In 1970, Tom Forçade put a pie in a federal commissioner’s face. The Secret Service used it to deny him a White House press pass. The case he filed became the precedent a judge invoked this week to restore access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico.
On Wednesday night a federal judge ordered the White House to give CNN, MS NOW and Politico their press credentials back. The judge was Timothy Kelly, appointed by Donald Trump in his first term. The reasoning was narrow and procedural, the kind of ruling that doesn’t make a good headline. But the precedent it rests on exists because the man who founded this magazine threw a pie at a government official in 1970 and then sued when the Secret Service held it against him.
At the district court level, that case was called Forcade v. Knight.
Pie power
On May 13, 1970, the U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography held the last day of its public hearings in a Senate office building in Washington. Thomas King Forçade was there as project coordinator of the Underground Press Syndicate, the consortium that linked hundreds of counterculture papers across the country. He testified first, reading a prepared statement of about a thousand words that called the panel a “Keystone Kommittee engaged in a blatant McCarthyesque witch hunt.”
Then he got out of his chair and pushed a pie into the face of Otto N. Larsen, a sociology professor at the University of Washington and a member of the commission. The Associated Press photographer Henry Griffin caught it. Forçade handed out flyers reading “pie power.” The New York Times ran the story the next morning, on page 8, and described the pie as cheese. The AP caption called it cottage cheese.
No charges were filed. Forçade …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
