perjury. Reich sought a personal meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. None was forthcoming. The
FBI simply informed Mills and Maguire of each move^16.
On March 10, Reich and his associates took rooms at the Lafayette Hotel in
Portland, where the hearing was to be held the next day. William Steig and Moise asked the
local police if a cell was available to make a citizen’s arrest. They undoubtedly had Mills and
Maguire in mind. The officials tried to get Steig and Moise to back off from this plan, which
only reinforced the government’s conviction that extra security precautions should be taken
for the hearing itself. According to Greenfield: “A federal marshall and his three deputies, a
deputy and guard from Bangor, Maine, two FBI agents, a number of employees in the
Federal Building and men from the Immigration Division were consequently interspersed
among the people in the spectator seats. Besides this precaution, Maguire, after the hearing,
was escorted by two FBI agents to the Maine Turnpike for his trip back to Washington.”^17
At the hearing, each side was given fifteen minutes to present its argument.The
Portland Evening Expressof March n reported Reich’s words as follows:
He pleaded against being imprisoned, saying that if the sentence were car-
ried out, it inevitably would deprive the U.S. and the world at large of his equations
on space and negative gravity.
These equations, he said more specifically in his written motion, are car-
ried only in my head, known to no one on this planet. This knowledge will go down
with me, maybe for millennia, should mankind survive the present planetary DOR
emergency.
It would mean certain death in prison of a scientific pioneer at the hands
of psychopathic persons who acted in the service of treason against mankind in a
severe planetary emergency.
It would amount to gross neglect of duty of the court with regard to all
legal facts on official record in this case.Reich also asserted that he and Silvert were devoted to the promotion of new
knowledge,not a cancer cure. “We are not crooks, not criminals,” he concluded, “but coura-
geous people.”
Judge Sweeney ordered that Reich and Silvert undergo psychiatric examinations
within sixty days, after which the motion for reduction of sentence would be considered.
We know that Judge Sweeney had been considering such a psychiatric examination
for Reich during the trial.The psychoanalyst John Murray, an admiring student of Reich’s in
the 1920s (see Chapter 6), has also told me that Sweeney, who was his neighbor and golfing
companion, devoted considerable thought to what he should do about Reich’s sentence. The
judge liked Reich, but he was deeply committed to the American system of justice, and Reich
had flagrantly and knowingly violated the law. Sweeney sought Murray’s advice about Reich’s
mental status.From what Sweeney said, and from seeing some of Reich’s recent writings,
Murray concluded that Reich was paranoid and an “adamant crusader.”^18
432 Myron SharafFury On Earth