Thomas Healy

Holmes loved to talk to people.

He loved to be challenged.

Those people were all dead by this point.

Holmes was pretty old.

He thought that they were all sort of stodgy and he didn't think that they were that smart.

Funny duddies.

Yeah.

And all of these young men, they worshipped Holmes.

And so he sort of found a new group of friends.

And he felt like some of these young men were the sons that he never had.

You know, he would write letters to them and he would call them my dear boy, my dear lads.

And they'd write letters back to him saying stuff like... Yours affectionately or yours always.

And they would talk about how much they loved him.

This group essentially engaged in a kind of lobbying campaign over the course of a year, year and a half to get Holmes to change his views about free speech.

And Holmes was so worked up by it that he sat down and he wrote a letter.

Kind of in a huff.

To the editor of the New Republic, defending himself.

He thinks maybe it's not such a good idea to be commenting on this issue because he knows that the court has another case coming before it in the fall, the Abrams case.

That these weapons that these people were making were going to be used to kill their loved ones back home.

So quit it.