomatic flourish, thanking the committee and its distinguished chairman. “And when he finished,” the court reporter testified, “the audience, a singularly diverse one, burst out into applause, which was, believe me, most spontaneous. This moment I shall never forget.” Dewey avoided stepping on the moment: “Anything I can say will be an anticlimax.” The hearings of the preliminary commission came to a close.
    Trotsky and Dewey had thus far been introduced only formally. The organizers had decided that, for appearances’ sake, the two men ought to be kept apart, and so they were, even in the Blue House patio duringrecesses in the hearings. A cartoon in one of the popular Mexican daily papers gave a different impression. It showed Trotsky and Dewey seated side by side in the hearing room. The caption had one audience member remarking to another, “What does Trotsky mean by saying he has been denied liberty when he has been all over the world?” The other man replies, “Yes, so he has, just like a lion [léon] in a circus.”
    Late in the evening after the final session, there was a social gathering for commission members, staff, and journalists at the home of an American well-wisher in Mexico City, an event attended by both Trotsky and Dewey. No longer constrained by protocol, the two men, surrounded by guests, were able to exchange pleasantries. Dewey said