I was with the President at his news conference that Wednesday morning when the maverick Supreme Court Justice William Douglas dropped his bombshell in the Rosenberg case. Everything had been proceeding according to plan, the appeals had been exhausted, the Rosenbergs were due to be executed the next night, and Eisenhower had called the news conference the day before to confirm the details and remind the nation: “I think I am as implacable a foe of the Communistic theory as there is in this world!” The General had been submitting himself to these confrontations at the rate of nearly three a month since taking office in January, and this worried me. They exercised a visible drain on his powers, he seemed almost to deflate, to simplify, from beginning to end, and from one news conference to the next. As a precaution, we had begun weighing him — down to 180 already — but I didn’t need medical proofs, I could see for myself. He won’t last, I thought. Not at this rate. Can the Phantom see this? Am I ready, if it comes to that?
The President was talking now about the so-called book-burning scandal — Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and one of the guys who had helped Irving Saypol send the Rosenbergs to the Death House in the first place, had been flying around Europe with his buddy G. David Schine, purging U.S. libraries there of what they considered dangerous authors — people like Howard Fast, Mrs. Clifton Fadiman, Theodore White, Bert Andrews, Dashiell Hammett — and yukking it up in their peejays with hotel clerks and cub reporters. Foster Dulles had had to admit that as a result somebody over there had actually set fire to eleven of the damned books, and now the press was in an uproar about it. The President was clearly confused on this issue. This was because, except for the odd western, he’d never read books, and so respected them more than he ought. Even the westerns were just part of the exercises associated with the reinforcement of his superpowers — he usually skipped past all the technicalities about such things as horse-breeding, trial procedures, and prospecting, all the interesting parts. As for the book-burners themselves, well, Roy’s devices were crude maybe, but after all they were also consistent, just like his courtroom prosecutions and his cloak-and-dagger work for McCarthy’s committee. Roy was smart and close to the hot center, but like Joe, he lacked real cunning. This was ironical because this is just what they were always accused of. They looked mean and shrewd — but they always outreached themselves. I warned Joe about this three years ago, but he wouldn’t listen, he was too excited. In the end, through excess and discredit, they served the Phantom. Risks of the holy encounter. Well, a Jew, a Catholic — maybe they lacked certain defenses, being spiritual outsiders, not quite true full-blooded Americans — too fearful of being misunderstood, of being victimized. Probably. Also Joe was piling up a lot of dough through privileged information — that was okay, but you couldn’t do that and be a crusader, too.
The President was saying: “By no means am I talking, when I talk about books or the right of dissemination of knowledge, am I talking about any document, or any other kind of thing that attempts to persuade, or propagandize America into Communism, so manifestly, I am not talking about that kind of thing when I talk about free access to knowledge.”
His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism — he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense. I knew I still had much to learn. People still took me for a carnival barker, a used-car salesman, a fast-buck lawyer — I was still too fluent, too intense, too logical. I had to study this awkward confusion, this easy stupid grin, this casual good-natured gruffness that blunted all the questions. It angered me that Eisenhower had seemed to come by all this naturally. He’d never had to study for anything, not even war. Who else in all history had ever become the world’s greatest living military hero without so much as firing a shot or suffering a wound, without so much as a field command, a single battle, even five minutes of real combat? I was no hero, but at least I’d got sent to the goddamn South Pacific and had had a pretty frantic month on Bougainville, while the nearest Ike had ever got to real battle was the White House Egg Roll this year. He was a lucky man. They all said this, it was true. It all seemed to fall in his lap. How could you imitate something like that? I felt cheated. I’d been studying all my life, and I still wasn’t there. I worried that I’d never learn enough, worried that Uncle Sam would never use me, and then worried about the worrying. Eisenhower, damn him, never worried at all.
Maybe inquiry, self-consciousness, impeded the process. Maybe Uncle Sam needed vacuity for an easy passage. Certainly, the President never risked clogging the mechanism with idle curiosities of the intellect. He’d had to lean all his life on his little brother Milton whenever it came to thinking (which was something of a closet problem for the Republican Party, Milton having rubbed shoulders with old Henry Wallace during the New Deal days), and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind. The only TV program he was known to watch was “The Fred Waring Show,” which he took to be a classical-music program. He sometimes liked to take in a movie in the White House basement, but generally snored through them, High Noon being one of the few that seemed to keep him awake. More or less awake: he tended to doze off during the kissing scenes (did he resent it that the wife was a Quaker?), then would wake up snorting: “What time is it?”—meaning, Is it noon yet? There was a motto inscribed on a small black piece of wood on his desk, SUAVITER IN MODO FORTITER IN RE, which he thought was Spanish and pronounced like a Texan. Of course, it was true, he had taken up painting of late, and the room across the hall from his bedroom, I was told, had even been converted into a studio, but other people generally drew the pictures and he just filled in the colors — he was always lamenting that he knew nothing about the chemistry of paints, next to nothing about anatomy (he would wink slyly over my head at some crony or other), and draftsmanship was the one subject that nearly got him flunked out of West Point. He was happiest with eight or ten buddies, broiling steaks and roasting corn in their husks on the grill up in the solarium on the White House roof, or else having some old cronies over for a stag dinner of pheasant in the State Dining Room, then sitting around in a circle in his oval study after, talking about fishing or women or war.
I was not included in these parties. He didn’t really like me. I was a “politician.” American adversary politics, the kind I knew how to fight and fight well, was nothing better than a childish gutter-brawl to Eisenhower: “If it takes that kind of foolishness to get elected, let them find someone else for the job!” Yet it was I, not he, who had whipped Adlai Stevenson last fall — Eisenhower won the election, because he couldn’t help it; but it was I who beat the other guy. Slogans of his like “Heart, Determination, and Productivity” did no harm — indeed they put people to sleep, and in this day of the hovering Bomb we could all be grateful for that — but people don’t vote for things, they vote against them, take it from W. C. Fields, and when they went to the polls it was my K1C3 formula they remembered, scrawling their X’s against “Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls.” (If some people were reminded of the old Klan slogan “Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics,” it was not necessarily an accident; Eisenhower wasn’t the only campaigner who knew how to stir up a little useful nostalgia for the primitive and virtuous village life of the past.) Ike had come home from his imperial life abroad, picked up the cross, and launched his “Great Crusade,” but I was the poor sonuvabitch who had had to get down in the ditches and fight the Turks. He seemed to think there was something shameful about this, about being a shameless politician, and always gazed at me as though he saw shit on my face. Yet at the same time he expected me to keep the politicians in Congress in line and got annoyed with me when they deserted him to cater to the home-town vote. His program over on the Hill was faltering. Even his Defense Department reorganization bill was under attack — and if a General didn’t know about defense, then what the hell was he good for? That “bunch of clowns” in Congress was concentrating on headline-grabbing investigations instead of constructive legislation, as he liked to call it, something which amazed and confounded this Living Legend — a man rich from birth astonished by thieves. And somehow all this was my fault. He maybe even thought I was betraying him. He was a Superhero, wasn’t he? Then why weren’t they doing what he asked them to do? Somebody must be messing with the message on its way over there. Thus, he didn’t even understand his own role. In a real sense, I was the old man, he the boy. Even Stevenson saw this.
This is an irony I have learned to live with. Old men, liking me, tended to make the paradoxical assumption that I could win votes among the young and women voters, the province of happy-go-lucky studs like Eisenhower — just as it had been my experience, and not Ike’s, that had kept our Party’s professionals, the old boys, from bolting the ticket last fall. They had made the obvious surface choices at the Convention last summer: Eisenhower was the candidate of the Eastern Establishment, so a Westerner was needed for balance. Eisenhower was old and easy-going and had lived much of his life abroad, he needed a sidekick who was, as Herb Brownell described me, “a young aggressive fellow who knew the domestic issues — the President could be presented to the country as one who would stand up against the Communists in the international sphere, and Nixon would lead the fight in the discussion of the domestic issues.”
But in fact, though all too few understood this, it went much deeper than that. Likable Ike’s open-faced friendliness and easy smile won a lot of votes, but some people began to suspect he might be a little simple. Any man on the street past thirty knows there’s a lot more to politics — at home and abroad — than plain talk and friendly handshakes. Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy. We all know this: politics is a dirty, combative, dangerous game, it’s not something to grin at like a doped monkey. A beloved leader is no leader at all. Gregariousness is a liability if you live close to the center. Crusaders all make one mistake: they leave home. Optimists buy the wrong used cars, take it from a guy who’s sold them. And never trust any man who’s “clean as a hound’s tooth”: it’s clear he’s never been out in the real world when the shit’s hit the fan.
So everybody liked Ike, that casual straightforward bumbler — me they called Tricky Dick. I hated this at first, it was a brutal thing to fight, but eventually I discovered it won votes. Uncle Sam probably didn’t like being called Yankee Doodle at first either, but eventually he stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. And as these plays on my name got filthier, I even started picking up some votes among women and young people. I’m not very interested in the philosophy of any gimmick or policy, only its efficacy. It’s not the content that counts, but the impact — and that attitude itself is efficacious at the polls. Ike was so accustomed to being loved, even apathy offended him. When some guy up in Racine, Wisconsin, borrowing from the 1948 campaign, invented the phrase “Phewey on Eisenhewey!”, the General was genuinely upset and wouldn’t associate with Tom Dewey for days. If the Democrats had hit him hard enough, portrayed him as a pompous disloyal fraud and something of a helpless moron to boot, if they’d ridiculed his cronies and dragged old Mamie through the mud as they should have, he’d have probably quit. In fact, I knew he could still quit, any day, he was already losing interest.
“I believe the United States is strong enough to expose to the world,” he was saying now, “its differing viewpoints, from those of what we call almost the man who has Socialist leanings to the man who is so far to the extreme right that it takes a telescope to find him, but that is America and let’s don’t be afraid to show it, to the world, because we believe that form of government, those facts, that kind of thinking, that kind of combination of things has produced the greatest system of government that the world has produced, that is what we believe, that is what I am talking about.”
Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the weak links in the American press system, was trying in his tenacious hangdog way to stir up trouble with further questions about this, when Herb Brownell, the Attorney General, came in, looking dark and secretive. Of course, this was easy for Brownell with that high dome and fixed gaze, he always gave you the impression there was nothing he didn’t know, even when he was half dozing, but today he looked less cool and collected than usual. He motioned me aside. We huddled, scowling importantly, and the newsguys watched us; I was beginning to catch on to some of these angles. “Pete Brandt’s trying to get up a fight between Ike and Joe,” I whispered.
Herb didn’t seem to hear me. Up close, I realized he was very agitated. “It’s all off, Dick!” he whined. “Douglas called it off!”
“Off?” I said. “What’s off, Herb?”
“The executions! The Rosenbergs! The anniversary! Tomorrow night!”
My heart jumped, seemed to lodge in my throat. I worried that the reporters would notice this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d been very tense about this thing since that golf game with Uncle Sam over the weekend, and I wasn’t sure whether this new situation was good or bad. I was pretty sure Uncle Sam wouldn’t like it — we’d been building up toward this thing for two years, everything was ready up in Times Square, we’d thought the last hurdle had been cleared: and now this! The fat was really in the fire! Or rather, it wasn’t…. There’d been delays before, of course — Uncle Sam had originally scheduled the executions just before the balloon drop at our Inaugural Ball last January — but none so shocking as this. On the other hand, I realized, it at least gave me more time. I’d been pressing very hard, going over everything, and I still hadn’t figured out what it was Uncle Sam wanted me to do. I’d thought I was safe, I who’d single-handedly vanquished Alger Hiss and put Voorhis and the Pink Lady to rout, but now I was feeling vulnerable again.
“But I… I thought the Supreme Court had recessed!” I whispered.
“They have!” wheezed Herb. “Douglas waited until all the other Justices had left town on their vacations, and then issued a stay of execution! It’s a helluva mess!”
“We’ve got to get word to the General, before one of these organ grinders asks the wrong question,” I said.
“Generally speaking,” the President was saying, “that is exactly what I believe. But I do say I don’t have to be a party to my own self-destruction, that is the limit and the other limit I draw is decency, we have certain books we bar from the mails, and all that sort of thing, I think that is perfectly proper and I would do it now, I don’t believe that standards of essential human dignity ought to be violated in these things. And human decency.”
I scratched out a note: ROSENBERG EXECUTIONS CALLED OFF! and passed it to the press secretary, Jim Hagerty. Hagerty blanched, seemed uncertain what to do with it. I motioned toward the President, but Jim seemed reluctant to pass it on. Probably afraid the Old Man would read it out loud like an announcement. Or get confused and become completely unintelligible. Maybe even blow his stack.
“How many of you have read Stalin’s Problems of Leninism?” the President was asking the reporters. We didn’t even know he knew the title. “How many of you have really studied Karl Marx and looked at the evolution of the Marxian theory down to the present application?” Everybody thought he had said “Martian theory” and he was getting a lot of laughs. This was very successful, the reporters had completely forgotten what they’d asked him, but I thought: My God, I could never do this! I wrote a new note: URGENT BUSINESS! BRING THIS CONFERENCE TO A CLOSE! and handed it to Jim. Jim added in PLEASE and AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, passed it on to the General, who was just saying: “Of course we shouldn’t give that text to a Communist teacher and say, Now. Take your students off, and try to lead them astray any more than you would give them, let us say Al Capone’s book on how to be a crook!” Nobody knew any longer what text he was talking about.
When the news conference was over and we’d cleared everybody out of there, Herb sprang the news.
The President drew himself up — a tall man, after all, and strong — in fact, his countenance was already changing — and with jaw set and fists clenched, yet with perfect composure, perfect equanimity, said simply:
“Friends, this is a job for Uncle Sam!”
A United States Supreme Court Justice — himself a controversial appointee from the Era of Compromise — thwarts the long-planned execution of the atom spies, disappears.
Two ore tankers go aground in the mud of St. Clair, Canada.
A coffee plot is uncovered in Brazil.
Russian tanks tool up, roll toward East Berlin.
From North Korea come horrific images of brainwashed GIs staring vapidly and twitching like zombies, while in the South, the port of the capital is bombed and underground rumors abound of trouble afoot, strange stirrings in the prisoner compounds.
In Times Square, the “c” has vanished from the SILENCE sign tacked up over the stage door of the execution chamber mock-up, and the letters are scrambled to spell SENILE, a cross-eyed Uncle Sam chalked crudely on the wall above it. The electrical sign reading AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD has been altered to AMERICA THE DOPE OF THE WORLD, and now, metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passersby, becomes:
AMERICA THE ROPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE RAPE OF THE WORLD
What’s happening?!?
The men of Local 333 of the United Marine Division of the International Longshoreman’s Association strike the two boats that take sight-seers out to Bedloe’s Island, throwing up what The New York Times calls “an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty!”
Judge Irving Kaufman, now guarded day and night by FBI in mufti and twelve boys in blue at his Park Avenue home, receives two bomb threats against his life, and total strangers send him telegrams: “May your children become orphans!”
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the heir-designate to Prime Minister Churchill, is struck down in London, taken to the hospital for a gall bladder operation, and fire breaks out in the key U.S. military port of Whittier, Alaska.
AMERICA THE RAKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE FAKE OF THE WORLD
King Sihanouk of Cambodia, having fled to Thailand, takes encouragement from the sudden dissolution and demands from the French full independence for Cambodia. The French will to stand firm falters.
The Phantomized Guatemalan regime seizes lands belonging to Uncle Sam’s United Fruit Company, redistributes them to greedy and incompetent peasants.
Francis Cardinal Spellman’s tireless epistolary efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, Italy, without a government, slips to the left, just as the body of a twenty-year-old student in the Passionists’ seminary at Caravete is found in the woods, skull smashed by a stone. There have been fires in the convent library, two watchdogs have been poisoned, and all the Passionist brothers and pupils found potassium cyanide in their morning espresso one morning of late. The village’s small community of newly-converted Protestants is suspected; anti-American feeling grows apace.
AMERICA THE FATE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HATE OF THE WORLD
Something passes like a cold unseasonal wind through Times Square, tipping over police barricades, blowing holes in the set, and stripping away all the white and blue bunting in the streets, leaving — from a Busby Berkeley overview — a tattered crimson star fluttering in its wake. This same wind blows through Whittier, Alaska, fanning the flames, spreading the fire through docks and warehouses, forcing back the hundreds of stevedore troops battling the blaze, and then through Africa, stirring the blacks in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa to rebellion. It whistles through the Federal Council of Italian Evangelical Churches, which cables President Eisenhower “to be great in your mercy and spare the lives of the Rosenbergs,” and it even touches the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Nepal: they erupt into a sudden feud over the exploits of Heroes Edmund Hillary and his guide Tensing Norkay, now down off the roof of the world, the British claiming that Hillary had to drag the reluctant Sherpa (they persist, out of habit, in calling him “the native”) up Everest’s summit behind him, while the Nepalese, who have declared May 29 a new national holiday — Tensing Day — retort that in fact it was their man who had to carry the fagged white man up on his back. An international crisis develops, and America seems unable to do anything about it.
Elsewhere, the Phantom strikes out even more boldly, using every weapon from hysteria to hyperbole, tanks to terrorism. In Korea, firing thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, the Phantom’s troops attack along a broad front, capturing Finger Ridge and Capitol Hill, breaking through Allied lines near Outpost Texas, scattering chickenshit ROKs and exhausted GIs in all directions. “If this is getting ready for peace,” bitches a shot-up U.S. rifleman as they cart him away on his stretcher, “I’d just as soon go back to the old war!” TIME, the National Poet Laureate, records this sentiment for immortality, then adds:
americans could not forget
korea and it spoiled
some of their pleasure in
tv sets and Cadillacs
Uncle Sam wants the hell out of this war, but Syngman Rhee is threatening it go it alone. He sends mobs of schoolgirls out in the streets to attack the GIs from the rear in protest against the truce negotiations under way. Key to these negotiations are the North Korean prisoners of war in South Korean compounds, most of whom are said to be anti-Communist. “Just so Rhee don’t go berserk,” mutters a U.S. negotiator, “and let them prisoners go!”
Almost as a kind of reflex, the guard is doubled on the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs are said to be gloating over their new stay of execution. The Phantom whips up anti-American demonstrations in their behalf in Milan, Toronto, Jakarta, Genoa, Paris, London, and swamps the White House with protest letters — nearly ten thousand letters asking Eisenhower to spare the couple are passing like stuffed ballots across his desk every day now. The Rosenberg lawyers, augmented by a gang of last-minute interlopers, are scrambling frantically through ancient lawbooks in search of any new shyster tactic that might confound Uncle Sam.
To gain time, the Phantom sends his terrorists into action in Malaya and French Indochina, and his tanks into East Berlin. The Russian T-34s come clattering in over the cobblestones, “rocking and snarling,” as TIME say, wagging their big 85-mm guns about like magic wands…
the machine guns and submachine guns
began chattering the crowds broke threw
themselves into gutters and down subway
stair wells to dodge the bullets but
not all made it…
Some run, some stand, some die, many are glad they stayed at home, most are frightened, and everyone soon vanishes, as the Rebellion in the Rain gutters out, all of it watched morosely by Uncle Sam, sitting helplessly on his blistered duff on the wrong side of Potsdamer Platz. Soon, nothing can be heard in the divided city but the soft dripping of rainwater, the clink of knives through the evening rituals of black bread, butter, cheese, and sausage, the odd Soviet firing squad off in the fields….
AMERICA THE NATE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE NITE OF THE WORLD
it was a quiet rainy night in
prisoner of war camp number nine
under the brow of a green hill in
pusan
at 2:30 a.m.
pfc willie buhan was reading
a book in the “maximum security”
compound (for prisoners who had broken
minor rules)
he wasn’t
worried much though vaguely aware
that his two rok buddies on guard
duty had been acting sort of
“funny”
the next thing
he knew he was looking down
the barrels of two carbines
one garand rifle and one pistol
all in the hands of
rok guards…
They’re gone: some twenty-five thousand of them. Dashing out into open fields, remote villages, the alleyways of Pusan: Rhee, the obstreperous old bastard, has pulled the straw mat out from under Uncle Sam’s feet and let his prisoners go.
By Thursday, peace hopes have been dashed in Korea, the East German freedom fighters have been crushed, and all preparations for the great atom-spy pageant have been thrown into utter confusion. The wires have been pulled on the electric chair and a manikin has been strapped into the seat, dressed up to look like Uncle Sam with a Hitler moustache. Bombastic handbills, instruction sheets for clemency vigils, tattered bunting, and dirty pictures showing President Eisenhower and all his Cabinet in compromising positions litter the streets.
The fire in Alaska is quenched at last, after millions of dollars of damage to military installations and supplies, but simultaneously the new $3,000,000 U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro bursts into flames. Smaller fires break out in a random pattern across New York City — on Fourth Avenue, West Thirteenth, Eldridge, and East Forty-ninth in Manhattan, Fulton and West Eighth in Brooklyn — and during a demonstration at Fort Dix, a mortar shell explodes, injuring sixteen American GIs and killing Private Frank X. Zirnheld, 20, of Buffalo. Adlai Stevenson travels all the way to Turkey to praise the Turkish troops fighting in Korea, but his words are drowned out by earthquakes that rock Adrianople; he sighs, remarks on his usual luck, and goes for a hopeful swim in the Bosporus.
Three Israelis are slain by a Jordanian patrol, three Home Guards by terrorists in Malaya. The Red Chinese crack down on the last of the Roman Catholic missions, arresting eleven priests in Shanghai, ten in Tientsin, more in Canton, as “well-known spies.” Indonesian terrorists kill 60 villagers and burn 800 homes in a raid on 4 villages south of Jakarta, leaving 3500 homeless. U.S. casualties in Korea shoot up to 136,029, while at home 305 new polio cases are reported for the week, bringing the year’s total to 3124. These numbers rattle through the streets like apocalyptic codes, signals of some numerological conundrum, resolving itself toward catastrophe. Broadway bookies now give the Rosenbergs a fifty-fifty chance of survival, which is better than they’re giving the best horse running that day. The local boatmen, holding out for another thirty-five cents, still refuse to take pilgrims over to Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island. Clemency floats containing photographic blow-ups of new documents brazenly stolen from the office of the Green-glasses’ lawyer, purporting to prove that major prosecution witnesses lied against the Rosenbergs, roll into Times Square. Enraged loyalists try to smash up the floats and fights ensue. AMERICA THE BITE OF THE WORLD, the sign reads. BILE. PILE. PULE. PUKE. JUKE. What kind of game IS this?
AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD!
There seems no stopping the Phantom in his blasphemy. It’s almost as if he has been playing dead all this time, like those inscrutable Japs used to do in all the World War II movies, lying in ambush, flat out, with a pile of hand grenades tucked under their yellow bellies. It’s not even clear who Uncle Sam’s friends are. The French, facing the most serious crisis in the dismal history of the Fourth Republic, are losing their nerve in Indochina, and everybody from President Auriol on down is protesting the Rosenberg executions. So are the Scandinavians, and the Pope is not exactly standing up and cheering for the Sons of Light. Churchill has talked about withdrawing British troops from Korea, where only 40,000 outside forces now support the 460,000 ROKs and 250,000 American GIs in this so-called United Nations action as it is. “United Nations, my ass!” Uncle Sam is heard to mutter, trying to find a toehold along Finger Ridge. “Hal-lucy-nations, more like it! In-subordy-nations!” India and Switzerland actually threaten to quit the commission to supervise repatriation of war prisoners in Korea, confirming Uncle Sam’s mistrust of “neutralism,” and there are suggestions — even at home in the Americas! — that Red China be admitted to the United Nations. TIME say: “SHADOW OF THE RED DRAGON!”
Not only are the North Korean hostages out of the prison camps and living like the golden boys of Pusan, heroes of the local dongs, but women and children are out in the streets, screaming insults at the Americans for failing to unify the nation, and mutilated veterans are staging a very unappealing lie-down strike on Pusan’s main drag. Syngman Rhee smiles at Uncle Sam’s discomfiture. Says a soldier-friend of TIME: “We came over here to help him, and now he’s kicked us in the face.”
It’s a scandal, just like the strikes, the rising prices, the legal shenanigans, the erratic weather, the clemency appeals. The Red Puppets of Poland insolently offer political asylum for the Rosenbergs. France’s Le Monde says Uncle Sam is “disturbed” and accuses him of planning a “ritual murder.” “More and more,” says Le Monde, “the Rosenbergs seem to us like the expiatory victims of the cold war…”
Many of America’s own atomic scientists, led by Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey, seem to be siding openly with the spies, claiming that there is no secret to the atom bomb in the first place (but this is a lie — Harry Truman said there was a secret, and so did J. Edgar Hoover), and now the granddaddy of them all, Albert Einstein, writes to a teacher just fired by the City Board of Education for refusing to answer questions about his connections with the Phantom: “The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without…. They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive. What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-cooperation….” New apostates are being won and the letters keep coming in. From Netherlands Women, British Railwaymen, French Lawyers, and the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies. Clerics, novelists, schoolteachers, and 2200 Melbourne ladies. The British Electrical Union! All writing to the President, all urging clemency for the atom spies. Even their sons — which prompts President Eisenhower to complain in a sputtering rage that “they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purpose!”
If he is offended by the boys’ appeals, he is even more outraged when Ethel Rosenberg’s latest letter to her two sons is flashed on the moving electric sign on the Times Tower: Christ on the mountain! he can just feel the damned Phantom’s power radiate through the spellbound crowds in the Square…
My Dearest Darlings,
This is the process known as “sweating it out,” and it’s tough, that’s for sure. At the same time, we can’t let a lot of chickens that go about their business without panic, even when something’s frightening them — we can’t let them put us to shame, can we…?
What’s that about chickens? The people duck their heads and peer nervously up at the sky. Is this it, then?
…Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying too when we were hugging and kissing goodbye, huh, even though I’m slightly older than 10. Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself…
What’s to be done? The National Maritime Union’s strike spreads like a virus, tying up hundreds of ships, and the U.S. Post Office announces a 36 percent rise in parcel post rates. Pickets appear: NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS PERJURY!
…but it would not have been any kindness at all. So I took the hard way instead of the easy…
The Reds walk out of the Korean peace talks, accuse Uncle Sam of bad faith. The Chinese breach the ROK defenses north of the Hwachon Reservoir. Soviet occupation troops raid workers’ homes in East Berlin and mark some thirty thousand ex-Wehrmacht officers for automatic arrest.
…because I love you more than myself, and because I know you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying…
Mrs. Sarah Brock Dodge, U.S. Army nurse in the Spanish-American War, and later personal nurse for General Douglas MacArthur and the Taft family, drops dead as a doornail…
…We need to try to remain calm and free from panic, so that we can do all we can to help one another to see this thing through!
…and then in Japan, an Air Force Globemaster transport with 129 American servicemen aboard falls right out of the sky, the worst disaster in the history of flight! Those damn chickens! “East and West,” TIME say, “from within & without / news crashed / upon the U.S….”
for 120 seconds
the rows of servicemen
held fast to their seat-
belts as the plane lurched
and swayed towards the
air base
some prayed
one boy clutched his
rosary
a second engine
failed & the plane began
to lose altitude more
rapidly
four miles short
of the base the globemaster
slammed steeply into a watermelon
patch broke up & caught
fire skittering bits of
burning metal at a fright-
ened Japanese farmer who stood
nearby
most if not all
of the men were killed
on impact which was so great
that many bodies were torn
from their boots
they were
returning to korea to defend
the embittered koreans against
the great conspiracy that
the rosenbergs had served…
…All my love and all my kisses!
Mommy
Demonstrators march in broad daylight through the streets with signs that read: THE ELECTRIC CHAIR CAN’T KILL THE DOUBTS IN THE ROSENBERG CASE! ROK troops fall back in Korea in the biggest retreat in two years. An anonymous caller tells the police that a bomb is set to go off in Public School 187 in the north part of the city. There are rumors of an all-out strategic exchange. Scrawled across the whitewashed walls of the Sing Sing Death House set atop the information kiosk: WHAT THE BOURGEOISIE, THEREFORE, PRODUCES, ABOVE ALL, IS ITS OWN GRAVEDIGGERS. Then somebody sabotages the stage and the whole business collapses into the street. And in Vienna, three beetle-browed Russians force their way past the landlady and drag Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas out of his flat. Strange perspectives, weird watching faces, peculiar zither music — an Austrian policeman intervenes and a four-man (French, English, American, Russian) Allied Military Patrol speeds to the scene. They block the kidnappers’ escape route, leap out of the car with weapons at the ready. But the Soviet member of the FEAR Patrol commandeers the patrol car, shoves Lukas and his kidnappers in, leaps into the driver’s seat himself, slams into reverse, rams two civilian cars, shifts back into first — for God’s sake!
STAND BY TO CRASH!
— Where Is Uncle Sam?
My old California colleague Bill Knowland was in trouble in his first test as the new Republican floor leader in the Senate, so on the way back to my office Thursday from the emergency meeting of the National Security Council at the White House, I stopped by the Capitol to see if I could be of help. The Hill and Mall were swarming with demonstrators, counterdemonstrators, tourists, cops, dogs, kids, and there were expressions of worry, gloom, apprehension, uncertainty everywhere. There’d been too many setbacks. In the middle of all this, Knowland had decided to pull a fast one: after having told the Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson earlier that there’d be nothing more controversial today than the call of the calendar — which few Senators even bother to show up for — he’d suddenly decided to interrupt the call with an aggressive attempt to ram our new controls bill through and catch the Democrats flatfooted. I wasn’t sure Bill was doing the smart thing, but I understood his motives and had to admire them: he’d just taken over from the ailing Bob Taft, and he was trying hard to put his personal stamp on the leadership job, make it his through partisan conflict. It wasn’t easy to follow a living legend like Taft, Bill had to do something audacious to signal the change and establish his authority. Of course, he could blow it, too, and the chances were just about fifty-fifty — with Wayne Morse now voting with the Democrats, there were forty-eight votes on each side of the aisle, and my vote was the tie-breaker. I was eager to get back to the Rosenberg case, things were in a mess now, thanks to Douglas, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on or what I was supposed to do, but Eisenhower’s relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn’t afford to antagonize them in any way — I had no choice but to be on hand and save the day for Knowland if need be. Besides, it was just the kind of political battle I loved: nobody gave a shit about the bill itself, it was a straight-out power struggle, raw and pure, like a move in chess.
On the way in, I saw Bob Taft. The poor bastard, he looked like hell. Mr. Republican. Fighting Bob. The Go-It-Alone Man. He was going it alone now, all right: he was dying, hip cancer apparently, probably wouldn’t last the year out. On the side of the angels now. There were some reporters hovering around him, looking very sympathetic, and since sympathy from those sonsabitches was something I rarely enjoyed, I decided Fighting Bob could share a little of it with me, he wasn’t going to need it much longer anyway. “Say, Bob,” I called out, moving in, “I have news for you!” Taft knew where I’d been that morning, knew about the Korean and German and Rosenberg crises — the whole Capitol was obviously ass-deep in the usual rumors, prophecies, and panic — and so of course he was all ears. He was on crutches and appeared to have lost a lot of weight (which was maybe why he seemed to be “all ears”), but he stretched forward eagerly as though reaching for a cure. The newsguys all turned to me, grabbing for the pencils tucked behind their ears, and photographers snatched up their cameras — I quickly lifted my chin and raised my eyebrows, conscious that my stern Quaker eyes and heavy cheeks often gave me an unfortunate scowly sinister look, putting a whole different slant on what I was saying (isn’t that a hell of a thing — that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?), and said: “I broke a hundred at Burning Tree Sunday, Bob!”
The Senator shrank back as though suddenly aged, but he smiled and congratulated me. I bowed acknowledgments, smiling generously, trying to make the best of it, but I was suddenly sorry for him, felt suddenly like a brother, regretted my little joke — hadn’t he said when he fell ill that the first thing he’d noticed was a great weariness when he started “whaling golf balls” early last spring? Shit, I was just rubbing it in. I wanted to reach out and embrace him, give him my shoulder to lean on instead of those damned crutches, make him well again, make him President or something.
We went on talking about golf, he seemed cheerful enough, but I felt like hell. I saw that the news reporters had stopped grinning, too, most of them had turned away, I’d been misunderstood again. I’d only wanted to give Taft something to laugh about in these troubled times, I’d meant no harm. He was one of the few guys, after all, who’d stood by me through the Fund Crisis last fall — even if the reason was that he was afraid Bill Knowland would be the guy to take my place. Taft had made a lot of mistakes, but he still might have gone to the White House if he hadn’t opposed NATO and collective security in Europe — what the hell, let’s face it, he would have gotten there anyway if a few of us hadn’t axed him, he could have won last year, that was clear now. And but a few short weeks ago, he was the most powerful man outside the White House in all America — maybe the most powerful Senator in history. Cut down. Last summer he’d been my enemy. It was I who’d busted up the unity of the California delegation and so assured Eisenhower of the Party’s nomination, had beat him out myself for the vice-presidential nomination — but now, looking at him there, shrunken, held up by those crutches, smiling gamely, his belly hanging low in his pants, I thought: Jesus, he’s a goddamn saint! I wanted to tell him everything, about the National Security Council meeting, about my talks with Uncle Sam, about the moves soon to be made, about the Rosenberg letters strewn around my office, about my hopes, my fears, the whole works.
I remembered the time he came to my office and asked for my support for the Party’s presidential nomination — me, just a green junior Senator from California — and I’d had to put him off. I think in part I objected to the fact he’d asked me. As though he’d demeaned himself. It was too personal, coming to my office like that. It embarrassed me — it flattered me, too, but mostly it made me uneasy, and I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Besides, with him I had no shot at something bigger myself. It must have been a terribly difficult thing for him to do, I could never do it, I could never walk into some other guy’s office and ask him to help make me President, any more than I could fly. I could send somebody else, but I could never do it myself. But now, if he’d come today, I thought, I’d have said yes. Now that it was too late. He smiled feebly but kindly, adjusted his clear horn-rimmed spectacles, said we’d have to get up a game soon, shifted his weight, and hobbled away on his crutches, showing me his bald spot like a kind of halo. Was he needling me now? I wanted to call out to him, but I didn’t.
This often happened to me, this sudden flush of warmth, even love, toward the people I defeat. It worried me, worries me still. It could backfire someday. Back when I was in the Navy, I wrote a note to myself on the subject, I have it still, taped inside my desk drawer: DON’T BECOME OVERGENEROUS ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT! But I kept forgetting. It was a weakness. Already some people were complaining I’d made too much of the tragic side of the Alger Hiss case, been too insistent in pointing out his intelligence, sensitivity, idealism, should never have said that I thought he was sincerely dedicated to the concepts of peace and of bettering the lot of the common man, of people generally — I might as well say as much for the goddamn Phantom. But once it was over, once I’d nailed the lying supercilious bastard for good, I couldn’t help myself. There’s something that makes me want the happy ending. Most conflicts are irresolvable, I know that, someone wins and someone loses, someone’s on the right side, someone’s on the other side, and what resolutions are possible are got afterwards by way of the emotions. I learned that way back in the seventh grade, first time I beat those girls in the now-famous Insect Debate. I’m no believer in dialectics, material or otherwise, let me be absolutely clear about that, I wouldn’t be Vice President of the United States of America if I was, it’s either/or as far as I’m concerned and let the best man win so long as it’s me. But I want these emotional resolutions when the fights are over.
People misunderstand me. They think it’s all vindictiveness. It isn’t. Personal hatred is a big waste, it’s as simple as that. Issues are everything, even when they’re meaningless — these other things like emotions and personalities just blur the picture and make it difficult to operate. But it feels good to indulge in them when it no longer matters. I’ve often said that the only time to lose your temper in politics is when it’s deliberate and useful. I don’t always live up to that, I’m human, but I still believe it. I’m a tough sonuvabitch to run against in an election, everyone knows that by now, they say I’m a buzzsaw opponent, ruthless and even unscrupulous, they say I go for the jugular, no holds barred, or as Stevenson put it, “Nixonland is the land of smash and grab and anything to win,” and discounting the partisan hyperbole, that’s largely true, I guess. You’ve got to win, or the rest doesn’t matter. I believe in fighting it out, in hitting back, giving as good as you get, you’ve got to be a politician before you can be a statesman, I’ve said that and it’s so. No ruffed-shirt, kid-glove, peanut politics for me. As Uncle Sam once told me: “Politics is the only game played with real blood.” I didn’t want to believe him at the time, I wanted it to be played with rhetoric and industry, yet down deep I knew that even at its most trivial, politics flirted with murder and mayhem, theft and cannibalism.
But — maybe because I do know that — I’ve always thought of myself as a healer as well. I was always breaking up fights between my brothers, saving them from Dad’s whippings, calming tempers at school, it was I who stopped that ugly brawl between Joe McCarthy and Drew Pearson in the Sulgrave Club washroom two and a half years ago (people thought I was siding with Joe, but actually I was saving Pearson’s life: Joe had heard from some Indian that if you kneed a guy hard enough in the nuts, blood would come out of his eyes, and he was eager to test this out), and it was I who bridged the generations in the Republican Party and brought its warring sides together for victory at last this past fall, I who now kept the peace between the President and a truculent Congress. I was Eisenhower’s salesman in the Cloakrooms, that was my job, I was the political broker between the patsies and the neanderthals, I had to cool the barnburners, soften up the hardshells, keep the hunkers and cowboys in line, mollify the soreheads and baby tinhorn egos, I was the flak runner, the wheelhorse, I had to mend the fences and bind up the wounds. Yes, bind up the wounds: I’m a lot like Lincoln, I guess, who was kind and compassionate on the one hand, and strong and competitive on the other. I gave Voorhis no quarter, for example, when I beat him for his seat in Congress in 1946; I called him a puppet of the Communists, hit him with dirty broadsides, anonymous phone calls, the whole lot, and if I hadn’t played it that way I wouldn’t be where I was now, America’s history and that of the entire world would have run a different course, the Phantom might well have had his way with us, maybe none of us would even be here now. But afterwards I went to the bastard’s office and smiled and shook his hand, spent nearly an hour with him, and I meant it when I said there was scarcely ever a man with higher ideals than old Jerry Voorhis, even if, like Alger Hiss and a lot of other insolent bums I’ve run into out here, he did come from Yale.
Probably I got this from my mother. My father was a scrapper, a very competitive man, cantankerous even and aggressive, he loved to argue with anybody about anything, and he always instilled this competitive feeling in all of us, we owed him a lot, my brothers and I, even if sometimes we hated his guts. But my mother was just the opposite, a Quaker, a peacemaker, and she taught us — showed us — charity and tolerance and the need to keep your feelings about people separate from your feelings about moral questions. People were weak, of course they were, but that didn’t mean you were supposed to stop loving them, even as you punished them. When my father’s Black Irish temper reared up inside him and he went for his strap or rod, she wouldn’t interfere, she understood the need for rules and the need for punishment and stood by watching while he laid it on (Jesus! he could really set your ass on fire, he scared the hell out of me early on and I learned how to avoid the beatings, even if I had to lie or throw off on others, but he pounded Don’s butt to leather and I used to worry he’d broken poor Harold’s health and crushed little Arthur’s spirit, I still have nightmares about it), but afterwards she always made him forgive us — some of our best family moments came after the strappings were over and Mother was getting us all together again. I suppose I’ve got something of both of them in me—“The Fighting Quaker.” TIME had called me after my nomination last summer, and that was probably the closest anyone had ever got to summing me up. “Richard M. Nixon: Change Trains for the Future.” I liked that touch, it took me back to my childhood in Yorba Linda, and identified me with the westward sweep of Uncle Sam’s evangel. Of course, there were the Democrats’ inevitable malicious jokes later about “the crash of the Federal Express” after the trainwreck here in Washington. And I wasn’t too happy about the anonymous parody I got in the mail shortly after that, titled “The Farting Quacker,” with a picture of me like a train engine chugging butt-backwards — was it my fault I had stomach problems? Some agent of the Phantom, I supposed, like all pornographers and irreligionists. I was used to it by now, I’d been called just about everything as far back as I could remember. When I was in high school, our Latin class put on a play based on Virgil’s Aeneid, it was maybe the most romantic thing that ever happened to me — I was Aeneas and Ola was Queen Dido and we wore white gowns and fell in love — but even then they started called me “Anus” and not even Ola could keep from giggling. Years later, when I was in the Navy, I realized we could have called her Queen Dildo, but we were all too green at the time to know about that. It was amazing we knew about anuses.
I stopped in the Chamber but things were dead in there. Bill Langer was reading off a list of aliens who were being let into the country as permanent residents, and George Smathers and silver-headed old Pat McCarran were making wisecracks about all the goofy names. When Langer was done, Smathers got the floor and announced: “I wish to commend the distinguished Senator from North Dakota for his linguistic ability!” The farmers up in the gallery laughed. Smathers waved at me, and I nodded. He was maybe the best friend I had over here, even if he was a Democrat. We were Senate classmates. In the Florida spring primaries, he’d defeated Senator Claude Pepper by calling him Red Pepper and a nigger-lover. I’d studied his techniques and turned them against the Pink Lady in California, a “brilliant campaign,” as Herb Brownell said, that laid the groundwork for our Party’s national success last fall. Smathers was apparently filling in today as Minority Leader while Lyndon Johnson was out getting his troops formed up for the vote to come — he was showing a lot of promise. Knowland was absent as well, Bob Hendrickson doing the Leader’s job for us. Things were quiet yet stirring. Even with the Chamber at low tide, you could smell the impending battle. My own presence here was electrifying in itself.
I let Bill Purtell, the acting pro tem, know I was around, then wandered back to the Republican Cloakroom. Ev Dirksen, another classmate of mine, was in there, and when he saw me he hunched his shoulders and snarled like a lion — with that curly hair, he looked like one, too! I grabbed up a chair as though to fend him off, cracked an imaginary whip. This got a lot of laughs from the old boys standing around (I have a sense of humor like everybody else, I don’t know why people doubt this), and Ev shrank back, making a sad face like the Cowardly Lion. He was making fun of course of all the pictures in newspapers and magazines of late showing me in the lion’s cage with Sheba, part of my initiation into the Saints & Sinners Club of circus fans. I had suggested through intermediaries that this would be a good year for my old law school at Duke to give me an honorary doctorate, but for some goddamn reason they’d refused me — me, the Vice President of the United States! Some malicious left-wing Democratic cabal on the faculty, I assumed. The rumor I heard was that it was because of the Dean’s Office break-in when I was in my last year there, but that was a lot of sanctimonious bullshit — every student breaks into the Dean’s Office to steal exams or find out results, most common prank in the world, it was just an excuse. So hurriedly, since I’d left this gap in my schedule, we’d arranged this initiation into the Saints & Sinners. Just as well. I’d got a lot more publicity out of it. Though not all the photos were flattering: when Sheba took offense — maybe at the smell of Checkers on me — my own reflexes had been pretty quick, and the news-guys had unfortunately caught the moment of panic. Later, they told me she’d only been yawning, but I didn’t believe it.
“Hey,” Ev rumbled, “I guess you heard about the Rosenbergs taking the Fifth Amendment…?”
“Oh yeah?”
We all perked up.
“Yes, they refused to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incinerate them!”
Dirksen grimaced comically and we all responded with groans and laughter. Dirksen had a wonderfully expressive face, it was a delight to watch it, just the opposite of mine, a real clown’s face — and he knew how to use his hands, too. He had produced one of the great gestures of all time at our Convention last summer, when he’d turned on Tom Dewey, pointing his finger at him and bellowing out as though in mortal pain: “We followed you before!” The finger was pointing all right, and in Dewey’s direction, but it was also as limp as a wet noodle, quivering slightly as though straining feebly and ineffectually to overcome its impotence. He’d given the crowd of delegates plenty of time to stare at that drooping digit and then to roar and moan, before continuing: “And you took us down the road to defeat!” I hoped he’d never turn that finger on me.
“Say,” he continued now, rolling his eyes, “you know what you get when you cross Little Miss Muffet with Red Riding Hood?”
“Naw,” laughed Gene Millikin, “whaddaya get, Ev?”
“A curd-carrying Communist!”
There were a lot of snorts and guffaws, and then Ev trundled off toward the Senate lavatory. I realized I badly needed to piss myself and I probably should have gone along with him, but not only did I feel out of place in there, never having really become a member of this private club (I often got odd surprised stares from other Senators in there, even the janitors were more welcome than I), but also to get to it you had to go through the President’s Room where all the news reporters hung out. According to the legend, the best news sources have always been Senators with “weak bladders and strong minds”—all the more so when the bladders have been weakened by bourbon. There were even women journalists out there, laughing as the Senators hurried through clutching their nuts. To me it was a real indignity, but most Senators didn’t seem to mind, even enjoyed the notoriety of it. It was said that during the debate on the Tidelands Oil Bill, Lyndon Johnson had got trapped by a young socialite reporter and had agreed to an interview provided only she’d come in and hold his pecker for him while he peed — which presumably she did. Scoop of the year. Or, as Lyndon was said to have remarked at the urinal, “Lady, you just struck a gusher!”
Homer Capehart came into the Cloakroom and started complaining loudly about the collapse of the workers’ riots in East Berlin. “First Czechoslovakia, and now this!” he snapped, glowering narrowly in my direction. Homer seemed edgier than usual today, and for good reason: if Bill Knowland succeeded in getting the controls bill past the Democrats and out on the floor this afternoon, it would be Capehart’s duty to defend it. “Why the hell is it we can’t seem to capitalize on these things?”
I worked up what I hoped was an enigmatic smile, meaning to suggest that there was more to what was going on behind the Curtain than met the eye, but in truth I was pretty disappointed myself. I remembered the day three months earlier when we heard that Stalin had suffered a stroke — if that was all he’d suffered — and was dying. It had been a raw day, one of those gray March mornings that makes the Capital look like a city in Central Europe, and a bunch of the boys had gathered early in the President’s office, waiting for the Old Man to come down. He’d come striding in, wearing a tan polo coat and a brown hat with the brim snapped far down over his eyes, like a Marine on shore-patrol duty. “Well,” he’d barked, making us jump, “what do you think we can do about this?” So we’d thought up a few things and done them. And this was what it had come to. You couldn’t help but feel the frustration of it. And I could see that some of these guys had had their confidence shaken. Though many of them had decried Uncle Sam’s vulnerability as a campaign tactic, none had truly believed it, but now they had seen for themselves: even Uncle Sam could get left with his finger up his ass.
“Give us time,” I said, “it’s a tough ballgame. But we’ve got them on the ropes, it’s the beginning of the end. The seed has been sown, they’ve had a taste of freedom and they won’t soon forget it. It’s like George Humphrey says, ‘You can’t set a hen in the morning and have chicken salad for lunch!’” Which reminded me: I was pretty goddamn hungry. Homer nodded solemnly, shrugged ambiguously, gazed off. Herman Welker, who had joined us, seemed less convinced, belching sourly. He said that over in the House Don Wheeler was outraged by the fact that Justice Douglas had “taken unto himself the authority to grant amnesty to two proven spies,” and was drafting an impeachment proposal, and Bourke Hickenlooper looked up from the old sofa where he was sprawled, going through his morning’s mail, to say that he hoped they smeared that butternut once and forever. Maybe I should find a page, I thought, and send him down for a sandwich.
Uncle Sam had actually prepared me for this crisis during our last match at Burning Tree Golf Club, but I had not understood. Had not taken it all in. I knew now he’d been telling me a lot of things — about history, about guilt and innocence, death and regeneration, about the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere — but I’d been too abashed by my transparent ignorance, too upset by the coincidence of anniversaries and by my fluffed drives, to think clearly. The only accurate description is that I was probably in a momentary state of shock. I had failed to heed one of Eisenhower’s favorite admonitions (which, in fact, he rarely heeded himself): “Always take your job, but never yourself, seriously.” Even the anniversary remark I’d misread — when he’d said that all judges were cabalists at heart, I’d thought he was talking about Kaufman, not Douglas.
Fourteen. Fourteen years ago today Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass were married. That was the same summer, fourteen years ago, that Hitler and Stalin signed their pact: yes, it was a year for weddings. Hitler had seized Czechoslovakia, annexed Danzig, and invaded Poland, divvying it up with Stalin, while Britain and France were celebrating a short-lived marriage of their own. But I was courting Pat at the time, could think of nothing else, hardly noticed the world falling down about my ears (how far away it seemed then!), I thought I’d go to Cuba to get rich or else to the opening of the New York World’s Fair, or freeze orange juice and start a company. If only I could win Pat. It wasn’t easy. She laughed at me when I proposed, made fun of me in public, it was humiliating as hell. She was so goddamned cool, she seemed to know everything, and all I could do was pretend. She tried to put me off, made me drive her into Los Angeles for dates with other guys, kept me on the leash for over two years before she finally gave in — and even then it was possible she capitulated only because she was getting on in years and I was the only real prospect still around. But I didn’t care, as long as I got her. I needed the win and she was it. I felt like a champ — like the Brown Bomber himself, who was ripping up Arturo Godoy, cutting him “crimson,” as the papers said, the night before we wed. This was in 1940, June, just one year after the Rosenbergs had got married. A lot was happening in the world, but we were oblivious to it — Pat and I were anyway, I can’t speak for the Rosenbergs. Of course, Pat was always out of it as far as the news was concerned — the only paper she ever read was the one she helped the kids edit at the high school where she taught.
Contrarily, I’ve always been a newspaper nut. But not that summer. We got married in the beautiful sentimental Mission Inn just as the Germans marched into Paris, honeymooned in Mexico the summer they killed Leon Trotsky down there, and I finally lost my maidenhead the night Harold “‘The Boy Wonder” Stassen keynoted the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell “The Barefoot Boy from Wall Street” Willkie for President (we were all boys then)…but I hardly noticed any of it. It was like I was living on some other plane. It lasted a whole year, longer even. Hitler was attacking Russia by the time we celebrated our first anniversary, and all I remember from that time is the little apartment we had over a garage in Whittier, going to San Juan Capistrano and Santa Monica beach with Jack and Helene Drown, getting out of bed in the morning with Pat, sharing the bathroom, driving into Los Angeles for the opera and a fancy supper from time to time, running civic clubs in town, thinking idly about my law career, mostly just exploring this new condition which I somehow thought of as unique in the world. On my own, I should say. Pat never liked to talk about it, not with me anyway, she just went her own way as before, which for the most part suited me just fine.
We were a perfect pair. At least it was a perfect pairing for me — Pat was a little restless and uncertain for a while, I could tell by the way she nagged. (Something to do with the mating part maybe, which, looking back on it now, wasn’t so good at fírst. I had to spend a stretch in the Navy before I really got the hang of it. Something a lot of people don’t understand about sex: it’s something you’ve got to study just like you study anything else — musical instruments, foreign languages, poker, politics, whatever. I did my homework in the Navy, and Pat was not a little bit surprised when I got out. Happily surprised, I think: we had two kids—whap bang! — before she even knew what hit her, and for a couple of years there it was pretty fantastic.) But for me it was like coming home. Pat had simplified my life, brought it all together for me. Not by doing anything. Just by being Pat and being mine. Without having to say a thing, she became my arbiter, my audience, guide, model, and goal. Sometimes she felt she did have to say something, but it was usually better when she kept quiet. She looked good in photographs. I understood myself better when I looked at those photographs. She was the undiscovered heroine whom I could make rich and famous and who would be my constant companion. When I explained myself to Pat, I knew I was explaining myself to what was good in people everywhere. Everything became easier for me. I wondered if it had been somehow like that for Julius Rosenberg? Had he, too, been waiting for someone to come along and make it possible for him to do what he had to do? Or maybe it was the other way around? Ethel was the one, after all, who’d been doing the waiting. Julius was just a kid when she found him.
The Cloakroom was filling up in anticipation of Knowland’s big play. Not everybody was happy about it. A lot of them had planned to be well out of the city by noon today. Hendrickson popped in asking for Bill, but nobody knew where he was.
“Do you think he’s drunk?”
“Not with this vote on, he hasn’t touched a drop.”
Somebody said they’d seen him in Joe McCarthy’s committee room, and Hendrickson sent a staff member down there to ask Knowland if two o’clock was still the target. I glanced at my own watch: just minutes away. Bob hurried back out on the floor, and the talk shifted to Joe McCarthy’s latest act. I stayed out of it. Tail Gunner Joe was dangerous to the peace around here, which it was my job as a kind of double agent — doubled and redoubled — to preserve.
“Jesus, it’s a real fucking carnival down there, the whole place wired up with klieg lights and microphones, reporters and photographers everywhere, crawling under the tables, on their knees in front of Joe’s table, perched up on windowsills — he’s really got something going, all right!”
My main problem was how to keep McCarthy safe inside the Party with all the enormous power he now commanded, here on the Hill and throughout the nation, and at the same time prevent him from getting out of hand and setting the whole house on fire. This wasn’t easy, old Joe could wax pretty evil at times, especially when he saw a crowd gathering around a speech of his and lacked a climax to what he was saying — he became increasingly reckless and impulsive then, and could get very dangerous. “Joe,” I’d say, “the best tactic in the face of suspicion from a large segment of the press and public is to be certain you can prove every statement you make about Communist activities.” But when I said things like that, his eyes would just spread apart and focus on some point way behind the back of my head, far out on the horizon. Ike could say, “I am not going to engage in personalities,” and so keep his lily-white fanny clean, but I couldn’t. And Joe was a tough sonuvabitch, he had energy to spare, a killer instinct, access to secret files, and a lot of allies. He didn’t fit the genial Foghorn image when he came here, and he’d had a hard time at first establishing a power base — so, like me, he’d formed his own club, picking up dissidents and outsiders, going out and working the vineyards, getting his own men — guys like Butler, Welker, Goldwater, Dworshak, Dirksen, and the like — elected. We had other things in common, too, Joe and me: we were both born poor and were shy as kids, both worked in grocery stores, went to Bougainville during the war, came back to make careers in politics off the Communist issue, and both of us had helped make Wheeling, West Virginia, famous. Also we were both Irish, but this was in fact what separated us. And Joe — like all those young beavers around him, Scoop Jackson, Cohn, Kennedy, Schine — lacked my patience, my thoroughness, my iron butt.
“I hear he’s got some sonuvabitch down there today who was supposed to be the head of a Phantom goon squad assigned to knock Joe off!”
“Ho ho! No shit! Who says?”
“Some guy from the FBI, used to be a double agent.”
“Fantastic! Where the hell does Joe dig up these guys?”
“You gotta admit, it’s the best show in town! I mean, he’s a legend in his own goddamn lifetime — how many of us can say that?”
Just then, through the Cloakroom doors came the missing Majority Leader, Bill Knowland, puffing in on us like an old World War I armored car, snorting and bellowing: “Okay, goddamn it! muster the troops! the vote’s on!” Bill slapped my back as he roared by. “C’mon, Dick! History calls!” And he barreled on out into the Chamber. A few of the Senators trailed out after Knowland, others came pouring in, genial with booze and rumor. I stood at the edge of the activity, moving my lips as though counting heads, just to give them the idea I was acknowledging their presence, and remarking to myself on the essential plainness of this famous “anteroom to history”: just a bunch of old sofas strewn with papers and pillows, some tables for signing correspondence, a couple of old typewriters, and upended jugs of Poland Springs bottled water — I remembered the time when, still green and as always overeager, I had made the mistake of going over to one of them to get a drink, breaking one of the innumerable idiotic traditions of this place. Now, not to get caught in another and to avoid the tensions when Joe McCarthy came storming through, I returned to the Chamber.
There weren’t that many more people out here than there had been when I’d come through earlier, but the atmosphere had completely changed. It was wonderful how you could feel this, the sense of an impending drama, the agitation, the swelling excitement: “King Cong” aroused. Movements were quicker, expressions less jaded, conversations more intense. Joe McCarthy’s Maryland protege John Marshall Butler and the Democrats’ Pat McCarran were on the floor arguing about our new hanging bill — Judge Irving Kaufman’s idea — which would restore the wartime death penalty for espionage (McCarran wasn’t arguing against the bill, he was just trying to steal it), and the court reporters were hustling about the Chamber with an augmented sense of purpose, tuning in on each Senator as he spoke, working their fifteen-minute shifts before running back to the Reporters’ Office to feed their shorthand notes into a dictaphone. The pages were suddenly awake and dashing back and forth with chairs instead of idly goosing each other, the chairs mostly for staff members who now came bursting through the swinging doors at the back — and it was filling up now, the tide was rolling in.
I waited for Purtell to order the reading of the conference report by the Chief Clerk, then, while it was being recited, bumped him from his seat as presiding officer. Nobody applauded my arrival. Not that I expected it, but I remembered how warmly old Alben Barkley was always received whenever he came over here while I was in the Senate. Why didn’t they greet me that way? I was an ex-colleague, too. Of course, I didn’t have Barkley’s length of service, nor did I share his fawning admiration for this bunch of rummies. I was always too independent for this place. I’d liked the House, I could operate there, but I could never get used to the Senate, and stayed away as much as possible. Coming here two years ago I had that same lost feeling I had in the war when I first went into the Navy and got shipped out to Ottumwa, Iowa. Since my school days, I’ve always been allergic to smart-ass private cliques and fraternities, avoiding the tuxedo snobs of the other outfits by forming my own. This place with its almost medieval exclusivity was even worse than most, because, in spite of the surface camaraderie, there was no real interaction here, just obedience to some primitive unchallenged customs and a blind loyalty based on the blood of Party. Each of these clowns lived in a world of his own, like a feudal baron, each one isolated from the other by his retinue of clerks and lawyers, trading favors, garnering wealth and power, loyal only to his own fiefdom. No wonder the Presidents always had trouble with the Senate: Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages.
“Mistah President…”
“The Senator from Texas is recognized for five, uh, minutes.”
Johnson, I could see, for all his surface composure, was hopping mad. Knowland had really pulled a fast one on him today, and Lyndon didn’t like to get outdrawn by anybody. It tickled me to see the old operator so discomfited. He had been feeling pretty smug that TIME had been running about the world this week wearing his face, calling him everything from “Rope Dealer” and “Combination Man” to “The General Manager” and “Landslide Lyndon.” What TIME didn’t talk about was all the tills the General Manager had his hand in; the Depression had been a real goldmine for Lyndon, and he didn’t do bad during the war either. Well, hell, why not? he had the smell of magnolias about him, as they say, magnolias and cowshit, no chance ever to be President, he might as well get rich instead. Anyway, I’d had my day with the Poet Laureate as the “Fighting Quaker,” and deep in my heart I knew, unlike Johnson, that if I stayed clean and on my toes, I’d have more. I wondered what kind of mail Lyndon was getting. I thought of some other alliterations besides “Landslide” and a good play or two on “Rope Dealer.” You could do plenty with “Combination Man,” too. Maybe I ought to send him one, I thought. He’d never guess. Take him down a peg.
“Ah submit that if’n the muhjority of the Senate is gunna legislate in thet way,” he blustered, lifting one big hammy fist, “it is legislation bah suhprise! it is a patronage grab in the dark, without notice! it is legislation bah steamroller!”
While he raged, spicing his argument with raunchy Texan broadsides, which his staff would later patiently excise from the record, the Chamber filled up behind him, the party Whips keeping tabs and waiting for the right moment to call for a quorum. There was an increasing racket and both sides were trading a number of more or less friendly insults without first asking for the right to speak. Like a bunch of bored and drunken cowboys, aching for a little action to liven up the town saloon. I tried to maintain a semblance of order for the sake of the visitors up in the galleries, and watched the doorways (seven, like the holes in a man’s head) to see who was coming and going. Over each of the three principal doors there was a statue: “Patriotism,” “Wisdom,” and “Courage.” Perhaps, in time, there would be a statue of me in here, I thought. Not just a bust like the other Vice Presidents, but a real statue. “The Fighting Quaker.” It fit. The motto over the east entrance translated, “God Has Favored Our Undertakings,” and over the south door: “In God We Trust.” Tailor-made for me, just like the “E Pluribus Unum” over my head. But the slogan that excited the imagination was the one attached to “Courage” over the doorway to the West, my part of the country: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Yes, this was what America was all about, I thought, this was the true revolution of our era — Change Trains for the Future! — and I was lucky enough to be alive just at the moment we were, for the first time, really getting up steam. It was our job now — it would be my job — to bring this new order of the ages to the whole world. My boyhood engineering dreams were coming true! Naturally, it wasn’t in the bag, there was already a lot of talk about jettisoning the Vice President, I knew I’d have to fight to stay on the ticket in 1956. And friends were few: my legislative power base was gone and I was a lonely outsider in Eisenhower’s administration of hoary-headed millionaire amateurs — but then I’ve always been a lonely outsider, that was my power. Besides, Ike, disliking me, was in fact helping me, constantly labeling me the “politician,” the pro, the Party man, and so identifying me with the real power structure of the actual nominating conventions. Yes, in reality, the old General was only setting the scene for me, preparing the way for the New Order that it was my destiny, and through me the destiny of my generation, to bring to the world! Of course, you had to be careful — revolution, new order, it was the kind of language people like the Rosenbergs used, too — but in ignorance, in darkness: yes, the truth about the Phantom was that he was a reactionary, trying to derail the Train of Progress! I was enormously pleased with this insight. Maybe this was why Uncle Sam got me mixed up in the Rosenberg case, I thought. Another object lesson in American dynamics for the heir to the throttle. I took out an index card and made a note. On the bottom, I wrote: START THE 1954 CAMPAIGN NOW!
“What? What?” I asked. Johnson had just addressed me. He’d been shouting something about “any gahdamn Senator” and “gunna ram it down yore throat!” The Parliamentarian whispered that he’d asked for a quorum call. “Oh…”
“Mr. President,” Knowland interrupted, “will the Senator withhold his suggestion of the absence of a quorum so as to permit the acting Majority Leader to make a statement?”
“Suttinly, Bill…”
Knowland launched a counterattack then, giving his reasons for pulling this surprise vote today, and making it clear he’d given Johnson fair warning, so I was able to settle back again. Knowland and I had known each other since my very first campaign in 1946. You could almost say we were friends, were there such a thing in politics. We’d fought a lot of political battles together, had both had our problems with Honeybear Warren back home, and we’d fought shoulder-to-shoulder out here against the Eastern Establishment. Bill had shown me the ropes when I reached the Senate, had sworn me in as Vice President, and it was his shoulder I wept on in that famous photo after the Fund Crisis. “Everything’s gonna be all right, Dick,” he’d said, mothering me, and I’d bawled: “Good old Bill!” On the other hand, we’d had our differences, too. I’d more or less stolen Murray Chotiner away from him and with Murray as my strategist had jumped over Bill’s head to the Vice Presidency in what looked to him like a sellout to the Eastern internationalists, and now I was fighting him still. During the Fund Crisis, he’d been the man called in to replace me after all, and neither of us could get over that overnight. Well, it’s an old truism, just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests. Uncle Sam taught me that — or maybe I learned it somewhere in grade school. Knowland and I would be real friends again only when we wanted something from each other. Like when I’m President and he and his newspapers are looking for a job in government.
As Knowland carried on, I glanced about the Chamber: it was going to be close. The Whips were scurrying in and out of their respective Cloakrooms, counting adversaries across the aisle, sending staff out in search of missing partisans. I looked down on all this old-man bustle from my marble rostrum, toying with the fragile old gavel — ivory capped with silver and said to have been in use since the first Senate meeting in 1789—and trying to imagine what it felt like to be the Incarnation of Uncle Sam, the physical feeling of it as the transformation came over you. Terrible, some said. I had the conviction Uncle Sam preferred Republicans for this process: somehow he never seemed to fit just right in Democrats, and he had left a number of them in pretty bad shape after. We Republicans were closer to America’s sacred center than the Democrats, which was what made it easier in a way to be a “good” Republican: the catechism belonged to us. But the people, living their day-to-day profane lives, were closer to the crude worldly pragmatism — the bosses, boodle, buncombe, and blarney — of the Democrats, and so, except on ritual or crisis occasions, tended to vote for them. Who listens to his conscience unless he must?
Bill asked for a quorum call and I said: “The Secretary will call the roll.” I realized, as the roll was called, that I was getting keyed up. It was like an election. “A quorum is present,” I said, and Knowland moved that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the conference report. The Democrats tried to stall and there was a lot of individual playing to the galleries, but when the vote was called, there were 39 “Yeas” and 39 “Nays.” “Under the Constitution,” I announced, feeling very good about it, “the President of the Senate, who has the right to vote in the case of a tie, casts his vote in the affirmative; and the motion to proceed to the consideration of the conference report is agreed to!”
Knowland flashed me a thumbs-up victory signal and the Chamber began to empty out again, as Homer Capehart commenced his arguments on behalf of the report. That reference to the Constitution had just given me an idea. I was just about to hand the gavel back to Bill Purtell and write a note to myself when Lyndon Johnson came rushing back in from the Democratic Cloakroom with Russell Long, who cried: “Mr. President! Will the Senator from Indiana yield?”
Oh oh. I sat back down. Knowland stayed his troops and sent Hendrickson hustling into the Republican Cloakroom. “For what purpose does the Senator from Louisiana request that I yield?” Capehart wanted to know.
“I was not able to be in the Chamber at the time of the takin’ of the last vote, suh!” said Long. “I understand it was a tie vote, and I should like to move to have the vote reconsiduhed!”
“Well,” I said, “does the Senator from Indiana yield for, uh, that purpose?”
“No, damn it, I — Mr. President, I refuse to yield!”
“The Senator from Indiana declines to yield for that purpose,” I said, and rapped the gavel smartly. I didn’t know if it was a proper occasion for rapping the gavel, but it seemed like a good thing to do: BANG! It was like a gunshot, and Long jumped.
“Yeah, well then, uh, Mr. President,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously, “as soon as I kin obtain reckanition, I shall move to have the last vote reconsiduhed.”
Capehart conferred briefly with Knowland, then started up his report again, and once more the Chamber began to empty out. I gave the gavel back to Purtell and headed out for the elevators. The day was fast wearing on and I hadn’t yet clarified my thinking on the Rosenberg case. It was still possible they’d be burnt tonight, I’d have to be out there front and center, and I had to be ready. Why had Uncle Sam asked me out at Burning Tree about the Clark House Players, for example? Why had he brought up that Ayn Rand play I’d been in? Julius’s reading of Horatio Alger, or my duel with Alger Hiss? Kaufman’s link with Justice Clark in—? Knowland intercepted me, his big boozy face flushed from all the exertion. “I’m afraid it’s not over yet,” he said.
“Doesn’t look like it, Bill. Where was Joe McCarthy?”
“I dunno, that sonuvabitch — hammin’ it up for the newspapers probably. And Dirksen, too! Where’d he disappear to?”
“Last I saw Ev, he was on his way to use the head.”
“He was, hunh? Okay, I’ll try to round ’em up. Capehart’ll be good for an hour or two, but don’t go far away.”
“I’ll be in my office.”
“Good boy. And…listen, Dick…” Knowland wrapped one weighty arm around me like an ape, softening some, glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being overheard. “Uh, if you see, you know… Uncle Sam…tell him I hope I didn’t screw things up with this little diversion, I just wanted to get off on the right foot, you understand? Just wanted to set the scene right. Tell him…tell him we’re pullin’ for him and, uh…give him my best, will ya, Dick?”
He’s going to kick your ass so hard, Knowland, you’ll have to take off your bowtie to shit, I said to myself, giving Bill a sincere look. “I’ll do that, Bill. You can count on me.” I took out an index card and wrote a note. I let him think the note was about him, but what in fact I wrote was: LOOK UP HIGH-SCHOOL SPEECH ON CONSTITUTION FOR POSSIBLE USE ON FIGHTING QUAKER MONUMENT.
“Thanks, Dick, I… I hope he’s…okay. Tell him he’s…tell him, Dick, he’s in our prayers!”
Metal and glass are flying everywhere, the scream of tires and crash of cars send the Viennese locals diving into cellars, but the American soldier on the FEAR Military Patrol leaps for the runaway patrol car, whips the door open, grabs the fleeing Russian soldier by the arm — the car careens, tips, smashes into a second patrol car. The four Russians reach for their weapons, but the Yank’s pistol is already out: the Rooskies, outdrawn, are disarmed, forced to leave the car at pistol point. Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas — the man they were trying to kidnap — is still alive. And free. A lean tattered figure crawls slowly out from under the wreckage of the smashed-up patrol cars, stands, brushes himself off: it’s Uncle Sam! “Yippee!” he mutters, somewhat breathless, “heav’n-rescued again!” He straightens out his crushed plug hat and clamps it firmly on his brow, and on the other side of the world a hundred escaped North Korean prisoners find themselves back inside South Korean stockades. “Our crool and onrelentin’ inimy,” says the Superhero, bugging his eyes, “has damn near discombobulated us!” GI units shore up, as he tucks his shirttails in and buttons up, the breached ROK defense lines north of the Hwachon Reservoir. A figure gaunt and grand is Uncle Sam, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world. He winks and Albert Einstein, no longer with the angels, comes down with the flu. He tugs at his balls and cargo transports airlift the heaviest tonnage of the year. “That pestifferous varmint may have got us in a drefful sityeation,” he declares in the old style of Holy Writ, while pinning a Merit Badge on the American soldier of the FEAR Patrol, “but by Godfrey Daniel, we ain’t been knocked outa this ballgame yet — no sir! if them sarpents mean to have ’em a ginewine knife-plyin’ skalp-t’arin’ punch-up, then, brothers, let the deevastation commence!” Flags are fluttering and somewhere a band is playing “Possum Up a Gum Stump.” Here, as the Evangelist Ed Markham so fairly put it, was a man to hold against the world, a man to match the mountains and the sea!
His eyes burning fiercely like Mandrake the Magician’s, a transfiguring glory in his bosom and a wad of chaw in his jowls, he reaches up and out, seeming to stretch and grow, and with a smile of Christian charity lets fly with the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a Union: “Whoopee-ti-yi-yo! it’s yore misfortune, little dogies, and none o’ my own!” he booms from above, and — ka-BLAM! — decimates a whole paddyful of contentious gooks. “Come on, boys! The only way to resumption is to resume!” One is reminded of Zack Taylor astraddle Old Whitey running down greasy spies or Andy Jackson routing the heathen Creeks, as the Yankee Peddler, gusty and overcast, like a tempestuous blast, leads the Legion of Superheroes forward on the Korean frontier to recapture Finger Ridge and Christmas Hill. His fighter-bombers strike the Phantom’s main highways, destroying bridges and bicycles, making road cuts. Defiance gleams in Sam Slick’s eye, a sneer curls Sam Slick’s lip — no more Mr. Nice Guy now, he’s shooting from the hip! “Fer pleasure or pain, fer weal, fer woe,” he roars, walking softly but swinging a big bat, “‘tis the law of our bein’, we rips what we sew!” And off he goes to quench fires, still earthquakes, keep planes aloft, confound mischief.
His tattered coattails gallantly streaming, he roars through the Third World, up the Iron Curtain, making it flap in the gale of his wake, and into Times Square — what a mess! He sweeps away the Phantom’s debris, reconstructs the Sing Sing stage, wipes the obscene slogans off the walls, chastises the reckless traffic. “Force rules the world still,” he thunders, his chinwhiskers aquiver in the fitful upper breeze, “has ruled it, shall rule it — meekness is weakness, strength is triumphint, over the whole dingbusted earth, still is it Thor’s Day!” Thus, with the timely aid of the Prophets, Uncle Sam manages to transform even this outrageous disruption by the Phantom into a seeming piece of his own Weltord-nung: Thor’s Day! He lifts his steel-blue eyes and spies a message scrawled across the billboard high over the Death House mock-up: COMMUNISM IS THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY SOLVED AND IT KNOWS ITSELF TO BE THIS SOLUTION! He contemplates this a moment, with doubt and strange surmise depicted in his troubled look, then spits in disgust. “The dadblame Phantom’s gone too far on that one,” he snorts dryly, restraining his mounting rage. “I’ll be swacked if that nasty mortiferous booger-man don’t seem to hanker after these burnings even more’n I do!” Then, his anger bursting its bonds, he rips the billboard down and erects new hoardings in its place: FELLOW CITIZENS! GOD REIGNS AND THE GOVERNMENT AT WASHINGTON STILL LIVES! And with that, the air seems to clear, a furtive presence seems to dissipate and let the sun through, and the electrical sign reading AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD begins once more to metamorphose, Uncle Sam accomplishing in three clean moves what it took the Phantom to do in sixteen dirty ones:
AMERICA THE POKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE POPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD
Thus does Uncle Sam struggle against this new tide of darkness and perversity, unleashed in effect by one man, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, acting alone in his chambers and against the will and necessities of the entire nation. Uncle Sam himself appointed him to this High Council of Elders as guardian of the sacred laws and interpreter of the Covenant, setting him “as a banner in the vanguard of Righteousness, as one who interprets with knowledge deep, mysterious things, as a touchstone for them that seek the truth, a standard for them that love correction,” but now he’s fucked it up. Was he innocent in his pernicious decision, or has he fallen prey to the Angel of Darkness, stumbling knowingly into wickedness and falsehood, pride and presumption? This is what he said:
I have serious doubts whether this death sentence may be imposed for this offense except and unless a jury recommends it. The Rosenbergs should have an opportunity to litigate that issue…. It is important that before we allow human lives to be snuffed out we be sure — emphatically sure — that we act within the law. If we are not sure, there will be lingering doubts to plague the conscience after the event….
To be sure, if any conscience is to be plagued it will be his, for thus, with one stroke, he has nullified over two years of careful preparations, over two years of exemplary Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and liturgy, granting not merely a stay but ordering the case sent back to the District Court, thence to the Court of Appeals, giving the atom spies not respite but life itself, and making Uncle Sam, Judge Kaufman, Edgar Hoover, and the entire U.S. prosecuting team look like a bunch of clowns. And he has done so knowing that the Court is in recess and scattered, the world is in turmoil, an A-bomb attack is imminent, and the legal point raised by these shady interlopers is so flimsy that even the Rosenberg defense attorneys rejected it.
Haven’t the Pentagon Patriots already warned us…?
…Now some quack lawyer with a flair
Shall try to save them from the “chair,”
But such a shyster (mark him well)
Is paid with gold that comes from hell.
So with God’s lash, he, too, should share
Death with this Communistic pair!
…Still, should some court support their prayer
And save them from death’s “waiting chair”…
If such there be, who’d stoop to spare
Their hides from Sing Sing’s “burning chair”
We’ll brand his brow
With marks of guilt,
And link his name
With traitors
In the sewers of shame!
As one voice, the free press of America cries out against the “treason” of Justice Douglas, calling him “arrogant…crafty…disruptive.” FBI agents secreted in the Warden’s garage at Sing Sing wire the Boss reassuringly that newsmen “are considerably upset as a result of the stay and it is Denno’s opinion they will probably blast Douglas.” And blast him they do. Leslie Gould in the New York Journal-American brands him “a headline-grabber with political ambitions, a tramp who has reverted to type,” and in the Chicago Tribune Walter Trohan writes:
Douglas, it must be remembered, has been the darling of the Communists. He dissented from the Court decision upholding the conviction of 11 top Communists. He called for recognition of Red China by United Nations at a time when the Red Chinese were killing American boys in Korea…. He compared the Communist uprisings in the Far East to the American Revolution…. Douglas aspires to the presidency. Most of his evil might still be before him!
The Washington Post laments that “Justice Douglas has plunged this highly controversial and internationally important case into utter chaos!” and the Philadelphia Inquirer asks: COULD JUSTICE DOUGLAS HEAR MOSCOW’S CHEERS…?
Justice Douglas has done his country one more monumental disservice…after the Court had adjourned until fall, [he] took it upon himself to reverse the whole Supreme Bench by a masterpiece of legal red-hair splitting [and then] hurried quietly away from Washington.
For the moment he is supposed to have gone to Oregon. Some say he will soon head for Moscow, is due there July 1. Many others will wish he would go back to Tibet, climb on a yak — and stay there….
The blackest treason in American history must not be condoned.
This is the man, incredibly, who might have been Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth-term Vice President, and thus ultimately the Incarnation of Uncle Sam himself! Uncle Sam must have had his eye on him even then — probably why he dumped the old satyr into all those sex scandals. Maybe he caught something in all that friskiness, a dose of venereal anarchy or something. And if so, what’s to prevent the whole damned Bench from coming down with it? “One scabbed sheep infects a whole flock,” warns Uncle Sam on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Congressman W. McD. Wheeler of Georgia leaps up as though he’s been goosed to introduce a prophylactic resolution “that William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors in office,” whereupon a special subcommittee of five is created instanter to act on the resolution. “Ah see no pahticulah point in sendin’ mey-un to Ko-REE-ya to dai, Mistah Cheymun,” declaims Congressman Wheeler, “whahl ay-tomic spies are allowed to liy-uv heah at HOME! One Justice yieldin’ to the vo-CIF’rous my-NOR-utty preshuh groups of this yere CUNT-tree is indee-FEN-suble! Ah canNOT sit ahdly by heah in this yere layjus-LAY-tuv BAHDY without seekin’ to DO somethin’ abaout it!” Don Wheeler is warmly cheered by his fellow Georgians, all of whom have been aching for years to see this nigger-loving New Deal cowboy stuffed as deep in hell as a pigeon can fly in a week, and they figure now they’ve finally got a clean shot at him.
The Rosenbergs themselves, of course, are elated. Their spirits had sunk pretty low of late, Julius burning his eyes out with futile late-night searches through the trial record, Ethel suffering from migraine headaches and sobbing herself to sleep at night. Columnist Leonard Lyons’s report recently in the New York Post that they were actually anti-Semites at heart who didn’t even want a rabbi with them on their Last Walk apparently rattled them, and they’ve been singing themselves hoarse at the prison services ever since, seemingly in the mad hope that somebody outside the walls would hear them. Julie had to have two teeth pulled out (Warden Denno in his economy-minded way making sure he got temporary plates only), and when his mother, Sophie, visited him while he was still dopey from shock and Novocain, what he said was: “Mama, I don’t feel good. Oh Mama, where is my wife? Where are my children? I’m sick, Mama. If only I were home you and Ethel could take care of me.” Ethel has evidently stopped writing letters to him altogether. She hasn’t wanted to go out in the exercise yard and play boccie-ball any more. Julius has tried to exercise, to keep in shape, but his knees have been like putty. When he’s tried to flip cigarette butts at the toilet bowl in his cell, he’s not only been missing, he’s been burning his fingers as well.
Now all that is changed. Their happy singing, as they call it, is driving the other cons up the wall, and their lawyers are dancing impertinent jigs right out in the streets: it’s a real breakthrough! They have until October now at the very least, even if the Appeals Court rejects the new arguments. Time to design hundreds of new questions, dig up more confounding evidence, get more signatures on the clemency appeals. The Korean War could end, the Soviet peace offensive could lead to detente, the whole climate could change. And what is this that Dr. Urey and others are saying about there being no secret to the A-bomb in the first place? Where is that spy ring the FBI has been shouting about? Who the hell is Harry Gold after all, and where did he come from? No, there’s reason to dance, and what’s more, the Appeals Court might even sustain the new argument, hold that they were indeed sentenced under the wrong law — then the whole indictment would be quashed and they’d both be set free! The government would have to obtain a new indictment and get up an entirely new trial! This time there’d be no mistakes, those Greenglass diagrams would be held up to public scrutiny, Gold would be cross-examined, Morty Sobell would testify, the complicated Greenglass finances would be probed, questions would be asked about where that list of prospective jurors came from, and they might even be lucky and get a Presbyterian judge.
But, like Justice Douglas on his way to the woods, they have not reckoned with Uncle Sam’s resourcefulness and his old-trouper determination that this show will go on — he sends for The Man to Send For, the Clean-Up Man, as TIME calls him, A LEGAL MIND & A POLITICAL BRAIN, Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell. “Get that Court back here, Herb,” he says. “I want this thing now!”
“Won’t be easy. There’s never been a special term of the Supreme Court just to review a stay granted by one of its own members.”
“Yeah? Well, new occasions teach new duties, boy!” His beard seems to darken and a wart flowers momentarily on his cheek: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion! Find Vinson! Lean on him!”
“O-okay, I’ll do what I can — but he’s not one of ours, I don’t know if he’ll—”
“What, not a Republican, you mean? Hell, neither are Kaufman and Saypol. So what? These guys are professionals, they know the score. Come on, boy, hop to it! This ain’t a political campaign, it is a call to arms!” His teeth flash and a silver cigarette holder seems to sprout from between them — he snatches it away and whips it out the window. “I said, shag ass, mister! Put his feet to the fire! I want what I want when I want it!”
“Y-yes-SIR!” The Attorney General wheels around in his red-leather swivel chair and grabs up the phone. Chief Justice Vinson is on vacation like the rest of the Court, but he tracks him down. “Hey, Fred, get everybody back here! You gotta vacate Douglas’s goddamn stay! Right now! Today, tomorrow — but quick!”
“Vacate a stay? It’s never been done!”
“Yeah, well, the occasion is piled high with you-know-what, and it’s about to hit the fan! Uncle Sam’s breathing hot down my neck, Fred! It’s important in the interests of the administration of criminal justice and in the national interests that this case be brought to a final determination as expeditiously as possible!”
Vinson caves in so fast, Brownell figures Uncle Sam must have got to him first. Justice Hugo Black is dragged, protesting, from his hospital bed, others from crap tables and hunting lodges. Justice Douglas is apprehended in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, heading west. He’s snapped back to Washington so fast his feet don’t even touch the ground. The mothproof dust covers, laid down a day ago for the summer holidays, are hauled off the furniture by emergency cleaning crews, 350 excited members of the public and press are admitted to the big red-draped air-conditioned chamber, and at twelve noon on Thursday, June 18, the Nine Old Men — reportedly “tense and snappish”—file in under a frieze of Truth holding a mirror up to life and take their seats behind the long dark bench. Lawyers crowd in, FBI agents, some of Herb Brownell’s lieutenants, members of the original Saypol prosecuting team, tourists, reporters, and sightseeing foreign dignitaries.
It’s a dramatic moment, unique in United States history, but Uncle Sam does not have time to see out the formalities. Around the world, the Phantom has Sam Slick’s lean back to the wall. The situation in Korea, for example, is still very bleak, riots are breaking out, there’s a new threat of invasions, rumors of nuclear warheads moving into the area, Rhee is as obstreperous as ever, even the Pusan whores are out in the streets bellyaching against the Yanks — biting, as it were, the probang that feeds them — and the Phantom has conjured up a dense fog to hide the North Koreans in their mischief. Undaunted, Uncle Sam sends his forces right into the worst of it. They get cut up, but they hold the line. The hardnosed 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, commanded by an up-and-coming tough-as-nails brigadier general named Westmoreland, is flown in from Japan to round up Rhee’s rampaging prisoners, put them back in the barbed-wire stockades, and quell the riots. This is the same bunch of cowboys used to break up the Red riots in the Koje Island P.O.W. camp last year, they take no shit from anybody. Uncle Sam wants the truce negotiations to proceed, he’s had it with all this yo-yoing, but the Reds say: no roundup, no peace talks. Sam snorts at the cultural ironies and tells them they’d better get their yaller hunkers back to the goddamn table or he’s really gonna cream ’em, but he’s infuriated with Syngman Rhee just the same, WHY’D HE DO IT? the newspapers ask. IT’S A MISTER RHEE! Uncle Sam lines up his boys around the world and they let Rhee have it — the barrage of abuse and repudiation is deafening. Rhee, unabashed, responds with a cablegram to the Ashland, Ohio, Times: The United States, he says, is being influenced by European countries that “are too far gone toward Communist ideology.” Who the hell does he think is running the world anyway?
In East Berlin the situation is even worse, hopeless in fact, it’s a real free-for-all for the Phantom and his T-34 tanks. A few guys throw rocks, West Berlin’s Mayor Ernst Reuter declares that it’s “the beginning of the end of the East Berlin regime,” President Eisenhower announces “with particular satisfaction” an additional fifty million dollars in economic aid to West Berlin, and some trolley wires are pulled down, but there’s not much else that Uncle Sam can do, his own tanks are just too damned far away, and his best stuff is tied down in Korea. Willi Goettling, an unemployed West Berlin housepainter with a wife and two small daughters, is caught by the Russians on the wrong side of the city, accused of being a hired gun of Uncle Sam and “one of the active organizers of provocations and riots in the Soviet sector of Berlin, taking part in the banditlike tumults directed against the organs of power,” and he is taken out and unceremoniously shot. Uncle Sam charges the Phantom with “irresponsible recourse to military action” and lack of imagination. Who’s going to remember Willi Goettling twenty years from now? he asks petulantly, but all he gets in reply is what sounds like a distant fiendish chortle.
Stung, Uncle Sam cranks up the Voice of America wattage to stimulate new riots, organizes a demonstration of two hundred thousand hungry workers in front of the National Palace of the “Red Colonel” in Guatemala, has Herb Brownell arrest fifty-five Chinese for deportation to Red China in retaliation against Chairman Mao’s hassling of the Roman Catholic Missions there, keeps things boiling in Lithuania, where the Kremlin bosses have already had to order drastic party and government shake-ups, and helps Generalissimo Francisco Franco inaugurate four new hydroelectric power plants in Spain, which amazingly all seem to work. “Intimates,” Sam murmurs, kissing Franco on both plump cheeks and stuffing a hundred million in his field-jacket pockets, “are predestined…!” The Radical Party of Argentina cables President Eisenhower, demanding clemency for the Rosenbergs — President Perón, whose own plump cheeks no doubt tingle in anticipation, promptly arrests seven Radical leaders. From one end of the world to the other, all these kissable men: General Sir George Erskine, for example, arriving in Nairobi and announcing his intention to discredit “this Mau Mau business” everywhere and make it “unfashionable” in the eyes of all likely to come into contact with it. It’s a kind of disease, and people must be made to understand that it can easily be fatal. To exemplify this, the British Royal Air Force is given the task of making certain prohibited areas “unwholesome.” In a trial run, a force of 1200 African Kenya Home Guards, supported by British planes and white mercenaries, attacks Mau Mau hideouts in the Aberdare Mountains, and at least thirty of the savages are exterminated by saturation bombing and strafing alone. Smiles Sir George: “By good discipline and common sense, we shall do our duty, distasteful as it may be!”
In New York, however, the iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty continues to vex the American Superhero. He moves the wage dispute directly to Washington, and there are hints of an operation along the lines of the Berlin Airlift if the boats don’t get moving again in time for the gathering of the tribe during the atom-spy burnings. And when is that to be? Crowds have been drifting all day through Times Square, but there seems to have been no sense of conviction — it is still scheduled for eleven o’clock tonight, but there is no jostling for front-row seats. Uncle Sam joins Cecil De Mille and Busby Berkeley briefly on the Astor Roof for a cinematic overview of the rebuilt Times Square arena, and gets the image of isolated thunderheads scudding through the Square but without the final massing up of unbroken storm clouds. And some of those thunderheads, he sees, are hostile, threatening tempests of another sort — he assigns Allen Dulles and Edgar Hoover the task of collecting and collating I.D. data from these gathering pro-Rosenberg clemency demonstrations, and sends the Holy Six out on the streets to propagandize against them, try to break them up. The Six — Rabbi William Rosenblum, Father Joseph Moody, Christian Herald editor Daniel Poling, former Presidential adviser Sam Rosenman, Notre Dame law dean and mystic Clarence Manion, and “Electric Charlie” Wilson, ex-president of General Electric — have formed a kind of transcendentalist brotherhood with the aims of discrediting the Rosenberg clemency drive, preserving America’s Judeo-Christian heritage intact, and laying their own claim to a piece of the exorcisory action. In newspaper ads across the nation recently, they declared:
The case of the convicted atom spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is being exploited by typical Communist trickery to destroy faith in our American institutions…. Racial and religious groups as such have no special interest in the Rosenberg case and cannot properly become involved in appeals on their behalf. Those who join in organized campaigns for clemency in this case have knowingly or unwittingly given assistance to Communist propaganda!
This campaign has in fact effectively scared a lot of people, but many others of weak faith are still putting their signatures to clemency appeals and turning up in the streets bearing inflammatory placards. The streets of New York and most other great cities are clogging up with them, and a special Clemency Train has this very day brought hundreds of these people to the very precincts of the Supreme Court — most of them are ganged up around the steps of the Court, but some have actually slipped by into the gallery up on the main floor — where now Chief Justice Fred Vinson is rapping the special term to order.
The government’s task is a formidable one, in spite of the known sympathies of most of the Justices — the point is, they don’t want to set any precedents for slapping each other down. Uncle Sam’s proxy is Acting Solicitor Robert L. Stern, dressed impeccably in striped pants and black cutaway coat. The Rosenbergs are represented (if that is the word) by four noisy belligerent outsiders — John Finerty, Dan Marshall, Fyke Farmer, and Emanuel Bloch — whose clothes look like they’re been slept in and who don’t seem even to know each other. Bob Stern argues that the Rosenbergs have already been allowed too many appeals, the new point is frivolous, further delays would make a mockery of our judicial system, and the stay should be vacated. “The defendants have been convicted of a most terrible crime,” he reminds the Court (two of whom are already starting to doze off), “nothing less than the stealing of the most important weapon in history, and giving it to the Soviet Union. Haven’t the Rosenbergs had their full day in court and more? The public’s rights and safety are no less precious than the Rosenbergs’. We do not think those rights should be violated any longer!”
The Rosenbergs’ lawyers scramble about these points, attempting to blur the sharp edges, cast doubt on the applicability of the various laws, and question the need for such haste and impatience in deciding the issue — at one point, tall loose-jointed Dan Marshall even grabs the counsel stand with both hands and does a fair imitation of a country preacher, though he lacks the radiance of a true Man of God, rocking back and forth and crying out: “I doubt whether even a justice of the peace would call the meanest pimp before the bar on such short notice!’
“Now, now,” scolds the Chief Justice, “don’t let your temperature rise!”
But it is cranky old jut-jawed John Finerty — whose connections with the Phantom go back to Tom Mooney, and to Sacco and Vanzetti — who really wakes up the nodding Bench and reveals his team’s true colors, or color: he denounces the special term as an insult to the Court and the integrity of Justice Douglas, scathingly accuses Brownell and Vinson of a kind of legalistic conspiracy, attacks the Justice Department for perpetrating along with Judge Kaufman a knowing fraud based on rigged testimony and phony evidence, and caps the whole outrage with a blustering assault on Irving Saypol, the original U.S. prosecutor in the case and one of the most admired men in America: “There never was a more crooked district attorney in New York!” he cries. Justice Tom Clark, himself a former Attorney General and a personal friend of Kaufman, Saypol, and Brownell, is offended by this frontal attack and leans forward to put a stop to it. Even Hugo Black grimaces at Finerty’s tirade, but this may only be a gas cramp. “If you lift the stay,” snaps Finerty, his Irish cheeks aflush, “then God save the United States and this honorable Court!” There are gasps in the courtroom at this old reprobate’s vain use of the Lord’s name, and many are sure they heard him say “dis-honorable Court.”
Argument has been edging toward violence, so Fred Vinson cuts it off and the Nine Old Men retire to their private conference room, where a very hostile atmosphere prevails. Black and Douglas are fit to be tied, and Vinson is not confident he has any of the other three New Dealers with him on this one either. It helps, of course, that they’re all browned off at Douglas for playing the devil with their holiday like this, this special term being a disconcerting precedent. On the other hand, the new impeachment threat against Douglas may provoke a show of solidarity — they don’t want any precedents set in that direction either. Listening to them wrangle like schoolgirls, Vinson figures he’s about had it with this goddamn job. If he doesn’t quit soon, it’ll kill him. He tells them all to go home and sleep on it, they’ll announce their decision whether to vacate the stay or not tomorrow at high noon. That’s right, high noon, why the hell not. He makes Burton go out front to pass the word, since he’s been drowsing through most of the arguments and so is less riled than most.
The public — jammed not only into the courtroom, but into all the corridors of the building as well, and in the doorways, stairwells, windows, down the steps, out into the street and onto the lawns of the Methodist Building and the Library of Congress — takes the news with mixed feelings. Apparently the Rosenberg lawyers have not been persuasive enough to convince the Court, or they’d have said so; the delay is most likely just to give the old fellows time to work up a few eloquent touches to their decisions, something to be remembered by in Bartlett’s Quotations. Also, let’s face it, the delay heightens the drama, and as long as everything turns out well in the end, that’s probably a good thing, makes everybody feel more alive. Okay, but the troubling thing is, it should have been easier than this. No matter what happens tomorrow, Uncle Sam has plainly lost this night to the Phantom! Though the day is warm and the sun though lowering still high in the sky, a faint shudder passes through the crowd as they drift away from the Court, not together toward Times Square as they’d hoped and planned, but separately toward their own private executions, slow, but inexorable; uncelebrated. Alone in the dark, tonight anyway. With the Phantom loose in the world. Scary…. By the time Uncle Sam staggers, bruised and bedraggled, into the courtroom, it is empty. The drapes have been pulled and dust floats sullenly in the beams of afternoon sunlight.
The weary Superhero slumps heavily into a pew at the back of the room, lifts his feet, stretches his legs out in front of him. “Ah well,” he groans, his voice echoing like a hollow wind through the empty marble halls, “no gains without pains. Like the man says.” There are holes in the soles of his boots, and a soft caved-in look through his cheeks. “A wise man,” he murmurs, tipping his plug hat forward over his nose, leaning his head back, “don’t try to hurry history…” His eyes close. He yawns, chuckles wryly to himself under the plug hat. “Everything human,” he sighs, “is pathetic…”
A husky broad-shouldered man in laced-up walking boots emerges from the back rooms, pulling a cloth windbreaker on over an old sweater. “Where ya goin’, Bill?” asks Uncle Sam coldly from under his hat.
“Out to walk the canal towpath. Want to come along?”
“Naw. Too bushed. I been working my ass off, you perverse sonuvabitch. The blisters on my heels are so big it hurts when I bend my elbows, I got tank treads up my spine both front and back, and I’m so dadblame hungry my belly thinks my throat’s been cut!”
“Well, come on then. Maybe we can make it up to the little store that sells that home-smoked country sausage before it closes…”
“That goddamn towpath of yours — I got half a mind to concrete it over and make a six-lane highway out of it, damn you! I’d go do it tonight, if I wasn’t so bodaciously whacked. Why’d you do this to me, Bill?”
“Well, the law…”
“To hell with that. You been voting with us in this case all along, I thought maybe you were coming around at last, why’d you go and blow it like this? Eh? Why’d you get us in this mess? Has Hugo been working on you again?”
“No…”
“That miserable tote-road shagamaw, he still can’t get over his days of whooping it up in the Ku Klux Klan back when they was still hanging coons, he’s a incurable overcompensator. Don’t let him make a fool out of ya, Bill!”
“Hell, he’s got nothing to do with it,” says Douglas flatly.
“The eccentric sonuvabitch, he’s even trying to boycott the executions by sneaking off to the hospital,” grumbles Uncle Sam from under his hat. He feels through his coat pockets for his corncob pipe. “If he ain’t careful, he might not come out again!”
“I tell you, Sam, it’s a matter of law…”
“My ass. You’re not gonna get away with it, you know.” Douglas sighs and shrugs his shoulders, glances up at the old clock dangling like an antiquated fob watch over the bench. “Like Mr. Dooley says, ’No matther whether th’ Constitution follows th’ flag or not, th’ Supreme Coort follows th’ iliction returns.’ You may have sunk our show for tonight, but your buddies are gonna have you shovelin’ shit tomorrow, boy!”
“Maybe…”
“No maybe about it. If they were ever gonna stick by you on principle, they’d of done it today. No, it’s time to pay up and look pretty — they’re gonna stomp all over you, Billy.”
“If they do, they’re wrong. The cold truth is that the death sentence may not be—”
“Ain’t no such thing as cold truth, hoss…” He finds the pipe, peers squint-eyed into the bowl from under the brim of his plug hat.
“—may not be imposed for what the Rosenbergs did unless a jury so recommends.”
“Huh!” Uncle Sam snorts, and sucks on his empty pipe. “Who says?”
“It’s a law too elemental for citation of authority, Sam, that where two penal statutes may apply — one carrying death and the other imprisonment — the Court has no choice but to impose the less harsh sentence.”
“That ain’t my Court you’re talkin’ about — damn it, Billy, you’re as ornery as ever you was!”
“Well, I know deep in my heart I am right on the law.”
“Deep in your heart, hunh?” Uncle Sam lowers his feet, sits up slowly, pushes his hat back off his nose, squints up at Justice Douglas. “Well, the law and your bleedin’ heart be damned! Watch out, my friend, morality is a private and costly luxury. Like your pal Felix says, ‘Courts ought not to enter this yere political thicket!’”
“Brer Rabbit had an answer to that one, Sam,” replies Douglas with a wry grin.
Uncle Sam finds some tobacco and stuffs it in the bowl of his pipe. “Fergit Brer Rabbit and remember the Prophets, my boy: ‘There is no good in arguin’ with the inevitable. The only argument available with a east wind is to put on your overcoat.’” He scratches behind his ear and withdraws a wooden match. “I’m tellin’ you plain, mister,” he says, holding the match up like a pointer, “them two traitors is gonna—” He strikes the match down Douglas’s pantleg, but it fails to light. He stares at it, dumfounded. “What the hell—!” He strikes it on his own pants: “Are gonna—” This time the head falls off. “Tarnation. Musta got it wet in Wonsan Harbor…uh…hey, Billy, ya got a light?”
Douglas tosses a packet of safety matches with a Smokey Bear warning on them down to the American Superhero. “Speaking of traitors, that’s another thing that’s been bothering me: this conspiracy law. I mean, using it to give somebody a harsher penalty than you could give him if you convicted him of the crime itself, or using it to get around—”
“Harsher penalty! Hell, man, this is treason!”
“Yeah, I know, everybody from the Judge and Prosecutor to the FBI and that goofy knuckle-headed Incarnation of yours keeps repeating that — but the Constitution says: ‘No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.’ No act in this entire case involving the Rosenbergs has been corroborated by a second witness, Sam, and they have not confessed!”
“So what? Everybody knows that. That’s why we had to use the conspiracy law, we didn’t have two witnesses to any of this shit, it was in the nature of the case!”
“I understand that, but if you convict them on a lesser or broader law, then I don’t see how you can sentence them on a more serious or precise law. You’d do well to think it over, Sam.”
“In two words, chum,” says Uncle Sam, dragging on his pipe and blowing smoke, “im-possible!” He jabs the pipe at Douglas menacingly. “‘When the ignorant are taught to doubt,’ quoth the Prophet, ‘they do not know what they safely may believe!’ So let’s get this straight, wise guy—”
“Well, I’ve got no doubts,” snaps Douglas, turning away to leave the chamber. “I’m sure of the answer, my duty is clear. I’m not sucking ass on this one, Sam, and if you’d stick a pin in that inflated head of yours and stop showing off for five minutes, you’d—”
“What? What!!” roars Uncle Sam, rearing up in anger. “Listen, this is my circus, you old coot! And I’m gettin’ goddamn sick and tired of you pretendin’ to know better’n me what’s right for this country!”
“Yup, well, while I’m at it,” replies the Justice, rumbling calmly on, one big hand resting lightly on his canteen as though on a holstered six-shooter, “don’t you think it’s about time you got down off this Sons of Light and Darkness kick? I’ve about had it with all this—”
“You’ve about had it is right!” storms the enraged Superchief. “You’re in more trouble than you know, boy! This country’s after your scalp! You’re so smart at giving advice, lemme give you some: Quit! If you don’t, Congress is gonna heave you outa here so fast they won’t be able to see your ass for dust! You hear me? You’ll be lucky if they don’t lynch you in the bargain! You — what the hell are you laughing at!?”
“Hell, Sam, you got about as much respect for those fatuous Dixie gasbags as I’ve got — they’re not gonna get anywhere, and you know it. When you turn Hayden or Aiken or Saltonstall loose on me, I’ll start to worry, but for now I think I’ll just go for my walk. You coming along or—?”
“NO!” Uncle Sam blusters. His face is flushed, his white chinwhiskers are standing on end, his blue eyes blazing. “I–I promise you, mister, we’re gonna get you! One way or the other, you are going to be sorry!”
Justice Douglas stares for a moment at the irate Superhero. “Yes,” he sighs, shaking his head, “I suppose I will,” and wheels out of the room, nearly bowling over the janitor just coming in to clean up.
“Who you talkin’ to, boss?” asks the janitor, peering bug-eyed into the empty Supreme Court chamber. “You talkin’ to yo’self?”
“Yeah,” says Douglas without turning back. “It looks that way…”
I was sitting on the floor of my inner office, surrounded by every scrap of information I could find on the Rosenberg case, feeling scruffy and tired, dejected, lost in a surfeit of detail and further from a final position on the issue than ever, when the bell on my clock rang twice for a quorum call. It was late, goddamn late, I thought Lyndon Johnson had long since given up. I desperately wanted to get rid of this atom-spy affair and go home — if I left the damned thing now, I’d just have to come back, and then where would it end? Why the devil had Uncle Sam got me into this? Just to convince me of the enormity of their crime? But I was already convinced. How many Americans had died and would die because of what they had done? Would the Reds have dared invade South Korea, rape Czechoslovakia, support the Vietminh and Malayan guerrillas, suppress the freedom-hungry East German workers, if the Rosenbergs had not given them the Bomb? We were headed, truly, into a new Era of Peace after World War II, our possession of the ultimate weapon and our traditional American gift for self-sacrifice would have ensured that — and we might even have helped our friend Chiang return to the Chinese mainland where he belonged, loosened things up a little inside Russia to boot — but the Rosenbergs upset all that. When the Russians tested their first A-bomb in 1949, I was one of the first to hit at Truman’s failure to act against Red spies in the United States. And then when they got Fuchs in England in 1950, I called for a full congressional investigation of atomic espionage to find out who may have worked with Fuchs in this country — I moved quickly, caught most Congressmen napping, got most of the headlines. And deserved them. No, Dick Nixon knew what was going on all right, and was quick to say so, that’s how I beat that fancypants movie star for Senator that year, and even though finally I didn’t have all that much to do with the Rosenberg case itself, I always felt that — indirectly anyway — it was my baby.
All the more so when you considered that it was my successful pursuit of Alger Hiss which had given courage and incentive to the entire nation, made Communism a real issue, restored the dignity and prestige of HUAC, changed the very course of America and the Free World, and ultimately had made these electrocutions possible. In Whittaker Chamber’s new best-seller, Witness, he wrote: “On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom — came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men…. Both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times…can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces!” And hadn’t I been the catalyst that gave Whittaker and the Free World victory? To hell with your goddamned “McCarthy Era”! I’m the one!
I’ll never forget the day that Hiss, beaten, walked over to the old davenport in Room 1400 of the Commodore Hotel in New York to examine Chambers’s molars: “Would you mind opening your mouth wider? I said, would you open your mouth!” What pathos! If these two were indeed, as Whittaker had suggested, the momentary Incarnations of the contending forces of the universe, there was something profoundly ironic about the Force of Darkness and Evil poking petulantly but almost tearfully among the dental ruins in the soft but firm jowls of the Force of Goodness and Light. I think he hoped that Whittaker would bite him so that he could cry from pain rather than humiliation. I had already guessed the real bond between these two guys, and Alger’s desperate scrutiny of the intimate details of Whittaker’s mouth, full of so much sadness and decay, began to embarrass me. I finally had to ask him: “Excuse me, before we leave the teeth, Mr. Hiss, do you feel that you, uh, would have to have the dentist tell you just what he did to the teeth before you could tell anything about this man?” From that moment on, Hiss was finished; like that snake that eats its own tail, he just couldn’t keep his foot out of his mouth after that. It mas maybe the most fun I ever had in politics, outside of elections, and when it was over I felt like one chosen. Like Whittaker said: “I do not know any way to explain why God’s grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it. But neither do I know any other way to explain how a man like myself…could prevail so far against the powers of the world arrayed almost solidly against him, to destroy him and defeat his truth.” Which was even more true of me, who unlike Chambers must struggle for a lifetime. Not that I’m unworthy. No, that’s just it, the powers arrayed against the good man are formidable and indefatigable, there are few who can stay the course. Defeat and disappointment dog every footstep. If old Hiss hadn’t been a liar, for example — and an eager one besides — I might have been destroyed before I could ever get started. So thank God at least for that: it gave me the power to prevail, it was a milestone in human history, and marked me once and for all as the greatest of the Early Warning Sentinels.
In short, my conscience was clean — so why had Uncle Sam brought this Rosenberg case up, especially so late in the ballgame? Of course, he’d only mentioned it in passing while washing his balls on the seventh tee, but I had long since learned that with Uncle Sam nothing was mere happenstance, you had to listen to him with every hole in your body. The case itself seemed cut-and-dried: a routine FBI investigation, a sequence of confessions from Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass, leading directly to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They denied all accusations, but then so did Hiss — in fact, their reactions were very similar, high and mighty sometimes, hurt and offended others — you could smell the ham in them. And they had a much more telling witness against them than a fat spooky slob like Whittaker Chambers. David Greenglass was also something of a fat slob, true, and a bit spooky as well, but he was more than that: he was also Ethel’s own brother. His story of his recruitment by Julie and Ethel, how he drew up the lens-mold sketches and lists of personnel, passed them on to Harry Gold, how he discussed these things with the Rosenbergs, with little details of family life mixed in, how Julie tried to help him escape — it was all very convincing. The only question remaining really was: who else was in the spy ring besides the Rosenbergs, Greenglasses, Gold, and the Russian Yakovlev? Uncle Sam had wanted maximum pressure to be applied to the Rosenbergs to make them talk, which was the reason Judge Kaufman had given them the death penalty, together with a hint that confessions might soften his heart. No one had to tell Kaufman this, he knew what he had to do, though he’d apparently sent Saypol down to Washington just to make sure. There had been a lot of evidence brought forward over the past two years to support some of the Rosenbergs’ minor testimony and try to damage David’s credibility as a witness, and having studied the case now, I could perceive a lot of backstage scene-rigging and testimony-shaping by the prosecuting team that deprived the courtroom performances of some of their authenticity and power, but there was no shaking off the basic conviction: the Rosenbergs were guilty as hell. So why—?
The “Yeas and Nays” bell rang. I leapt to my feet, hauled on my jacket, and dashed out the door. I took the subway car over to the Capitol, arriving breathlessly in the middle of the roll call. “Jesus, Dick, where the goddamn hell ya been?” whined Knowland through clenched teeth. I rushed forward to relieve Purtell and count the vote: it was another tie, this time 41 to 41. Once again I cast the tie-breaker, but then into the Chamber came Dennis Chavez, Democrat from New Mexico: “Mr. President, ah, due to unavoidable circumstances…” That did it. All this effort for nothing, I thought. I felt weak from the run over, sweaty — I realized I’d forgotten to have lunch; mustn’t let supper go by, I could make myself sick. Willis Robertson, yellow-dog Democrat from Virginia, announced flatly, almost sadly, that he wished to speak for three minutes on the dubious merits of the issue, and then he would call for a vote on the conference report itself and have it simply voted up, eh, or down…that is, unless the distinguished Senator from California wished to postpone a vote on the report until three p.m. Monday, as the Democrats had originally requested.
I watched the collapse set in on Knowland’s big florid face. It was like an old fortress turning to putty. There was nothing more that I could do. He rose slowly, heavily, like a tired old walrus, and made one last stand: all right, goddamn it, not till Monday then — but two p.m., not three p.m. Knowland probably thought the Democrats would let him have that point to save his pride on this, his maiden sally as Leader, but if so, he should have known better. Chavez in fact suggested they delay the vote until Tuesday. Knowland, crashing to defeat, agreed to hold the vote no sooner than three p.m. Monday. Johnson, grinning like a possum, nodded, and it was all over. Monday! — it seemed light years away! I was eager now to get back to my office and get some of my thoughts down on index cards before I forgot them — not just about the Rosenbergs and their goddamned fourteenth anniversary either: I remembered that I’d had an important thought about the 1954 campaign tactics that had already slipped my mind, and another about justice and my generation. And then, as I banged the ivory gavel down, terminating the exercise and giving the Democrats their victory, it suddenly occurred to me: ivory was the traditional gift for fourteenth wedding anniversaries! The trouble with me, I thought, is that I’m too attentive, I see things too clearly. One could well envy old boozers like Bill.
I took the elevator down to the subway, jammed in with the others on their way to their offices and homes, but once below decided against riding the subway car — it was crowded and I saw I might have to sit facing the rear of the car, something I always hated to do. It even made me motion-sick sometimes, short a ride as it was. Also, they were squeezing as many as sixteen to eighteen on the damned thing, and I hated to sit that close to anybody, especially perspiring as I was now, so I set out on foot on the walkway beside the monorail, glancing back over my shoulder from time to time, mindful that John Bricker had nearly got assassinated down here five or six years ago. It was windy in the tunnel, it was always windy in here, but it seemed windier than usual today, threatening, almost as bad as it was out at Burning Tree Sunday. The Burning Tree Golf Club was also known on Capitol Hill as the Smouldering Stump, but I now thought of it as the Burning Bush because it was there, during the past few months, where Uncle Sam had most often dropped his mask and talked with me directly about such things as statecraft and incarnation theory, rules for the Community of God, the meaning of the sacred in modern society and the source of the Phantom’s magical strength, the uses of rhetoric and ritual, and the hierology of free enterprise, football, revival meetings, five-card stud, motion pictures, war, and the sales pitch. And it was there last Sunday, in the comparative seclusion of the seventh tee, that he slipped out of his duffer’s disguise, hit a hole in one, and on the way over to rinse off his balls, asked me what I thought about the Rosenberg case.
In the aftershock of Uncle Sam’s transmutation, it is difficult even to hear a question, much less to grasp or answer it. One is struck by a kind of inner thunder, a loss not so much of vision as of the coordinates of vision, and a loosening of all the limbs as though in sympathy with the dissolution of the features of Uncle Sam’s current Incarnation. I say he went over to rinse off his balls and asked me about the Rosenbergs — but perhaps he had asked me long before, while watching his drive arc distantly toward the flag on the sixth green, for example, or even during the backswing, somewhere in that timeless era between the first snap and crackle of metamorphosis, Ike’s blue eyes flashing me a glance full of fear and trembling as the moment grew in him, and my own slow recovery from the awesome dazzle of this miraculous transubstantiation. My senses only began to pull together and function again, as it happened, while watching his large pale freckled hands plucking the little white balls, gleaming wet, out of the suds and popping them into the gray folds of the towel: at that moment it came to me that Uncle Sam, freshly shazammed out of the fretful old General, had just whipped out a five-iron, smacked the ball four hundred yards to the green, vacated the tee like a priest his altar, and somewhere along the way, asked me my opinion on the atom spies.
I realized he was putting me on the spot, testing me, and I didn’t know quite what to answer. Did it have something to do with Korea? Stalin? My Checkers speech? American jurisprudence? Alger Hiss? I raked my mind for some clue to his drift. He was leaning against a bench, tossing the shiny white balls up in the air, juggling them two, three, seven…thirteen at a time. His white cuffs flashed in the sunlight like signal flags. Of course, I expected to be tested like this, expected it and welcomed it, knew it to be part of the sacred life, something Uncle Sam had to do to protect his powers. And I trusted him — he’d never used kid gloves on me, but he’d never been unkind to me either, I was pretty sure he liked me — I trusted him and was eager to please him. Maybe he only wants to be reassured, I thought.
I was glad about the way the case turned out, of course, but he knew this already. After all, having gone out on a limb about it back in ’49, I couldn’t help but be flattered when J. Edgar Hoover actually found a spy ring and busted it. But past that, I had to admit, I didn’t know too much about the case. The trouble was, by the time it came up in ’51, I had begun to catch fleeting glimpses of Uncle Sam’s blue coattails and was busy chasing them, and so I had pretty much stayed out of Hoover’s and Saypol’s way. Oh, I knew well enough what the Big Issue was, my whole political career had been built on it. And I knew, of course, that the Rosenbergs were part of it, an important part: Edgar had called it “the Crime of the Century” in the Reader’s Digest, and I’d gone along with that, even if I did think he should have given equal billing to the perjury of Alger Hiss. And even though I didn’t follow the details — about all I knew for sure was that Fuchs had led the FBI to his American courier Harry Gold who had led them to Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass who subsequently had turned state’s evidence against the Rosenbergs (Morton Sobell fitted in there somewhere — maybe he was the one who tore the Jell-0 box) — I did admire Irving Saypol’s dynamic, intransigently hostile prosecution of the case, applauded the breadth of Judge Kaufman’s vision and courage, and was properly relieved when the Supreme Court, still dangerously New Deal-tainted, refused to review the case. On the other hand, let me say — and I don’t mind being controversial on this subject — I was a little sorry that two people, a father and mother of two little boys, had to die. I’m always sorry when people have to die, my mother taught me this. Especially women and children. But how much of the world’s sadness can any one man handle, no matter how sensitive he is? I had troubles of my own, and I knew that Uncle Sam would do what was right and necessary; just stay on the reservation, keep the faith, do your own job well, get your rhetoric ready, and don’t ask too many irrelevant questions: that seemed the best policy.
But maybe it was not. Maybe I had not done enough. I fussed about, choosing a ball for teeing up, worried about this. Everything was remarkably green, the sky was deep blue, the balls a blinding white: my senses were still on edge from the transmutation. Uncle Sam was now balancing a putter on his sharp thin nose while juggling the golf balls. The empty tee awaited me: the novice called upon to show what he knows. I’d built my reputation on the thoroughness with which I’d pursued the Hiss case, after all, and maybe I’d gone soft on this one, lost some of my fabled diligence and so part of my image as well, perhaps this was the thrust of Uncle Sam’s question now. He somehow had his old plug hat up on top of the putter and was twirling it around. His playfulness could be deceptive. Don’t take chances, I thought — stick with what you know. I wasn’t sure whether or not the actual conspiracy charge had been proven, but let’s be frank about it, it was just a technicality anyway — mainly because of the statute of limitation, I supposed, and the fact that in these espionage cases there were rarely two witnesses to anything. They were being tried in fact for treason, never mind what the Constitution might say, which was anyway written a long time ago — and on that charge, J. Edgar Hoover’s word was as good as a conviction.
“Well,” I said finally, poking around bravely in my golf bag, “well, I believe they’re, uh, probably guilty.”
Uncle Sam blinked in amazement, gathering in the balls with one big hand, catching the putter and hat as they fell with the other. “Guilty!” he roared, his chinwhiskers bristling. I realized, glancing away, pretending to study the distant green, that Abraham Lincoln, whom I’d always admired, was probably the most terrifying man of his age. “Well, hell, yes, they’re guilty!”
I knew by his reaction I must be miles off the mark, but my answer still made sense to me and I resented what seemed like some kind of entrapment. Instinctively, I counterattacked: “Well, naturally, I haven’t had ample opportunity to study the transcripts carefully, but I, uh, from what I’ve seen of them, the case has not been proven—”
“The case!” he snorted incredulously. “Proven! Gawdamighty, you do take the rag off the bush, boy!”
I stared miserably into my golf bag while he railed at me. Not only was I giving all the wrong goddamn answers, I was also having trouble with my drives. I do not believe that some men are just naturally cool, courageous, and decisive in handling crisis situations, while others are not. I chose a number two wood for a change. I knew this was a mistake and put it back. “There…there was no hard evidence,” I said, pressing on desperately. “And since the Rosenbergs refused to cooperate, all we had left really was the brother’s story!” I wasn’t sure this was true. I’d read it somewhere. I thought: there is less than a 50 percent chance that what I’m doing will help me. “And to get that, we’d had to make this deal with him and his wife which—”
“So all that courtroom splutteration was a frame-up,” he blustered — he was in a ferocious state, “what trial isn’t?”
“Wait, that’s not what I meant!” I protested. “Irving Saypol’s a fine trial lawyer!” I wished I could keep my mouth shut. But I’d always admired Saypol, the greatest of the anti-Communist trial lawyers, though I knew he was mean and ornery with a mind about as broad as a two-by-four, and a Tammany Democrat to boot. I pulled out my driver, swished it around a little. My hands were so sweaty it nearly slipped right out. “I don’t think he’d ever—”
“Rig a prosecution?” Uncle Sam laughed sourly. I knew better, of course, I was being a fool. “Hell, all courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a baldface lie, ain’t that so? Moonshine! Chicanery! The ole gum game! Like history itself — all more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation’s seen since the Gold Rush — the fatal slantindicular futility of Fact! Appearances, my boy, appearances! Practical politics consists in ignorin’ facts! Opinion ultimately governs the world!”
“Yes, but… I thought—”
“You thought! Cry-eye, look out when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, we’re all in for it! I’m tellin’ you, son, the past is a bucket of cold ashes: rake through it and all you’ll get is dirty! A lousy situation, but dese, as the man says, are de conditions dat prevail!”
I felt my neck flush, so, to cover up, I stooped and concentrated on teeing up my golf ball, grunting to kill time. My hand was shaking and the ball kept falling off. I seemed to see my father down in the front row at a school debate, flushing with rage as I disgraced myself with a weak rebuttal.
“And so a trial in the midst of all this flux and a slippery past is just one set of bolloxeratin’ sophistries agin another — or call ’em mettyfours if you like, approximations, all the same desputt humbuggery — and God shine his everlastin’ light on the prettiest ringtailed roarer in the court room! Am I right? You remember that Ayn Rand play you were in years ago: a game for actors!”
I didn’t know he knew about that. If he knew that, what didn’t he know? How could I compete? I felt like a fighter wearing sixteen-ounce gloves and bound by the Marquis of Queensberry rules, up against a bareknuckle slugger who gouged, kneed, and kicked. But life for everyone is a series of crises, I cautioned myself, it’s not just you, and with that I finally got the ball on the tee. I stood, gazed off toward the seventh green, trying to see the flag there. It was red, I knew. I was on to what this golf game was all about, all right, but I still hadn’t figured out what Uncle Sam was up to. Did he mean the Rosenbergs might be innocent? Or their crime insignificant? I addressed the ball. My brand-new golf shirt was wet with sweat. I remembered my opening line from that Ayn Rand play: Gentlemen of the jury — on the sixteenth of January — near midnight — the body of a man came hurtling through space, and crashed — a disfigured mass — at the foot of the Faulkner Building. That was just how I felt. “But you said — I mean, President Eisenhower said, and J. Edgar Hoover, Judge Kaufman, everybody: a crime that has endangered the lives of millions, maybe even the whole planet—!”
“Damn right! — and much of Madness to boot, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot, but we’re not just talkin’ about that little piece of technological cattle-rustlin’! Even though that’s more than enough to scrag a man all right — like Sweet Andy Carnegie used to say: upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends — but still, we all know how he got his: no, a little healthy thievin’ never hurt anybody. But real guilt, real evil — listen, son, get that right hand around there on that club, like you’re shakin’ hands with it, not jerkin’ it off!”
I twisted my hand around on the club: the toe turned in and tapped the ball accidentally, knocking it off the tee again.
“God may forgive sins,” Uncle Sam observed grimly, “but awkwardness has not forgiveness in heaven or earth — that’ll cost you a stroke.” He could be as cold as a New England parson sometimes. “No, guilt, real guilt, is like grace: some people got it, some don’t. These people got it. Down deep. They wear it like a coyote wears its lonesomeness or a persimmon its pucker. They are suffused with the stuff, it’s in their bones, their very acids, it’s no doubt a gift of the promptuary, even their organs are guilty, their feet are guilty, their ears and noses—”
“You mean, because…because they’re Jews?”
“Jews! What in Sam Hill has that got to do with it?” I’d missed again. I was completely lost. I coudn’t even find my goddamn tee. “Irving Kaufman’s a Jew, isn’t he? Is he guilty? Is Irving Saypol guilty? Roy Cohn? Hell, I got a touch of kike in me myself, son, not much, just enough for a little color and wile and to whet my appetite for delicatessen — shoot, I might even incarnate myself into one of ’em some day…”
I glanced up. He was as stern as ever, but there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. My mind raced uneasily over the possibilities. I felt sure I had a good head start on all of them. I knew, too, it would help a helluva lot if I hit a decent tee shot for a change. If I could find my tee. “It’s under your right foot,” Uncle Sam said flatly.
“No, bein’ a Jew ain’t it, though it probably didn’t help them none either. Their kind of depravity is something deeper even than that, something worse. You don’t see it so much in the shape of their noses as in the way they twitch and blow them. You see it in how they shuffle and squat, how they bend, snort, and grimace. You see it in their crummy business, their greasy flat, their friends — even their crockery betrays them, their lawyers, their pajamas, their diseases. It’s no accident, son, that they’ve been nailed with such things as Jell-0 boxes, console tables, and brown paper wrappers — and it coulda just as easily been the studio couch they slept on, their record player, medicine chest, or underwear — they stink with it, boy, it’s on everything they touch!”
I knew now what he meant. It was the feeling I’d had about Alger Hiss. Others, less perceptive, had had that feeling about Whittaker Chambers. In our case, it had been pumpkins, carpets, typewriters, and teeth. Whittaker, who had smelled a little unhealthy himself for a while, had emerged aromatic as a saint. “Perjury wasn’t Hiss’s crime either,” I said. I’d been talking more or less to myself, but as soon as I said it, I knew I was on the right track at last.
“No,” Uncle Sam agreed. “That’s right.” I glanced up. He was watching me closely, fierce as a tiger and cool as a cucumber, as the Gospel says, rolling the balls around in his mighty fist as though he were peddling them to me, a gesture of such iconic depth that I felt suddenly elevated past myself.
“It wasn’t…it wasn’t even espionage or double-dealing!” I was nearly there…. “Uh…”
“They have walked in the path of the spirit of perversity,” whispered Uncle Sam hoarsely, leaning toward me like an eager schoolmaster, urging me on, “violators of the Covenant, defilers of the sanctuary…”
“Sons of Darkness!” I cried.
Uncle Sam leaned back and smiled, not a smile of self-contentment or amusement, but a smile of blessing, the smile of a life-insurance salesman who has just successfully put your affairs in order, or of a parent who has come to see you graduate from Duke Law School — or any law school, for that matter — and he set his plug hat back on his head. I knew I’d turned the corner. I began to feel I might actually hit a decent drive after all. “And what’s the reward for all them what walk in such ways?” He tossed one of the golf balls up in the air and smashed it with his putter, baseball fashion, out of sight. “A multitude of afflictions at the hands of all the angels of destruction!” Whack! “Everlastin’ perdition through the angry wrath of an avengin’ god!” Swat! “Etarnal horror and perpetual re-proach!” Smack! “Darkness throughout the vicississitudes of life in ever’ generation, doleful sorrow, boils on the ass, contumely in the opinions of Christian men, bitter misfortune and darklin’ ruin!” Slam! “And the disgrace of final annihilation in the…” splat!“…fire!”
He was something to watch, all right — he had a lot of style. A lot of styles, I should say: now that of Larry Doby, next Country Slaughter, then Mel Ott, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Luke Appling — but though he’d organized baseball’s liturgy and had governed its episcopacy (to be sure, there was more of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in his briary nineteenth-century features than of, say, Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover), he’d never actually played it. Golf was his game, the first he’d come to, back in the capacious days of William Howard Taft, and it was still the only one he played regularly. Before that, he’d pretty much limited himself to hunting and fishing, riding, swimming, war, billiards, and the odd cockfight — indeed, the very idea of Uncle Sam wasting his time playing idle games would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. But such was the character of our twentieth-century revolution: gamesplaying was now the very pulse and purpose of the nation. It was Taft’s successor, Woody Wilson, who gave it its fateful turn: he was sometimes out on the course as early as five in the morning, even played the game in the dead of winter, using black golf balls to find them in the snow, until that awful day when the transmutation did not quite come off and left only half of Wilson still working. Now golf was part of the Presidential discipline — indeed, why else would I be out here? — and every time Uncle Sam eagled out or blasted his way mightily from a sand trap to the pin, somewhere the Phantom cringed.
I dug up my tee and set my ball on it, took a practice cut at a dandelion. “But how can you, uh, tell for sure?” I asked, and—whick! — took the head off the dandelion. Why couldn’t I hit a golf ball like that? “I mean, even Foster Dulles trusted Hiss…”
“Ah, well, the pact with the Phantom is no less consecratin’ in its dire way then gettin’ graced by Yours Truly,” said Uncle Sam, and imitating Stan Musial’s quirky stance, smacked another golf ball out over the horizon. “Ask that mackerel-snapper Joe McCarthy about the Grace su’ject!” He tossed up his last ball and belted it high in the air — in fact, I lost sight of it completely. I wondered, if it got up high enough would it just stay there? Where does gravity run out? But finally it did come down, about fifty feet from the seventh green, and lodged in the roots of a tree. I supposed he wanted to keep his hand in on approach shots. Or got a kick out of blasting trees — Burning Tree indeed! you’d think it was Ben Franklin’s private lightning lab to see the way Uncle Sam’s left the vegetation out here. Now he tucked his putter under one arm and withdrew his corncob pipe, knocked it out on the heel of one boot. “The impure, through their presumptulous contact with the sacred, are momentaneously as lit up with this force as are the pure, and it’s easy for folks to confound the two,” he said, leaning back against the bench, “as much, I might add, to the unwarranted sufferin’ of the holy as to the ephemeral quickenin’ of the nasty…” He gazed at me meaningfully…aha! so that was why I had been accused of the secret slush fund! why, in spite of everything, I was still so distrusted many people said they wouldn’t even buy a used car from me! The Philistines wouldn’t have bought a used car from Jesus either, right? Things were becoming clear now. I concentrated on the ball, sitting firm on the tee like truth itself, and took a practice backstroke, trying to keep my elbow straight. “You’re gonna top the ball, son,” Uncle Sam said gloomily.
I did. I tried my damnedest to lift the ball and I swung so hard I splintered the tea, but the ball only plopped about six feet ahead. Judas, I thought, I really hate this fucking game.
“Ya know, you’re about as handy with that durn stick,” muttered Uncle Sam irritably, tucking the pipe in his mouth, “as Adlai Stevenson is with a set of dumbbells!”
I was badly stung by this. I would be a good golfer if I had the time to play regularly, but a man can’t give himself to everything on this earth. And the innuendos worried me: Stevenson was a loser. I realized it was still touch and go…
Uncle Sam sucked on his empty pipe a couple of times, then blew it out, reached into his pantaloon pockets for tobacco. “There’s one thing about criminals and kings, priests and pariahs,” he said. He packed the tobacco into his pipe with one long bony finger, peering at me as though over spectacles. “They may be as unalike as a eagle to a rattlesnake, but they both got a piece a that dreadful mysterious power that generates the universe!” As he said this, he whipped a long wooden match out from behind his ear. “The difference,” he went on, “is what happens when they try to use it. The ones with the real stuff, the good guys, they achieve peace and prosperity with it — these are…” he scratched the head of the match with his thumbnail and it popped ablaze: “…the Sons of Light!” He cupped it over the pipe bowl and continued: “The other geezers, the (puff!) Phantom’s boys, well, if you (puff! puff!) don’t watch out, those squonks can haul off and (puff!) exfluncticate the…” he looked up and held the match out, still burning, then crushed it in his fist: “whole durn shootin match!”
It’s true, I thought, he’s not exaggerating, the Rosenbergs no longer belonged to the ordinary world of men, that was obvious, you could see the sort of energy they now possessed, even though stuffed away in Sing Sing prison, in the rising fervor of world dissent — in France, the whole damned government was being shaken. I walked up to my ball, teed it up on a little hump of grass. I felt a little shaky myself. “You mean, we’re not executing them…just because…?” I poked my toe about, looking for firm footing.
“We ain’t goin’ up to Times Square just to fulfill the statutorial law, if that’s what you mean,” Uncle Sam said. He blew a smoke ring, then another and another, each inside the other, ending with a little puff of smoke for the center. “This is to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World, the precedint on which the future is to be carn-structed to ensure peace in our time!” He hacked up a gob and spit into his smoke rings, hitting the bull’s eye…. “We’re goin’ up there to wash our feet, son!” A miniature mushroom cloud welled up from the center, and the concentric rings flattened out and spread like shock waves.
I understood his question now. I turned back to my ball, dug my feet firmly into the turf. Times Square, the circus atmosphere, the special ceremonies: form, form, that’s what it always comes down to! In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities — why did I keep forgetting that? I smiled. “Then, wouldn’t it have been better to burn them at our Inauguration?” I commenced my backswing, shifting my weight confidently onto my right foot.
“Tried that,” said Uncle Sam, “but we got knocked down with a lame duck. Anyhow, don’t matter, now we got the summer-solstice and the anniversary angles—”
“Eh—?” I was so startled my knees buckled and I sliced the ball out of bounds. “The—what?”
“Thunder and tarnation, boy! That’s four strokes already, and you ain’t even off the damn tee yet!” cried Uncle Sam.
“I… I’m sorry! I, uh, thought you said…”
“The solstice and the anniversary, soap out your ears, son!” he repeated irascibly. He had blown a smoke ring shaped like an outline map of the United States and, as it expanded, was trying to fill in the several states. “The Rosenbergs signed their dierbollical pact fourteen years ago come Thursday the eighteenth,” he muttered around puffs and rings. He was trying to squeeze the District of Columbia into his map, but it was getting very cluttered in that area. He seemed about to lose his patience. “I thought you knew that!”
“Ah…” So, it was also the Rosenbergs’ anniversary! I’d thought for a moment he’d been referring to my wedding anniversary! When Kaufman had set the date finally for the week of June 15th, I had seen that it could fall on Pat’s and my anniversary — our thirteenth! — on June 21st. And I’d seen that summer-solstice angle, too: after all, we hadn’t married on the 21st for nothing. It was the climax to our “Beauty and the Beast” game, time of the roar of Behemoth and all that. Then, when I learned that this year June 21st was also Father’s Day, it had suddenly looked like a sure thing. I’d said nothing to anyone about this, but it had worried me: if it was intentional, were they doing it as a favor, giving Pat and me something extra to commemorate? or was somebody out to get me? I’d feared the latter, usually the safest of the two assumptions when you’re in politics. But then the marshal had scheduled it officially for the 18th, and I’d forgotten about it…until now. I teed the new ball up, twitching my shoulders and wrists, trying to loosen up. I had a better understanding of things now, but it didn’t make me feel any easier. Their fourteenth! And what were we doing here on the seventh tee? “I… I guess I missed that,” I admitted frankly.
“It seems to be you missed just about everything!” snapped Uncle Sam. “You don’t know no more about this case than a goose knows about rib stockings!” He had given up on the map and with a flick of his finger had drawn the Canadian border up to a straight perpendicular line, the Great Lakes clustering like a knot, turning the whole thing into a kind of gigantic hangman’s noose. “Do you know what law the Rosenbergs were actually convicted under? Do you know who the Clark House Players were? Sarah O’Ken? Helen Rosenberg? Catharine Slip? Do you know why they called David Greenglass ‘Little Doovey’ or what Julius Rosenberg’s secret Talmudic name was? Why was Julius born in Harlem? How is it that Roy Cohn was working for Irving Saypol? What were the Rosenbergs doing in Peekskill in 1943 or Irving Kaufman in Washington in 1948? Eh? Did you even know that Ethel Rosenberg played the Major Bowes talent rackets? that Julius read Horatio Alger and Tom Swift and took to the stumps against the National Biscuit Company? or that Emanuel Bloch’s marriage is on the rocks? And who’s that screamer workin’ for anyway?”
“I thought you…you said the past was a pot of lies…”
“We ain’t talkin’ about trials now, boy, stay awake, we’re talkin about the sacraments!”
“I… I’m sorry,” I said, and stepped up to the ball. I felt like I’d been stepping up to this goddamn ball all afternoon. Roy Cohn once mentioned that Saypol used to be a really rotten golfer himself, but that he read almost every book ever written on the subject, and it improved his game immeasurably. Maybe that was what I ought to do.
Uncle Sam raved on and on about the case; most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried to pay attention, I knew it was important, but the coincidence of anniversaries and my own stupid panic about it when he brought it up were still troubling me. “And what about the CCNY Class of ’39? Why was J. Parnell Thomas sent to the same jail as Ring Lardner, Jr., of the Hollywood Ten? What the hell’s a proximity fuse? Should we feed ’em on cheese and barley cakes and beat ’em with fig branches? Why does that Russian astronomer now say that the vegetation on Mars is blue? Eh? Eh?” Of course, June, a lot of people get married that month, Eisenhower’s own anniversary was just another ten days away, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all that improbable. But it was all tied up somehow with those generational vibrations which were exercising such a grip on me these days — how many other parallels might there be? I was afraid to find out. Maybe it was because I’d just passed forty, things like this happened to people when they reached forty, I supposed. Uncle Sam was trying to explain why it was the Rosenbergs, why the Lower East Side, the Foley Square Courthouse (another link to the Hiss case! my subcommittee met there, it was just before I finally nailed the bastard!), Sing Sing, and now Times Square, why Nelson Eddy and Bernard Baruch had to be there, Louella Parsons and Dr. Kinsey, why an electric chair instead of sending them out to sea in a leaking boat as in the old days, and why just now, this week…. “I mean, McCarthy’s got such a cactus up his cornhole, he’s bound to blow it soon, and now that we’ve laid the threat of a A-bomb attack on them heathen Chinks, they gotta fold their hand any day now, and what with Stalin dead the whole goddamn mood could change — this may be our last chance to kill these people! And what if the Phantom squeezes an extra day out somewhere? Have you thought about that? That hodag’s known to have a lotta contacts in the jew-dishiary — then what? If we had to go through the Fourth without them atom spies burnt or burning, the whole shebang could come unhinged like a hog shed in a Okie twister!”
“That’s…that’s true,” I agreed, vaguely aware of the wind commencing to blow across Burning Tree, but unaware at the time how prophetic he’d been — or had he been telling me something I should have picked up on? Should I have got Edgar to put a watch on Douglas right then? I was too distracted to think about it — a few days to play with, a couple of days’ delay: then Pat and I could still get hit with it!
“This week, son! We gotta move!”
“Yessir!” I cried, and took a violent swing at the ball, topping it again and sending it skittering this time into the rough about a hundred yards away. Well, shit, at least I was off the tee.
“Damn it all, boy!” thundered Uncle Sam, rearing up off the bench, brandishing his putter like a saber and stomping forward like Ulysses Grant debouching from his field tent. “The brave man inattentive to his duty and who don’t keep his eye on the ball is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger! Life is real! Life is earnest! You gotta get on top of this thing! You gotta get your ass in gear!”
“I’m sorry… I just can’t seem to get the hang—”
“That’s just it! We gotta get the hang! We gotta exsect these vinimous critters this week or our name is shit with a capital mud! This ain’t just another ballgame, johnny, we are gonna have to fight for the reestablishment of our national character, and we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth — namely, me!”
“You—?” I croaked. “But you…you’re…you can’t—!”
“Die? Oh, I ain’t immortal, son, I’d hate to think I was. Nothin’ goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I? Sooner or later, the Phantom gets us all!”
I was truly shaken. I caught myself staring at him the way I used to stare at my mother when I first realized that she had to die. Suddenly, everything seemed very fragile and tenuous. Brittle. “But you’re so…so strong—!”
“Remember the old kings, boy, the times don’t change. I’m the force what’ll raise up the whole sin-besotten world, see if I don’t…but I’ll get et by it, too!”
“I… I don’t understand…?”
“I would not live alway, I ask not to stay, loveliest of lovely things are they, on earth what soonest piss away, so long as you get your kicks in in the passin’! That’s poetry, boy! Xerxes the Great did die; and so must you and I!”
Yes, I was shaken, but oddly I also felt like I was very near the center of things. There’s been a point to all this, after all, I thought. I felt closer to Uncle Sam than I’d ever felt before.
“Oh, probably, after it was over, like Christ, I could come back some day…” He sighed wistfully, puffed on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke shaped like a bird — an eagle. “But it wouldn’t be the same…” He added wings and it flapped off into the sun: I was blinded by the light, but as far as I could see it simply disappeared. When I looked back at Uncle Sam, he was staring at me very strangely, his blue eyes glowing as though lit from behind. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “sometimes I almost want to die….”
A cold chill rattled through me. My sense of Uncle Sam’s presence in front of me dipped briefly, almost imperceptibly, as a candle will gutter in a faint draft — and for that fraction of a second, I seemed to have an intuitive awareness of everything happening in Uncle Sam’s head. And then, as quickly, it had passed. My head ached slightly and I felt a momentary emptiness down in the marrow of my bones. Then that, too, filled up.
“Don’t worry,” Uncle Sam laughed, “it ain’t such a grave matter, if you’ll pardon the pun, son — in fact, it’s a lot more fun this way.” He put his arm around me and led me down the fairway toward my ball, his white locks blowing in the cool breeze. He seemed to have shrunk some in the last few minutes. “It’s like old Tom Paine useter say, panics in some cases got their uses — we ain’t had a party good as this one’s gonna be since you were just a little tyke sayin’ your breakfast prayers back home on Santa Gertrudes!” I felt swarmed about with fears and absences. Paradox. But I felt protected at the same time. I had a feeling that everything in America was coming together for the first time: an emergence into Destiny…. “Oh, I don’t reckon we could live like this all year round,” he said, “we’d only expunctify ourselves. But we do need us an occasional peak of disorder and danger to keep things from just peterin’ out, don’t we?” I nodded, remembering my own peaks — the Hiss Case and the Checkers speech, and before that my school highs, debate wins, romances with Ola and Pat, the war, even my brothers’ deaths — and I knew how they could light things up, make everything new again: after all, that was what light and darkness, the sacred and the diabolic, death and regeneration were all about! “Well, okay,” said Uncle Sam, pocketing his corncob pipe and clapping me on the shoulder, “let us, then, be up and doin’, with a heart for any fate; still achievin’, still pursuin’, and though hard be the task, keep a stiff upper lip!”
“Oh, yes!” I said, flushing with pride and joy and eager to begin, for he’d just singled me out among all men: that fractured echo from the past was a piece of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which Grandma Milhous penned by hand under a photo of Abe Lincoln she gave me on my thirteenth—thirteenth! — birthday! I kept it on the wall above my bed all through high school and college: Learn to labor and to wait! “I will!”
“Good boy!” he said. “I press thee to my heart as Duty’s faithful childering! Be prepared for anything, for this is one a them hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold, dear! But be brave, and whatever happens, just remember the sagassitous words of that other Poor Richard long ago: ‘Fools make feasts…and wise men eat ’em!’ So whet up that appetite!” He hugged me, then gave me his club to swing with, saying: “Now, listen here, a golf ball is propelled forward by the verlocity imparted to it by a club-head, see — this is physics, now, my boy — and it’s kept aloft by under-rotation or backspin, which producifies a cushion of air, and this is what gives the ball lift. To get this backspin, the clubhead’s gotta travel downward, right swat whippety-snap through the center of the ball, and this is where you been goin’ wrong. You think you gotta lift the ball up, and this is makin’ you pull your swing…”
“Ah…”
“Actually the uplift is projectorated by the spin, and the spin is got by hittin’ down and through, you got it? Now, another problem is movin’ your maximum verlocity back to six inches…”
Down and through, got it. I took a practice swing, keeping my shoulder down, my eye on the ball — then, because when I looked up I realized that people were staring at me (got to watch it, can’t let my guard down like that), swung on up into a friendly wave at a carload of Senators disembarking the subway car. “See ya, Dick!” “Don’t miss the show!” “Not for the world!” “Take it easy!” Down and through. And out and up, back to the office, get rid of this goddamn thing. With maximum verlocity.
The curtain rises upon the Warden’s office, a large old unfriendly apartment, with bare floors and staring whitewashed walls, furnished only with the Warden’s flat-topped desk and swivel chair, a few straight-backed chairs, and an eight-day clock. On the Warden’s desk are a telephone instrument, a row of electric bell-buttons, and a bundle of forty or fifty letters. There are two large windows, crossed with heavy bars, at the back of the room, and doors left and right. The Warden is verging toward sixty, and his responsibilities have printed themselves in italics upon his countenance. With him, staring out the window, is the Prison Chaplain, dressed in slightly shabby clericals. The Chaplain’s face, normally calm, intellectual, and inspiring, is presently depressed. The Warden blows a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, drums on the desk, and peers over his shoulder at the Chaplain. He clears his throat and speaks brusquely: “Has it started raining?” “Yes, it has,” says the Chaplain, without turning around. The Warden glares at his long thin cigar and impatiently tosses it aside. He is wearing a dark brown suit, open shirt, and black string tie. “It would rain tonight,” he complains.
In fact, it is not raining tonight at Sing Sing. It is a warm clear evening, a little heavy, and there are rumors of an impending heat wave, maybe as early as Saturday. The prison officials, who have had to proceed today with all the usual death-chair preparations, are dressed in short-sleeved shirts with open collars. Not until Justice Burton’s announcement of the Supreme Court recess at 6:29 p.m. has the evening’s Death Watch been canceled, the electrician and rabbi sent off duty. Yesterday on the central radio speaker, during the seventh-inning stretch of the Dodgers’ baseball game, the Rosenbergs heard the news of Justice Douglas’s stay, and Warden Denno reported that they were “overjoyed,” but all that joy was soon dispelled by Attorney General Brownell’s rapid countermoves. The Rosenbergs still cling to hopes of further delays, but among the professionals it is generally felt that Douglas has overstepped himself on this one, and the odds are on for a vacated stay and a quick execution. They have their own reasons: all those preparations down in Times Square, the other executions stacking up, the daily expense: Ethel alone is costing the state $38.60 a day, Julius is due for more dental treatment, and there’s the burden of keeping 290 prison police and nearly as many New York State Troopers on constant guard, defending the prison against protest marches by the Phantom’s Legions of Darkness, even who knows? (guards in the tower gun emplacements flex their shoulders, scrutinize the prison borderland, now losing definition in the gathering dusk) — a mad attempt at escape.
Not that the Rosenbergs are showing any signs of sudden defiance — if anything, they seem to be mellowing as they near their exterminations. It could be a ruse, the kind of trick Errol Flynn often uses on his way to a last-minute rescue. Or it might be saltpeter in their diets. Most likely, though, they’ve known for years that the Phantom has intended this role for them, and they’ve been practicing. Ethel especially: for some time now she has ceased resisting and has taken the part on and made it her own. Julie still seems unable to believe it is all really happening to him, and continues to search frantically for the legalistic dodge that will get him out of here. “Everything seems so unreal and out of focus,” he writes, “it seems like we’re suspended somewhere, far off…” Today is their fourteenth wedding anniversary, and as a present from Sing Sing prison, they were allowed a full ninety minutes together at the dividing screen this evening. Not that they made much use of it — they sat as though tongue-tied half the time. What is there really to talk about on a warm June evening through a fine mesh screen with someone one’s been married to for fourteen years, after one’s been preparing all day to go to the electric chair? It’s all been said. Too many times. They’re weary of each other’s arguments, illusions, complaints. They’re weary of their own. Talking about the children only makes them cry or feel angry or guilty. They love each other, of course, more than ever — love indeed is why they’re here — so they could talk about the night they met at the Seamen’s ball on New Year’s Eve or their Sunday strolls through the Palisades or that first room they had together in Marcus Pogarsky’s apartment, but none of that seems real any more — it’s somebody else’s past, it belongs to those other people whose Death House letters are being read around the world. Anyway, they’re boxed in by prison guards and snoopy FBI agents with big ears, why give them a thrill? So they talked about things they’ve heard on the prison radio. How their suppers have settled down. The demonstrations. What they’ll do next if Justice Douglas’s stay is upheld. An interesting magazine article about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Julius said he read in LIFE that Henry Ford II’s personal income in 1951 after taxes was $87,000,000. After taxes! This was on his mind because of his intention to write out their own last will and testament later tonight. Ethel repeated her wish to see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible playing in New York. She’s heard that the audience applauds when a character says toward the end that he’d rather burn in hell than become a stool pigeon. They sat silent a good part of the time, not even looking at each other, as though afraid of what they might see in the other’s face, yet like a pair of octogenarians at the fireside, finding familiar solace in each other’s company, glancing up from time to time, then away, listening to the trains rattling by along the river, sounds floating up from the town below: music, kids playing softball, trucks grinding up a hill. Now they are separated, Julius struggling with the text of his will, Ethel perhaps dreaming of opening night many years ago of the Clark House Players’ production in the settlement house on Rivington Street of The Valiant, in which she starred as the sister of the condemned man, who was played by Paul Muni in the movies….
“Was he quiet when you left him?” asks the Warden uneasily. “Yes, yes,” says the Chaplain, “he was perfectly calm, and I believe he’ll stay so to the very end.” The Warden lights a fresh cigar. In the wings, the young girl awaits her cue. “You’ve got to hand it to him, Father. I never saw such nerve in my life. It isn’t bluff, and it isn’t a trance, either, like some of ’em have — it’s sheer nerve. You’ve certainly got to hand it to him.” He shakes his head in frank admiration. “He still won’t give you any hint about who he really is?” “Not the slightest. He doesn’t intend to, either. He intends to die as a man of mystery to us.”
What is this unnatural intransigence? It is not silence, no, the Rosenbergs are rarely silent. But their declarations are all bombast, impertinence, self-indulgent pique, nothing of substance, nothing Uncle Sam can use. At this very moment, there is a telephone in Warden Denno’s office linked directly to the Justice Department in Washington: the Rosenbergs need only avail themselves of it, agree to a public confession of their own duplicity and exposure of those who have schemed with them (not that the FBI actually needs this information, apparently — newspapers almost daily announce, just as they have done for the past two years, that the FBI has broken the ring and is “closing in” on the rest of the spies), and what is now a time of worldwide risk and disorder might well be converted into an occasion of national victory and joyous in-gathering, and even, if only briefly, a happy family reunion as well. But still, unnatural parents, they remain adamant. “We are confident of the righteousness of our cause,” Julius Rosenberg has written, “and we will not allow ourselves to be used as tools against the fight for peace, freedom, and decency.”
Ah yes, the fight for peace, freedom, and decency — everybody knows what a Communist means when he uses language like that. Wasn’t Uncle Sam struggling right now against a cunning Soviet “peace” offensive? They seem almost eager to die, as though in spite. “I shall not dishonor my marital vows and the felicity and integrity of the relationship we shared to play the role of harlot to political procurers,” Ethel has declaimed, her spontaneous use of that metaphor confirming what everyone has long believed about this tough little number off the ghetto streets, handmaid of the Phantom. The world has not forgotten the day twenty years ago when she and more of her kind descended upon those poor truckdrivers like frenzied maenads, ripped off their pants, and lipsticked I AM A SCAB all over their bottoms. And speaking of vows, what about her Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag? “I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon such bounty.” Meaning the rumored commutation of her death sentence, while burning Julie, so there’d still be the possibility, eventually, of getting the spy secrets out of her. “How diabolical! A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion, for these saviours are actually proposing to erect a sepulchre in which I shall live without living, and die without dying…. And what of our children! What manner of mercy is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness?” Ronald Colman did it a lot better in A Tale of Two Cities. As for the children, everyone from the Judge to the President has observed that they loved their cause more, and indeed sacrificed their children to it. Even now their boys are being dragged around to all the clemency rallies to cozen old ladies with soft hearts and loosen purse strings, and their parents are actually using them as grounds for their contrariness: “As long as we do the right thing by our children and the good people of the world, nothing else matters…. The love we bear our two sons and each other demands that we hold fast to these truths, even to the death which may destroy our little family…. One thing I feel sure of — that when they are older, they will know that all the way through, we, their parents, were right, and they will be proud.” Pride, yes: that’s the key to it.
Even were they not guilty of stealing the secret of the A-bomb, such grandstanding, reminiscent of the hyperbole of their student days, together with their open-faced provocation of international unrest—“The world has come to recognize the true nature of our case and the people, the most effective force on earth, are behind us and are demonstrating a thorough awareness that they know how to fight for peace and freedom!”—would alone warrant their present condemnation. For make no mistake: that the world is tonight in crisis, that the Phantom is afoot with rare favor and authority, is largely due to the persistent agitation of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who will not talk and who will not be silent. The Rosenbergs have been honing their incendiary rhetoric for twenty years, testing their vitriol on the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Standard Oil — they’ve even propagandized against Nabisco cookies! Ethel launched her oratorical career, after a fling at the stage, as a union whip and street shrieker, Julius as a student agitator, participating in the Stalinist purges of decadent Trotskyites. The FBI has accused them of “premature anti-fascism.” In their flat, they found an empty collection can bearing the label: SAVE A SPANISH REPUBLICAN CHILD, VOLVEREMOS, WE WILL RETURN! And now their training in perversity has come to fruition, their target is the entire American System:
No need for any pretense — the farce is exposed. / This harsh and cruel decision was sired in madness / part of a pattern of pro-fascist and bellicose actions by those who rule our land—/ this is political prosecution, shameless, blatant, cynical. / The executive arm of our government has become a party to murder. / They hide their demagogy under a mask of super-patriotism, wild lies and charges. / The courts have deteriorated to the point that they are mere appendages to an autocratic police force and in political cases the rights of defendants and the protection of the Constitution no longer operate. / Such a situation will only lead to a police state at home and war abroad. / While we are able, we must prevent these evil men from enslaving the mind as a prelude to complete subjugation—/ it is imperative to stand up to these fascists and nail them to their own lies! / Progressives are beginning to fight back against McCarthyism — the fuehrer of American fascism. / At this late hour, I am still confident the good people of our country will make their will felt in Washington and stop the execution!
And indeed, now, tonight, as evening marks the close of day and skies of blue begin to gray, the “good people” emerge, as though on cue, to protest the executions, attack Uncle Sam and his Legion of Superheroes on the frontiers and harass him within, violate human decency, threaten the Free World with terror and disruption, and strike ruthlessly at the very faith that binds it together. It is no real surprise that in the vanguard of the rebellion are agents of the Phantom disguised as ministers of the Holy Gospel — clemency appeals and rabid protests have been pouring in all week from preachers and theologians in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, California, Latin America, the Vatican, France, and the Evangelical Churches of Italy. Nearly 2300 American “clergymen” sign a last-minute appeal for clemency, demand an audience with the President. There is loose talk about “peace” and “justice” and “mercy.” One would think the Daily Worker had seen the light, so many churchmen appear these days in its pages. “Obvious evidence that the Angels of Darkness are deceiving the very Elect,” FBI undercover agent Herbert Philbrick warns, “is the increasing number of Communist-sponsored petitions going out over the imprimatur of ministers of the Gospel and the outsized number of clergy who are signatories! Never is an Angel of Darkness more secure than when he poses as an Angel of Light!” In Washington, the Rosenberg forces move with a cynical snicker into “Inspiration House” on Kalorama Road. Thousands hold a protest vigil in front of the White House, pretending to “pray” that the Rosenbergs be spared. “I saw those ministers in action,” G-man Phil-brick confides, “ruthless Communist leaders prostituting the Christian ministry to the evil ends of atheism and oppression!”
“The Bible teaches us that we are engaged in a gigantic spiritual warfare,” explains the Reverend Billy Graham, “and when God begins to move in a country, as He is now moving mightily in America, Satan also begins to move!” And not only in America: around the world, demonstrators gather, chant, sing, metamorphose into dangerous mobs, egged on by the inflammatory letters of the Rosenbergs: “We are confident that the people will raise a mighty cry against this new great danger which threatens to engulf millions by dooming two innocent Americans first!” Protests flow in from Mexico, Quebec, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen. Hundreds of mesmerized workers converge on the U.S. Consulates in Milan and Genoa. In Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre calls the Rosenbergs victims of “legal lynchings”: “Whenever innocent people are killed,” he declares, “it is the business of the whole world!”
If you will not hear our voices, hear the voices of the world. Hear the great and the humble: from Einstein, whose name is legend, to the tyros in the laboratories of Manchester; from struggling students at Grenoble to Oxford professors; from the world-famous movie directors of Rome to the bit players of London; from the dock workers at Liege to the cotton spinners of India; from the peasants of Italy to the philosophers of Israel…
Read the tons of petitions, letters, postcards, stacked high in your filing rooms, from the plain and gentle folk of our land. They marched before your door in such numbers as never before, as have their brothers and sisters in London, Paris, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Rome. They ask you not to orphan our two young boys. They ask brotherhood and peace to spare our lives.
Hear the great and humble for the sake of America.
So cry the Rosenbergs, and in Dublin, two homemade Molotov cocktails crash through the windows of the U.S. Information Agency. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is set upon by an entire motorcade — they push him to intercede with President Eisenhower, but Winnie does not flag or fail, he braces himself to do his duty: “It is not within my duty or power to intervene.” There are threatened boycotts and work stoppages around the world. Egghead leftists in Europe plan a counter-trial of the people who have judged and sentenced the Rosenbergs. Onstage at the Martin Beck over on Forty-fifth Street, Reverend John Hale in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is saying: “No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village. There is too much evidence now to deny it!” Nearby, in Times Square, the electric chair lies, uprooted, in the gutter, blocking traffic, while tricked out in nigger colors on the marquee of the Criterion is the strange message, attributed to some frog named Du Bois:
WE ARE THE MURDERERS HURLING MUD!
WE ARE THE WITCHHUNTERS DRINKING BLOOD!
The helmet of night has fallen upon man the word-carrier. It is the Phantom’s hour…!
“I am not much good at saying goodbyes,” Julius Rosenberg writes to his lawyer from his cell in the Death House, “because I believe that good accomplishments live on forever but this I can say — my love of life has never been so strong because I’ve seen how beautiful the future can be. Since I feel that we in some small measure have contributed our share in this direction I think my sons and millions of others will have benefited by it.”
“This front of his makes me nervous as the devil,” the Warden says. “I feel just as if tonight I was going to do something every bit as criminal as he did. I can’t help it. And when I start feeling like that, then I think it’s about time I sent in my resignation.” Why is it that the most obvious things in the world, she wonders, watching the Warden and Chaplain from the wings, seem to elude the understanding of men like these? It’s not that they have failed to learn something, but rather that they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts. It’s as though society through its formal demands were bent, not on ennobling people and leading them toward art and truth, but on demeaning them, reducing them to cardboard role-players like the characters in this play, The Valiant. And the deeper they get into their roles, the less they remember who they were before they took on the parts. But what is the alternative? Going on with life at all means having to adopt one role or another, even if it’s a rebellious one, doesn’t it? She is sixteen years old and she doesn’t think so. She thinks this is the defeatist argument of old people who have failed, people like her own parents, her teachers, those two men out on the stage. It was the argument one of them tried to use on her when he walked her home the other night from the cast party at the Paramount Cafeteria. She said, no, life is more open-ended than that. Then he jammed her up against a wall in a dark doorway, dragged up her skirts, and pushed his knee into her crotch. Some argument. “His whole attitude has been very remarkable,” the Chaplain admits reflectively, winking at her from the stage. “Only a few minutes ago I found myself comparing it with the fortitude that the Christian martyrs carried to their deaths, and yet…” “Has he got any religious streak in him at all?” the Warden asks. “I’m afraid he hasn’t,” the Chaplain sighs. “He listens to me very attentively, but…”
Atheism, as J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI has so often reminded us, is the first step toward Communism, the very “cornerstone of Communist philosophy.” Marx, Engels, Lenin, they all got started that way. A clue leading to the apprehension of the Rosenbergs was their admitted apostasy. Julie had given up the Talmud in favor of Tom Mooney and premature anti-fascism. Ethel, depressed, had gone to a psychiatrist instead of her rabbi. Phonograph records ridiculing the Kol Nidre chant were found in their flat by the FBI. The Phantom, G-man Hoover has warned, is out to “sap religion’s spiritual strength and then destroy it…. Communists have always made it clear that Communism is the mortal enemy of Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and any other religion that believes in a Supreme Being!”
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have written hundreds of pages to each other and the world, and there’s not a word in them about a Supreme Being. They never mention the afterlife, angels, or the Holy Trinity. Peace, bread, and roses, that’s all they talk about: their materialist dream. Even Justice Douglas in his eccentric recreancy admits that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” and if pressed, he might even be able to tell you His name. It’s true, of course, Patriot John Adams, in one of his spasms of quirkiness, did pretend that no “persons employed in the formation of the American government had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven,” but the Prophets have since corrected him — the Lord Himself has declared right out in the Doctrines and Covenants of the native-American Latter-Day Saints:
I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up onto this very purpose!
Nothing could be clearer than that. When Tom Jefferson swore “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” he swore it “upon the altar of God,” that Heavenly Engineer who set the world going, fathered Jesus Christ, and fired the shot heard round the world, and Long Tom himself once asked in a theocratical fit: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” This afflated reflection has stirred the hearts and minds of American Super-heroes from General George Washington right down to the current Incarnation, who is much given to visions of God working His wondrous will through the invention of America. His Quaker Vice President, lay evangelist and cleanser of the temple, has often echoed him, and more: “Our beliefs must be combined with a crusading zeal to change the world!”
LET THE CHURCH SPEAK UP FOR CAPITALISM!
For there is, as the Christian missionary John Foster Dulles, former Chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches (now U.S. Secretary of State), has said, “no way to solve the great perplexing international problems except by bringing to bear upon them the force of Christianity!”
But is there time? A young girl appears. She is fresh and wholesome, and rather pretty, but her manner betrays, as the authors say, a certain spiritual aloofness from the ultramodern world which separates her from the metropolitan class. She is dressed simply and wears a blue tailored suit with deep white cuffs and a starched white sailor-collar, and a small blue hat over her fluffy hair. Her costume hints at the taste and repression of an old-fashioned home, the sort of home perhaps which would have taken to heart Mr. Edgar Hoover’s firm advice:
Since Communists are anti-God, encourage your child to be active in the church…. Whether you know it or not, your child is a target. His mind is the fertile plot in which the Communist hopes to implant his Red virus and to secure a deadly culture which will spread to others. When enough are infected the Red Pied Piper hopes to call the tune. He lives for the day when he can draw constantly increasing numbers of American youngsters away from their families and the sound traditions and principles which have guided this Nation thus far along its course and enroll them in the service of the Red masters!
J. Edgar Hoover’s advice is to use faith, history, hickory, and old-fashioned prayer on these susceptible young. The girl onstage, however, would seem to need none of them. Incorruptible purity is her essence. She is neither timid nor aggressive; she is self-unconscious, an open-faced contrast to the more devious Warden and Chaplain. Her expression is essentially serious due to the present mission; ordinarily she takes an active joy in the mere pleasure of existence, according to the script. She has just heard the Warden say, with regard to the doomed prisoner: “I don’t want any such yelling and screeching tonight as we had over that Greek!” Now, seeing her, he half rises from his chair, much affected by her youth and innocence, and with grave deference offers her a chair. The audience’s laughter at the image of the screeching Greek subsides. The young girl regards the Warden trustfully, being a good actress. He says he understands she wishes to see the prisoner. “Yes, sir. I hope I’m not…too late…”
But maybe so. Terrorists creep out of their jungle hiding places and lay waste villages in Indonesia, Malaya, French Indochina. A full company sweeps down on U.N. positions north of the Hwachon Reservoir in Korea and a U.N. effort to retake Christmas Hill is repulsed by the Phantom’s hyped-up forces. Two hundred Indian fishermen are reported missing forty miles off Madras in the Bay of Bengal. Officers sift through the ashes of the fire in Whittier, Alaska, named after the Quaker Poet who once prophesied that “evil breaks the strongest gyves,/ and jins like him have charméd lives!” They agree that the important U.S. military port is now totally inoperative. Damages are estimated at $20,000,000. John Greenleaf Whittier also gave his name to the home town of the young Vice President, and some wonder if the Phantom had really been aiming at him but missed? HUAC, clutching their dossiers and taking for the Congressional bomb shelters, issue a warning that roaming the nation’s streets unchecked, intent upon committing all manner of sin and transgression against the American government, are 469 heretical organizations, not least of which are all the Rosenberg clemency committees to whom are rallying thousands of people, all displaying “a shocking readiness to join hands with treason!” Hardly have names been named when new demonstrations crop up in London, Chicago, Jakarta, Japan. In Times Square, the stage, unchaired, is dark, torn Jell-0 packages flutter through the streets in a cold breeze, and suspicious-looking characters lurk in the doorways. “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time,” Deputy Governor Danforth is saying onstage at the Martin Beck, “we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it!” Yes, but the sun is not up. The sun is down.
And as the fatal midnight hour, when all evil things have power, closes down on them, the children of Uncle Sam, slipping uneasily into their beds, are beset with nightmare visions of Soviet tanks in Berlin, dead brothers lying scattered across the cold wastes of Korea, spreading pornography and creeping socialism, Phantomized black and yellow people rising up in Africa and Asia in numbers not even Lothrop Stoddard could have foreseen, and the Rosenbergs, grown monstrous, octopuslike as Irving Saypol depicted them, breaking out of their cells, smashing down the walls of Sing Sing with their tentacles, and descending upon the city like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. They knock over buildings, crush automobiles under their bodies, swallow policemen whole, get tangled up in a Coney Island roller coaster. Bullets do not stop them. They are joined by Walter Ulbricht the Coffinmaker, wading ashore with his firing squads; the Necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie, his huge organ bloody and gangrenous; a big black white-eyed giant with SUPER MAU MAU emblazoned on his savage breast; thousands upon thousands of groaning victims, blinded, their flesh eaten away, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Chairman Mao, swirled about by fumes from the dens of vice, like a bloated gold-toothed Fu Manchu. The Rosenbergs pulverize synagogues and cathedrals in their monstrous tentacles. Super Mau Mau smashes the windows of supermarkets and department stores, letting the dark out. With a lash of his tail, Chairman Mao reduces Wall Street to rubble. Christie grabs little girls out of Sunday schools and beauty parlors, smearing whole handfuls of them against his calloused peter and laughing maniacally. As the Red Pied Piper tootles, Nero, Pontius Pilate, Genghis Khan, and juiced-up Red Indians from Ambush at Tomahawk Gap smash their way out of movie palaces, crying: “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself!” The people scrunch down in their sheets, shivering in spite of the warm June weather, chilled by the Phantom’s echoing laughter, dismayed by the prospect of a never-ending night. How did this happen? Where did all the good times go? Whatever happened to the rendezvous with destiny?
But then they hear, distantly, the cheering thump of Nelson Eddy singing “Stout-Hearted Men,” and over that, through the deep darkness, comes the voice of Uncle Sam, firm, resonant, unwavering: “0 suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie steeped to the lips in misery, illegitimi non carborundum, as Vinegar Joe useter say: Don’t let the bastards grind ya down! I know the gloomy night before us lies like a black arse in a coal-hole, but jumpin’ jig-a-jig! we ain’t weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God a Nature has placed in our pockets! So punch, brothers, punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare, so when Jesus comes to claim us all and says it is enough, the diamints will be shinin’ but no longer in the buff!”
“But O Uncle Sam,” cry the people, making doleful moan and groan, “the Angel of Darkness is loose in the world, and iniquity goes unpunished! They go on contriving the mischief of their hearts, opening their shameless mouths, unleashing their lying tongues like the venom of adders fitfully spurting forth, vipers that cannot be charmed! Confusion and panic beset us, horrendous anguish and pain, like to the throes of travail!”
“Damn my britches!” sighs Uncle Sam, “for the land what is sown with the harvest of despair! I hear ya talkin’, piggy-wigs, but is it not wrote in the ancient Scrolls: ‘When they engage the Phantom, amid all the combat and carnage of battle, the Sons a Light’ll have luck three times in discomfitin’ the forces of wickedness; but three times the host of the Phantom shall brace themselves to turn back the tide. But on the seventh occasion the great hand of Uncle Sam shall finally subdue the Phantom, and He will make truth to shine forth, meanin’ me, bringin’ doom down upon the Sons a Darkness like a tom-tit on a horse-turd!’”
“Yea, six times have they appeared before our Judges, men well versed in the Book of Study and in the fundamentals of the Covenant, and this is the seventh,” reply the people. “Thou bringest us cheer, O Uncle Sam, amid the sorrow of mourning, words of peace amid havoc, stoutness of heart in the face of affliction!”
“Well, awright then,” thunders Uncle Sam, “straighten up and fry right, friends! Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart on, for they are but anathema maranatha, and dirty dogs to boot! Don’t fergit that all that has been and is and shall be throughout all time are in my hand, so there may be storms in my path, but I’ll wear a smile, cuz in a little while, my path’ll be ro-o-ses! And so, trustin’ in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good and anon, let us remember the Maine, cock a snook, cover the embers and put out the light — toil comes with the morning, and broil with the night! Hoo hah! God bless you all!”
“Thine is the battle,” respond the children of America. “From Thee comes the power; and it is not ours. The base of spirit wilt Thou burn up like a flaming brand in a hayrick, a brand that devours wickedness and that will not turn back until guilt is destroyed!” Then they tune in their radios to an all-night station playing Frankie Laine’s “I Believe,” and drift off, their minds freed of the Phantom’s terrors, dreaming peacefully of baseball, business, and burning hayricks.
For the Rosenbergs, it is not so easy to sleep. Julius has dutifully composed his last will and testament, but Henry Ford II he is not. In fact, he has nothing to leave his two sons but best wishes, three cartons of rather pathetic personal effects which the FBI is bound to paw through, some dead bugs, and his exemplary misfortune. He has good reason to doubt they will possess even his name. “Love them with all your heart and always protect them in order that they grow up to be normal healthy people,” he begs his lawyer, Manny Bloch. “Our children are the apple of our eye, our pride and most precious fortune.” He last saw his sons two days ago. Unless Justice Douglas’s stay is upheld, he will not see them again. They were dragged away, screaming, confused. He can’t write to the boys himself. Ethel will do that. He is afraid the boys will be angry. With him. He is afraid their memories will be erased. Or will not be. He is afraid his legs will fail him on his way to the chair and make his boys ashamed. “You Manny are not only considered as one of my family but are our extra special friend. Be strong for us, beloved friend. Never let them change the truth of our innocence. For peace, bread and roses, in simple dignity, we face the executioner with courage, confidence and perspective, never losing faith. As ever, Julie.”
It is time for the prisoner in the play to die, and the young girl must make her farewells. She endeavors to smile, but her voice catches in her throat and she nearly breaks down. She and her brother used to have a game at bedtime, reciting lines from Shakespeare, and though the prisoner has made it clear he is not after all her brother and doesn’t know Shakespeare from Barney Google, she wishes now she could…. “What was it?” the prisoner asks. “I… I told it to you once, and you said it was silly.” “Say it again,” the prisoner says softly. The girl swallows, looks up at him. “‘Good-night, good-night!’” She cannot quite control her voice, but struggles on, thinking: at the end, this is all there is. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow… That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.’” She goes toward the anteroom, hesitates, hoping — in vain — that he might yet respond with the matching lines, and then with a choking sob hurries through the door and closes it behind her. For several seconds the prisoner stands rigidly intent upon that door, until at length, without changing his attitude or his expression, watched raptly by the Warden and the Chaplain, he speaks very tenderly and reminiscently:
“Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!
Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”
“P.S. — Ethel wants it made known that we are the first victims of American Fascism.”
The play is over. The girl has made her tearful exit, and her brother, the condemned prisoner, has gone through the act of clutching his throat and quoting Shakespeare on the fear of death, amazing the Warden and the Chaplain. The Jailer has arrived to call the prisoner to his execution, and the prisoner, standing erect like a soldier at attention, regarding them all fixedly and with a voice low and steady, has replied: “All right, let’s go.” They’ve gone. The curtain’s come down and the audience, if there is any, is now applauding. They take curtain calls. Now the condemned man is smiling and so is the girl in her little sailor dress. All just make-believe. Then, let’s see, they…uh…they scrub off the greasepaint and change out of their stage costumes. Always liked that part, the makeup. A kind of transformation comes over you, a kind of metamorphosis. It was while a girl in my class was putting makeup on me one night that I thought she was in love with me. Maybe she was. Probably I didn’t make the right moves. Water under the bridge. Anyway, off with the makeup and costumes. There’s a cast party afterwards at the Paramount Cafeteria tonight, they’re all going to that and hurrying to get ready. Everybody in the cast is lusting after little sixteen-year-old Ethel Greenglass, the sister in the play, and they all drop by casually to poke their noses in while she’s changing, but she’s too excited by her own performance to notice. She supposes that middle-aged men winking and blowing congratulatory kisses at her in her underwear is just part of the theatrical life. Anyway, let’s face it, she’s a tough little broad from the slums, a lot of horny brothers, this isn’t exactly Whittier High School, she knows the score. Anuses, dildos, the whole lot. She’s probably seen all there is to see right in the hallways of her own tenement house. Whores have often lived there, working their trade in the rooms next to her own bedroom, she’s no goddamn innocent. But has she ever…had it? Hard to guess. Probably not. Certainly no boyfriends. Not till Julie. Probably too idealistic. Standoffish. Too much familiarity with it has made her shy away. She wants something better out of life. She dreams of escaping the slums. She’s young, bright, pretty, talented, she can sing and act and she’s got nerve — that’s the famous Broadway formula for success, isn’t it? Just like in the motion pictures — and it’s all just a few blocks away. Each night they do The Valiant in this crummy little makeshift dump of a neighborhood theater, she thinks: Tonight I may be discovered! But each night nothing happens. She goes home to her lousy room in that stinking slum tenement, where her wretched old witch of a mother rails at her: “You’ll never get ahead, you smart-ass little twit! There’s no place in life for arty people!” Maybe she didn’t say “you smart-ass little twit,” I just made that part up. Quite likely, though. Or something just like it in Russian or Polish or whatever the hell the old lady was. Ethel has had to leave school and go to work. She makes seven dollars a week as a clerk in a shipping company on West Thirty-sixth Street, and gives it all to her mother. She gets two dollars back for carfare and lunches, but she walks to work and often skips lunch to save for voice and piano lessons at the Carnegie Hall Studios. At her job, left-wingers are trying to seduce her into union activities: she’s cute and has a lot of personality, she might make a good organizer. She likes the special attention they give her. She could be headed for a life of lawlessness and disorder, strikes, premature anti-fascism, a Daily Worker subscription, subversion, treason, and death in the electric chair. Or the theater could be her salvation. If she became another Clara Bow, her life and that of thousands of GIs fighting in Korea could be saved. And she doesn’t even have to become another Clara Bow — just so her dreams of success are not soured. That’s the secret: keep them hoping. But after the party at the Paramount Cafeteria, one of the older guys in the cast, some bum in his mid-forties, offers to take her home. Uh, the Lower East Side streets are dangerous, he’ll see her home safely, something like that. I didn’t know if the Paramount Cafeteria served beer or not. Probably not, anyway it was still Prohibition. I think. The guy probably had a hip flask. So he says he’ll see that she gets home safe, nothing wrong with that. The condemned brother maybe, good irony in that. Probably not, though, because that was the part played by Paul Muni in the movie — a younger guy. So maybe it’s the Chaplain, a pious man, maybe Catholic in the play, chastity vows and all that, though in fact he was probably a Jew or an atheist, most theater people are. Or maybe the Warden, keeper of law and order. Anyway, she’s grateful. She’s still feeling dreamy. Exhilarated. She’s glad to have somebody to talk to on the way home. What about? Her hopes, her fantasies. The old guy encourages her, putting an arm around her sympathetically. Like a father. She opens up her young heart to him. In response, he pushes her into a dark doorway, hauls up her skirt, tears his fly open, and tries to push his throbbing cock between her legs. She screams. No, she can’t scream, who would she scream for? Besides, uh…he’s pressing his mouth against hers. What does she do? She bites him maybe. Knees him in the nuts. Something like that. It’s a very rough scene for a little starry-eyed sixteen-year-old girl. She runs all the way home, terrified and disheveled, crying, her dreams shattered, thinking: So that’s what the theatrical life is like! She becomes a Communist instead and commits espionage.
Maybe. Maybe not. Too pat somehow. And the details were blurred. Where was the Paramount Cafeteria? And what dark doorway was it? Maybe it was her own. Under the peeling gold letters of her father’s name. I sighed, sat up, stared at all the notes and data spread around me on the office floor. It was getting late and I was floundering about in midfield, getting nowhere. Pat and the girls had no doubt wondered why I wasn’t home for supper. Should have called. Pat was probably still waiting up for me. But I couldn’t go home. Not yet. I had to complete this investigation, make sense of it somehow. Douglas’s stay of execution, coupled with the sudden rise of tensions throughout the world, had cast a whole new complexion on the case. Uncle Sam had projected me into the heart of this thing and I had to respond. Anyway, Pat would suppose I was in some emergency meeting, that was all right. Or preparing a speech. She was used to my late nights. At the time of the Hiss case, I spent as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at my office, we hardly saw each other. At such times, I deliberately refuse to take time off for relaxation or “a break,” because my experience has been that in preparing to meet a crisis, the more I work the sharper and quicker my mental reactions become. “Taking a break” is actually an escape from the tough grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance, and Pat has had to learn to live with this. Many times I’ve found that my best ideas come when I think I can’t work another minute, when I literally have to drive myself to stick at the job. Sleepless nights, to the extent the body can take them, can stimulate creative mental activity, it’s happened to me lots of times. Oh, you have to take the machine out of gear once in a while, but it’s never wise to turn the engine off and let the motor get completely cold, not when you’re on to something. I could write a goddamn manual about it.
This was why my golf game disappointed Uncle Sam so. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the game, it was the going and coming, the time lost in the clubhouse, all those empty-headed boozers clomping around in golf shoes, a whole day could get shot down. Whenever I was in the middle of a period of intense study or work, leaving the problem for a day on the golf course simply meant I had to spend most of the next day getting myself charged up again — to the point of efficiency I had reached before leaving the task in the first place. That was why I was collecting all this flab around the middle, too. I knew that was something I had to watch — Americans rarely elected fat men President. Old Taft got away with it, but that was because he went to the other extreme. But just fat and sloppy, never. As long as I was down on the floor, I decided to do a few sit-ups. After a couple, though, I felt a little giddy — hungry probably — and so stayed stretched out, my head pillowed in bomb diagrams. I had already studied these sketches, looking for hidden objects, thinking they might be some kind of puzzle pictures, but I hadn’t turned up anything. They tended to suggest sex organs, but this was natural with bomb diagrams.
I lay there, just letting my mind wander. Often I got good ideas this way. Felt good, too. I thought about the names of the principals in this case: all the colors. Strange. Green, gold, rose…which nation’s flag was that? I played with the street names, codenames, names of the lawyers, people at the edge of the drama — Perl, Sidorovich, Glassman, Urey, Condon, Slack, Golos, Bentley. I realized that the initial letters of the names of the four accused — Sobell, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, and Yakovlev — would spell SORRY were it not for the missing 0. Was there some other secret agent of the Phantom, as yet unapprehended, with this initial? Oppenheimer? Oatis? No, he was our man, we’d just got him back from the Czechs. O’Brien, the FBI man? What a fantastic idea! Bobo Olson? The OPA maybe. Always hated the OPA. My first political job. I was glad to see it liquidated six weeks ago — fulfillment of my oldest campaign pledge. Those goddamn hucksters. And that awful joke that went around when I got into politics: Dick Nixon of the OPA, maybe that one would die now. “Meet J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI…!” Obnoxious. Odious. Or how about the Orthogonians — somebody out of my old fraternity at Whittier? A Square Shooter who was a Double Dealer? It would explain why Uncle Sam had pulled me into this case. But it was hard to believe. Football players mostly, hardly the type. We did wear those big “O’s” on our sweaters, though. I remembered those symbolic suppers of beans and spaghetti we used to have. One would taste pretty good right now, and fuck the symbols. Also there was Old Nick, and Ola, and Señor Ortega, a role I had in a play once. No, I was getting pretty far off the track. Then suddenly I recalled that Justice William Douglas’s middle name was Orville. Mmm, that fit, that was probably it, all right. He’d sure set us back with that stay of his, which if nothing else was goddamn disrespectful of the wishes and wisdom of the American people. The tramp who’d reverted to type. Just as the Rosenbergs had caused the Korean War, so perhaps had Douglas enabled the Russians to crush our revolt in East Berlin. Why not?
I felt that I was close, hovering as it were (even though in fact I was flat out on my back) over the answer, not quite able to pick it out. Something about judgment. Time. My generation. My lousy drives. The city. The riddle of history, the letter O. Growing up. Balance. Motion.… I wondered if I should trace the travels of Harry Gold on a map to see if some kind of picture would emerge. Roughly, in my mind’s eye, they seemed to trace out half a cheese sandwich. I remembered that he said somewhere that the Greenglasses asked him where they could find good Jewish delicatessen in New Mexico. Or maybe Gold asked them. I realized the bomb diagrams somewhat resembled cheese blintzes. Deviled eggs. Stuffed cabbages. My stomach rumbled. I realized I should stop thinking about food.
I tried to think instead about the money, the amounts exchanged, what got done with it. Murray Chotiner taught me this rule: When you’re attacking an opponent, looking for scandal, ask first about the money. But the sums here were small and the evidence even for these was dubious. In fact, the only people with real money in this story were the Judge and Prosecutor, Attorney General, and FBI Director. The jury members were modestly but comfortably salaried, most of the witnesses were getting by, while the Rosenbergs were the poorest of the lot. Which was maybe the point: O for zero. They ran a small business that lost money, apparently donated their services to the Phantom for nothing — real fanatics. Well, I could understand Julius’s business failure: I’d gone that route myself once with frozen orange juice, and my father had entertained us all with a whole lifetime of successive failures. I could even understand their working free for the Phantom — I’d do the same for Uncle Sam, though I was glad he had never asked this of me. How could he? Money is dignity, he’s told me that himself. What I couldn’t understand, though, was the Rosenbergs staying poor. Not that poor. Not in America. They didn’t even have a car or a TV. Hell, I was earning money by the time I was eleven years old, picking beans on farms and working in my Dad’s store, pumping gas, grinding hamburger, culling rotten apples and tomatoes — Dad didn’t give me any abstract lessons in the American Way of Life, he simply turned over the vegetable shelves to me, let me fill them, keep them in order, and take the profits. I learned everything I needed to know about hard work. And its rewards. Now, even the simplest lump could pump gas or grind hamburger, so I figured Julius Rosenberg had to be faking it. Their poverty was just a cover. They no doubt had a secret bank account somewhere — Poland probably, since that country had had the brass to offer them political asylum. There were people who said Julie was throwing money around like water toward the end — I think it was the FBI who said this — he was buying clothes, photographs, eating out at expensive restaurants. I wondered if I should take Pat out to an expensive restaurant on our anniversary. There was a good Mexican place on Connecticut I’d heard about. At one time, I’d been eager to take up Mexican food, because I had so many California constituents who ate the goddamn stuff, and I knew it was something you had to get in practice for. Pat would probably want to eat fish down by the river. Where all the mosquitoes were, very romantic. I’d settle, as always, for a good well-done hamburger. And a pineapple malted. Or even a dish of cottage cheese. I eat a lot of cottage cheese, I can eat it until it runs out my ears. And one thing I do that makes it not too bad is put ketchup on it. I learned it from my grandmother.
My stomach growled. I loosened my belt a notch, belched emptily, ate an antacid. I’ve been at this too long, I thought. If I wasn’t careful, I’d make myself sick again. How did other people get where they were without having to work like this? Since the moment I’d got in off the course Sunday, I’d been going at it. I hadn’t even paused to take a shower in the clubhouse (of course, I rarely shower in public places any more — I agree with Ulysses Grant about that, I don’t think it’s wise to let people see what any Incarnation of Uncle Sam looks like without his clothes on — or even in his shorts or pajamas; I just couldn’t understand Eisenhower making his valets help him on with his underpants every morning, it seemed like some kind of unnecessary strategic risk), I’d rushed straight back here and headlong into a full-scale exhaustive study of the Rosenberg case, the trial, the background, personal histories and peripheral issues, appeals, the impact on world affairs, everything. This is my way with every project, scholastic, political, athletic, or romantic: I talk for hours with every person I can find, spend every spare moment studying reports and recommendations, gather up and try to absorb every known bit of information, make hundreds of calls, read whatever philosophy or political science or history I need to accomplish the task. “Iron Butt,” they called me in law school. There was always a tradition of hard work in my family, especially on my mother’s side, the Quaker side. And it always paid off.
I assumed it would pay off now, though I still wasn’t sure just what that payoff was going to be. Of course, I could only think of one thing these days, and that seemed a long ways off, but I knew how important it was to keep your eyes open at all times, miss nothing — one moment of carelessness or distraction, and you could stumble and fall from sight forever. Like that fund they set up for me in California, I hardly thought about it at the time, and I nearly got erased by it. The least detail could make or break you. Or maybe I was making too much of this thing. Maybe it was nothing more than just an exemplary entertainment of sorts. Who could tell what was on Uncle Sam’s mind? Certainly it was very theatrical. There was the drama of a brother sending his big sister to the electric chair; the implied tragedy of the Rosenberg children who would be left orphans; the curious spectacle of Jews prosecuting and judging Jews, then accusing each other of tribal disloyalties; an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution’s presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil…and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody in this case from the Judge on down — indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government, myself included — behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama, speaking in their letters of sinister “plots” and worldwide “themes” and “setting the stage” and playing the parts they had been — rightly or wrongly — cast for “with honor and with dignity.”
And that was another thing: not just the Rosenbergs, but almost everybody involved in this case was about the same age—my age! Judge Kaufman, for example, who in many ways had emerged as the real star and hero of this thing — he must have been going through his own fortieth-birthday crisis at the time of the trial two years ago. The Boy Judge: I had to admire him. I’d always thought of myself as a fast starter — I’ve been “the youngest ever” to do a lot of things in my life — but even I was no match for Irving Kaufman. He’d entered Fordham when he was only sixteen, had graduated so young from law school he wasn’t even eligible to take the bar exam, and while I was still dusting Tom Bewley’s office library back in Whittier and working on drunk cases, divorces, and traffic shit, he’d already been fighting the big ones, right in the heart of New York City, for over five years! He’d become an assistant D.A., helping gangbuster Tom Dewey and winning fame as the “Boy Prosecutor”—the Roy Cohn of his day. No wonder they got on so well. I hardly thought of national politics until I got asked to run for office in 1946, but Kaufman had already been called in personally by F.D.R. to help choose a federal judge way back in 1939 (fourteen years ago!), and by the time I’d got to Washington as “the Greenest Congressman in Town,” he was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Tom Clark, on a first-name basis with Edgar Hoover, and getting big write-ups in all the newspapers. When Harry Truman made him a federal judge in 1949, he was only thirty-nine years old, the youngest in America. And now he was being touted for the U.S. Supreme Court. His friend Tom Clark, Truman’s old hatchet man, was already sitting there, no doubt promoting his cause. Well, if I was ever in a position to nominate and he hadn’t made it yet, provided the Jewish seat was open, he’d be a likely candidate. I’d have to get over the resentment I sometimes felt at the fact that while I was fighting seasickness and mosquitoes in the South Pacific, Kaufman was sitting out the war in a private law practice, pulling down $100,000 a year with well-heeled clients like Milton Berle, but I figured if I ever became the true Incarnation, all such feelings would drop away like Clark Kent’s spectacles. Certainly he was my kind of judge — and a popular choice with the opposition at the same time: Pope Kaufman, the All-American Christian Orthodox Jew, a Tammany Hall Democrat whose law partner was a prominent Republican leader, hard as nails and heart of gold, “radical one day,” as the New York Post said of him in a headline story, “reactionary the next,” a natural. This judicious balance: it was his special genius. He could appear both strict and generous, scholarly and worldly, intense and serene, innovative and traditional. He’d even produced a set of twin sons. And smoked exactly two cigars a day.
In the Rosenberg trial, this talent helped him make all the right motions with regard to due process and fair play, while in fact keeping tight control over the development of the case. Whenever Irv Saypol seemed in danger of floundering, Kaufman would pop a telling question at the witness and get the Prosecutor back on the track, but he coolly kept his peace when Bloch was making all the obvious blunders on the other side. Whenever Bloch did get onto something at last and begin to peak, the Judge would deflate him with a blunt, sometimes even derisive, interruption, and Bloch would have to start all over. He knew how to heighten a prosecution moment with a brief recess, how even as a Jew to bring the Spirit of Easter into the courtroom, and how to reduce a rebellious defense attorney to abject silence: “Don’t give me any course of instruction as to what is usually done in a courtroom! This is the way I am running this courtroom, and I think I understand the way a courtroom should be run! I don’t care to hear anything further from you!” Then there was that day when the Rosenbergs were taking the Fifth on the Communist issue. They were looking bad enough without any help, but upstairs in the same building gangsters like Joe Adonis and Frank Costello were also taking the Fifth before the Kefauver crime-investigation committee, and Kaufman evidently couldn’t resist. He interrupted the interrogation, cleared the court, asked the jury to stay, and invited down that old New Hampshire windbag, Senator Tobey. “I’m very glad to be here and meet you,” Tobey said to all of them as Kaufman scrambled down off the bench to greet him. “We could use people like you upstairs.” Who could miss the connection? Another time, when Saypol ran into trouble on a query from Bloch about possible wiretapping, it was Kaufman who got him out of it—“It is ridiculous!”—even managing at the same time to remind the jury that whatever the United States Attorney said must, de fide, be true, and obscuring the fact that the question was never really answered (of course Bloch was probably right about the wiretap, but nobody wanted this fundamental case to be obscured by a technicality, maybe not even Bloch — besides, Kaufman liked wiretaps: thirteen years before, he’d been the first prosecuting attorney in the district ever to use one in a federal case; he’d played it on a small portable phonograph, creating a big stir in the courtroom, even the defendants had crowded around to see how it worked). He was like the director of a play who knows how to boost his actors’ egos and give them a sense of participation in the staging and interpretation, while in fact pulling all the strings — a fantastically smooth performance, Bloch himself had to applaud it at the end.
Applause, director, actors, script: yes, it was like — and this thought hit me now like a revelation—it was like a little morality play for our generation! During the Hiss case, I had felt like a brash kid among seasoned professionals; now my own generation was coming into its own — and this was (that lecture at Burning Tree was making sense to me at last) our initiation drama, our gateway into History! Or part of it anyway, for the plot was still unfolding. In the larger drama, of which the Rosenberg episode was a single act, I was a principal actor — if not, before the play is ended, the principal actor — but within this scene alone, I was more like a kind of stage manager, an assistant director or producer, a presence more felt than seen. This was true even of the trial itself: I felt somehow the author of it — not of the words so much, for these were, in a sense, improvisations, but rather of the style of the performances, as though I had through my own public appearances created the audience expectations, set the standards, keyed the rhetoric, crystallized the roles, in order that my generation might witness in dramatic form the fundamental controversy of our time!
Of course, I knew it was foolish to place too much weight on a court record, even as didactic theater, Uncle Sam had already warned me about that. What’s missing in the record is the atmosphere of the courtroom: the expressions on faces, gestures, inflections, betrayed emotions — in short, what are elsewhere called acting values. But it could equally well be argued that the court record, like a baseball box score, was even more reliable than the actual trial: some people were better actors than others, and the emotions of a courtroom could often get jurors into such a state they couldn’t even hear what was being said. Practiced liars could overwhelm the hardest evidence against them, turn it to their own credit, and reduce a whole courtroom to tears, while simpler folk, accustomed to telling what they thought of as the truth, could get caught in a small exaggeration or personal embarrassment and become so flustered that everything they said afterwards sounded false. Some attorneys blew their best material right at the outset like a premature ejaculation, saving nothing back with which to bring the jury to climax just before they retired for a decision, and so finding themselves getting beaten by an opponent with nothing but nonsense, innuendos, and a superior sense of dramaturgy. Class identifications or hostilities could evoke juror responses completely unrelated to the testimony, well-timed comedy could provoke gratitude or ill-timed comedy shock, and evidence suddenly produced by surprise could obscure the fact, later obvious, that it was worthless. The point of Night of January 16th, for example, that Ayn Rand play I was in back in Whittier, was that there was no final conclusion to be drawn, no “right” or “wrong” judgment, the evidence was ambiguous, the testimony contradictory, and each night a jury selected from the audience was invited to render its own verdict. Depending on our various performances, the verdict changed from show to show. I played the part of the District Attorney and prided myself on winning more nights than I lost — one of my most successful roles actually: I was a natural as a prosecutor, could have made a Tom Dewey career out of it. But I would have taken just as much pride in winning for the defense.
The genius of Irving Saypol — himself just forty-five then — was how well he understood all this and used it in the Rosenberg trial. He even stole one of my lines from the play: “I am not going to appeal to your ‘souls,’ or to those ‘deep secret chords of your hearts’—but to your reason alone!” He himself had said somewhere: “A well-turned case is just like a stage play really,” meaning by that not merely that convictions depend upon dramatic entertainment, but that justice is entertainment. His own performance as Prosecuting Attorney was inspired, his backstage manipulations imaginative and exhaustive. With the help of a cooperative and close-mouthed FBI, he had produced a brilliant working script and then had rehearsed his principal witnesses for weeks — he’d even lodged Harry Gold and David Greenglass together up on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison (the “singing quarters”) for several months so that they could perfect their interlocking testimony — while at the same time, he’d seen to it that the defendants were kept too disturbed even to think properly, disrupting their family life, isolating them from each other and driving them to despair over fears for their two kids, depriving them of their freedom and personal dignity, not to mention an ordinary sex life, terrorizing them with ominous rumors, exposing them to vitriolic press and radio campaigns, dividing their own families against them, keeping them ignorant of his own strategy while maintaining tabs on theirs by intercepting their communications and planting FBI informers in the cells near Julie, holding back from them the vast amount of back-up support and research he was getting from the FBI and other government agencies, forcing them to rely entirely on their own limited resources, knowing that no one would come to their aid since to do so could implicate that person in the “conspiracy.” Saypol had even managed to arrange a complete dress rehearsal — sort of like trying the show out in New Haven — in the thematically similar, though less serious, Brothman-Moskowitz trial four months earlier, in which virtually the entire cast — including the Judge and excepting only the accused — was the same. Thus, the Rosenbergs and their lawyers were the only ones not rehearsed, and were in effect having to attempt amateur improvisation theater in the midst of a carefully rehearsed professional drama. Naturally they looked clumsy and unsure of themselves…and so, a bit like uneasy liars.
Saypol was terrific in the courtroom, too: shrewd, thorough, quick on his feet, cold-blooded, and powerful enough in his hushed no-messing-around way to make what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth — at least long enough to wrest a guilty verdict from an impressed jury. True, he accomplished this more with adjectives and style than with verbs and substance, but, given the difficulties, this was all the more to his credit. Knowing he’d have a group of middle-class jurors (most of them were accountants and professed anti-Communists — and here again, in jury selection, Saypol had done his homework, having complete access to police and FBI dossiers withheld from the Rosenberg team), he saw to it that all his witnesses were properly dressed and carefully schooled in witness-box mannerisms, so as to create the undercurrents of awe, rapport, sympathy, or believability he wanted, and he himself stood tall and stern, like Lou Gehrig or Randolph Scott, speaking softly but wielding a stick as big as Uncle Sam’s forearm. Poor old Manny Bloch, contrarily — stocky, stoop-shouldered, and baggy-eyed — looked a little sinister and out at the elbows, and his clients behaved strangely — shrill, pompous, abject, seedy, emotionally unstable — for this jurybox of middle Americans, so like my own constituents. I knew the way Saypol’s mind was running: with this jury, dowdiness was guilt.
Bloch treated him deferentially and sometimes fawned on him, conceding he might be right on this or that minor point, or accepting his word and thanking him for his “courtesies,” obviously angling for Saypol’s pity and sense of fair play, but there was no reciprocal gesture from Saypol. He just accepted the compliments as though deserving them and lashed back, never giving an inch. A natural killer. As he himself once said: “As a prosecutor in a criminal case, one in my position has armament like an iceberg.” Every word was calculated to further the impression that the defendants were tampering with or dodging the truth, and that even their lawyers were embarrassed at having to defend them — a one-track mind, that track leading straight to the electric chair, which Saypol firmly believed in. And those you couldn’t eliminate, teach: “I’ve often wondered,” he has said, “whether the whipping lash wouldn’t be a greater deterrent than what we have now.” Mr. District Attorney. According to Roy Cohn, Saypol loved to play cop, interrogating suspects himself, investigating them — he even carried a gun around in his back pocket like Sam Spade.
Nevertheless, tough as he was, I could have whipped his ass from Foley Square to Jenkins Hill and back again, could have beat the rap for the Rosenbergs — though of course this would have been a miscarriage of justice. Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, was a dunce, a pushover — in fact, he played so naively into Saypol’s hands at times that I suspected Uncle Sam must have had something to do with frazzling his mind somehow. Giving him bad dreams so he didn’t sleep well or something. He buckled under to the Judge, overpraised the Prosecutor, joined the chorus of admiration for the FBI — who were, though he never seemed to grasp this, his real opponents in this trial: in the final analysis, it was their word against his, and it was his job to destroy their credibility. But this never even occurred to him. He just didn’t know what the game was all about. He neglected to bring in friendly witnesses and refused to cross-examine key government witnesses, bungled the Fifth Amendment procedures, seemed not to hear half of what got said. Nor did he challenge any of the physical exhibits, a lot of which were very dubious looking and should have been exposed to public scrutiny — hell, the FBI has a special section which does nothing but produce fake documents, they have to do this, it’s a routine part of police work, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed doing if they’d given me that job I asked for when I left Duke — and much of the stuff that Saypol offered up looked like it might well have come from that factory. Of course, what choice did Saypol have? The real evidence was in Russia. You had to credit his ingenuity. Just as you had to fault the defense for chickening out under pressure.
Bloch’s crosses were hardly likely to get him into the Hall of Fame either. He failed to ask who if anybody helped Greenglass prepare those new sketches, presumably copies of the originals, for the trial, even leapt up and urged the impounding of the goddamn things in a phony act of patriotic grandstanding that fooled nobody, stamped the drawings as the real McCoy, and drew an awful lot of excitement to the testimony of Greenglass which followed. He neglected to probe into Greenglass’s complicated finances, failed to follow up when Greenglass talked spookily of “memories and voices in my mind.” He did not demand to know the details of the prosecution’s careful rehearsal of David, Ruth, Harry Gold, and the others during the six months preceding. In short, he lacked a win complex. I believe you have to stay on the offensive, wait for windfalls, get what dope you can on your adversary, and then blast him, whether in a courtroom, an election campaign, or a summit meeting. Saypol had built a house of cards and Bloch just didn’t blow. “Every man sitting over here is an honest man,” Bloch said in his summing-up: “The FBI representatives, Mr. Saypol and his staff, every man of them, they are doing their duty.” Saypol must have had a hard time just to keep from laughing.
Bloch’s most astounding blunder was to refuse to cross-examine Harry Gold. Gold was the alleged courier-link between Fuchs, Rosenberg, and Greenglass, and if he was lying — or if the jury could be made to think so — then Bloch and the Rosenbergs had it made. Gold, like most spies, even our own boys over in the CIA unfortunately, was an incorrigible fantasist, who in the course of his operations had invented a wife, twin children, an apartment, a house purchase, a polio attack on one of the children, a separation, his brother’s death, and even a fictitious list of “contacts” which he gave the Russians, sharing intimate moments from this fantasy life with friends and associates, acting it out for the world in all its bizarre detail, while in fact living at home all the time with his mother, at least until she died. His wife’s name in this saga was Sarah O’Ken, a former gun moll of an underworld villain named Nigger Nate; he said he’d met her while courting another girl with one blue eye and one brown eye (his mother had such a pair). John Hamilton, who had once been our National Committee Chairman and who somehow got Gold as a client, told me he sometimes wondered if Gold was even a spy, maybe he was making the whole thing up; he had all the apparatus, all right, but it was all down in his basement, even the stuff he was supposed to have given the Russians, boxes of it, like the raw materials of some novel. He told me Gold was something of a self-destructer, too, a man with no sense of his own being, and as a boy — probably now in prison, still — he played these weird baseball games with decks of cards, inventing a whole league of eight teams with all their players, playing out full seasons, keeping all the box scores and statistics, even taking note of what they looked like! It’s a wonder one of his ace pitchers didn’t turn up in the trial testimony as a contact or something. Maybe one did. And vice versa.
He was apparently fascinating to watch on the witness stand, a man so used to living in make-believe worlds under one cover or another he couldn’t remember rightly the real one any more, yet outwardly very calm and convincing, with an ingenious sense of detail — a man at home within the artifice of a courtroom trial. Maybe Bloch was afraid to probe such talent, no telling what he might come up with. That smug self-confidence reminded me in some ways of Alger Hiss, except that Gold was both creepier and humbler than Hiss and could spin it off with less self-consciousness. He had a round face with a sharp nose and big dark eyes, wore a pinstripe suit with enormous lapels and fat bright ties — he looked like a silent-film comedian doing an imitation of Roy Cohn. Outpost Harry. Must have seemed like a gift from the goddamn gods to the FBI, and maybe that was the best way to think of it. He was the man who supposedly turned up in Albuquerque one day with half a card from the back of a Jell-O box that matched a half that Julius Rosenberg had given David Greenglass, told David “I come from Julius,” and then exchanged some money for some atomic-bomb sketches and other material. Thus, he was the master link that brought it all together, made a “spy ring” out of it. Hamilton told me that in his early conferences with Gold, he’d apparently forgotten all of this, but once he’d had a couple of weeks with the FBI agents, it all “came back” to him. That “I come from Julius,” for example, maybe the key piece of corroborative testimony: at first glance it was very damaging. But in fact, if true, it was strong evidence that Rosenberg was not involved, since these intelligence agents always use made-up names, not real ones, especially in recognition signals. Moreover, Greenglass had felt obliged, after the exchange of money and data, to give Gold Julius Rosenberg’s name and phone number as a way of getting in touch when David was in New York on furlough, so in any case both of them must have assumed Gold was referring to some other Julius. Fuchs, for example: one of his middle names was Julius. So for that matter was Herb Brownell’s. Hamilton didn’t even think this was the real signal used. He said that in his first conversations with Gold there’d been no mention of these signals at all — in fact, no mention of Greenglass or A-bomb sketches either — all this had come later after Gold had had several helpful sessions with the FBI. But even after Gold had begun to “remember” Greenglass, there had still been no Jell-O box and no Julius, just “something on the order of Bob sent me or Benny sent me or John sent me or something like that.”
Admittedly, Bloch didn’t know then what I knew now — and thank God for that, I suppose, God and John Hamilton, who kept his mouth shut — but how the hell are you going to find out if you don’t ask? Bloch had surely read the transcript of the earlier Brothman-Moskowitz rehearsal when Gold had spun off that fantasy-family routine — with that alone I could have split that screwed-up schizoid in two, right slap through the void in his middle. He could’ve walked out of the courtroom afterwards through two separate doors. And one thing about a witness with a penchant for all those cute little supplementary details: keep egging him on and he’ll invent one too many, ask any of those famous inspectors from the classic murder cases of literature. Or take that baseball game played with a deck of cards, I can just imagine what I might have done with that one…
DEFENSE: Say, by the way, this fella “John,” you know, your Russian contact — an older fella. I gather, tall and sort of blond…
GOLD: No, he was about five feet nine inches in height, had a medium build, which tended toward the slender, and he was about twenty-eight or thirty years old…
DEFENSE: I see. But blond and—
GOLD: No, he had dark or dark brown hair and there was a lock of it that kept falling over his forehead, which he would brush back continually…
DEFENSE: Tried to keep it stuffed under his cap, I suppose…
GOLD: Yes, and he had a rather long nose and fair complexion, dark eyes. He walked with somewhat of a stoop…
DEFENSE: Like a catcher, you mean. Or a rightfielder…
GOLD: NO, first base was his position actually…
DEFENSE: Not too tall, but agile…
GOLD: Yes, he had a good reach, and…uh…ah…
DEFENSE: I see. Tell me, Harry, what…uh, what team did John play for?
GOLD: (A slight twitch in the left side of his face. His fingers flutter as though shuffling cards, as his eyes glance to and fro uneasily, DEFENSE smiles at the PROSECUTOR.)
Like taking candy from a baby. Which makes one wonder why Gold caused Bloch such distress. He seemed very eager not to hear more. It may have been simply that Rosenberg didn’t want anyone else to get implicated, and just couldn’t trust a fabulator like Gold. Gold had said little so far that touched Julius, had admitted he didn’t know him at all, but if you kept him talking, who knew what friends or relatives might get dragged in? And maybe Julius knew damned well who Gold was and what he might say. According to Edgar’s secret files, Gold, under prompting, had begun to “remember” passing Julius on a street corner in Jackson Heights during an aborted “contact” with an unknown agent back in 1950, Julius suited up in the style of his newspaper photos, scowling and wallowing a cigar like Groucho Marx. A preposterous tale, but who could say? More than once what looked like a complete Gold fantasy had resulted in arrests and confessions, almost as though he were dreaming the world into being. Maybe he was the real playwright here. And maybe the Rosenbergs quite reasonably feared some irrevocable casting. Whatever, the net effect was terribly damaging to them.
Most of Bloch’s blunders, in fact, implied that he was running scared, that a wrong move could sink them all — implied in short that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. As no doubt they were. You only had to look at them. Like Uncle Sam said: They reeked with guilt. Their arrogance, their clumsy lying, their hiding behind the Fifth Amendment, those obvious Communist links they wouldn’t admit to, their obsequiousness, their phony complaints about bad health, their frequent failure to “recall” simple facts, all the political grandstanding — from considerable experience in observing witnesses on the stand, I had learned that those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake—they tend to overact, to overstate their case. Even the way they took the Fifth was different from the way an innocent man might take it on principle. Like Alger Hiss, they’d hung themselves with their transparent deceitfulness, their pompous denials, their pretensions of injured innocence.
Part of what seemed to give the lie to their testimony, of course, was the phony role they’d cast themselves in: the ordinary middle-class American couple, romantic and hardworking, loving parents, being framed by a deceitful and unnatural brother, backed by a monstrous State bureaucracy, victimized by some ghastly error. Julius wore a business suit. He carefully obeyed every rule. He had never broken a law, though he’d once been fired from an Army job as a suspected Red. Ethel pursed her lips and wore a cloth coat like Pat. Their children had neat haircuts and scrubbed faces. Julius kept his chin up. Ethel smiled at the witnesses. They said they loved their mixed-up brother. They were shocked at Saypol’s indecorous puns. They held hands and kissed each other through wire mesh. “All our lives,” wrote Ethel for international publication, “we lived decent, constructive lives…” They had probably moved automatically, even gratefully, into these middle-class clichés after their arrests — I understood well the solace and protection you could find in them — but they wore them awkwardly. Julius moved like a whey-faced automaton in his stiff blue suit. The jurors called Ethel’s courtroom composure “steely” and “stony.” They had the wrong kind of friends, which didn’t help, noisy old left-wingers from college days whom they’d stayed loyal to — they just couldn’t play the bourgeois act straight, knowing those friends would be tuning in, watching for betrayals, contemptuous of anything less than heroics. Every time Julius said “sir,” you suspected him of satire. They were very impressive in their open willingness to put themselves in the witness box and in their bold denial of all charges, but their taking of the Fifth on ideological questions undid all that and suggested continuing Party orthodoxy, while deep in their voices like an indelible stain ran irrepressible un-American accents, the sour babble of steerage passengers and backpack peddlers, scarcely concealed, the pedantic precision of bright children whose parents don’t speak proper English. The electorate, needless to say, were not fooled.
But then who were the real Rosenbergs behind their role-playing? Probably never know. FBI reports had hinted at a taste for pornography and histrionics. Their apartment was cluttered with cheap junk, and they hung out with friends who lived pretty unconventional lives. People Pat and I wouldn’t even know how to talk to. They seemed to live without any structure, without any roots, yet they never went anywhere. I’d grown up across the river from the Mexican ghetto of Jim Town, so I knew what one looked like, but I couldn’t imagine living in a ghetto. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t just move out and go somewhere else. Lack of imagination or something. Terrible life there, they both got pushed around a lot. Ethel, just sixteen, had gone to apply for a job and had got knocked down by police fire hoses. Her ghetto past had haunted her, frustrated her theatrical career, just as I’d been frustrated in my hopes for a New York City law career by my small-town California past, only I didn’t let it embitter me. Julie had taken a lot of punishment, too, and seen worse. He’d become a left-winger in college, but ghetto Jews were supposed to be left-wingers at a time when most right-wingers were Jew-baiters, so in a way he was being just as conventional as I was back at Whittier College. He’d seen young Bundist toughs beating up bearded old Jews playing chess in Seward Park, Negroes shot in race killings. He’d got stopped one night near Union Square by two brownshirts who’d asked him what CCNY meant. “City College of New York,” he’d told them. “Naw!” they’d laughed, shoving him off the sidewalk: “It means Christian College Now Yiddish!” And then, one thing had led to another. They’d stayed loyal to the left-wing friends who’d admired them — their constituency, as it were — and the next thing they’d known, there was a war on, the Communists were amazingly our allies, Julius was working for the Army and Ethel had a brother out on the A-bomb project, other engineering friends were similarly dispersed — so suppose the request came through: how could they say no? Get out of the overt activities of college days and withdraw to the very center of the heresy that excited them: why not? After all, I’d become Vice President of the United States of America by a chain of circumstances not all that different, one thing drifting into the next, carried along by a desire, much like theirs, to reach the heart of things, to participate deeply in life.
Maybe Julius, like me, had somehow gotten this quality from his mother. Sophie had come to the United States at the age of fourteen, had worked eleven hours a day, six days a week, for eight dollars a week, and had somehow saved enough out of that to bring her own mother and four brothers over from Poland, then had wed Harry Rosenberg, a fellow worker, at age eighteen. They’d been flamboyant, romantic, in love with the old Polish culture, but terribly poor, living on the top floor of a five-story tenement on Broome Street where the roof leaked and in winter icicles hung from the ceiling and windows. Like my own father, Harry Rosenberg had tried to keep a store going, a dry-cleaning business, but had failed, fallen into abject poverty, and then, through hard work and tenacity, had fought his way back through bread lines and soup kitchens, had finally reached the point where he could afford for his family an apartment with steam heat. Like something out of a Horatio Alger story, except that Harry was a socialist. Phantom-seed brought from the Old World like lice in an old hat brim. Also, Judaism was not the prevailing faith of the Alger heroes, but in this regard one couldn’t help but admire the Rosenbergs’ orthodoxy and commitment. Little Julius had been very serious about his religion as a boy — we shared this — and moreover he’d been a strict fundamentalist. At the synagogue, they’d called him “Jonah,” and he’d been elected vice president of the Young Men’s Synagogue Organization. Like me, at Christian Endeavor. He had led lessons and had even considered becoming a rabbi, just as my mother had always thought I might become a Quaker missionary. He was younger than me, about the age of my baby brother, Arthur, who’d died when I was twelve. Julius was a sickly boy with bad eyesight, given to allergies, sudden illnesses — he’d nearly died of a ruptured appendix when he was ten, just a year or so before my bad attack of undulant fever, and he’d suffered from asthma and other psychosomatic problems. Kept him out of World War II and set him up for his spying mission — he became an inspector of electronics products manufactured by private industry for the Army Signal Corps — but his draft deferment pissed me off: didn’t he care about all those poor fellow Jews in Germany? Whose war was this anyway? A lot of things he’d said at the trial and in letters had disgusted me, but one of the worst was when he got Reveille mixed up with Taps. Of course, I suffered from hay fever myself, but my problem was strictly physical, and I joined the Navy anyway. His problem was, he was sick. Probably started when he was a little boy and his mother had to go with him to the bathroom at night to hold a lighted candle — it was down an unlit corridor, and he was afraid of the dark. A stinking place used by everybody on the floor. Rats rustling behind the walls, drunks sprawled in the hallways. Maybe one of them asleep on the toilet right now. Or holding a knife. Back in the night of my parents’ bedroom, I could hear my father calling me a baby. I was afraid that when I stepped through the door I’d fall down a deep hole. Mother was angry and told me to hurry. Tallow dripped into the stool. It was clogged up. Stuff seemed to be moving down there. I couldn’t get started. I thought I could hear my dead brother crying behind the walls….
I reared up with a start. Where was I? I glanced about: the office was empty. Just the documents scattered about. Ah yes, the Rosenbergs…. I gazed blearily at all the litter, wondering what Pat might have back home in the icebox. What a mess. What if somebody came in here and saw me like this? I thought. At least I should sit up straight, be seen to be thinking, concentrating. The Spartan look. But I was too tired. My back was stiff and my butt hurt. I wondered if I’d got blisters from sitting too long. Or boils — didn’t that happen to somebody famous? My old butt ain’t so ironic as it used to be, I mused to myself as I got to my feet and staggered off to take a piss. I grinned at this and said it out loud: “My old butt’s not as ironic as it, uh, used to be…” It didn’t sound as funny out loud. Like Saypol’s puns at the trial: “Did you say ‘a Russian business’ or ‘rushing business’?” Even Bloch pretended to enjoy that one, and Judge Kaufman said: “Try to restrain your desire to be another Milton Berle.” Which might sound like a scolding, but which in fact was a gentle compliment, drawing an affectionate link between himself, the comic, and Saypol, and serving in its embracing humor to unite Judge, jurors, lawyers, spectators, the outside world — indeed everyone except the two outcast defendants, suddenly more isolated than ever — while at the same time subtly providing a bit of promotion on the side for Uncle Miltie, one of Kaufman’s former clients and oldest friends, setting him up as the very paradigm of American wit and humor.
I checked the refrigerator again. For the fortieth time. Nothing there but an empty cigar box, empty cottage cheese carton, half a bottle of ketchup, and a tin of maple syrup, almost empty. I uncapped the syrup, tipped it up — it took forever draining down, and then all I got from it was a long stale lick. I threw the can in a wastebasket, did a few deep knee-bends, trying to stir the dead cells, get alert enough to bring this thing to a close, make conclusions, clean it up. Late. Very quiet. Spooky in fact. I could hear voices very far away, chanting. I knew the National Gallery Orchestra was performing some new work celebrating the Old South this week, but it didn’t sound like “All Quiet Alone the Potomac Tonight.” Too late for that anyway. The demonstrators probably. They’d been infiltrating the Capital all week. Clemency vigils tonight at the Odd Fellows Hall. Could be dangerous out there. I should get home and get to bed. Cabinet meeting tomorrow morning early. But in fact, to tell the truth, I liked staying up all night. Got in the habit back in high school when I had the bell tower to go to. I was always more efficient at night, something about the pressure in the air, and I liked the dark down around me. So did Kaufman, apparently. He liked to brag he slept only ninety minutes a night during times of stress. And visited the synagogue several times a day. For meditative catnaps probably. I yawned.
Jesus! I realized I was stretched out again, this time on the leather couch. I scolded myself angrily, did three fast sit-ups there on the cushions, then sprang to my feet and resumed my pacing, throwing short shadow punches like Rocky Marciano. Unff! Unff! All right, wrap it up, I said to myself. Something’s bugging you, what is it? Something about the linkages. If you walked forward through all this data, like the journalists, like the FBI invited everybody to do, the story was cohesive and seemed as simple and true as an epigram. The Soviets tested an A-bomb in 1949, sudden proof they’d stolen the secret from us. The nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, arrested in England by Scotland Yard, verified the theft and led the FBI to his courier Harry Gold, who confessed that his Russian contact was Anatoli Yakovlev. Yakovlev had sailed away to Russia with his wife, two kids, and all relevant secrets aboard the S.S. America some time earlier. Journalists tended to find the name of the ship deeply ironic. Gold also put the finger on David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos and former Communist, and Greenglass in turn, his wife Ruth collaborating, turned state’s evidence against his sister Ethel and Ethel’s husband Julius Rosenberg, also ex-Commies. Or maybe not ex. Other witnesses substantiated this charge and widened the ring to include Morton Sobell, who had fled to Mexico, but who with the help of Mexican police had been “returned” to the U.S. and captured. There were no doubt others — the Rosenbergs and Sobell seemed like small-time operators at best — but so far none of these three had said who the people behind them were. Or, if Hoover was right and Rosenberg was the Master Spy, who the others in his ring were. Which was why maximum pressure was being applied, although in fact the FBI already had plenty of evidence on other members of the conspiracy. They said.
Okay. So far so good. The Crime of the Century, by J. Edgar Hoover. But working backwards, like a lawyer, the narrative came unraveled. All that the minor witnesses really substantiated was (1) that people were indeed spying for the Russians in this country, as everybody knew, and (2) that Julius Rosenberg was a left-winger, probably a Communist or at least a sympathizer. But no links between (1) and (2), no hard evidence that the Rosenbergs themselves were spies. The principal evidence against Sobell was his wild flight to Mexico. This was pretty peculiar, all right, but who knew what he was actually fleeing from? He’d been a Communist, after all, and that by itself was a federal crime. The FBI had not been able to connect him in any way to the theft of the bomb secrets, only to a ring of City College classmates with unhealthy opinions, including Rosenberg. So forget Sobell. Yakovlev had been out of the country for years and wasn’t apt to come back to the U.S. to deny the FBI charges, and as for Harry Gold, not only was he a notorious fantasist, but his testimony in any case had nothing to do with the Rosenbergs, only the Greenglasses. Moreover, though I got the impression from the files that Gold seemed to know Yakovlev all right, this FBI legend of Fuchs leading them to Gold and Gold to Greenglass just didn’t hold up. Gold had hardly begun to speak vaguely of some “unknown individual in Albuquerque” but what the FBI had Greenglass under questioning. Where did they find him? The files didn’t say. But they did show that as soon as Gold — with FBI assistance—“remembered” this contact, the FBI showed him a list of twenty possible names and David’s was already on it. And prior to that, the FBI had descended on Gold long before getting any help at all from Fuchs. In fact, Fuchs had told them time and again that Gold was not his courier, in spite of Harry’s signed confession. But the agents working on him in England were very persistent fellows, and Fuchs may well have gone along with them finally just to get them off his back. So, if anything, it was Greenglass to Gold to Fuchs.
What about the Greenglasses, then? Without their testimony the government had almost nothing left: a few suspect associations, meetings, uncorroborated assertions, the open sesame of “I come from Julius,” patently fabricated by the prosecution, a sackful of photo equipment, and the solemn word of the FBI that they knew what they were doing. And maybe they did. Certainly the Greenglass confessions seemed real enough, especially since they involved a brother sending his own sister to her death and himself to the penitentiary, but it was a bit odd that the night the FBI first picked him up for a preliminary interview, David laughingly told them everything. Almost as though it had been rehearsed. All except any references to his sister Eth, who he insisted from the beginning had nothing to do with it. Nailing Julius, though, seemed to please him. By the time of the trial, he had stopped laughing, but he was still grinning. It made him look like Joe McCarthy. His trial testimony, like Ruth’s, was smooth and polished — too polished. They seemed to remember odd facts too readily, facts all too similar in type to those used successfully by the Saypol team and approved by Kaufman in the earlier warm-up Brothman-Moskowitz trial. And there was too much that never got said, too much information concealed that might have muddied the argument, too much hanging over the Greenglasses’ heads. Not just the thefts either, maybe the FBI was really ignorant of that, but espionage, Communism, and possible perjury as well: their letters through the war showed them to be committed Party zealots, enthusiastically working for a “socialist America” and “raising the Red flag,” Ruth helping to organize New York City units, David proselytizing among his fellow soldiers — they even called each other “comrade” and signed their letters “with all the love of Marx and the humanity of Lenin”! Yet the very openness of these letters seemed to militate against any subplot beneath the text, about the only hint of anything out of the ordinary being David’s remark in a 1944 letter from Santa Fe that by 1948 “we should have made our contributions to the world, at least one such contribution.” Which could mean just about anything.
Then would they just jump into wild charges of atomic spying all by themselves? No, but it could have been the other way around. Maybe the FBI had told David that they already had the goods on Ethel and Julius, knew a lot of things in fact that even David didn’t know, they only wanted him and Ruth to “confirm” certain things — the FBI often worked this way, and the Greenglasses were easy marks. And maybe the FBI did know about the uranium theft and used that to scare him into “cooperating.” After all, the FBI had to win this one — their whole reputation depended on it, as well as their budget and a lot of jobs. Including Hoover’s: the Democrats had been out to get him for years, and what better opportunity than to be able to turn the “soft on Communism” charge back on the old Master Red-Baiter himself? The British had made a chump out of him with their arrest of Fuchs, now he had to top them to save his neck, and with no other big guns in sight, only a vast network would make it for him. And if some links were lost, maybe others would have to be forged. Or David might simply have been guilty as hell, and jumped at the chance to save his own skin and Ruth’s. Certainly, given the apparent commitment of their wartime correspondence, there was something very hard and cynical about their sudden “conversion.” Weirdly, it was only by chance that David got sent to Los Alamos in the first place — another guy in his unit was assigned to go there but went AWOL, and David was his last-minute replacement. Who was that AWOL soldier, and did he know what, in effect, he’d done? But for one moment of an unknown GI’s weakness, the Balance of Terror might not even exist and the Rosenbergs might be home tonight, celebrating their anniversary and wishing something exciting would happen to them for a change.
As for a brother sending his sister to the chair, maybe too much had been made of this. There was nothing unusual about it, after all, it happened every day. Fathers threw their children out of tenement-house windows, kids kicked their grandmothers down the stairs, brothers and sisters ratted on each other from the moment they could talk. When you’re up against it, survival’s the thing, I’m not sure I’d trust my own goddamn brothers in the same situation. Besides, it was widely known that there was a lot of bad feeling between the brothers-in-law, largely because of their postwar business venture which had gone sour, and one thing that became transparent during the trial was the wholehearted eagerness with which the Greenglasses laid it on the Rosenbergs. The files suggested that David had even been blackmailing Julius for some time — this was seen as a corroboration of sorts of the charges, the final $4000 at the end being then a last frantic payoff, Julius well aware that if arrested David would spill his guts. Ethel and Ruthie didn’t get along either, old jealousies over David, and old lady Greenglass apparently hated Ethel and the whole Rosenberg lot with her. She seemed almost pleased her daughter was getting the hot seat, letting the world know that if Julius and Ethel died in the chair, she wouldn’t even go to their funerals. A lovely family. It was even likely, now that I thought about it, that David and Ruth had hoped for the death penalty all along, so they wouldn’t have anybody around afterwards to remind them of what they’d done. Gone from the face of the earth. I’d known guys like Greenglass. Not quite bright enough to come to grips with the world or understand what any of it was about, yet not dumb enough to find a conventional place in the herd and stay out of trouble. You could talk them into anything, they were full of emptiness and longed to be filled up. Women wrapped his kind around their little fingers: his mother Tessie, his big sister Eth, his tough unhappy wife. Greenglass had no real connection with actuality. Yesterday it was Ruth and Ethel telling him what to do, now it was Saypol and Cohn — a man disciplined by shrews at home and so obsequious abroad.
What was I saying? That the FBI, convinced maybe that they’d located the spy ring or at least were very close, but lacking hard evidence, had arm-twisted all these people into concocting a bomb-theft plot? It hardly seemed likely, yet all the linkages, walked through backwards like this (in fact I was now down on my hands and knees, crawling through them), did seem to come undone. Supposing Gold really was Fuchs’s courier, for example: would the Soviets have been so crazy as to risk compromising this connection by sending Gold to the Greenglass flat? Fuchs to the Russians was like a dream come true — he was, literally, almost everything they needed. Greenglass, by comparison, was just some dumbnuts YCL on-the-make Army kid who through sheer stupidity and overzealousness could spoil everything. Who could be sure? he might even be an FBI plant! And anyway, if Rosenberg was in on it, then they hardly needed Gold — anything David had for them, Julie could get. Well, I knew what the pressures were in a place like the FBI. Each division had to justify its budget and salaries, come up with the goods when pressed, and each man had to think of his own advancement: assuming the Rosenbergs were guilty (and perhaps no man at the FBI doubted this from the beginning, one man’s beliefs or assumptions supporting the next, just like in religious cults, augmented by the incredible state of paranoia — Fear Bullshit Insecurity, they called themselves — and the blind obeisance to the Director that prevailed over there), then the man who nailed it down stood to win the prize. Rewards and punishments: this was how it worked. On May 31, 1950, just eleven days after the case had been opened, for example, there were Gold’s interrogators T. Scott Miller and Richard Brennan getting Bureau commendations for their “imaginative, resourceful, and vigorous” handling of the assignment and being recommended for “meritorious increases in salary.” An instant parable for the whole force, all of whom were out there competing for the prizes in this one. The biggest one of all: the Crime of the Century. Hoover, reacting with “shock and anger,” had grabbed up the intercom in 1949 and said: “Get that spy ring!” And so, like unquestioning soldiers of Christ, they had gone out and got one. It would have been just the same at the OPA. Of course, we never electrocuted anybody at the OPA.
And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves — or, as they’d say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers — maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they’d been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and pitied, to demonstrate their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one), were members of the alleged conspiracy. In 1943 the Rosenbergs were known to have dropped out of all overt Communist activities, canceling their subscription to the Daily Worker, refusing to sign any more petitions. Saypol argued that these were signs they were going underground, and maybe that was so. But maybe not: what with the new baby and Julius’s well-paying Army job, a brighter-than-ever future, they might merely have been ducking out on their friends, something they’d still feel guilty about eight years later. In the interim, Julie loses his job, Ethel thinks she’s having a breakdown, they sink into a drab and scummy life, and then suddenly — BINGO! — the A-bomb trial, a chance to recover their pride and juice up their meaningless existences with real content. Sobell, meanwhile, doesn’t know what the hell is happening — is it a fascist takeover? — and in panic flaps off to Mexico. When he hears about the Rosenberg spy ring, he probably believes it. So do the other witnesses: why not? it’s possible…we all believe it…
I lay on my face gazing across the wide spread of scattered paper. I was somewhat lost in all these speculations. At sea. It was a little like lying by the irrigation ditch in Yorba Linda and gazing up at the endless sky, watching truths blow by like shifting clouds, only now it was more serious. What was fact, what intent, what was framework, what was essence? Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn’t he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man’s land, between logical alternatives? I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was the one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. Fortunately, I knew, I’d forget most of this — these errant insights always fled and something more solid, more legal, sooner or later took over. I’d find the right question, take a side, and feel on top of things again. Gain perspective. Courage, Confidence, and Perspective: the Rosenberg formula. It was in all their letters. Maybe it had a secret meaning. Something about the Communist Party. “CCCP,” I knew, was the way the Russians wrote USSR. I had to admit that it resembled somewhat my 1952 “K1C3” campaign slogan: Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls. Or Costs — we never got that sorted out. The Great Crusade. Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment. For Peace, Bread, and Roses. Things we’d learned in the thud and blunder of college politics, Julius and I….
Different from me, though. His moustache alone was proof of that. A kind of holyroller in his way. Gullible, emotional. We were more like mirror images of each other, familiar opposites. Left-right, believer-nonbeliever, city-country, accused-accuser, maker-unmaker. I built bridges, he bombed them. A Talmud fanatic at age fourteen, Manifesto zealot at fifteen. He moved to the fringe as I moved to the center. He argued with his Socialist dad, helped kick the Trotskyites out of the Party while he was still just a kid. If he’d been born a Catholic or Lutheran instead of a Jew, he might have been a Nazi. Probably some kind of sexual deviant as well, most of these ghetto types were. Too many people piled up on top of each other, it was easy to imagine a lot of combinations country kids would never think of. When the FBI raided the Rosenberg flat, the one thing they found besides old check stubs chronicling the dismal decline of Julie’s failing business was a set of pornographic records and other records ridiculing religious ceremonies, like the Kol Nidre chant. What Eisenhower in his news conference yesterday called “violations of human decency.” Saypol thought those records were enough alone to hang them on: “An indication of their state of mind,” he liked to say.
Certainly, if what I’d heard about their first reunion inside Sing Sing was true, they didn’t care who was watching, they could go at it like dogs in the playground. They’d been separated since the trial, and had been working themselves up for this meeting. When the door opened and they saw each other, they broke away from their guards, rushed together, smothered each other’s faces with hot kisses, started pawing at one another wildly, pulling at their clothes, Julius had Ethel’s blouse out and her skirt up, she was going for his pants — they’d have been fucking on the floor in front of everybody in five seconds if the guard and matron hadn’t recovered from their shock, grabbed them apart, and locked them up. They called it love but it was clearly a lot more dangerous than that. Warden Denno had issued orders that henceforth they were to be handcuffed, sit at opposite ends of a seven-foot conference table, well guarded, and never be allowed to touch again.
They’d met in 1936 in New York at a New Year’s Eve fund-raising ball given by the International Seamen’s Union. Probably another front for the Phantom. One of those seamen’s unions was on strike right now, tying up ports, putting an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty. It seemed like everything in the city was a front for something else, made me nervous just to walk the streets up there. Not like that out in Yorba Linda or Whittier. What was it about cities? When I was a boy, I sometimes dreamed of going to the city and leading a double life. Even now, I felt freer there. If that was the word. Ethel had been waiting to go onstage to sing “Ciribiribin.” This was her famous number, but she was out of practice. She’d been spending too much time as a labor organizer, her stage career was nearly over…just as I had been slowly giving up my secret dreams at that time of being a playwright and actor. Julius had walked up to her, got introduced, and asked: “Why are you nervous?” What a line. Why are you nervous. Just like one I might have thought of. Only I’d probably have said: “Why am I nervous?”
It was possible: I might have been there myself that night. I was in town. I was excited and lost, but pretending to know my way around. I could have stumbled in anywhere. I kept my head down, trying not to gawk at the skyscrapers, walked purposefully, even when I didn’t know where I was. To tell the truth, I rather liked New York, but I wasn’t all that impressed. There was something run-down about it, and it struck me as being a very cold and ruthless place to live. Not even exactly American — a kind of Hong Kong West. Therefore exciting, though; and challenging. A fast track, faster even than Los Angeles. A man needs that, even if he doesn’t like it. Any person tends to vegetate unless he is moving on a fast track. You’d have to bone up, I thought, to keep alive in the competition here, but I felt ready for it. I was about to graduate from Duke Law School, and I was looking for a position with a big law firm. I knew I’d get it. I looked forward to going back on campus and bragging about it. Modestly, of course. Writing home about it. I jotted down details I could use in letters. I enjoyed the prospect of passing the word more than the thought of living here. I was third academically in my class, president of the student bar association, a member of the Order of the Coif, and had worked for the Law Review and the Duke Bar Association Journal, had written an important article on auto-insurance law and helped Dean Horack research his goddamn book, it was a sure thing. But I didn’t get a job. They all looked down their noses at me. I felt like my clothes didn’t fit right or my haircut was too fresh or something. Maybe the accent gave me away — I told them I’d won the Harvard Club of California Prize in high school, but it didn’t seem to help. The two guys who went up to the city with me got positions, great positions, but I didn’t. I felt like a goddamn ass. If I’d gone to the International Seamen’s Union Ball that night instead of to Rockefeller Center and Times Square, I might have become a Communist and changed the course of history, I was pissed off enough. Later, when I settled down, I realized I’d been a little too generous in praising left-wing judges, and as president of the student bar had brought a hotshot New Deal trustbuster down to speak at Duke, and I supposed some of my enemies at school had distorted all this to their contacts in New York. That maybe accounted for my striking out with the FBI, too. So, to hell with them, I bought a new blue serge suit and went home to Whittier, did it my own way.
Oddly, though I didn’t go to the Seamen’s Ball, I seemed to have a very distinct impression of the hall: a vast slick floor, heavily waxed, a Victrola cabinet in one corner, a little stage, kitchen off the far end. Musty smell. Six-piece band. Balloons overhead. Julius and Ethel went to a room backstage so she could practice her song on him. His idea. He was trying to make out. And why not? I didn’t think it was a real dressing room. Just an empty room back there, couple of chairs maybe, some scribbling on the cream-colored walls. Might have been a mirror. I could see her smiling balefully up at him, giving it a try. “Cheery-beery-BIN!” Thin. But pretty. So open and bright-eyed. It turned out they were neighbors — to Julius, Ethel was literally the girl-next-door, just like in all the movies, even if she was three years older than he was and lived in a part-time whorehouse. “More than a decade ago, at Christmas time, 1936, I met a young lady, fair, sweet, unassuming…” So different from all the others. She had no other boyfriends either, never ever had one. Not like Pat. More like me. Afterwards, walking her home, Julie had explained that he was in trouble with his grades at college because of all the student activities. The activities at City College of New York were different from those at Whittier College, but I could see how he would get involved. “I’ll help you,” she’d said. No one had ever said anything like that to me. “I’ll help you.” Of course, I’d never been in trouble. With my grades or anything else. “I’ll help you….”
I sat up abruptly. I thought I’d heard it, heard her voice. A sheet of paper was stuck to my cheek. I peeled it off. “Light of my life, rose of my heart, you my beloved being kept apart from me, are the thing I hold most dear. When I see your beautiful expressive face I know we are as one.” Was this for me? Ah no. The Rosenberg letters. Right. I must have imagined the voice. Maybe it was my own. I’d started to doze off. I was very tired. It had been a long day. Crisis conferences, world tensions, chairing the Senate, fear for Uncle Sam, phone calls, the Rosenberg affair. I’d better clean up this mess and go home, I thought. I may be needed tomorrow. Home to Pat, the icebox, the kids. If I could just get organized. Couldn’t leave this mess for the girls to see tomorrow. I remembered someone had said that in prison Julius had read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Maybe he said that himself in one of his letters. Laugh-a-minute Julie. Some home: “The constant battle against rats and vermin still is vivid in my mind.” Be fair: that was when he was a kid. I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to my swivel chair, dropped heavily into it. I tried to reconstruct the thoughts I’d just had about the case. I couldn’t remember them. Only a vague sense of a dark hallway, the K1C3 campaign formula, something about Manny Bloch and the FBI. That he was a secret agent? No, impossible. His ears stuck out too far. You couldn’t have ears that stick out like that and get into the FBI. Wrong kind of nose, too. You had to be big, athletic, deep-voiced, look like a young businessman, and wear gabardine coats and snapbrim hats. Also it helped if you were a Republican, Catholic or fundamentalist, an ex-military officer or lawyer, and chewed gum with your mouth closed. I wondered if I had a stick of gum somewhere in my desk. Or maybe a candybar. I rummaged through the drawers. I used to be able to live on candybars. Julius Rosenberg was fond of candy, too. There was this story about him at the age of four on his way to his Grandma’s house. He begged a penny off his brother and ran across the street to a candy shop. Crossing back over, he ran into the side of a passing taxi. He was okay, after treatment, but the shock caused his mother to give premature birth to her next baby and it died. America came that close to being delivered of one atom spy and saving its secrets. Because of a sweet tooth.
The episode had made a large impression on me because I, too, had nearly died young when our hired girl let me fall out of her lap and under the iron wheel of our horse-drawn buggy. It ran over my head and split my scalp open. I was rushed twenty-five miles to the nearest hospital in the neighbors’ automobile, and it took eleven stitches to sew my head up. I didn’t remember falling out of the buggy, remembered nothing of the hospital or my mother’s fright, all I remembered was the upholstering on the seats of that automobile. It was owned by people called Quigley and I think it was the only automobile in Yorba Linda. We were all terrifically impressed. I still had the scar — all the way from my forehead to my nape — but you could hardly see it because I parted my hair over it. At the time, everybody thought I was going to die. But then later two of my brothers died instead. What would history have been like, I wondered, if my brothers had lived and I had died? I found I was utterly unable to imagine this. I was also unable to find anything to eat in my desk. “Shit,” I grumbled, and slammed the last drawer shut, slumped in my chair. I started to say this again, more earnestly, but I was suddenly afraid Uncle Sam might be watching somewhere. I still had some difficulty getting used to this — and I would have to live with it, I knew, all the rest of my life. People don’t appreciate the sacrifices you have to make if you want to be President. There were times I wished I could have been happy just getting rich like Smathers or being an admiral in the Navy or a famous playwright or something.
I could be happy right now, I thought, with an ice cream cone. A hot beef sandwich. A slice of chocolate cake. Even one of those dirty dates off the streets in Whittier. Other kids used to pick them up and eat them, but my mother told me it was filthy to eat things off the ground, and so I never did. They had big seeds, hardly any fruit at all. But I’d eat one now. Probably. Ethel Rosenberg used to buy ten-cent ice cream sodas when she was a little girl, I’d read, in a place called Marchiony’s on the Lower East Side. The FBI probably had the place staked out. Or maybe it was gone by now. I imagined a dark place with grimy windows and cockroaches crawling up the wall. Probably lousy sodas, too, not nearly so creamy and rich as the sodas in California. The people out here in the East are very arrogant about food, but they don’t know a goddamn thing about it. There’s a popular tendency to ridicule my tastes and call me square, but history will show I was one of the few Americans of my time who really knew how to eat.
I grew up with food, after all, what with my father’s fruit ranch, and then our family store, delivering groceries, buying produce, talking about food with the customers. And when Harold got sick and Mom took him to Arizona for a couple of years, leaving the rest of us alone in Whittier, I did a lot of the cooking, whipping up terrific suppers of canned chili, spaghetti, pork and beans, soup, even learned to fry eggs and potatoes. I could right now eat a can of pork and beans — cold! Yum. A western with mayonnaise. Jell-0 with bananas and whipped cream. A chicken salad on white, roasted marshmallows, a Coke float. But all I had was another antacid, so I ate it.
There was some fuss at the trial, I recalled, about the flavor of that torn Jell-O box used as a recognition signal between Gold and Greenglass: raspberry. Raspberry? Maybe this was just an in-joke down at the FBI: giving them the old raspberry. The flavor had to be red, naturally. I always liked raspberry Jell-O, I hoped they didn’t take it off the market now. It was one of the things Pat did very well. She baked good pies, too, like my mother did. While we were going together, she used to help Mom bake pies to sell in the store. Sometimes I had the feeling she was going with Mom more than with me, but I didn’t mind. Her own Mom had died young and Pat had had full charge of all the family chores when she was only thirteen, taking care of things until her Dad died, so she was right at home there in the kitchen. It was beautiful watching her make pies with Mom. She reminded me of Tillie the Toiler. And I was faithful Mac. Only a lot smarter.
I’d known a lot of girls, but not well. I’d helped them with their homework, served on committees with them, debated against them. But I’d only had one steady girlfriend before Pat — Ola — and she hadn’t appreciated me. Not that I hadn’t wanted to make out with almost every girl I ever knew. Oh no, I’d already wanted this when I was eight or nine years old, maybe younger, and there were times as the years went on when I could hardly stop myself from reaching out and grabbing a girl’s butt as she bent over a water fountain in the school corridor or brushed by me in a movie theater — but I couldn’t even talk to them right, much less grab their butts. I just couldn’t bring myself to say all the silly things I knew had to be said before it could be accomplished, this was my problem. Partly, too, it was shyness, of course — I had this Milhous face which made me look too serious and bookish to be any fun, and I didn’t know how to get around this. People don’t realize it, but I actually have to work harder, physically harder, to smile. They make jokes about my smiling calisthenics, but it’s not a joke really. I’ve always envied people like Dwight Eisenhower who are born grinning. I looked like a preacher the day I was born. Gloomy Gus, they called me. Maybe this was why Foster Dulles and I got on so well. And girls and I so poorly. They admired me for my brains and leadership, but they wouldn’t get in the back seat with me. They wouldn’t even go into the Sarah B. Duke Gardens with me. Sometimes this angered me, this inability to excite a girl beyond a kind of friendly respect, and I’d become momentarily reckless, but I was always disappointed.
And then came Pat. I’d been living like a monk at Duke and no better back home in Whittier. I hadn’t even kissed a girl in years when I met Pat that night at Little Theater tryouts. There she was, just like Jack Drown had promised: “a gorgeous redhead!” She was all the girls I’d ever dreamt of: she’d been an orphan, a student, a New York secretary, a hospital technician, waitress, librarian, movie extra, and salesgirl — and she was beautiful, industrious, popular, and Irish, to boot: it was fate. So that night I met her, the spirit of Christmas and homecoming and the New Year upon me, I proposed. That I did this, many people have found hard to believe and there have been a lot of stupid interpretations of it — even Pat thought I was joking, or else was some kind of nut: “I guess I just looked at him — I couldn’t imagine anyone ever saying anything like that so suddenly!” But to me it was just part of the was looking for a real adventurer like her Dad — a whaler, surveyor, prospector, and world traveler, who had finally married a poor widow in the Dakotas with two kids, and had settled down as a miner in Nevada to have three more, Pat being the last. It took her a while to realize that I was the adventurer she was looking for. She dated around a lot after that night we met, having to find out the slow way, while I waited, patiently playing my part. I didn’t put on any backstage rush, as I had with Ola. It wasn’t necessary, I knew. I’d read the ending. Sometimes I even drove Pat to her other dates. Didn’t matter, not at the time, I knew what had to happen. And eventually, after a couple of years, it did. On June 18, 1940. At first, I think, she’d identified me too much with the part I’d had in the play, but since then I’d — June 21, I mean. I was about to say that since then I’d shown her…never mind.
I pivoted in my chair to stare out the open window. It was a warm humid evening, very still, somewhat pregnant as though with rain, yet with a faint trace of the midsummer night’s light in the sky. Well, they’d made it, happy anniversary. I felt the leather straps, the electrodes, the hood: I realized that it made me sweat to think about getting electrocuted, anniversary or no anniversary. And how did they celebrate it? Seemed like they ought to be allowed to sleep together on the last night. If it was the last night — I shivered, remembering: the Phantom’s out there! That was what gave the night that heavy leaden feeling. What did Uncle Sam mean: “Even the Phantom’s having fun, I bet”…? I wondered if I should have driven home while it was still daylight. At least I was lucky I’d brought the car in today, it was too late now to bother my chauffeur. After midnight. I sighed, rubbed the back of my head. Perhaps, I thought, if I am ever electrocuted, my scar will prove to be a nonconductor and save me.
When was the last time a man and wife were executed the same day? French Revolution probably. Given the French sense of humor, they probably let them do it, but through the bars. Of course, there were no appeals then, anything could yet happen with the Rosenbergs — further delays, then a pregnancy, it could get to be a real mess. Still, think of it like the last meal, a final…ah, well, that was an idea, no risk of pregnancy either. Something I’d always been curious to try. Not with Pat, though. I could imagine the chewing out I’d get if I even brought it up. The Rosenbergs had no doubt tried everything. Since they were little kids maybe in the ghetto, being Jews and all. Ethel was two years younger than I was, around Don’s age, Julius was younger. We all probably went to the same movies, sang the same songs, read some of the same books. We were the Generation of the Great Depression. Now I demned to burn as traitors. What went wrong? Why was this necessary? Of course, they had had congress with the Phantom, I truly believed this, they had touched the demonic and so were invaded: and their deaths, I knew, would kill a part of the Phantom. What did it feel like, I wondered, to be possessed by the Phantom? Some said it was like swallowing a cold wind, others that it was a kind of fire that ran through the veins. Some believed he invaded through the eyes, like a hard light you could feel, others that he used the genital organs, that he could fuck like a man, but had no semen, leaving his chosen ones feeling all filled up, as though with an immense belch or fart they couldn’t release. I lifted one cheek. I was still okay, no difficulties at all. The Farting Quacker. Take that, you villain! Ungh! And that!
I sat there, firing shots at the Phantom, one part of my mind trying to plan out an orderly clean-up of the office so I could go home, the other part floating idly back through time, back beyond the Pink Lady and the Hollywood Ten, the Snack Shack on Green Island and Dick Nixon of the OPA, past all the torts and plays and campaigns and debating contests, to my childhood in California, recalling the lonesome train whistles in the night, the prayers and Bible verses at breakfast, the Rio Hondo near Jim Town, the fishing, the grinding sound of cranking up the old Ford, the smell of produce and plowed earth and hot tar, the nervous excitement of smoking cornsilks where Dad couldn’t see, the rusty taste of ice chips off the bed of the iceman’s wagon, the odd impression of my little brother’s clumsy kiss when I came home after a long time away, my first recital in the eighth grade when I played “Rustle of Spring.” But somehow these memories were mixed up with other images, just as vivid, but strange to me. I seemed to remember things that had never happened to me, places I’d never been, friends and relatives I’d never met who spoke a language I didn’t know. I recalled narrow streets filled with trucks, lined with crude stalls, stacks of trousers and shirts and underwear, chicken feathers in the gutter. I distinctly remembered a kind of tacked-up wooden cross with work gloves hanging from it, ties draped over it, sweaters and slips heaped and tumbled below, short fat men with glasses and flat-billed caps haggling with women dressed in long shiny black dresses and bell-like bonnets down around their ears. There was a hand-painted sign overhead of the bottom half of a man, with the words PANTS TO MATCH. A white nag hitched to a truck with wooden wheels, scales eight feet tall, barrels of fish, men in overalls shoveling chopped ice from wooden crates. A dingy room with no curtains on the windows, just a shade, some kind of pot, an old woman gabbling in a foreign language, the roar of vans and trains outside.
Hey — where did I get these memories? Me, a farmboy, born in Yorba Linda, California, the first child ever born there — it was so unusual there was an eclipse of the sun the next day. I lived all alone with Mom and Dad and my three brothers in a lemon grove and dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer on the Santa Fe. When I was school-age, we moved in to Whittier where Grandma lived—“Ye Friendly Town,” where folks believed in “plain living and high thinking”—just a meadow with scattered houses, chosen by the Quakers as a place to settle because of its remoteness from the blighted urban East: what did / know about the stink of sweatshops and fish markets and fifth-floor cold-water flats? Yet, sitting there in my swivel chair, wet with sweat myself and staring numbly out the window into the night, I could smell them, see them, it was very peculiar. And it was also somehow pleasant. I felt richer somehow. Girls with bobbed hair and plain cloth coats, clutching soft handbags to their flat bosoms, seemed to come walking toward me, heels clicking on the hot city sidewalks, ogled by men wearing vests and dusty pants. A fat Gypsy lady in a flowered blouse grabbed up a piece of material, stretched it, and an old man rose feebly to protect his small heap of goods. I saw the kosher live-chicken merchants on Delancey Street under the Williamsburg Bridge holding up their squawking birds, the heads rearing, wings flapping madly, saw doll buggies perched on wooden crates, men leaning over the slatted sides of pick-up trucks, saw huge rolls of newsprint piled on the sidewalk in the shadow of an elevated train on Canal Street, kids chasing each other, heard a window break — I ducked: no, it was still whole. They’ve found me, I thought. All the way from Sing Sing! My heart was beating wildly. I could hear it thumping in the empty room, the hollow night, the dark silence. I sat rooted to my seat, trying to force my mind back to Whittier, back to Yorba Linda…the picnics, the Sunday comics, the palm trees and sandlot ballgames, grinding hamburger in the store, sharpening pencils at school—
And then suddenly I had this stunning vision of little Ethel Greenglass, about six years old, standing naked by a kitchen coalstove, pulling on a pair of white cotton panties, watched furtively by her brothers, her mother nagging at all three of them from the kitchen table where she was laying out some kind of breakfast. It looked like bread. The table was spread with an oilcloth. Her swollen belly was pressed against the lip—
I tried to shake it off. But the stove was still there. There was something like linoleum on the floor. I could smell the breakfast and feel that early-morning tremor of getting ready for school. Then I remembered that my brothers and I always used to get dressed huddled around the kitchen stove like that in Yorba Linda, and I caught this exact look of midwinter grayness out the window, only there were old brick buildings out there, not a lemon grove. And this peculiar sensation that Mama — Mrs. Greenglass, I mean — was pregnant, I could see the very shape of her swollen belly just about eye-level. Was it when my mother—? And Ethel’s amazing bottom: we didn’t have any sisters. Only the hired girls.
I leapt up, grabbed my jacket, switched off the lights and, praying fervently: “God, get me home safe!”, fled the office, afraid even to look back over my shoulder, much less clean the place up. As I ran down the corridor of the old Senate Office Building toward the elevator, my footsteps echoing and reverberating through the empty marble hallways of that dark tower, I seemed to see rats and vermin everywhere, to hear the grinding racket of traffic and feel the violence and dereliction of tenement houses crowding around me, yet at the same time I felt the stomach-churning excitement of a school football game, a piano recital, dance date, my nostrils twitching with a wild murky reminiscence of chlorinated pools, choir robes, girls’ hair, pie crusts, and greasepaint. I felt angry with myself for giving way to panic like this, it was like lurching offside in a big football game, I tried to stop myself but couldn’t — I heard footsteps just behind or beside my own, somebody breathing, the stairwells were sunk in a swarming darkness, doors seemed to be yawning open. At the elevator I pulled up, tried to catch my breath, my heart was beating wildly, I—what? something rustling in the dark space behind the elevator! I wanted to cry out, to run the other way, but I was determined not to lose my cool, not to show fear in the face of the Phantom, not any more than I already had. I knew I had to do something unexpected. I turned and walked directly toward the shadow behind the elevator. “Coward!” I gasped, and gritted my teeth. There was a wall back there and I hit it with my face.
I staggered back, half blinded by the blow, feeling hurt and alone. I found the elevator button and leaned against it, remembering that hired girl who let me fall out of the carriage and get run over, her big lap, big to me, yet not big enough. I could almost smell her as she came to tuck us in, fresh from washing up. To listen to our prayers. Read to us from James Whitcomb Riley: “Listen, boys…”—the elevator door gaped: a big mouth — I was frightened of it and took the stairs down, jumping them three at a time—“… I’m tellin’ you…
“The Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!”