The man in his seventies who showed me into his private office without shaking hands was less the calcined Boston type than I had expected. There was a metallic quality about his eroding features. His wiry gray hair fluffed over the collar of a rumpled white shirt. He had taken off his coat, exposing waist-high trousers held up by police galluses. His eyebrows were tufted and he wore round gold-rimmed spectacles. “I did not,” he announced, “like the tone of your Sacco-Vanzetti article in _American Heritage_ at all. Nevertheless I am willing to see you. What is it you want to know?” I told him I was trying to write an impartial study of all the events in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that I knew he thought they were guilty, and that I wanted to include his point of view. His knees creaked a little as he sat down opposite me. A smile broke through his clouded face. “If you want to write a book like your article you could probably finish it in four or five months; but if you really want to be honest, it will take you two years just to do the preliminary reading. The fundamental thing is to make the proper comparisons between the trial record and that of the governor’s committee. Of course if you tell the truth you’ll never find a publisher. Because if you really go into the case you can only conclude that those two Italians were guilty. And you’ll never get a hearing on that. Why? Because their innocence has become a liberal trademark. There has never been any real doubt about this case among those who know about it. It was just used by people—by the anarchists and that radical lawyer of theirs and then the Communists. “The case was open and shut. Everyone at the Dedham trial was convinced they were guilty, except a few old women social workers and Frank Sibley of the _Globe_. Sacco and Vanzetti said the night they were arrested they were out to pick up anarchist literature from their friends because they were afraid of the Department of Justice raids. That was May fifth, though. All those anarchists knew beforehand that the raids were going to take place on May first. No, they weren’t out to pick up their anarchist papers that night. They were going to Bridgewater with guns on them to get a car because they knew that next day was payday at the factories. They needed money for the defense of their comrade Elia in New York, and they were going to get it in the only way they knew.” I said that I could not imagine why, if a man had shot someone, he would be foolish enough to have the murder weapon in his belt three weeks later. Any sensible murderer would have thrown the gun away.