Four decades have passed since the trial. Judge Thayer, Katzmann, President Lowell, Governor Fuller, and most of the jurors and witnesses are dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Beyond all else, doubt. Refusing to face this doubt, the two sides became irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer’s court be repudiated. There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula that would at least have pacified if not contented the reporter and his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense’s private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to have said less about him and to have concentrated on the evidence discovered after the trial. That this evidence changed nothing was preeminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he did in private with his committee, unhampered by the strict rules of legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have stayed the death sentences and ordered a new trial. Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the Lowell Report. If he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Bay ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His jail meetings with Sacco and Vanzetti are said to have been friendly. Once or twice a year in the decade after World War II, going into the State Street Trust Building, I used to see Fuller. The doorman would see him first and swing the door open with a ringing “Good morning, Governor.” I could slip through in the eddy. The old financial clipper would billow ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that had reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Malden bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when Packard was the Rolls-Royce of America. A mansion on the water side of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns. That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard slipped in the Depression, the ex-governor sensed the moment of ebb and shifted to Cadillac. There was a cragginess to his features in age. More and more he came to resemble the Back Bay Brahmins he so much admired. I suppose Sacco and Vanzetti, those men whose hands he had shaken so long ago in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, overlaid by eighteenth-century paintings and the tailfins of Cadillacs. “Our reputation is your protection,” said the governor’s used-car ads. Yet I never saw him sweeping into the State Street Trust but I thought of his role in the case.