Hi, everyone. It's Ken here. This episode deals with the F word the Los Angeles County Courthouse on the corner of Grand and First.

He stopped outside Department 20, which in those days was a municipal court courtroom, hearing misdemeanors and minor crimes.

He took off his jacket and folded it under his arm, and he went into the courtroom to watch what was going on.

He was a witness in a case that was going forward.

While he was in there, several officers at the Los Angeles Police Department

entered the courtroom and asked the judge to hold Mr. Cohen in contempt.

The judge refused.

Cohen hadn't done anything in his court.

But when Cohen stepped out, he was arrested by the

police officers. Paul Robert Cohen hadn't said anything inflammatory. He hadn't threatened anyone.

He hadn't made a speech or held a sign. Nobody reacted to him with a threat of violence.

But that day, in that courthouse corridor,

he was wearing a jacket, that jacket. It had a slogan, stopped the war. It had two peace signs,

and it had another slogan. I said the word, the big one, the queen mother of dirty words, the F-dash-dash-dash-word.

What did you say?

That's what I thought you said.

Cohen's jacket said in big, bold letters, fuck the draft. This in April 1968 was a cause for tumult.

As every judge to touch the case carefully noted,

there were women and children present.

The word fuck was still taboo.

Dropping it in public was still like dropping a bomb.

Just 20 years before, the literary bomb thrower Norman Mailer wrote a searing story about how war dehumanizes us, called The Naked and the Dead.

...