This is a fascinating rumination on how activists who attain legitimacy have their hands tied in ways that conservatives and "illegitimate" activists do not. It's the story of the lawyers for the Rosenbergs, executed for spying for the Soviets. After their sentence, their lawyers needed a stay so that they could try to get to the Supreme Court when its new session opened. A conservative judge agreed to grant the stay, but a "liberal" judge who needed to affirm the stay balked, and so the Rosenbergs were executed.
Jerome Frank might, in a profound sense, have changed the course of American history that afternoon. He could not do it. He was a prisoner of the system he served. As a liberal, as a progressive, he had risen to a position of leadership in society. He would jeopardize the usefulness of those labels and, accordingly, the position they afforded him if he participated in the act of courage that Judge Swan, the conservative, was prepared to take. The labels themselves, Frank's "liberal" past, imprisoned him – kept him from the course he would have taken if he were "as young as" we were. When we were "as old as" he was, he was telling us, we would understand that to preserve our position in society, we must compromise with those in control.
… [Frank] was afraid – afraid of threatening the already shaky position of himself, of all the liberals, of the progressives, and even of the Jews – although that was a thought which I, as a young Jewish person, was most reluctant to face. It simply was not prudent for a "liberal Jew" to be the one to save the two "Jewish atom spies." This was what we would understand only when we were "as old as" he."
