PART TWO: FRIDAY MORNING

8. What a Glorious Morning for America!

reads the sign being erected on the Roof of the Astor Hotel overlooking Times Square. The sun is rising, sending its prophylactic shafts deep into the city canyons, dispersing not only the Phantom and all his legions, but all thought of them as well. Although the Supreme Court will not reconvene for hours, there is already, with the first hazy glimmer of sunlight, a new certainty in the air, a confidence, bookies refuse to take more bets, the electrocutions seem a sure thing, preparations resume. Traffic is once more blocked off, carpenters and electricians busy themselves about the sabotaged stage, the Phantom’s filthy litter is swept away by Sanitation Department crews. There is a resurgence of pride, even the taxi drivers leave off their complaints as traffic snarls around the edges. The temperature is already in the seventies and rising, the humidity is falling, it’s going to be a beautiful day. It feels good to wake up, get out on the streets.

Except for the Sanitation crews maybe — the Phantom has laid a formidable task on them this morning. The stage is wrecked, the props lie smashed and strewn for blocks around, wires have been ripped out and knotted, the bunting hangs in shreds, and the litter of pornography and propaganda is worse than a midwinter snowfall. Sanitation is no small task in New York City any day of the year: there are about 6000 miles of streets to clean, flush, and service, with more than 24,000 tons of refuse to collect and dispose of every single day, over 12,000,000 pigeon bowel movements to cope with, 5000 tons of daily dogshit, so the cleanup crews are hardly fans of the leafletting and wreckage-strewing Phantom. Given the arduous mission, they are joined in Times Square this morning by volunteer teams from the Fire Department and the New York City Transit Authority, as well as a good many of the city’s 19,000 cops and most of its 200,000 pigeons.

The area’s capacity to absorb these multitudes is but one of its many and renowned magical properties. It is actually home for over 50,000 people, and thousands more of transients from all classes sleep here — now stirring, scratching, yawning, blinking out on all this bright activity, watching tow trucks haul away parked cars, overalled workers sweep up the gutter flyers and scrape the clemency snipes off the NO PARKING signs and hooded traffic lights, scrub the graffiti off the tall chalk-white statues on the Bond clothing store. Some 357,750 commuters begin to pour into the center, soon to be followed by tens of thousands of shoppers, sharks, and eager sightseers.

Including the previous Incarnation and his First Lady: Harry and Bess Truman, now what the press calls just another couple of ordinary American tourists, have arisen before dawn this morning back home in Independence, Missouri, birthplace of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and likely site of the New Jerusalem, and have set out in a brand-new automobile to come to the big city to see the show and visit their daughter Margaret. Just what Harry thinks about these ceremonies he hasn’t said, but it was his own Attorney General who pushed for them in the first place, and when Harry had his own chance to act on a clemency appeal from the Rosenbergs last January, he simply passed it on, without comment, to his successor, granting amnesty and full pardon instead to his old crony J. Parnell Thomas, the HUAC Early Warning Sentinel who’d been jailed for taking salary kickbacks from his office staff. Some say he passed the buck on the Rosenberg appeal just to complicate the new President’s life. Others that it was an act of modesty and generosity, typical of Harry Truman: let the new man have the headlines. Many, though, believe he’d simply lost touch with Uncle Sam by then and didn’t want to take any chances.

As for the new man this morning, he’s wandering around the White House in his pajamas in a playful mood, practicing his oral clumsiness and startling his staff with bounding Eisenhoppers — those little plastic grasshoppers with springy metal legs and rubber suction cups on the bellies, given to him by his old friend Louis Marx the Toymaker, not to be confused with his Martian theorist. Reporters christened them “Eisenhoppers” at Christmastime and they’ve since sold like hotcakes. There is much curiosity, even among insiders, as to how and when Uncle Sam chooses his disguises. The National Poet Laureate has called Dwight David Eisenhower “The Man of Destiny,” and certainly there have been few Incarnations less obvious (as Harry himself has said: “Why, this fellow, this fellow don’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday!”) and yet more inevitable than this grinning aw-shucks farmboy from the wrong side of the tracks who clowned his way through West Point and the Mexican border troubles, only to find himself suddenly the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, and, without firing a shot, the Number One Hero of World War II. And yet, it must be admitted, all American Superchiefs are “men of destiny.” So few men actually seek the office, it should be easy to get if they want it, yet there seems to be no evident connection between their own eagerness to surrender to the hypostasis and the actual takeover — indeed, it’s often just when they’re giving up and looking the other way that suddenly and improbably the famous plug hat falls down around their ears. How does this happen? Why them? Does Uncle Sam groom his Incarnations from birth, for example, or does he play it more impulsively, adjusting to the surprises that come along? Does he field a range of options for himself and drift speculatively among them, or are these apparent alternatives merely illustrations of discarded possibilities? And what about the reserves: do the same rules apply to the Vice President, or is this a kind of wild card that Uncle Sam allows the world to play just to liven things up every twenty years or so? Finally, when a candidate does arise (or is conceived), does the actual Incarnation hit him like a ton of bricks, a sudden brutal invasion of the Presence, or has it been growing in him all along? Does the voter, entering the polling booth, exercise his own free will, or is he too the captive of some larger force — and if the latter, is that power exercised upon him directly by Uncle Sam, or more subtly through some sort of force field that even the American Superhero cannot entirely control? Are political parties, in short, living organisms, abstractions, solvents, catalysts, viable alternatives, or merely the visible form of Paradox in the world?

Well, only Uncle Sam knows why this or that receptacle is chosen to receive the Host, but one thing is clear: Uncle Sam moved toward Dwight Eisenhower with more conviction and gusto than toward any other Incarnation since the Father of the Country himself. The new President was packaged and sold by BBD&O as “Strictly a No-Deal Man Clean as a Hound’s Tooth Who Will Go to Korea Restore Faith in God and Country and Carry On a Crusade to Clean Up Creeping Socialism Five-Percenters the Mess in Washington Crooks Cronies Mink Coats Deep Freezers and Rising Inflation,” but the true source of his power was summed up more simply in the big badge Uncle Sam wore last fall on his blue lapel: I LIKE IKE. Uncle Sam seemed to want Eisenhower like a child wants happiness. Perhaps it was because he was nostalgic for the old days, the time of his childhood when life was simple and causes were clear, the days of the Minutemen and Bunker Hill, of cracker barrels and hayrides and old-time religion. A “crusade” Eisenhower called his political campaign, and he told stories about his old Uncle Abraham Lincoln Eisenhower galloping his goofy gospel wagon through prairie villages, shouting “This way to heaven!”, and he told about selling hot tamales three for a nickel and riding a raft in a flood with his brother Ed while singing “Marching Through Georgia,” learning to fire old muzzle-loading guns with powder and shot, about seeing a real cowboy shootout on Texas Street in Abilene. He conjured up the crackle of a campfire, the taste of country fried chicken and thick potato salad at church picnics and the thump and clank of a game of horseshoes, lamented the passing of the old country store, and recalled the time during the Spanish-American War when the whole town ran out in the streets on hearing the rumor: “There’s a Spanish airship over Abilene!”—it turned out to be a box kite advertising a sale of straw hats. Straw hats! Box kites! Airships! Wow, it felt so good to think about these things again! The early 1950s has been a time of great national prosperity but also a time of great national malaise: things seem to have gone sour somehow. Uncle Sam is running half the world and scaring the pants off the rest, but it’s not as easy or as much fun as people had thought it would be. So maybe Uncle Sam just wanted to get inside all those old memories again, experience for himself once more the dusty heat of a lazy summer day on the prairie, the excitement of hearing the C. W. Parker Circus parade coming down Main Street, the romance of a young happy-go-lucky officer in a Mexican border town on a Saturday night, even the old-fashioned sting of a hickory stick on his fanny. It may be so.

“Behind the dingy walls inside cramped rooms,” his Man of Destiny is declaiming now, “and airless, ah, there are thousands of homes let me say in which parental love and care burn as brightly as, as intensely…” He spies his wife’s personal secretary, presses an Eisenhopper down on her desk, pokes his finger in his ear as though absently cleaning it. “As in the homes of, uh, Abilene…” She pretends to be startled when it pops up and Eisenhower roars with delight. Mamie, staggering half-blind out of her bedroom, fumbling with trembling hands for a wake-up fag, asks him what the hell’s so funny this morning, what’s got into him? He grins, that effortless affable grin that has brought him to these premises (what’s got into him? well, for one thing, he woke up a short while ago with the handsomest hard-on in a dog’s age, dreaming of his old Irish WAC girlfriend, they were both stark naked, running around in France somewhere in the middle of the war, he wasn’t even sure which side of the lines they were on or who was winning or losing, but they were balling the jack something fantastic, out in the open fields, in tents and bivouacs, village streets, in the mud of the trenches, and the only thing spoiling the fun at all was a weird little runny-nose private — he looked foreign or Jewish or something — who kept wandering by looking miserable and threatening to tattle on them…but somehow even this was exciting in its way), and says: “Hey, listen, Mamie, what do you think of this: Hemmed in by masonry and, uh, by masonry walls confined to thin streets, boys, let me assure you, in New York even as in Kansas they have found ways to enjoy themselves without hurt to property or to their elders, the farm boy and the tenement boy are one, ahem, at heart. That’s what I’m trying to get at.” He smiles. His wife stares at him for a moment through squinting eyes. Then she grunts, shrugs, and shuffles back into her bedroom. “I should say, or remind you,” he calls after her, “that does not mean that we can forget about the unforgenate, uh, FORTCH-inut circumstances growing up — which many young per — people grow up in trusting that good will! Ah, will flower out of evil! At least that is my opinion!” He has meanwhile pressed down another Eisenhopper, having glimpsed his own secretary coming in the door behind him: the hopper leaps with a loud BO-I–I-ING! the secretary squeals, Ike’s laughter booms.

The President’s assistant, Sherman (The Abominable No-Man) Adams, is in the Oval Office laying out the President’s agenda for the day, which includes a Cabinet meeting, a therapy session with the stricken Bob Taft, and a possible address to the nation after the Supreme Court meets at noon. Adams, hearing all the shrieking and laughter and seeing the President promenading out on Harry’s Balcony in his pee jays, wonders if, by coincidence, Eisenhower woke up this morning in the same state of oddly disturbing excitement that he’d experienced himself. It’s impossible, of course, for Sherm Adams to know, but were a poll to be taken, he would discover that not only he and the President, but also most of Congress, the Supreme Court, lesser courts and commissions, the Fourth Estate, Cecil B. De Mille and Cardinal Spellman, the Holy Six, the Vice President sacked out on his living-room couch, and the entire Cabinet — even old Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of Twelve Apostles — have all awakened this morning from the foment of strange gamy dreams with prodigious erections and enflamed crevices. Some, like Irving Saypol, have wisecracked about it. Others, like Foster Dulles, have felt furtive and guilty. It has made Joe McCarthy boisterously reckless, Felix Frankfurter confused, the Boy Judge grumpy, Emily Post gay. Edgar Hoover has taken a cold bath. But none, curiously enough, has used his or her aroused sexuality on a mate, it’s as though, somehow, that’s not what it was all about, and all are left in a state of suspended agitation, feeling itchy and faintly irreverent, giddy and bemused yet unsatisfied, somehow detached and isolated, but gregarious at the same time, and with an unwonted appetite for risk and profligacy. Which makes them nervous. Hoo-eee! have to take it easy today or things could go haywire. Few, however, can put their finger on what it is that’s disquieting them. One who has no such difficulty is the Sing Sing Executioner Joseph Francel. Brushing his teeth in his bathroom in Cairo, New York, Joe winces at himself in the mirror (his is frankly hurting him) and says: “Hmf. (Spit.) Better get down to Times Square this morning.”

Times Square, the Crossroads of the World: it is said that half the people on Forty-second and Broadway at any given moment are from out of town — and the other half are Armenians. Shabby by day, luminescent by night, it is the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest. Historians have written that everything that happens in the Western World originates in Times Square and — to judge by the souvenir shops, auction galleries, gutter debris, and panhandlers — dies here as well. The Heart and Cock of the Country, it is called. Sin City U.S.A. The Entertainment Capital of America. The United States is the first electric nation of the world, and this is its luminous navel. The Diamond Stickpin in New York’s Shirtfront. The Brightest Ten Blocks in the World. Here pilgrims come to kiss the holy stones, the despised second sons of the world to seek their fortunes, mystics to walk the Great White Way.

There is an ancient tradition for this. Nomadic tribes crisscrossed the island for centuries, and transience is the profoundest element in the American Spirit. Broadway itself, as legend has it, is an old Indian trail — certainly this would explain its erratic polestar course down through the island. It’s said the last to use it were the Mana-hatta tribe, who departed by it after nicking gullible old Peter Minuit, first of the tourist yokels, for twenty-four dollars. Many Italians have come here, more than there are Italians in Italy, but the first was a navigator named Verrazano, who claimed the island for the French. Next came an Englishman named Henry Hudson on behalf of the Dutch, who named it Niew Nederland and commenced to settle it. The English wrested it from the Dutch in the name of the Duke of York, then lost it to their rebellious colonials a century later (even then, the inhabitants of Medcef Eden’s meadows, eventually to become Times Square, stayed out of it, played both sides, and raked what profit off the Revolution they could). By the time it had become the Capital of the United States of America and seen in its streets the Incarnation of General George Washington as Superchief I, there were more than thirty thousand people, heterochthonous the lot of them, passing through the borough’s precincts, and half that many again in nearby Breuckelen, Bronck’s Land, Queens, and Staaten Eylandt.

Now, a little over a century and a half later, there are seven and a half million people living in 116 villages around Times Square, these in turn surrounded by another 574 suburban communities of millions more, and half of them are foreign-born or one or more of their parents were. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, getting processed for destiny now in Uncle Sam’s melting pot. Lithuanians, Thais, Persians, Jamaicans: this is the place of their initiation into Americanism, the Great White Way. The heaviest migrations come west from Italy and Russia, but there are thousands upon thousands of Germans and Czechs, too, and Irish, Austrians, Hungarians, English, and Welsh. And it is these, the tired, poor, and tempest-tost, more American, as they say, than the Americans, who each year play host to the summer inswarm of country boobs, come east to Mecca like flies drawn to a pig’s ass.

From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sport-shirts and J. C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men’s room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cab-drivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.

But wherever they go, sooner or later they will come to Times Square. Today, of course, this is required of them, even the locals will be here tonight, but even without the public electrocutions, they would gather here. Partly because of the sex: this is the home of the G-string, the cut-rate hustler, the dirty book and naughty record, the bedroom comedy and cheap condom, and the American tourist is well-known — and far beyond his own shores — as the horniest creature this side of the Bronx Zoo. Whatever he needs, he can find here, from an orchestra view of famous movie stars onstage in their skivvies to a quick blow job in a subway John, but this is not in the main why he is drawn here. For if sex is dirty, it is also, at its dirtiest, cleansing; if it defiles, it also sanctifies: the principal reason for the traffic into Times Square — this place of feasts, spectacle, and magic — is that it is the ritual center of the Western World.

Is this really the ground the storied ancestors trod? Is this the actual place where Peter Minuit invented the American Way of Life with his twenty-four dollars? Is this hole, now a subway entrance, really the one from which Uncle Sam sprang in all his glory — full-grown, costumed, and goateed — from the belly of Mother Earth? Who knows? It hardly matters. Tradition has hallowed it and investment has certified it. The nation’s dramas are enacted here, its truths tested and broadcast, its elections verified, its material virtues publicized — who has not stood in awe before the famous Wrigley chewing-gum sign, the giant smoke rings and waterfalls, the tipped whiskey bottle that never empties? In Saint Augustine’s words: et inhorresco, et inardesco! It is here where one might have slept with the Yankee Doodle Boy, George M. Cohan, in the Knickerbocker Hotel, got soused on the New Amsterdam Roof with Florenz Ziegfeld, kissed the hand of Sarah Bernhardt, and gone to confession after with Father Duffy, the Fighting Chaplain, at the Holy Cross Church on Forty-second Street — and even today one can still break bread with Milton Berle and Phil Silvers at Lindy’s on Tin Pan Alley, sneak a smoke with Rosalind Russell behind the Winter Garden. This is the site of the world’s largest New Year’s Eve party, where hundreds of thousands gather to watch the ball drop on the Times Tower, exercising its perennial charm against death and entropy. The oracle that “he who circles Times Square will end by falling inside” only inspires greater feelings of awe and desire in the people: “Far from fleeing, we draw nearer…!” The American Showcase, Playland U.S.A., the Electrical Street of Dreams — it was inevitable that Uncle Sam should choose it as the place to burn the atom spies.

Flags are now unfurled from all the hotels and from atop the Times Tower, and huge blow-ups of Uncle Sam strangling a bear and a dragon are mounted under the starry-digited clocks on the Paramount Building, with General Eisenhower’s immortal D-Day rouser as a caption:

I CALL UPON ALL WHO LOVE FREEDOM TO STAND WITH US NOW!

Not only is a terrible dignity thereby attached to this momentous occasion (D-Day having been the nearest thing to the Second Coming mankind will probably know until the real thing comes along), but an overwhelming sense of righteousness and ultimate victory as well — some start calling it E-Day, Electrocution Day, the proper sequel, long-awaited; but others prefer D-Day II: a Day of Death, Drama, and Devotions. Not to mention Decency, human Decency. The little man in the Johnnie Walker whiskey spectacular above the Whelan drugstore is today sporting a red-white-and-blue topper, and the sanitation crew-members wear little badges that read THE LARGE THING TO DO IS THE ONLY THING WE CAN DO. A blue-white-and-orange flag — same as that of the Netherlands in 1626—with the seal of New York City in blue on the white stripe is hung out on the façade of the Times Tower, the five stars above the seal indicating that Mayor Vincent Impellitteri is in the Square or soon will be. Still early, but the Square is filling up. Cafeterias are crowded already, and they’re standing in line under the Eveready sign at Elpine Drinks. Workers, theater people, young execs, guys in sportshirts with cameras around their necks, women in sleeveless blouses with high collars, long pleated skirts. Carpenters and electricians, too, already in some dismay over the seemingly impossible task that confronts them here this morning. Colored boys are sweeping out the theater lobbies, grinning up at the sun, jigging around their brooms like the late departed Bojangles Robinson, winking at all the passing girls. And off to the north, over Central Park, there are already kites in the skies.

The Police Commissioner, overseeing the Times Square operations alongside the Sanitation Commissioner, is examining the statue of Father Duffy. It has been splashed during the night with a bucket of red paint — now being scraped away by the clean-up crews — but it’s not certain whether this was the Phantom’s doing, or a citizen’s righteous protest against the rising tide of treason among, not only American clerics, but scientists, teachers, and judges as well. To be sure, someone has daubed Omar Bradley’s famous line all over the pavement: WE HAVE GRASPED THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM AND REJECTED THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT! But on the other hand, right there on Father Duffy’s bronze behind are the words THE ABOLITION OF RELIGION AS THE ILLUSORY HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE IS REQUIRED FOR THEIR REAL HAPPINESS, so it’s a moot point.

“These are the times that try men’s souls, George,” says the Sanitation Commissioner with a sigh.

“Yes, Andy, an appeal to arms, and to the God of Hosts, is all what is left us.”

President Eisenhower, of course, has long insisted that “the church, with its testimony of the existence of an Almighty God is the last thing, that it seems to me, would be preaching, teaching, or tolerating Communism,” but even the President is said to be taking a hard second look this morning. For a starter, the Chief has turned over to Edgar Hoover’s G-men the names of 2300 clergymen who signed a “special plea for clemency for the Rosenbergs,” as well as the list of 104 signatories to a follow-up letter, taken to be the hard-core Comsymp preachers. “The Rosenberg campaign,” warns Harold Velde’s Early Warning Sentinels, has “afforded the Communist conspiracy a momentous opportunity to remount a long-planned invasion of the churches of America!” FBI undercover mystery man Herbert Philbrick thinks many of the 2300 are dupes, “unsuspecting victims” sucked in by the wily Angels of Darkness at the center, but turncoat Joe Zack Kornfeder, former bigwig in the American Communist Politburo, disagrees:

REP. GORDON SCHERER, OHIO: Among those two thousand ministers were, however, some just idealists and pacifists, were there not?

JOE ZACK KORNFEDER: I do not think so. I think that those two thousand were pretty close to the machine.

Demonstrators, moving past the White House this morning toward the Supreme Court, are actually carrying blown-up posters of the Son of God Himself, with the text:

REWARD

— for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ…

Wanted — for Sedition, Criminal Anarchy, Vagrancy, and Conspiracy to overthrow the established Government…

Dresses poorly…has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums… Alien — believed to be a Jew… Red Beard, marks on hands and feet, the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities.

“One of the most sacrilegious propaganda pieces ever used by the Communists!” scream the Early Warning Sentinels, still much agitated by their overnight dreams and eager for some kind of consummating encounter. “The Communists did not need the churches in past years; they had ample other channels of subversion,” G-man Philbrick warns, coughing up a little early-morning phlegm: “They do need the churches now; they will fight savagely for your church!”

And for anything else they can get: Uncle Sam has been whipping about his vast domains all morning, struggling against crooks, Commies, and crawfishing backsliders. He has just been called to Coney Island to investigate a report of a monster said to be tangled in the roller coaster there, but this turns out to be a metaphorical alarm. Not so phantasmal is the corpse of Steve Franse, former owner of the Howdy Club down in the Village, found brutally beaten, face down, on the rear floor of his automobile just south of Times Square, nor the cynical overnight robbery of the Muscular Dystrophy Association on Broadway: at least nine grand missing, only the Phantom could do such a thing. “Just thinkin’ about it,” quips Uncle Sam, “takes the starch right outa me!” And then a call comes in from further up the street: a thief has just jammed a pistol in the back of a Greystone Hotel secretary and seized a $3600 payroll. Uncle Sam draws himself up, gazing austerely in the direction of this newest outrage, his blue eyes glinting in the morning sunlight, his famous top hat cocked forward on his brow in manly defiance, shoulders squared, lean jaw rippling with suppressed fury, exhibiting all that “rugged strength and radiant beauty” so admired by the great American Prophetess Sarah Hale, ready as ever for his “humble toil and heavenward duty,” but clearly pretty pissed off at the same time. He looks like Grover Cleveland confronting the election returns of 1888.

“Do not delay!” the people cry, gathered apprehensively about their Superhero in front of the sacked Muscular Dystrophy offices, “the golden moments fly!”

Uncle Sam turns and gazes compassionately down upon all these common people whom the Lord and careless fucking have made so many of, and gripping his lapels like Abe Lincoln, declares “Yes, friends, the fack can’t be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us. But, hey, politics ain’t beanbag, folks, and repose is not the destiny of man! The ripest peach is often highest on the tree in the boisterous sea of liberty! Yea, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose map is marred with sweat and dust and bloody bung-balls, so shoot if you must this old gray head, for the manners of women are the surest criterion by which to fool all of the people some of the time! If destruction is to be our lot in order to insure domestic tranquillity, a new frontier, and a full dinner pail, we must ourselves be its author and finish the work we are in until every drop of blood shall be sunk in this sea of upturned faces!” It seems like no one can hold back from celebrating the Poets and Prophets this morning, least of all the American Superhero, who speaks by custom with the grandeur of a nation of runesmiths, from Davy Crockett to Longfellow, the Carnegies and Cranes to Hank Williams and the Whittier Poets: “The tree in which the sap is stagnant, my friends, is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, so like that sweaty old nigger piss-fire Ira Aldridge used to say, ‘The bow is bent, the arrow flies, / The winged shaft of fate!’” And off he flashes — WHOOSH! — up Broadway to the north.

On his way, Uncle Sam stops off in Times Square to inspect the cleanup operations and reconstruction of the Death House set, finds the electricians despondent over the condition of the electric chair, uprooted and half-wrecked, lying in the gutter, draped with the broken Uncle Sam manikin with its Hitler moustache. Workmen are painting over a sign on the south face of the Hotel Claridge that says THE TRADITION OF ALL PAST GENERATIONS WEIGHS LIKE A NIGHTMARE UPON THE BRAIN OF THE LIVING. Uncle Sam strips the manikin of its wig, Uncle Sam suit, and moustache, and what he discovers under all that is not a replica of himself — that stern puritanical visage and lithe powerful frame — but a figure that looks like a cross between Bishop Fulton Sheen, Everett Dirksen, and Our Miss Brooks, and as sexless as Christine Jorgensen. Just a little lump down there, a shiny bulge, like a tumor, and smooth as Ike’s bald pate. Uncle Sam turns it over his knee as though to spank it, but actually to inscribe on it Henry Adams’s dictum: “Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces,” and he orders that the manikin, what’s left of it, be hung from the nearest flagpole as a kind of old-time Broadway parable on the nature of reality and illusion.

More of a problem is what to do about the electric chair: it’s really in bad shape. Wiring all ripped out, legs busted, bolts threaded, leather straps shredded, electrodes swiped. The auxiliary generator has been taken apart and the pieces carried off: nothing left but the concrete base and a protective wire fence. The rheostats and voltmeters are gone, too, and up on the stage, somebody has taken a sledgehammer to the switch panel. Warden Denno, Cecil B. De Mille, Executioner Francel, Electric Charlie Wilson, Rube Goldberg, and others gathered in the Square to put things back together again, are deeply distressed. These electric chairs are relatively rare, no chance to get a new one made this late in the game, and this one seems clearly beyond repair—

But not so! They watch, astounded, as with one fluid movement, Uncle Sam lifts from the gutter the wrecked chair, light as a matchbox for him, squeezes the splintered wood whole again, and bolts it down on the concrete part of the stage with hammer blows of his powerful fists! Wow! A commanding figure, Uncle Sam; crowds have gathered in the Square to ogle him, root for him, worship him even, discovering in their Superhero all that’s best in themselves. He now studies, tugging thoughtfully on his white goatee, the ripped-out wiring and sabotaged switch, and one is reminded of Tom Jefferson, rugged and tall, poring over his designs for the White House or struggling with his quirky polygraph machine, or perhaps of Handsome Frank Pierce, puzzling over the metaphysical obscurities in the books of his friend Nat Hawthorne. Just as, yesterday, as he fought back against the Phantom’s reckless spree, one saw glimpses of Old Hickory galloping up on Horseshoe Bend, T. R. throwing steers in the Badlands, Abe Lincoln splitting rails, or as now one seems to see George Washington crossing the Delaware or Franklin Roosevelt projecting the Four Freedoms in the simple way in which Uncle Sam instructs the workmen on the repair of the electrical system and sends them off to get the parts they need from Pitt Machine Products Company Incorporated, over by the synagogue on East Houston Street.

“You mean, we just take the stuff, or…?”

He hands them the key, looking like Ulysses Grant handing his manuscript over to his publishers. “It’s already took,” he says quietly, his voice firm and gentle as Silent Cal’s. “That business used to belong to Julius Rosenberg.”

There is this peculiar quality about Uncle Sam: it’s as though his many metamorphoses since his early days as an Inspector of Government Provisions have each left, mysteriously, their mark on him. One discovers Old Tip Harrison’s long nose in the middle of his face, little Jemmy Madison’s scraggly white hair (or is it Old Zack’s or Little Van’s? certainly he’s got Zack Taylor’s craggy cheeks and rough-and-ready ways), Willie (Big Lub) Taft’s gold watchchain, old Jim Monroe’s bony rump still in its — even then — out-of-date pantaloons. Debilities have been shed, donated to museums, or else never assumed (just part of the real-time cover story) — Washington’s rhinoceros teeth and smallpox scars, F.D.R.’s shriveled legs, Cleveland’s vulcanized rubber jaw, Abe’s warts and Jim Polk’s spastic bowels — but virtues and marvels have been laid on, fortified and refortified, many times over: there’s the lean virility of Monroe, Jackson, and “Stud” Tyler, steadily augmented by passage through the likes of Long Abe, Doc Wilson, and Ike; there’s that willful hard-set jaw, shaped by every Incarnation from “54–40 or Fight” Polk to Reverend Garfield, Ugly Honest Grover Cleveland, and the Roosevelt boys, not to mention the strange subtle influences of such as Hamilton and Burr, Clay and Calhoun, Bill Borah, Harry Hopkins, and even Ed Stettinius; there’s the lofty pride of John (His Rotundity) Adams, the shrewdness of the Red Fox of Kinderhook, the Grecian mouth of Millard Fillmore, and a hand calloused by the campaign habits of everyone from Matty Van Buren and Chet Arthur, the Gentleman Boss, to affable Warren Harding, who once shook hands with 6756 people in five hours. When he cocks his head a certain poll-parrot way, he recalls Old Buck Buchanan, who had one nearsighted eye and one farsighted eye — which alone was enough to qualify him as Uncle Sam’s Incarnation. And when, as now, tracing leads, fusing wires, unbending panels, putting this electrical system back together again, he scowls in concentration through a pair of antique wire-rimmed spectacles perched halfway down his Yankee nose, one cannot help but remember Citizen Ben Franklin jotting down his scientifical notes by candlelight after successfully sucking electrical fluid down a kite string. Or the old Rough Rider himself, Teddy Roosevelt, squinting to hide his lame left eye. Abe Lincoln trying to read the program in the weak light of Ford’s Theater: “Other means may succeed,” Uncle Sam says, glancing up at these recognitions, sparks flying between his fingers, “this cannot fail!” Fsst! Sizzle! POP! “As America’s greatest Prophet once said, ‘There is always a best way of doin’ everything…’” The marquee lights dip, there’s a crackling hum on-stage and a faint glow: it is done, the chair is ready! “‘… Even if it be to bile an egg!’”

Huzzahs from the crowd, beaming smiles from the gathered functionaries, who try to get as close to Uncle Sam as possible. The workmen line up and sing “Hail to the Chief,” then test out the chair by burning six or seven chimpanzees in it. And high over the Square behind Father Duffy, up where the Chevy sign used to be: the headlines from the Newton Kansan of exactly eighty years ago today, June the 19th, 1873:

LET PATRIOTS EVERYWHERE PREPARE TO DO THE CLEAN THING


BY UNCLE SAM AND HIS BALDHEADED EAGLE!

9. The Vice President’s Beard

Shaving that morning, I thought: I was born a hundred years too late. If I could let this damn thing grow, I’d look like Ulysses S. Grant. There’d be no more talk about shyster corporation lawyers and used-car salesmen then. I could say what I pleased, glowering over my beard, and everybody would listen. Black and bushy, like Saint Peter or Henry VIII or Whit What’s-his-name. Walt Whitman. My skinned nose and forehead gave me a special ferocity this morning. I growled at myself in the bathroom mirror: G-r-r-row-w-f-f! Beauty and the Beast, that game I used to play with Pat before we were married, my secret self. She thought it was funny, she didn’t understand. Mess up my hair, roll my eyes, shake my jowls, the good old days. I could always get a laugh then. If I’d worked at it, I might have been another Jack Benny.

I actually started a couple of beards back then, always got embarrassed, shaved them off before anyone started to notice. That drift from the focal center, which was somehow clean-cut and open-eyed — it had to do, I suspected, with the approval of old men. And fear of turning into the grizzly irresponsible red-eyed derelict I looked like after a day or two of stubble. With a beard you were expected to move differently, say different things, become more cynical and detached, I got conscious of my hands, eyebrows, lips. I could let myself look like that bent over law books on a Sunday night, but not in class on Monday morning. Then, before I knew it, I was a prosecuting attorney, had to set a community example, then an OPA civil servant in the war and soon a J.O. in the U.S. Navy, where hairiness was frowned on more even than gonorrhea, unless you wore it on your chest, and I wasn’t even out of the Navy before I was running for Congress. With that, my public face was set. Change it, lose votes, I was no longer a free agent. How a candidate looks is a lot more important than what he says, and the most important thing is to look familiar. Even our rare vacations became public appearances, I put it out of my mind. Except occasionally while shaving in the morning. Maybe someday when I’m President. Like Lincoln. Have some little kid write to me and suggest it. That would solve the television makeup problem, too — I can shave thirty seconds before I go on camera and, unless I put some powder on, still have such an obvious beard that people write me letters about it. The five-o’clock phantom. My enemies will stop at nothing.

As I’d feared, I’d had a sleepless night — probably for the best, it could be stimulating at a time like this, I knew, but for the moment it made me groggy, unable to see clearly how close the shave was, I had to go by feel. I’d been pushing too hard, consuming all my reserves, making myself vulnerable. All those disturbing apparitions, those images out of a life not my own.… It was as though something had got into me last night, like an alien gene, and I’d lacked the strength to fend it off — all my Early Warning rhetoric about “boring from within”: I’d suddenly begun to understand it for the first time. It was pretty stupid, banging my face on the wall like that, but in a way it had been a good thing. It had cleared my head, and by the time I’d reached my car I’d pretty much forgotten about old lady Greenglass’s inflated belly and the chickens and traffic on Delancey Street. Soft summer night out, new moon over my shoulder: I’d rolled the windows down, turned on the car radio, tuning in a station playing old songs like “Heartaches” and “Whispering Hope,” and had cruised down Independence, taking the long way home so as to calm down some, letting my mind fill up with reassuring pictures from my own past, my boyhood vibrating in me like an old movie: the Anaheim Union ditch in Yorba Linda where I went wading, Easter eggs and May baskets, the adventures of the Gumps, Grandma’s big austere house at Christmastime and “Joy to the World” being trumpeted out from our Meeting House steeple, Lindbergh’s flight and all the little stuff we collected from it, a book I read told by an abused dog, hanging baskets of smilax ferns on sunny porches, the Four Square Gospel Temple and Ken Maynard rolling off his horse inside the Berry Grand…Goddamn! I’d thought: I’ve lived a wonderful life! I’d remembered playing railroad fireman, learning to salute the flag at school and sing “Old Black Joe,” nosing through the Books of Knowledge, memorizing stanzas of “Snowbound” and struggling with “In a Persian Market Place” on Aunt Jane’s piano, sweating in the heat of a Tucson summer, mashing potatoes for Mom. I was good at that like everything else and Mom was always pleased because I never left any lumps, using the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down like the other boys did. I’d recalled — tooling past the Smithsonian and up around the Washington obelisk — mashing those potatoes, and it was like some kind of epiphany. I’d felt like I felt one morning at Whittier College when I’d been up for nearly three straight days and everything was incredibly beautiful — or that day, not all that long ago, when I was sitting on a dilapidated rocking chair on Whittaker Chambers’s front porch in Maryland, the warm sensation sweeping over me that it was all falling into place.

It had felt right, this feeling, I hadn’t resisted it. History working things out for me in its inexorable but friendly way: my brother had got sick and my mother, overburdened with work and worry, had sent me to live half a year with Aunt Jane. I had hated this and had felt cheated somehow. This was natural. I didn’t even like Aunt Jane. But that was where, feeling lonely, I’d learned the piano, and it had been an important part of my life ever since. Just as when I’d followed my mother over to Arizona. She’d taken Harold to a sanatorium there and was helping to pay the hospital bills by cooking and scrubbing at the sanatorium. I’d felt guilty tagging along without helping, so I’d got a job in the Prescott rodeo, cleaning out the stables. I’d been as thorough at that as I was at everything else, and so they’d asked me to be a barker for their wheel of chance. This was a come-on, I’d discovered, for the dice and poker tables in the back room, but everything out front where they’d put me was legal, the prizes were real hams and bacon, and I’d earned a dollar an hour and praise from the old guys for all the business I brought them. In many ways, in spite of the money, it had been the worst job I’d ever had, I was nervous for hours each day before I started, was scared to death of some of the people in those crowds — a complete waste of time, I’d thought…but without that experience, I would never have survived the cruelties of that whistle-stopping campaign tour last autumn when news broke about the so-called secret fund. Destiny. My Dad decided to open a gas station in 1922. He could have had a site in Santa Fe Springs, but he chose the one in East Whittier. The next year they found oil — lots of it — on the Santa Fe Springs property: we would have been millionaires. It gave my father bleeding ulcers, but for me, what was being a millionaire? Being at the center was everything, and this meant having nothing in excess to throw you off balance. Except power. Power, I knew, was something that existed in the universe like electricity. There was no reason to be a conductor. There was no reason not to be.

I’d skirted the Tidal Basin and wheeled around toward the Lincoln Memorial, then had followed the Potomac around to Rock Creek, letting the old tunes on the radio—“Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking”…“Me and My Shadow”—call up all the old feelings, the old scenes, the old dreams. No patterns, just a sweet nostalgic flow…the church picnics with homemade ice cream…the dense odor of the inside of my violin case… Tunney and Dempsey and the Irish Rebellion (how my father raged against it! “But aren’t we Irish, too?” I’d asked him; “Not that kind!” he’d bellowed)…a beautiful print we had in our house, an advertisement I think for Edison light bulbs, called “Shedding Light,” with a boy sitting on a purple rock in a misty rose and green landscape, gazing up at the light bulb glowing in the branches of a summery tree, looking for God up there, I supposed, as I always used to do while watching the clouds go by…or maybe it was a girl sitting there, I’d forgotten exactly. Passing the locks, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” fading in and out on the distant station, I’d had sudden total recall of Fredric March’s transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and back, which was nevertheless mixed up somehow with The Best Years of Our Lives, probably the greatest movie I’d ever seen, though I no longer remembered much of it. And so it had gone: the Armistice parade and a circus, Wallet finding a baby on his doorstep in “Gasoline Alley,” Grand Canyon through the stereoscope, the fear of Bolshevism, the strange light at Christian Endeavor meetings on Sunday nights, the 1924 World Series on our new radio and then Babe Ruth hitting sixty home runs when I was fourteen years old. But mostly school memories, ballgames, girls, clubs, bike rides, and things at home, Dad’s knuckled hands on a gas pump, the way his ears stuck out when he was dressed up, Mom’s smile when I brought things home from school, fights with my brother Donald, Harold’s vague grin, Dad coming home one day to tell us there was a little doll over at the hospital, a real live doll — poor little Arthur, who’d died so young. I’d once written a school composition about him, a kind of threnody…“And so, when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the child-like prayer — If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take — I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur…” I got an A for it. A for Arthur….

I’d swung off the deserted Parkway and up onto Massachusetts, better lit but just as empty, my fingers drumming on the wheel, picking out the song on the radio — Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” I think — I might have been a great jazz pianist, or a very good one anyway, if I’d had the time. This was the long part of the drive home, up past Washington Cathedral and American University, almost all the way to Maryland. But not quite all the way: we lived in Alexandria when we first came here, but now I wouldn’t live outside the District if they’d give me title to all of Montgomery County. I was dangerously close, I’d realized, to Inspiration House, headquarters for the pro-Rosenberg forces, and, wheeling around past the Naval Observatory, I’d flashed again suddenly on Ethel’s bare bottom by the kitchen stove, but I’d pushed it away before all the tenement stuff started crowding in, concentrating instead on the broad dirt streets of Yorba Linda, the scattered one-story wooden buildings, distant hills, the hair rolled tight on top of Grandma’s head, the elections I’d won, the first time I got to drive the truck alone, things I’d thought about when I was a janitor at the swimming pool. “My Wild Irish Rose.” The drunken Mexicans over in Jim Town. Snitching grapes. Throwing passes. Standing under the big lamp on the corner of Green-leaf and Philadelphia, talking with guys late into the night. A full moon one night that seemed to separate itself from the street lamp as I walked out from under it — it’s God! I’d thought, it’s proof! — and then a girl’s window, lit: but she was dressed, and then, unbuttoning her blouse with one hand, she pulled the blind with the other. My eyes had closed a moment, capturing that lowering shade — and I’d almost wrecked the car, two blocks from home, right on Wesley Circle. Easy, boy. Don’t let your guard down.

Checkers had greeted me, threatening to wake up everybody in the house. I’d petted him roughly and cracked his nose to shut him up. The most famous dog in the nation since Fala. The goddamn spare room was still full to overflowing with dog collars, handwoven dog blankets, dog kennels and baskets, and enough dog food to feed all of Southeast Asia, sent to us by dog lovers and other lonely people. Some of them had actually thought that my Checkers speech was an appeal for charity! Thus: one more profession, if all else failed. I’d found a rib bone in the refrigerator for Checkers, a bowl of vanilla pudding, three overripe slices of tomato, a french-fried chicken back, a partial tin of Spam, a plate of soft fudge, cole slaw, a Dr. Pepper, some sour gherkins, a peach half in syrup, and a cold hamburger for myself — more or less in that order and eaten as discovered. I was very hungry and it all tasted good. There was actually some red Jell-0 in there with canned mixed fruit in it: I wasn’t sure of the flavor, but I ate it up anyway, thinking: Who knows? it may be the last of its kind. I’d also cleaned up what was left of a jar of apple sauce, bottle of skimmed milk, bowl of tapioca, and tin can of cold baked beans, followed by caviar and strawberry ice cream, lit up a ceremonial pipeful of Rum and Maple, and sat down in an armchair to digest.

Foo. I’d eaten too quickly. I felt terrible. But one had to be uncomfortable, I knew, to do one’s best thinking. I’d tried to think about the case again. Here at home, pull it all together, solve all the problems. What did it mean that they’d found the missing console table, that Schneider the photographer had committed perjury with FBI connivance, that Greenglass had spent six months in the Tombs with Harry Gold preparing their testimony? Nothing. The table could be any table, Schneider’s alleged perjury was merely technical, witnesses are always schooled. I’d belched sourly, shifted in the chair, knocked out the pipe (why do I smoke at all? I hate the goddamn stuff), and recalled that in one of the confidential notes stolen from her lawyer’s office, Ruth Greenglass had been reported admitting that her husband, David, had “a tendency to hysteria”: “Once when he had the grippe he ran nude through the hallway shrieking of ‘elephants’ and ‘lead pants.’” Lead pants? Maybe he’d seen our secret research into anti-shrapnel underwear for Marines. I’d realized I was just pooping around, so I’d chased Checkers off to bed and gone that way myself.

In the bedroom, I’d seen that Pat had got tangled in the sheets, her bottom exposed: was she trying to tell me something, I’d wondered? Such a lean pale spiny rear, yet slack and inviting at the same time. Calvinist but charitable. I’d struggled, grunting, into pajamas, had slipped into bed feeling very heavy. Hot, too — I could afford an air-conditioner now, why hadn’t I bought one? Residue of that goddamn campaign. Pat needed a new coat, too, but I still couldn’t risk it. Of course, thirteenth wedding anniversary: the proper gift for that was furs and textiles, wasn’t it? Might be the occasion. Now that I was lying still, my face had started to sting again where I’d hit it on the wall, and I’d felt a throbbing ache in the small of my back from sitting too long on my office floor. I’d remembered that Ethel Rosenberg had suffered from back pains all her life because of a ricketic curvature of the spine. This was supposed to explain a lot of things. I could see how it could make you cranky, all right. I couldn’t get comfortable. I’d tossed about, sweating, conscious of Pat’s butt, reminded of the time I’d got nauseous working as a handyman in a packing house and had had to quit. What a miserable job. It had been like some kind of seasickness, all that meat, everything churning and hammering — I’d been too chicken to quit right away and had stuck it out for sixteen weeks, worst time in my life. Too dogged and persevering to quit, I mean. Oh man, why the hell did I eat all that junk? There were awful moments in the Navy, too, and in cars — about the only thing I dreaded about becoming President was having to take the Presidential yacht out from time to time. Pat had complained softly in her sleep, and I’d got up, opened a bottle of beer, and moved to a couch.

I’d thought, stretching out: I must do what I always do, I must consider all the worst alternatives as cold-bloodedly as I can, and reach an analytical conclusion. But instead I’d dozed off and found myself in bed with the guy I slept with at Duke. He had been studying so hard he’d set his ass on fire, and he was trying to show me the burns. Curiously, he had a thin black moustache and wire-rimmed glasses, was wearing a double-breasted suit jacket, white shirt, and tie. “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said as I pried the cheeks of his butt apart to see what was the matter. We didn’t have any electricity in that place and it was dark, but by peering closely I could tell that the whole area was festering and badly inflamed. It was almost like somebody had taken a meat cleaver to it. I felt nauseous and sorry for what I’d done. I wanted to comfort her but I was worried what the lasting impression would be. Dad came in and suggested a poultice of hot mustard. He didn’t seem to understand the problem. I shouted: “Summer solstice, not poultice!” He seemed utterly abashed and ashamed of himself. I was ashamed, too, because I knew he’d never finished school. Pat lay naked on the bed, her eyes closed, moaning softly, literally shedding light. I was at the sink. Perhaps I’d been washing the dishes, or else I’d been vomiting. “She’s the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” Dad said solemnly. He was dressed up for church and his ears stuck out. I went outside, thinking: Didn’t they know I could die, too?

I’d awakened, vaguely recalling a warm sunny scene, very attractive and soothing, as though from some pastoral painting: green hills, a brook, the house receding… I’d drifted back trying to recapture it, but found myself instead giving a guided tour of the Coney Island boardwalk to gruff old men in flat straws and red suspenders. There was something before this about shit. Maybe it was something about cleaning the stables at the rodeo in Prescott. Except the shit was from people who were frightened or made sick by the carnival rides. I was still wearing my pajamas and an old woman with cheap spectacles came over to feel the cloth. The fly on the pants gaped and my peter kept flopping out. The old woman was Jewish and had hairs poking out her nostrils. She didn’t seem interested in my peter, only the pajamas. Her fingernails were long and scratched at my skin. I was afraid the old men would walk away. I knew everything depended on them. I was trying to sell them a ride on the Whip, and I made some kind of joke about going round and round instead of up and down, which didn’t go over at all. They became angry and grumbled in some foreign language. The old woman — my God, I realized, it’s Bob Taft! — looked up at me and winked, then shrank away. This was because I was getting bigger. And I realized my face was changing — rough clumps of hair were sprouting on my forehead and nose. I felt crude and ugly. I smelled bad. I seemed to be getting tangled up in the roller coaster. I was afraid of the wires. I woke up and realized that Checkers had crawled up and was sleeping with his head on my belly. I seemed to remember a rifle range, and near it a lady carrying a parasol and a white handbag, girls lying on the beach in candy-striped swimsuits. The pool was closed and I was sweeping out the girls’ changing room: smell of chlorine and damp wool. I thought of places I could hide in here to watch the girls dress. I dreamed of discovering secret things while sweeping up, but all I ever found was a pair of wet cotton socks. I peed once in the girls’ toilet and was frightened by my own face in a mirror. I woke again. Or had I been sleeping? I had an erection and needed to use the bathroom. Peeing, I realized that the scene in the girls’ toilet at the swimming pool was not a dream at all, but a true memory from a job I had in high school. The sweeping, the mirror, the guilt. I’d turned the socks in to “Lost and Found,” feeling virtuous. Then what about the rifle range at Coney Island? I looked in the mirror and saw that I’d given my face quite a whack on that wall. I put some cold cream on it. I looked puffy and hairy, I hardly recognized myself, some kind of monster. I seemed to see Uncle Sam’s face behind me, his blue eye glinting with amusement. Or fury. I can only do my best, I thought. What more does he want of me? Later, I dreamt of tomatoes with big dark bruises on them. I couldn’t find a good one in the lot. This seemed to justify an old proverb: There is no little enemy. I had to struggle to remember this proverb — at first it kept reading: There is no little enema. I thought I could make the best of the situation by making juice out of them, start a business. I took the rotten tomatoes to an electronics shop. The sign over the shop door said: OPTIMO CIGARS. Taxicabs went by with tires mounted in their right fenders. I thought: Somebody could get killed! The man in the cigar store said: “I don’t know nothing about pressing tomatoes, mister, I’m in underwear machines.” He seemed frightened. There were children huddled around a radiator that was hissing like a snake. “I come from Julius Caesar,” I said. A woman was putting bread on a table. The children seemed to resent me. I was wide awake, not dreaming at all. “David gave me your number,” I explained helplessly. I thought I must be going mad.

Now, in the hard light of day, scraping the bristle from my forty-year-old throat, freshly shampooed and showered, the sweat of yesterday’s ordeal sent safely down the drain, I could see that many of those associations from last night were more innocent than they’d seemed at the time. I’d pushed too long without rest or nourishment and had momentarily blown a few circuits in the memory-retrieval system, that was all. Opened up the gates and flooded the syntax routes. In fact, it could be fun, if you didn’t do it too often. Take that vivid image of Pat lying flat out on the bed, for example. I realized now that she was also somehow my little brother Arthur. And Mother was there all the time, though I don’t remember where. There was some kind of satire on the Rosenbergs mixed up in it, too, because at the time I had said to myself, watching Pat thrash about: “For peace, breast, and Moses.”

Also, I realized now where some of those New York images might have come from, which last night had seemed so enigmatic. As a boy, for example, working in my folks’ store, I used to drive a pickup into the produce markets in Los Angeles in the early morning hours so I could get the fresh fruit and vegetables back in the store and ready for sale when we opened at eight. Not that L.A. was New York, but then neither was my image of New York New York. And for small-town kids like me back then, New York was like some kind of Jerusalem, an El Dorado. There were picture books and photos in the papers, newsreels, stereoscopes, and later, Tru-Vue films, all those movies about the great Empire City — who knows? those skylines in my mind may have been painted a few miles away in a Hollywood studio. The so-called Great White Way: invention of Warner Brothers probably. Washington Square. The Battery. The Chrysler Building and Astor House. And the Lower East Side: the mysterious ghetto with its hives of colorful immigrant populations, the place where the melting pot melted. Yes, we’d all been there. For a kid who loved baseball like I did, it was a real dream town, that was where the Babe and Lou and Burleigh and Red Ruffing lived, John McGraw and Zack Wheat, three great teams all in the same city — when I was a boy either the Yanks or the Giants were in the World Series almost every year, and more often than not, both of them. On street corners, we talked about New York. One of the first tunes I learned to bang out on the piano was “The Sidewalks of New York,” and even now I liked to play it and call up that city of my imaginings. I read a lot of books about the city, too, I think there was one by Horatio Alger with New York in the title, something about a poor kid whose real father turns out to be a millionaire, and that was where Wall Street was and the crash and the bread lines we read about. That’s right, no need to get upset last night by what seemed at times like telepathic messages from the Sing Sing Death House, I told myself, and pulled my cheek forward over my jawbone to examine the hidden stubble. “Just misses being handsome,” TIME had said. Just misses! If I‘m ever President, I thought, I’ll send that fairy to the boondocks and give the laureateship to Reader’s Digest, who deserves it anyway.

It had all started, I remembered, with that inexplicable “memory” of the rented hall on Delancey Street where Julius and Ethel had met at a union ball, and I realized now, old piano tunes tinkling in the back of my head, where that vast gleaming waxed floor had come from: the Women’s Clubhouse in Whittier, across from the Bailey Street Park. Mom and Dad got married there. I‘d been in and out of that place all the time I was growing up — yes, the old Victrola in the corner, the kitchen…some of those pastoral images later on might even have come from the park out front. And the kids dressing around the kitchen coalstove: I‘d read in one of the FBI reports that that was the only heat Barnet and Tessie Greenglass had had in their Sheriff Street flat — the family used to huddle around it on cold afternoons, get dressed by it in the mornings. In the report, this was to show how poor they were and to make the point that poverty and injustice were “the parents of revolutionary idealism”—in other words, the poor, given their resentments, were not to be trusted, and if there were any trouble, it was smart to look there first. Naturally, this had reminded me of the stove we got dressed around in Yorba Linda, Mom full-bellied at the time with little Arthur. The Sam and Bernie Greenglass I had pictured might in a crowd have been mistaken for my own brothers Harold and Donald, and as for little Ethel’s naked bottom, well, to tell the truth, it had looked a lot like my daughter Tricia’s.

Had I resented the implication in the FBI report that, because I had also had to dress around a kitchen stove on winter mornings, my life too might be suspect? Perhaps. But it was not the same. We lived in frost-free Yorba Linda, after all, home of the Mother Tree of the Fuerte Avocado in California, we rarely needed heat at all. And even if we weren’t rich, we were never resentful. We just got busy and improved ourselves. “Self-respect, self-regulation, self-restraint, and self-attainment!” my mother always admonished us. Strange I even remembered that kitchen coalstove, it was so long ago. No wonder it seemed like something in a dream! To think of the changes that this country had seen in the few years since I was a boy! Just look at that terrific layout Pat now had in her kitchen: who would want to change something that was working so well? These Communists were crazy. Every time I flicked a switch, adjusted a thermostat, started a car, boarded a plane, walked through automatic doors, flushed a toilet, or watched a record drop on a turntable, I loved America more. And not just for her material progress either, but for her great traditions as well. Like Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Church picnics and the Rose Bowl. The annual Congressional baseball game. The bonfire at Whittier College — it may seem frivolous to some that while Julius Rosenberg at the age of fifteen was circulating a petition for Tom Mooney, I nearly six years older was chairmanning the annual bonfire on Fire Hill and establishing a new all-time record by topping it, not with the traditional one-hole privy, but with a real four-hole collector’s item—“the hottest thing that ever happened at Whittier,” it’s been called — but anyone with any understanding at all of the American mainstream will know that in 1933 Tom Mooney was peripheral to it and that shithouse-crowned bonfire was dead center. Now, twenty years later, Julius Rosenberg was still outside, in fact he was colder than ever, while I was playing golf with Uncle Sam. Oh, he was still trying. Identifying himself with the Founding Fathers, black martyrs, and what he liked to call “the people.” But even that yellowed newspaper copy of the Declaration of Independence that he kept taped up on his cell wall, presumably to demonstrate his undying patriotism, was just one more sign of his alienation: the Declaration was never part of the mainstream either.

On my office wall, by contrast, I had the Inaugural Prayer of President Eisenhower, framed and under glass: “Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong.” As I told the American Legion: “Among the great privileges that we enjoy is the privilege of hearing President Eisenhower pray at the beginning of his Inauguration. That could not happen in half the world today!” It was a treat, all right, listening to him, his voice high-pitched and straining against the cold, against the strangeness, the vast multitudes, somewhat snappish, militant, overeager, sing-songy at times, a bit tongue-tied and struggling to overcome it. “DEAR FRIENDS!” He really cracked that out, made us all jump. Wonder it didn’t start us giggling, but we were all new to this, afraid of forgetting our parts or getting assassinated or something. “Uh, BE-fore I begin… THE expression…of those thoughts…that I deem appropriate…uh-TO this mo-MENT…would you permit me the privlidge of uttering ay little private prayer of my own…and I ask that you bow your heads!” This was amazing, because for Dwight David Eisenhower, religion was something organized by the USO for the entertainment of the troops. When he was a kid it was what dragged you out of the crap games at the Herd on Sundays, and once out of Abilene he had rarely let it interfere with his life any longer. Asking no questions, he suffered no answers. For Ike, Jesus was some kind of loser, attractive to old ladies. Bowing your head in prayer was to make you look tougher and taller when you raised it again. Talking about religion, a consolation for the dying, could be bad luck for a soldier — the less said about it, the better. And then, suddenly, standing there before us was the inspired visionary of the Inaugural Address — here, clearly, was a man who had gone to the center and seen the sacred. You could see it in the sweat on his brow, hear it in the constriction in his throat, the crack and thunder of “faith,” “freedom,” and “good and evil,” rolling off his tongue. “All-might-y GAWT!”

He started going regularly to church again. He joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. He rejected the side-aisle pews used by Jackson, Pierce, Polk, Buchanan, Grant, and Cleveland, insisted instead on sitting “front and center.” He gave us frequent lectures on American history, tracing our lineage directly back to God. Jefferson’s phrase “We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was like a tic with him, kept coming to his tongue. But it wasn’t the unalienable rights that interested him, it was the endowment by a Creator. “Thee Cree-AY-torr!” It was as though he’d never really believed in God until he discovered Him there in the Declaration of Independence. Maybe he’d read it for the first time while boning up for the 1952 campaign. “The Declaration of Independence established once and for all,” he liked to say, “that our civilization and our form of government is deeply imbedded in a religious faith. Indeed, those men felt that unless we recognized that relationship between our form of government and religious faith, that form of government made no sense.” Well, when an old soldier returns from the profane world to the sacred heart of his people, when he becomes overnight, without even realizing it, the workaday abode for the spirit of the race, we might expect such declarations. Indeed, the conversion of Dwight David Eisenhower was as great a proof of the immanence and immutability of Uncle Sam as the renewed preaching of the Disciples after their Good Friday dismay and dispersion was of the Resurrection of Christ. Even Ethel Rosenberg had come to recognize him as a “sensitive artist and devoutly religious man.” Clumsy as he was, you knew he was the one to know.

I had always had this instinct, I always knew who had it, whether at school, in downtown Whittier, or in Washington. I learned right away to talk things over with Dr. Dexter, president of the college, and Dean Horack at Duke, with Herman Perry, manager of the Bank of America in Whittier, with Herbert Hoover and Murray Chotiner, Karl Mundt and Christian Herter, Tom Dewey, Foster Dulles and his brother — there was a certain vibration they had, and I always felt it. And who was Julie Rosenberg hanging out with? Losers like Morton Sobell and Max Elitcher and William Perl and Joel Barr. Collecting money for the Reds in the Spanish Civil War and signatures for the Scottsboro boys. Organizing the Students’ Strike for Peace. Instead of telling his deans and teachers how much he admired them, he insulted them. A great deal of time during the trial two years ago had been spent on describing the Rosenbergs’ adolescent activities, what was termed their “premature anti-fascism.” The defense objected, but this was demonstrably relevant, not to show “motivation,” as Judge Kaufman allowed, but to reveal the hidden patterns of developing heresy.

The first thing I did when I went to Whittier College was help found a new fraternity, the Orthogonians (actually, we called ourselves the “Square Shooters”), which was a kind of bridge between the old-line Franklins with their fancy-dress rules and right-wing pride, and the more open but disorganized and apathetic independent students. Athletes mostly, Chief Newman’s boys, but we ran the politics and social scene as well. We met once a month down at Sanders’s cafe for our traditional symbolic meal, or sometimes I took the whole fraternity to Grandma’s house, and she and Mom fixed the beans and spaghetti. I was always generous like this. The Square Shooters was a real fraternity, all right, with all the usual hoopla, horseplay — I’ll never forget our christening ceremonies at a Wednesday-morning chapel service when Sheik Homan tried to break a bottle of Old Taylor over my head! — and campus politicking, but we were also innovators. True, we had “secret” symbols — a boar’s head and a square with “Beans, Brawn, Brains, and Bowels” as the four corners — and mottoes and special handshakes and I even composed a chapter song: “All hail the mighty boar, Our patron beast is he!” But at the same time, we got rid of the evening dress, fought against exclusivity, even initiated a Negro football star, shocked the whole campus with our risqué vaudeville skits and plays, most of which I wrote, and made a virtue of being a good guy instead of a rich guy. I’ve been making bridges like that between tradition and innovation ever since. In a very real sense, Julius Rosenberg was going to the electric chair because he went to City College of New York and joined the American Students Union when he was sixteen. If he’d come to Whittier instead and joined my Square Shooters, worn slouch sweaters and open collars with the rest of us, it wouldn’t be happening. Simple as that.

Tricia and Julie were running up and down the stairs screaming, and I could hear Pat calling them down to the table. Breakfast was cooking. I had expected an upset stomach this morning, but instead I was simply hungry. I hoped that Pat grasped the fact that I was in a major crisis and was fixing corned beef hash for me with an egg on it. That I hadn’t come to bed all night, that I’d slept in my clothes on the living-room sofa, should be enough of a clue. Probably not, though. She could be pretty insensitive.

I discovered, inspecting my face closely, that I’d somehow missed a patch of beard under my chin. Still not as alert as I ought to be. Hard to focus. I hadn’t completely shaken off all that happened last night. I had awakened with an erection, for example — luckily, Pat had come down to call me before the girls had seen it — and it still hadn’t gone away. I plugged in the razor again, grimacing at my face. Well, TIME’S right, I admitted, lifting my “fat cheeks” and staring down past my “duck-bill nose,” it’s true, I’m no goddamn Millard Fillmore. But then, what the hell, neither was Abe Lincoln. Once, a little girl came up to me with a news-magazine photograph to sign. After I’d autographed it, she thanked me and said: “It’s an awfully good picture. It doesn’t look like you at all.” I wondered afterwards if someone had put her up to it. But people have often registered an odd kind of surprise on first meeting me face-to-face. They tend to stare at my nose as though measuring its breadth, lost there and unable to find my eyes again. So, all right, I’ve often said that there wasn’t much that could be done with my face. In that regard I’m my own severest critic: it isn’t perfect; it’s never going to be.

Cartoonists had had a heyday with it. Not even Julie Rosenberg, who had a genuinely sinister mug, right down to the weak chin, pointed nose, and pencil-line moustache, had had to take the kind of punishment I’d received every week from Herblock and the others. Picasso had actually made the sonuvabitch look handsome, very Anglo-Saxon, whereas Herblock always showed me as a jowly, wavy-haired, narrow-eyed tough, linked usually with McCarthy and Jenner, and with suggestions of some bad odor about me, like a little boy who’d just filled his pants or something. He hadn’t given any of us a day’s rest since we came into office back in January, you’d think we were invading Mongol hordes or something, instead of fellow Americans. His cartoon Ike looked a lot like Jiggs from “Bringing Up Father,” only daffier, he drew Herb Brownell like a kind of Dracula, and Joe McCarthy was shown as a sweaty, hairy, cleaver-wielding tramp. I don’t know about these other guys, but cartoonists had always had fun with my face. Already back at Whittier College, they were happily nailing me with a few harsh lines: a solid black bar for eyebrows (no eyes), a stretched ski-slope S for a nose, a small sour turndown comma for a mouth, encompassed by curly black hair cut square, little parenthetical ears, meat-platter cheeks, and a stiff neck — just three mean marks and a dark frame. I didn’t mind. It was one of the consequences of power. If not a condition: maybe politicians needed faces like that to become recognizable. Something to set you apart: people respected the almost magical force emanating from archetypes, no matter what sort, or who put them there. Or maybe the caricature came first and the face followed….

“Dick!” Pat called from the foot of the stairs. The maid had the sweeper going in the living room, and I could smell bacon frying on the stove in the kitchen. So much for corned beef hash. “Your car’s here!”

“What—!” I glanced at my watch: holy shit! nearly eight! I was going to be late for the goddamn Cabinet meeting! I scrubbed my face angrily — it smarted where I’d hit the wall last night, but I deserved it for so much lollygagging — and applied talcum and deodorant, hobbled into the bedroom for a fresh white shirt, muttering irritably under by breath. I was ordinarily a very punctual man: down to breakfast every morning by seven, fruit, toast, a cup of coffee with a half teaspoon of sugar and a touch of cream, break up the squabbles between the girls, check the newspapers and thumb through the Congressional Record, get picked up by John just before eight, read The New York Times on the way in, and be at work in my office before most of my staff turned up. That I was nearly an hour behind this morning was yet another sign of how disturbed I was by this damned thing—I’ve got to get to the office, I thought with some anxiety, rushing stiff-legged down the stairs, knotting my tie on the run, folding a white handkerchief for my breast pocket, tripping over Julie’s doll Tiny, and taking the last of the stairs three at a time, and clean up that mess!

10. Pilgrimage to The New York Times

The Friday-morning commuters into the center gather, as is their ancient custom, before their great civic monument, The New York Times, there to commune with the latest transactions of the Spirit of History as made manifest in all the words and deeds of living and dying men fit to print. On great slabs of stone, lead, and zinc, words and pictures appear and disappear, different ones every day, different yet somehow reassuringly familiar. It is as though — the slabs seem to tell us — a certain constancy of purpose motivates the Spirit, even when perverse, bringing a kind of fragile episodic continuity to the daily debris of human enterprise, a “handle” as they say on the Great White Way, though it’s not certain whether this is thanks to the Spirit or to The New York Times’s monumental sign language. TURKS URGE GREEKS / TO RUSH BALKAN TIE. PANAMA AND FRANK / SEE KAYE ON FILM. FAVORITISM REFUTED / IN WESTERN PEA SALE. It is a kind of hunting magic, a talisman against the terrible flux: men fear only surprises, HOLY NAME PARADES IN BROOKLYN.

Some have broken fast, some do so now before the monument. Symbolic foods appropriate to the sober occasion are taken: eggs, smoked flesh, the seeds of living things, uroboric bagels and doughnuts, sustenance drawn from swollen teats, SENATE GROUP FOR OLEO IN NAVY. British Girls Advance, PRODUCERS TRAIL MARY MARTIN. There is a ceremonial drone of wheels on rails, clicking turnstiles, respectful murmurings and rustlings, rhythmically accented by sudden hornblasts and whistles, the wheeze of air brakes, the blowing of noses, the clatter of dishes and whump of doors, a man asking for tickets, CHINESE STAB AT 6 U.N. POINTS. The Milkman Is Slipping. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WEEK BACKED, EXECUTED GERMAN / A JOBLESS PAINTER. The worshipers move methodically among the slabs, breaking bread and sipping hot stimulants, muttering the traditional responses, snorting and farting, momentarily losing themselves, absorbing the positional metaphors that will preserve the earth’s gravity one more day and stay their own panic. PLANTS DISPERSED / TO FOIL BOMBINGS. BRONX PASTOR’S SON GETS CALL. Weddings, murders, mergers, wakes. Recipes and riots, batting averages and book reviews. The Cold War between Uncle Sam and his enemies, hot wars in the bushes. Ominously, the world chooses to publish today The Art of the Checkmate, and Frankenstein, say the slabs, is being reissued. Reissued?

VERY RECENTLY, 19 COPIES OF THIS BOOK WERE LITERALLY BURNED. Shadows cloud the pilgrim faces as they learn that the French World War I ace who shot down seventy-five Bosch planes from his old Spad biplane is dead, but the shadows are dispersed a moment later by the revelation that Ruth Hussey has had a daughter after two sons. Martha Raye is obtaining a divorce from Nick Condos on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The communicants try to imagine this cruelty and wonder if they will be able to watch some of it tonight in Times Square.

Or whenever. If ever. There is a pervading unease here at the monument this morning: something is wrong, every responsible voice in the nation has been insisting the executions had to take place last night and they didn’t, and now even The New York Times, ordinarily impervious in its grandeur to common panic, must acknowledge that the nation needs these deaths and needs them soon, for as Arthur Krock announces, deep inside the maze:

The operation of justice in the United States is subject to inordinate delays, anyhow, and the Communists have already taken full advantage of this in the Rosenbergs’ case to injure the reputation of the judicial system here with our friends abroad and otherwise make effective anti-American propaganda. By granting the stay, and on the grounds he gave, Justice Douglas has enabled the enemies of this nation to besmirch it further….

They read that as a consequence of Justice Douglas’s action the Supreme Court is today in special emergency session — CASE SEEN IN PERIL — and that before it the associate counsel for the atom spies has said of the New York Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol that “there never was a more crooked District Attorney in New York than the one who tried the Rosenbergs!” Perhaps, they conclude hopefully from this, the Phantom has overreached himself. ROSENBERGS MAY FIGHT / INDICTMENT IF DEATH / SENTENCE IS UPSET. Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”‘), a movie review of Devil’s Plot, and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30. “Something to fit every taste.”

Which is to say, information is one thing, The New York Times another. One does not assimilate data in a trance. Communion services are essentially tactile, not cognitive, a confrontation of life with life. What compels the attention and taps the wellsprings of prophecy on these pilgrimages is not this announcement that little Arlene Riddett, 15, of Yonkers, won the girls’ championship in the 28th annual marbles tournament in Asbury Park, New Jersey, nor that picture of two East Berlin demonstrators throwing stones at Russian tanks on Leipzigerplatz, but the fact that these things touch each other. There are sequences but no causes, contiguities but no connections. The government of Argentina orders the price of theater tickets cut by 25 % and the President of the United States is given a large toy model of Smokey Bear. The execution of an unemployed housepainter in Berlin takes shape beside the report that a new collection of wall coverings and shower curtains offers a variety of choices to homemakers who wish to decorate the bathroom: BATH WALLPAPERS / ARE EASY TO CLEAN. “Panorama” is one of the wallpaper designs, made up of impressionistic scenes of the country against a background of abstract motifs reminiscent of ancient calligraphy. Design as a game. Randomness as design. Design ironically revealing randomness. Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic. As in dreams, there is an impressive amount of condensation on the one hand, elaboration on the other. Logical relationships are repressed, but reappear through displacement. There are pictures of shower curtains with cats carrying umbrellas in their tails. The housepainter’s wife said her husband had merely left home that rainy morning to collect his unemployment check. He had a bad cold and planned to come straight home. Handy Man of High Degree. “Shot through with compassion and humor…” Advertisements for airconditioners, summer suits, and umbrellas provide the setting for the crash of the Globemaster IN FIERY SPIN NEAR TOKYO. Cool and carefree as a breeze, SOME UNUSUAL WAYS WITH COLD SOUP. The news that 905 MORE CAPTIVES / ESCAPE FROM CAMP is paired with an ad for UNITED HUNTS. Send them off to camp looking their nicest after a trip to Best’s Children’s Barber Shop.

There are those who commune directly with the words, caressing them blearily with their sleepy eyes or swallowing them like antacids, leaning against the slabs for support whenever the earth should rock, but doubting they represent anything more than themselves. Others gamely seek the space between, likening these cryptic hoarstones to clues in the daily crossword puzzle (and look what’s there today, first clue, 1 Across: Burning Tree activity), signals in an ordered maze, a possibly more or less ordered maze. And perhaps that was why — the tenacious faith in the residual magic of language — this monument was erected in the first place: that effort to reconstruct with words and iconography each fleeting day in the hope of discovering some pattern, some coherence, some meaningful dialogue with time. But so enormous a shrine is it, so prodigious a task just to keep the translation of gesture into language flowing, that all consciousness of any intended search for transcendence must long ago have disappeared and been forgotten, leaving all visionary speculations to the passing pilgrim. Yet even this extravagant accretion of data suggests a system, even mere hypotyposis projects a metaphysic. “Objectivity” is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions; facts emerge not from life but from revelation, gnarled as always by ancient disharmonies and charged with libidinous energy. Conscious or not, The New York Times statuary functions as a charter of moral and social order, a political force-field maker, defining meaningful actions merely by showing them, conferring a special power on those it touches, creating the stations of life that others might aspire to. And why not? How else struggle against entropy? PACE AT WESTBURY / TO MIGHTY GRATTAN. N.Y. Life Officers to Be Elevated. WASHINGTON ANGRY. Fail to Find a Bomb in School. HOUSE PURCHASED / FOR WORKING GIRLS.

They often come here, working girls, prowling in the Classifieds, searching for fairy godmothers, magic carpets, the secret name of that gold-spinning gnome. Bombers poke about, open-faced and friendly, looking for targets. Politicians, too. Pensioners and passing tourists. Uncle Sam also comes from time to time, mostly just to show off. And the Phantom, though he never shows his face, can often be glimpsed in the dark shadows behind the slabs, exposing his hindend and farting damply. Judge Irving Kaufman, like so many, comes here out of duty, essentially oblivious to the Phantom’s impieties, seeking what he would think of as a balanced view. One eye on New York, the other on the World. Tammany Hall is his metaphorical link, just as it is Irving Saypol’s. Governor Tom Dewey, whose connection is the Republican Eastern Establishment, those same International Bankers who have put Dwight David Eisenhower in the White House, rushes here daily, shoulders bulled forward, fists clenched, chewing his moustache, ready for a fight, looking down his nose, or up his nose, at panic-stricken creatures like Mayor Vincent Impellitteri or Mother Luce (her son TIME whistles through here like a thief in the night). As for Eisenhower, he snorts in amusement at all this misplaced sanctitude and steers clear — a man could lose hours in such twaddle; but his Vice President, Richard Nixon, does come here often, pretending disdain (all right, so it’s the famous organ of the Eastern Establishment, it’s not that big), yet not without awe and a certain practiced self-effacement. After all, he is something of a stranger here, and he understands and respects the codes for sojourning in alien lands. Not so, Joe McCarthy. He parades through like a peacock, sporting all his medals, and jabbing his stubby fingers in outrage at any signs of pink stains on the face of the monument (some say these odd blotches are the blood of Innocents, others claim that Roy Cohn and David Schine come at night and sling them there, but most are confident that the Senator knows what he’s shouting about).

Even the Rosenbergs turn up. Disparagingly, fearfully, yet eagerly. A sign perhaps…? Ethel wanders dreamily through the entertainment section, purses her lips disapprovingly at the fashion ads, falls into a quiet trance before the Letters to the Editor. Julius, more faithful — a regular dues-payer, in fact — presents himself diligently at Page One every morning at ten o’clock, pressing his nose against the great slabs, frowning through his wire-rimmed spectacles at all this irrelevant history, weeping softly to himself to see such monumental dignity conferred on a world so mad. These bitter tears blur his weak vision, and he is left with little more than the vague sense of a great gray threat, remote, impenetrable, yet for that all the more menacing. Often enough, through his tears, he has discovered himself here on these slabs, or someone they said was himself (“the accused,” they call him, but the words keep melting and blurring on him, and what he sees there is “the accursed”), but he has not recognized his own image, grown gigantesque, eviscerated, unseeing: it’s like looking into some weird funhouse mirror that stretches one’s shape so thin you can see right through it. He used to think that if he could just find his way onto these tablets everything would be all right, but now he knows this is impossible: nothing living ever appears here at all, only presumptions, newly fleshed out from day to day, keeping intact that vast, intricate, yet static tableau —The New York Times’s finest creation — within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is.

Oh, he shouldn’t be surprised, he’s a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia — my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again. But even if he martyred himself like that, what would it amount to? just another thread in the fabric, another figure in the eternal tableau, one more little exemplary parable for the hucksters to amuse themselves by, sell a few more books and papers. So much for terrible happenings, good intentions. Two years ago, he came here and stole away, on July the Fourth, a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It was very heavy. Perhaps he thought he could beat down his cell walls with it. But though he pressed his whole body against it until it turned yellow with his fear, he was unable to read what it said. He tried to pretend, but he got mixed up. “It is interesting to read these words,” he wrote bravely to Ethel, “concerning free speech, freedom of the press and of religion in this setting. These rights our country’s patriots died for can’t be taken from the people even by Congress or the Courts.” Perhaps, he would often think, squinting helplessly at the quirky script, I need new glasses.

Today, in any case, he is not here, they are not here. Their cells have been stripped and so have they, and they have been moved into the Halfway House in anticipation of the Times Square spectacular, and subsequently, though they will presumably miss this, their own climactic hour on the great slabs. Ethel is now clothed in terrycloth slippers and a cheap green dress with white polka dots, a frowzy second cousin to the one the model’s wearing on Tablet 25; Julius has been dressed in a loose T-shirt, buff-colored slippers, and fresh khaki pants. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs have not lost hope; in fact, they feel pretty certain they’ve won the day, and all these execution warm-up rituals are just one more last-ditch effort by the government to frighten them into confessing. Well, it won’t work.

But if the Rosenbergs are absent this morning, they are not missed. No one is missed here. Or recognized either. For curiously, these same slabs which bring pilgrims together each morning in meditation and wonder, creating a fund of common tropes and expectations, also somehow isolate them. The demand made by these tablets on the faithful is quite literally monumental, and they often experience the illusion suffered by mystics throughout the ages: the Spirit, annunciating reality, displaces it, and the tangible world dissolves even as it is being proclaimed. Thus, one may need to read here tomorrow what momentous events were transpiring just behind the slab one stood before today. People press themselves against the Father’s Day advertisements and crisis tabulations, fail to notice the people leaping out of buildings, girls being raped on subway platforms, the colliding traffic. They vibrate before the reported joy of the Rosenbergs at news of their stay and the editorial on moustaches (Julie’s has been shaved off), but cannot see the crowds gathering outside the Supreme Court building, the writing on the subway walls: OBJECTIFICATION IS THE PRACTICE OF ALIENATION!

Ah, this strange eventful History, witness of the times, the light of truth and a tissue of crimes, the true poetry, distillation of Rumour, mockery of human affairs, chart and compass, this whimsical prophet with his face turned backwards, reciting the manners, the pursuits, the peoples, and the battles of the race. “Aghast I stood,” Pope once said, though ignorant of The New York Times, “a monument of woe!” RAIL LABOR CHIEFS / ATTACK EMPLOYERS. Greeks Repulse 3,000. MARIE IS REJECTED / AS FRENCH PREMIER. Rhee Rebuffs Eisenhower. PARAKEET ELUDES JAY. POLO GROUNDERS / TRIP REDLEGS. REDS ACCUSE US. Double Jeopardy. F.B.I, ENTERS CASE. Eternal Son and Patrol Triumph. DAVID AND GOLIATH: A miracle of fit and flattery. Remember, too, that in Hitler’s Germany it started by burning books in the streets…and ended by burning people in the ovens of Buchenwald. ‘Wishful Thinking’ Seen. SOVIET GUNS / CALM SECTOR…

Then an Atomic Thriller

This is a story about what might have happened if the Russians had planned to set off an atomic bomb at the Coronation Naval Review that took place at Spithead last Monday….

Spithead, Goliath, Frankenstein, Eternal Son: as always, it is names that provide resonance to the experience of the daily pilgrimage. Guilmartin, Frauenglass, Finerty, and Krock. Kirk. Ike. Braque. Bortz, Bricker, and Bobo Olson. If anything on these slabs is sacred, it is these names. It’s an ancient maxim of the tribe: If you violate the name, you violate the man. Even if he is dead. In the old days, before The New York Times, if you wished to destroy a man, you inscribed his name on a pot and smashed it. Or stuck a clay image with a pin. Now you attach his name to a sin and print it. Such an act is beyond mere insult or information, it is a magical disturbance of History. It is a holy act and an act of defilement at the same time. It may bring peace and prosperity, it may result in madness and disaster. Is Alger Hiss a Communist? Is Joe McCarthy a Fascist? Is Justice Douglas a Traitor? Is Richard Nixon a Farting Quacker who dreamt of selling his pajamas at Coney Island? What matters is: where are such questions being asked? The great experience of the twentieth century has been to accept the objective reality of time and thus of process — history does not repeat, the universe is not changeless, masses dissolve and slide through the fingers, there are no precognitions — and out in that flow all such assertions may be true, false, inconsequential, or all at the same time. Such things are said every day, and no marvels ensue. But The New York Times transforms this time-process into something hard and — momentarily anyway — durable: it is as if these slabs, these great stone tablets, were being hurled out into the timestream, causing the river evermore to eddy and swirl around them. And thus the danger. Envoûtements have been known to destroy the priests who practiced them: the keepers of The New York Times, though fascinated by the possibilities, are cautious, and they do not stray often into this dreadful domain. Ike’s hard-on is not here this morning. Instead, they report that Dutch Schoch is hopeful. Universal-International wants Ruth Roman to share the adventuresome life with James Stewart in “The Far Country.” Timothy J. Doody has entered bankruptcy proceedings. The President had breakfast with Bridges, Dirksen, Magnuson, and Dodge. RHEE IS ASSAILED BY HAMMAR-SKJOLD. They hie to the world where the commonplace unfolds, the place of freedom and property and ease and security, the land of the more or less likely. They celebrate the names — Sinclair Weeks! Virgil Trucks! Bojangles Robinson and Jabbo Jablonski! — but they avoid the sorcery, the terrible center, the edgeless edge. Louis Appelbaum will be buried today. Okay. And Barfield, Bluhm, and Carrie Batt. BERKMAN — Joseph. You are always with us. Jeremiah Troup. Teresa Love, Eva Roller, and Kathryn Ripberger. Sacred stuff, to be sure, but ritualized. QUICK START FOR MISS SWIFT. Catch Ma Perkins at 1:15. No breakaway wildness, no terrible conjurations, just the easy knell of names in mild parade. General Withers Burress. Coach Callow. Nero. Ifu-de. MISS BAREA LAMB / BECOMES FIANCEE. Marie Trotzky. Corliss Lamont and Licurgo Costa. Leo Tolstoy. Walt Dropo. Sugarfoot.

Like gongs in the mind, hinting at echoing infinities, names, names and number: Sarah Dougherty sells the 4-story 1-family dwelling at 825 Carroll Street to Mrs. Rudolphine Dick. General Van Fleet kills a 1950-pound Kodiak bear and the 1952 profit ratio for department stores is the 2nd worst in 19 years. Mangrum Posts 69. There are big numbers like the $4998732500 foreign aid bill, little numbers like the 5 tons of gravel and dirt that Jimmy Willis is buried under in Lambertsville. The 6–2 record of Vinegar Bend Mizell. The 500 Fingers of Dr. T by Dr. Seuss — You’ve got to see the 480,000-key piano hit an atomic clinker! WITH STEREOPHONIC SOUND! Allison Choate of Apawamis cards a 77, 55 Chinese are ordered out of the country, Eleanor Hortense Almond dies at 103. Volume declines to 1010000 shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The President is visited by 100 schoolchildren, and the Vice President tells Senator Taft: “I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday, Bob!” A kind of accountability, but without irrevocable consequence, gently disturbing the timestream on occasions, but never causing it to leap its banks. The Red Sox scored a record 17 runs in one inning, canteloupe is selling at 19 cents for one pound. Even the patterns are usually familiar ones, suggesting cribbage runs, the inflationary spiral, countdowns: Eighth Race: Perón arrests 7 Radicals, a 4-nation chase nets 6 thieves, the French crisis enters its 5th week, Nick Condos was Martha Raye’s 4th husband, and Willi Goettling, leaving 3 dependents, is shot between his 2 eyes by the Russians, losing his 1 life. 37 Down: Zero. NIL.

Despite all this effort at secularity, some communicants are nevertheless disturbed by these litanies, discovering in them hints of the terrible abysses beyond the tablets. The very enormity of the monument, at first thought comforting, begins to smother and overwhelm them. A few duck out. Others withdraw to a familiar corner, content to follow a recognizable time-line or two and keep their heads intact. But many begin to lose control. They twitch, lurch forward, jerk back, rush ahead, cower, circle back, then panic and race recklessly through the sanctuary as though lost in a circus or a ceremonial abattoir. Prince Karl Rudolf Marries. SOME HOPES FOR U.N. / TOO HIGH. Trouble on First Hole. HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT (if you really care…): The Goddess Strapless in fine white Push-Button Loading. DULLES’ REMARKS SHARP: Don’t Neglect Slipping FALSE liquid will help you to handle expanding demands as well as to weather adjustments Fair and a little warmer today highest temperature near 23980 entries in McCalls’ dress-your-best Candidate for the worst-dressed woman scattered with black polka dots RED PLOT! “What’s happening? Where am I?” they scream, tearing frantically through the shrine, plowing into other pilgrims, slapping up against the slabs: “Let me out!” But Papagos Sees Need for Speed and CLARK KNEW OF RHEE VIEW, all seams are bound: PHARMACISTS ELECT Michigan Assassin ‘BLIND FATHER OF 1953’ Following Crude Advance with that priceless American Quality—FRESHNESS! 19 COPIES OF THIS successful businessman keeps abreast of FAILLE LASTEX WANTED IN Mr. Divine’s imaginary atomic explosion bathing suit and bra colors *(T-T) TIMES tested! Churchill Voices Shock STEAK FOR FATHER’S DAY Wired for sun it’ll blast space helmets back to Mars and put all the cowboy hats out to pasture HOGS moderately active. HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? Sabers Down. Margaret Truman Passes. “How long has it been…?”

11. How to Handle a Bloodthirsty Mob

I was getting dizzy trying to read The New York Times on the ride in. Actually, I felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands, reading them was a lifetime habit of mine, I’d been an enthusiast since I was a little kid, eccentric about it in fact, but I couldn’t read anything in the back seat of a moving car. And of all the papers, the goddamn Times was the worst. Letters too small and uneven, too gray, too much crammed onto a page — what the hell do we want with all this high-minded gossip, anyway? Had to get through it, though; you never knew what you might need in the middle of a Cabinet meeting. I did know what I was likely to need on the way in, however, and so turned to the sports pages: sooner or later my chauffeur was bound to ask me about yesterday’s ballgames or tonight’s pitchers. Who are you betting on tonight, Mr. Nixon? He was a Negro and so I always tried to have something good to say about Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. Usually this was pretty easy because both those colored boys were having terrific seasons, they were hot and the team was hot, but not yesterday: I was glad to see that they’d both gone hitless and the Cardinals had whipped the Bums’ asses, 12 to 4. On the other hand, my own team, the Washington Senators, had lost to the White Sox and dropped back into the second division, overtaken by the Boston Red Sox, who had made a complete mockery of the game by scoring seventeen runs in one inning — the goddamn seventh, needless to say — crushing Detroit, 23 to 3. My God, what’s baseball coming to? By coincidence, 23 was exactly how many Boston batters had gone to the plate in that seventh-inning outrage. And it was also, it occurred to me, the number of my football jersey back at Whittier College…23. Well, what of it? Nothing.

I leaned my head back a moment, closed my eyes for a little stomach-stroking seventh-inning stretch of my own, then braced myself and turned back to the front pages. Full of the Berlin, Rosenberg, Korean stories, the government crisis in France, the foreign-aid-bill fight in the House, the port strikes. I glanced through for my own name, noticed that Joe McCarthy was still getting a lot of headlines. That FBI agent’s hairy tale of the “goon squad” plot to assassinate Joe had made the front pages of all the papers this morning, Joe was also being widely quoted on his anti-Administration support of Rhee’s prisoner release in Korea, and there was even a long story on a new member of his staff, yet another “veteran Red-hunter.” Certainly, I wasn’t getting that kind of press these days, but this was probably for the best. I wouldn’t be running for office again for at least three years, and if I was going to create a sense of momentum, I couldn’t start from too near the peak. And I hadn’t gone hitless, they’d covered my work in the Senate yesterday, even if it was back in the middle pages, and there was even a report on my casual encounter with Bob Taft: “The Eisenhower Administration is improving its collective golf score, whatever luck it is having with its larger problems.” At first glance, I was flattered, pleased I’d pulled it off, but I began to wonder if maybe indirectly it was some kind of smear: trying to say we were out playing golf when we should be facing up to our national problems…? I didn’t care if they said that about Eisenhower, but it wasn’t fair to hit me with that one, I was only doing my goddamn duty. And then the score, too, they were obviously making fun about that: “‘I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday,’ Nixon declared, then bowed acknowledgement to Senator Taft’s congratulations. Taft was on crutches and appeared to have lost considerable weight, but was ‘gay’ as he exchanged golfing talk with Nixon.” Gay? Maybe I’d made a mistake warming up to a dying man. “Bob, I have news for you…”

I sighed. News and more news: I read that New York City was installing “Atomic Age” city lights that turned on by radio, that several teachers had been axed in New York City in apparent reprisals against Albert Einstein, and that they were letting Trotsky’s killer out of jail — thank God I wasn’t paranoid, or I’d begin to worry it was yet another goddamn anniversary gift to Pat and me. At one time in my life, I actually thought I wanted to be a journalist and took some courses in it at college, but I hated it. Only C’s I ever got all through school. It was one thing to witness an event, another to go home and make up some story about it. Anyway, if it was worth witnessing, it was worth getting into — I couldn’t just stand stupidly on the sidelines and take notes, I had to jump in and play a part. Move things around. And then, whenever I did, and chanced to glance back over my shoulder at those cynical bastards watching me, grinning, jotting it all down, making a fat living off my spent hide and life-force like some kind of cannibals, even contributing to my suffering with their niggardly reports and mud-slinging insinuations, how was I expected to respect and admire them? Besides, it’s a fact, while most publishers might be Republicans, most reporters were Democrats, or worse — look at how they’d smeared me last fall with that phony manufactured “fund crisis,” for example, hurling charges, ignoring my refutations — trial by press, that’s what it was, worse than trial by ordeal, not even Tass would have dared to do so much to damage our national prestige at home and abroad — to hell with them.

Pat was luckier, they were kinder to her. Always had been. “Patricia Ryan as Daphne Martin had a role which called for temperament, and did she have it? Plenty. She did some fine acting as she wheeled in and out of the room, always in a semi-rage. Richard Nixon had a small part but carried his assignment well.” No smaller than hers, goddamn it. That was from the Whittier News in its review of that play we were in, The Dark Tower, the one where we met. It was about actors in the big city. An evil man’s possession of a young girl’s mind. Murder. I was the playwright, Barry Jones, “a faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth of 24,” a small-town greenhorn outsider among these snide and pompous Easterners, a rare part for me since I usually played old men. Pat played the part of Daphne Martin, “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of 20, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment,” in short, a hot-pants actress on the make, tough and lethal. In the play we ended up going off to get married, but it was meant as a kind of cynical joke. “Jones & Martin, card tricks and sex appeal.” It wasn’t an altogether pleasant part to play. All the way through the thing, they made fun of me, whether I was onstage or not, made fun of my open-faced self-confidence, my naïveté, my youth, my name, my piano playing, my writing, my taste, it probably put Pat off me for months. Even as she and I made our final exit, Pat slipped back onstage to tell the real hero: “Listen — as soon as he’s tucked in his crib I’ll call you up!” But they all forgot one thing. I wrote the play that was the title of this play, the play within the play — or perhaps the play that embraced the play. The Dark Tower was mine, and they all lived in it….

“Eh? Stole what?”

“Stole second, Mr. Nixon. That’s how him and Sammy White scored when Umphlett singled, see…”

“Oh. Yes, I see…” I realized John had been talking for some time. Trying to tell me about that mad 17-run inning. “A good move…” While John talked, I turned to the entertainment pages, looking for some place to go Sunday on our anniversary. Washington was out, the National was closed, getting ready for Guys and Dolls, nothing on but Man and Superman and Show Boat. Some good boxing matches, but she’d probably never go along with that. Maybe the new Cinerama or one of those 3-D movies like House of Wax. I’d feel silly wearing those goddamn cardboard glasses, though.

“…So with the bases loaded, Jim Piersall singled and Dick Gernert homered, so that was seven runs in…”

“Izzat so?” I smiled. I’m generally very good at these one-to-one relationships.

“The pitcher come up and singled and they started the whole lineup over again. Sammy White…”

There was a new Dr. Seuss movie premiering in New York about a boy who hated piano lessons, but it looked a little childish. Mary Healy looked like she had big boobs, though. And another new one with Sylvana Pampanini in it called O.K., Nero—wasn’t that the guy who used corpses as torches? A little heavy maybe for the season. To tell the truth, the idea of going to a movie bored the hell out of me, boobs or no boobs. I recalled the days when I was investigating the Hollywood Ten with HUAC, that proximity to the stars — in fact, I was surprised how ordinary they seemed. There were Bogart and Bacall out there, pushovers for the Reds. Cooper was a hopeless dope, I haven’t been able to sit through one of his pictures since, even if he was on our side, and guys like Menjou and Disney and McCarey weren’t much better. Then came the stoolies, guys like Parks — whoo…. Made me angry in a way. Of course, having lived near Hollywood all my life — and even married, as it were, into the industry — I’d never been really star-struck like other people. And besides, there was my father’s eccentric habit of naming all his cows after movie stars — after you’ve milked Lillian Gish and remarked on her swollen blue teats, slapped Greta Garbo on the rump, and cleaned up Mary Pickford’s shit, it’s hard to be romantic about them.

“No kidding!” I said, since John seemed to have paused in his story.

“Right, so they bring in another pitcher, the third one this inning — and he can’t get the ball across the plate! He walks one guy, filling the bases, then walks Gernert, forcing a run in! And then the pitcher comes up and gets another single…!”

One thing I wanted to do was go in to New York and see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible after all I’d heard about it, but we couldn’t risk giving it any kind of official sanction, and besides, Edgar was probably photographing the audience for his files. Could go and denounce it publicly, maybe. Should get a headline or two. Protocol-wise, though, the smart thing would be to take her to that film of the British coronation ceremonies which was such a surprise box-office smash. England had spent five and a half million dollars to crown the Queen and now they were going to get it all back in film royalties. Make history, make money…

“Say, uh, how much longer is this going to go on, John?”

“It’s wild, ain’t it, Mr. Nixon?” he laughed. I rattled the paper impatiently. “Well, so Gene Stephens singles, see, and that’s his third hit of the inning, a new all-time record. Umphlett comes up and he singles, and Sammy White comes in, scoring his record-breaking third run of the inning. The next guy walks, filling the bases—”

“My God! Listen, I tell you what, John…”

“But then finally Kell flies out to retire the side.”

“Ah. He probably got bored and did it on purpose.”

“How’s that, Mr. Nixon?”

“I said, sometimes that’s how the ball bounces, John, we all have to live with our victories and defeats, only teams that believe in themselves can rise to their challenges.”

“Oh yeah. I see what you mean, Mr. Nixon…”

There was a summer ice show, “Scents and Nonsense,” on at the Hotel New Yorker, I noticed. Pat might like that, she used to be hot for ice skating before we got married, I busted my head more than once trying to keep up with her, never did get the hang of it. She was a real time-waster, dancing, skating, gadding about, it was a relief to get married and get all that over with. Better skip the ice show, she might get ambitious again. It occurred to me that I had been living with Pat for nearly thirteen years, thirteen years this Sunday, and yet in a real sense she was a complete stranger to me. Only when she was chewing me out did she become somehow real, but the rest of the time…well, it was almost as if I’d married some part of myself, and Pat was only the accidental incarnation of that part. Do we all do this? Is this what marriage is all about, finding fleshly embodiments of our ghostly selves, making ourselves whole?

I’d found her very gloomy at breakfast this morning for some reason. Feeling neglected maybe. I remembered the way I’d found her last night. My Wild Irish Potato. People have noted my unusual empathy with despondent people; on the other hand, Pat gets despondent all the time and this only tees me off.

Julie had greeted me at the kitchen door with a sticky strawberry-jam kiss, then had wrinkled up her nose and said: “Oh, Daddy, your beard!”

“Don’t be silly,” I’d said impatiently. “I just shaved it.” This had got to be a joke with the girls and I was a little tired of it. I wondered what would happen if Tricia and Julie grew up and met and fell in love with the Rosenberg boys. Maybe that was what was troubling Pat. Looking at her then, standing there at the stove frying bacon in her bathrobe, she had seemed like all those well-washed people from obscure little California towns and suburbs who used to come to see me in July and August when I was their Senator, shake my hand, get an autograph, talk about the weather back home or the condition of the roads or some pet theory about the Red Menace. Plain and simple people, not very bright, not very well informed, nice though, and they were voters. And they were on my side. Pat was a voter. She was on my side. But, no, it was more than that, she was the choice that gave others trust in me, earned their vote. What do the common people care about tidelands disputes or wars in Asia? The important thing to them is who you married, how you live, what kind of kids you’ve got. I married Pat and revealed to the world something about myself, and so became Vice President of the United States of America.

“Sit down, Dick, and eat your breakfast,” she’d said dully, munching toast. “I told John you’d be out in a few minutes. What happened to your face?”

“Eh? Nothing. An accident.” I’d dropped irritably into a chair, ducked my head in the Congressional Record. Why was it, whenever I was at home, I felt guilty?

“An accident?” One trouble with Pat was that when she chewed you could see the way her jaws worked.

“I, yes, well, I… I ran into some…demonstrators last night. Near the Supreme Court.” Perhaps this is true, I’d thought. After all, history is never literal. If it were, it would have no pattern at all, we’d all be lost. “They, uh…one of them hit me with a placard. Nothing, really.”

She’d looked at me like my mother used to when I came in from playing touch football in a muddy field. “Oh, Dick!” she’d scolded. I’d realized that it relaxed her to be able to scold me about something.

While I shoveled down my breakfast, conscious of my chauffeur out there waiting for me, we’d discussed where and how we’d meet if they held the Times Square executions tonight. I’d told her about my having to attend that Republican fund-raising dinner over in New Jersey afterwards, had said I was leaving her the car, she’d said she didn’t really want to go to the executions, I’d said she had no choice.

“What’s a eggsy-cushion, Daddy?” Tricia had asked.

“You’ll find out tonight,” I’d said crisply, scraping my chair back. Some other time her question might have been cute, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Julie, damn it, stop picking your nose at the table!”

Pat had sighed and turned back to the bacon. I knew she didn’t like to go to these public ceremonies, I shouldn’t have been peeved, but I’d felt like she’d just turned down my plans for our anniversary. Watching her there at the stove while I finished tying my shoes, I’d wondered if her bathrobe was inflammable. Ruth Greenglass had got burned once standing too close to a stove in her nightgown. Nearly killed her. And six months pregnant at the time. We’d just passed a bill about it in the Senate yesterday, the so-called “exploding sweaters” bill, which at least five Senators had voted for thinking it was an anti-pornography law. Ruth had been feverish for weeks, her whole body a mess — like a foretaste of the electric chair. This was shortly before the FBI picked up David. He’d got burned, too, trying to put out Ruth’s flames. Lot of goddamn fire in this case. Everything from the Greenglass kitchen stove to talk of an atomic holocaust. Holocaust: burnt whole. Just what the Rosenbergs had to look forward to. “Flaming Reds,” the papers called them. “This infernal conspiracy.” The day’s hot news story. “Gonna put their feet to the fire,” Uncle Sam had told me out at Burning Tree: “They’ve inflamed a lotta passions out in the world, let ’em get their own frizzed a little!” Maybe that was what my dream last night about Pat’s burning bush was all about….

“I’ll see you tonight!” I’d snapped gruffly, and stamped out of the house into the sun, struggling with my face. We lived in a nosy neighborhood. It ticked me off that she didn’t kiss me good-bye in the doorway any more.

And what if she died, I wondered: was I ready for that? Tough, of course. It would hurt. I’d be lost without Pat. It’d win a lot of votes, though. People might even, for once, vote for me, instead of against the other guy. Then maybe, later, when I’d got over it, if I ever did, a White House wedding like Grover Cleveland had. In the Blue Room, little Frances Folsom, just twenty-two years old. Tyler’d done well, too, waited two years after his wife had gone and then married a twenty-four-year-old. Woodrow Wilson, there were a lot of precedents. Maybe Uncle Sam even liked it that way, a source of energy and renewal: keep the Incarnation’s pecker up. That was the one thing he was obsessed about: staying young. To him, a closed frontier was like a hardened artery and too much government, too much system, too much political theory, was a kind of senility. It was what made him hate socialists: “a bunch of goddamn zombies,” he called them. “Dead before they’re born!” Sometimes he frightened me with his vehemence about it. “If those lizards ever get their world revolution, it’ll be all over for ’em!” he told me one day out at Burning Tree. It must have been one of the first times I’d played golf with him. “This excitement out on the perimeter is all they’ve got. Inside, son, there’s nothin’ but old mold and fungus. They’re learnin’ the hard way what our Old West was all about, all that tumult and butchery and wild unsartinty. Two pollrumptious screamers shootin’ it out on a dusty Main Street over a saddlepack fulla gold: now them two fellers is about as alive as anybody’s ever gonna be! Socialists are skeered of this, they want everything buttoned down fair and logical and all screwin’ up antedeluvian quiet, which is to say, they don’t want nothin’ to happen! What’s there to live for in a world like that, I ask you — all them sissies runnin’ your life for you? No, the earth belongs to the livin’, boy, not to cold pickles! You can’t tame what don’t stand still and nothin’ in this universe does! Einstein put his finger on it a long time ago — oh, he’s gone off the deep end lately, I know, but listen, he knew what America was all about: don’t let the grass grow under your feet! saddle up, keep movin’, anything can happen! Ya know, people useter think of time like some kinda movin’ knife edge cuttin’ acrost the entire universe, but that was on accounta they was locked up in a room in Europe somewhere and not heedin’ what was roarin’ up over here! America was on the go — not only on horses, but on wheels, on trains, on steamships and automobiles, even into the air. Einstein seen this. And while he was skinnin’ his eyes for what this signified, it suddenly come to his attention that a movin’ clock appears to run slow set off agin an identical clock sittin’ still and the — hope I’m not too fast for you, son…?”

“No! No, I…”

“Bodies in motion just don’t age as fast, that’s what it boils down to. America, by stayin’ off its ass, was stayin’ young! No surprise Albert come to live here when he got his chance! This here’s a country of beginnin’s, of projects, of vast designs and expectations! It’s got no past; all has an onward and prospective look! The fountain of youth! Lookit me!” he’d cried, and had rolled off a few lively cartwheels, flipped over his golf cart, and done a handstand on a putter, while clicking his boot heels so hard he drew sparks.

“What’s that, John?” I asked.

“I said, there’s supposed to be twelve thousand of them here today, Mr. Nixon,” my chauffeur said.

I realized we’d been slowed to a crawl, and there was a terrific traffic jam up ahead of us around Dupont Circle. I clutched my newspaper. “Twelve thousand what?”

“Demonstrators. You know, the atom spies…”

I saw them now, moving down Connecticut toward the White House. “Can’t we — can’t we do something—?”

“I can try to cut north up toward Howard University, then down Capitol…”

Howard was a Negro university and there were a lot of those people in the pro-Rosenberg movement. I felt a sudden twinge of distrust: was John leading me into a trap? “We don’t have time to go to the office now,” I snapped. “We’d better get straight to the White House!”

“Yessir. I’ll try to cut down to the Mall.”

But at Washington Circle on Pennsylvania, seven blocks from the White House, there was no movement at all: a solid mass of traffic, people, placards, and photographers. John swerved left, and left again, but all the cars were bumper to bumper, and people were running back and forth in the streets. I was nervous, so I decided to distract myself by working the Times crossword puzzle. I found it on a back page, nested among book ads. My eye fell on the first clue, I Across: That’s easy, I thought with a shudder: GOOF. I suddenly saw the puzzle as a kind of matrix, a field of play which mirrored the structure of the newspaper and thus history itself, the paradigmatic range of “news” and possibility, crossed with real “time-arrow chain-of-events,” I felt like Alice lost on her chessboard. I read the clues: why all this business about plays, food, cartoonists, rats, God, women, and cosmetics, I wondered? AHAB was there, SAN ANTONIO, NEGRO, and ROAMERS. 23 Down: HEAT. I dragged my eyes away from the crossword puzzle to the book review: it was about an “atomic thriller,” Atom at Spithead. Even before I saw it, I knew it would be something like this. Adlai Stevenson’s Campaign Speeches were being advertised, and a novel called The Singer Not the Song: “He could not resist using the girl as one last diabolic weapon….” From all over the page, words jumped out at me: SOCIALISM … BUCHENWALD … EISENHOWER … FRANKENSTEIN … BLOOD … TENEMENT … REVOLUTION … CHECKMATE — we were stopped dead. “I’ll walk, John!” I cried. I ripped the crossword puzzle out and stuffed it in my pocket, jumped out of the limousine.

Once on foot, I found it much easier to keep moving. Not so many people as it had seemed inside the car. Just enough, together with the sightseers, to bottle up traffic at the intersections and make it seem worse than it was. It also helped that they were mostly moving in the same direction. At first, I supposed they were headed for the White House, and I decided to circle around behind them, past the Treasury and in by the East Wing, but once I reached the back side of Lafayette Square, I could see they were all moving on east. It look me a panicky moment to realize that their objective was not my Senate Office Building, but only the Supreme Court. But though I felt relieved by that, I had to recognize that the worst, nevertheless, was still before me: crossing the park and Pennsylvania Avenue through all this lawless rabble to the White House gates. I began to regret leaping out of the car so impulsively like that.

A mob, you see, does not act intelligently. Those who make up a mob do not think independently. They do not think rationally. They are likely to do irrational things, including even turning on their leaders. Individually, people in a mob are cowardly; only collectively, goaded on by a leader, will a mob appear to act courageously. A mob is bloodthirsty. A taste of blood will whet its appetite for more violence and for more blood. Nothing must be done which will tend to accentuate these characteristics. A mob has lost its temper collectively. An individual dealing with a mob must never lose his or he will be reduced to its level, and become easy prey for it. He must be as cold in his emotions as a mob is hot, as controlled as the mob is uncontrolled, concentrating entirely on the problem which faces him and forgetting about himself, keyed up for battle but not jittery. Since those who make up a mob are basically cowards, one must never show fear in the face of a mob, blocking out any thought of it by a conscious act of will. Since a mob is stupid, it’s important to confront it with unexpected maneuvers: take the offensive, don’t panic, do the unexpected, but do nothing rash. I knew all this. Nevertheless, I was scared shitless and could hardly think.

Intuitively, I just kept moving. I put the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at my back like a big brother and plunged straight ahead, into the park and toward the White House. I saw it, I knew it immediately: this crowd is all unfriendly — the Phantom has touched them, I thought, he’s invaded them, they’re all contaminated, we will have to liberate them all, as we’ve done with the Rosenbergs. I kept my head ducked and bulled hopefully ahead — so far they hadn’t noticed me. Just a block, that damned square, but it seemed endless — I felt like I was crossing all of Gettysburg. I prayed to God to get me through safely. I prayed to Uncle Sam, I prayed to Pat. “In the name of Jesus Christ!” I whistled softly between my clenched teeth. What troubled me most was the complete unreasoning hate in their faces: this mob, I recognized, is a killer mob! I suspected some of them were even doped up, and I feared that, if they saw who I was, they’d get out of hand. They carried placards, shouted, and seemed to be picking up things they might throw. It made me almost physically ill to see the fanatical frenzy in the eyes of those teenagers; anyway, something was making me quite ill. I felt absolute hatred for the tough Communist agitators who were driving children to this irrational state, and I wanted to shout at them, or scream, or bite them or something, but somehow I kept a grip on myself, knowing that above all I had to control my emotions and think calmly. The test of leadership is whether one has the ability, as Kipling said, to keep his head while others are losing theirs. By this time, I was virtually running, shoulders hunched like a fullback, snorting desperately.

I slowed. I noticed I was drawing a lot of attention. I worried I might have a heart attack. Or some other kind of seizure, I could hardly breathe. The mob turned toward me and started to close in. It was essential, I knew, that I bust right through: if I turned back now, it would not be simply a case of their bluffing out Richard Nixon, but of the United States itself putting its tail between its legs and running away from a gang of Communist thugs. For an instant, the realization passed through my mind: I might be killed! — and then it was gone, mind and all. They were nearly on me. I stopped abruptly. Then I lurched forward. Everybody must have been surprised: as I plunged on, straight at them, amazed at my own impetus, the mob stumbled backwards. In a larger sense, I recognized, this was another round in a contest which has been waged from the beginning of time between those who believe in the right of free expression and those who advocate and practice mob rule to deny that right. I might have calmed myself with such a thought, but there was no time — one of the ringleaders, a typical case-hardened Communist operative, stepped into my path, blocking me off, a look of cold hatred in his eyes. And I realized then, as this was going on, that right here was the ruthlessness and the determination, the fanaticism of the enemy that we faced! That was what I saw in his face. This was Communism as it really is. He opened his mouth — I felt like I was back in the lion’s cage with Sheba. Oh my God—!

“Excuse me, Mr. Nixon,” he said, the rest closing up behind, forcing me to pull up short. “Could I have your autograph?”

“What?” I shouted. This startled them and they fell back a step. I noticed then for the first time that the placards they were carrying read DEATH TO THE JEWISH TRAITORS! and THE HOT SEAT FOR THE ROSENBERGS — SIZZLE ‘EM! It came to me then that this was my own constituency. The range and scope of this crisis began to fall into a pattern. “Can you have my autograph?’” I yelped, repeating his question to give myself time to think, and also, hopefully, to stop my hands from shaking. I groped for words, for a phrase, something tough and pungent I could exit on. I wanted to do more than simply mouth prepared platitudes, but my mind was completely locked up, like the traffic around Washington Circle. All I could think of was: everyone in politics knows a Vice President cannot chart his own course, it’s not my fault! They stared at me, somewhat amazed. A young college boy with a friendly smile was carrying a big picture of the electric chair with the legend HOME COOKING, KOSHER STYLE! and I saw a priest with a sign that read THE ROSENBERGS ARE MORTAL ENEMIES OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE! I realized it was going to be another hot day. I was sweating like a stoat. “The issue is not whether or not I can give you my autograph,” I said at last, leaning toward them as a coach would lean toward his players in a huddle, “but rather the survival of the nation itself!” I gazed at them with a very heavy look, and the few who were still smiling went blank, their jaws dropping. For a fraction of a second there, I gave them all a sense of what it felt like to be at the center of things, drew them all in to the High Councils of Power, showed them a glimpse of the brink and its peril. Then I smiled, nodded, clapped a shoulder, waved to someone at the back as though recognizing him, and lunged on through. They parted in astonishment. This has been very successful, I thought.

Except for the mounted U.S. Park Police, some parked buses, and a couple of lonely Red Top cabs that had managed somehow to get through the traffic jam further up the street, Pennsylvania was empty as I crossed it. A long way across, and I felt very self-conscious. Then, off to my right, I saw them: the real demonstrators, marching toward me, seven abreast, down Pennsylvania, headed toward the Supreme Court. What now? I wondered, freezing in my tracks: should I stop and confront them? — and nearly got run down by a trolley car whistling up from behind. Jesus, I thought, picking myself up and scrambling on across the goddamn street, this is going to be one helluva day. At the White House gates, still hurrying forward, I looked back over my shoulder at the crowd in Lafayette Square, thinking: you’ve got to be careful in a situation like that, you have to think all those things through — and plowed into a child standing there on the sidewalk. I glanced around. Luckily, no photographers had seen this. I set the boy back on his feet, brushed him off, skinny little kid, about the age of my daughters, with big dark eyes and baggy pants. Like the waifs out of those Horatio Alger novels. Very intense and even, somehow, mysterious. I’d given him a thumping whack and he wasn’t even crying. He looked up at me as though he were lost, as though looking for a friend or a father, and I thought: he’s beautiful, this child! He reminded me of all those March of Dimes posters. I wanted to hug him to my breast, to protect him from all this, to kiss him, I wanted to reach into my pocket and give him something. “Don’t be afraid, son,” I whispered. His nose was running. I wiped it with my own handkerchief. “It’s all right.” He gazed up at me with those soulful eyes, parting his small lips — I know this child, I thought. As though from a dream, a beautiful dream. I seemed to recall green hills, a rippling brook, a rustic cabin, and inside — and then I realized who it was he looked like. I pushed him away in alarm, wiped my hands nervously on my pants, and, shuddering, hurried on through the White House gates. That haunting face: it belonged to Ethel Rosenberg!

12. A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle

The special session of the Supreme Court is the tourist sensation of the summer. Thousands stand in line for the 350 available seats to watch the spectacle of the nation’s highest court, called back to the bench from golf links and fishing boats, having to decide overnight whether or not to execute without further delay “the principals,” as Judge Kaufman has called them, “in this diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation.”

It has been a dramatic move. It’s obvious that Uncle Sam and his government in Washington are determined, their Fourteenth Wedding Anniversary Celebration having been taken away from them, to exterminate Ethel and Julius Rosenberg now as quickly as possible. And not just out of spite: the anxious haste with which Uncle Sam has summoned the Elders back to National Headquarters suggests he might be fighting for his very life. There’s the mounting world pressure of course, the military buildup on both sides, the threat of all-out nuclear exchange, but it’s more than that — it’s almost as though there is something critical about the electrocutions themselves, something down deep inside, a form, it’s as though events have gone too far, as though there’s an inner momentum now that can no longer be tampered with, the nation is too deeply committed to this ceremony, barriers have already come down, the ghosts have been sprung and there’s a terror loose in the world, an excitement: if the spies don’t die and die now, something awful might happen, the world’s course might get bent — Look! Out in the world, the frontiers are crumbling — but as the people draw back toward the center to restore their strength, they find an appalling void right where the axis of the earth ought to be, a big black hole inviting them to fall in and be lost forever! There are actually a few who hold that the executions may not have been Uncle Sam’s idea in the first place, but rather a devious and calculated maneuver by the Phantom, either to distract Uncle Sam from actions on the frontiers, or maybe…maybe to get everybody down to Times Square and then let them have it! Is this what is driving Uncle Sam? Is this why Herbert Brownell has acted so swiftly and with such transparent alarm? No wonder the Courthouse is packed!

Of course, some people scoff at this. They pretend not to see the black hole and they don’t respond to the apocalyptic funk. What kind of a rube do these neo-latitudinarians take Sam Slick for? they ask. They even conjecture that the American Superhero may have coaxed Justice Douglas into this brief delay just to heighten the drama and draw a bigger crowd. After all, is Uncle Sam the maker and shaper of world history, or isn’t he? Just as he might have engineered the border troubles, goaded the Phantom into exposing himself around the world, provoked the strikes and boycotts, and altered a few marquees and billboards himself just to ignite the occasion with a few titillating “Fee-Fie-Fo-Fums.” Some skeptics are dubious about all these anniversary patterns in the first place, and others argue that Uncle Sam simply needed this delay to finish getting the stage built. Or to negotiate an end to that “iron curtain” around the Statue of Liberty. Or to extract confessions from the Rosenbergs by making them live their last hours over and over again.

In any case it’s certainly true, no matter whether Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom wanted it this way or not, the Rosenbergs suddenly have a terrific rating — overnight they’ve shot past every show in the country, and up in the city their executions are already being acclaimed as the biggest thing to hit Broadway since the invention of the electrical spectacular. To be sure, there’s not much competition this time of year, it’s the off-season for theater and rerun time on TV, but short of a Bowl Game or a return from the other world by Harry Houdini (and where would he appear? the old Hippodrome is gone…), it is difficult to imagine any act outdrawing the Rosenbergs. And it’s not simply because they’re to die, people die every day — look at poor unlamented and uncelebrated Willi Goettling who got executed over in East Berlin: he played to a few pigs and an empty field — no, it’s the way they’ve been linked, like all top box-office draws since the days of the Roman Circus, to archetypes. Irving Saypol and Judge Kaufman have helped them in this. So have Uncle Sam, Congress, the press, the FBI. They have worked hard at it themselves, though they have not achieved exactly the image they sought. And they have become — no less than Valentino and Garbo, Caruso and Bernhardt, the Barrymores and the Bumsteads, Rin Tin Tin and Trigger — true Stars, their performances forever engraved upon the American imagination, their fame assured for generations to come. Sooner will the nation forget Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Waiting for the Court to arrive, the crowds on the Mall exchange rumors, take snapshots of each other with Baby Brownies, buy pop and ice cream from passing vendors, sun themselves on the grass, listen to the newscasters on their portable radios. The Justice Department is said to be working on back-up moves just in case things go wrong this morning, but there seem to be few doubts which way the Court will vote. Less certain is the outcome, also due today, in another trial out in Hawaii: that of the six longshoremen — the so-called “Aloha Shirt Set”—accused of Communism. The trial has already lasted seven and a half months, during which time eighty-three witnesses have unloaded more than three and a half million words of testimony, and now the jury — all American nationals, but of mixed Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian descent, a real goddamn zoo in the minds of most statesiders — has been locked up for over a hundred hours trying to reach a verdict. They’re nervous about it, because they’re aware that Hawaii’s prospective membership in the Union may well rest on the results.

This seems to be the morning’s pattern: there are no clear victories. Five thousand Red demonstrators attack a pro-Mossadegh rally in Teheran, but are repulsed — though Mossadegh himself, like Rhee, is a pain in Uncle Sam’s fundament. In Quezon City, a security guard and a leader of a Huk rebel outfit trying to sabotage Manila’s water supply are shot dead before any damage is done (that’s good), but in Indochina, the French Army’s biggest fuel dump is ablaze and still erupting after a daring night raid by Vietminh commandos (that’s bad). The four-man Vietminh suicide team has run through a wall of French machine-gun fire to hurl firebombs on the steel storage tanks in Haiphong, the tanks exploding just like in all the movies, big orange balls of roiling fire billowing up into the skies, thousands of gallons of burning oil spilling out onto the highway — hundreds of French troops and volunteers are needed just to contain it. Authorities report that “…at least one of the raiders was hit.” Probably.

In Malaya, Sir Gerald Templer orders house-to-house searches and confiscation of all rice in excess of a week’s portion, to keep the villagers from feeding the terrorists (“This is not a punishment! It will enable you to tell the terrorists truthfully that you cannot spare rice for them!”), and progress is reported in the sticky Burma-China talks in Thailand, but while the Legion of Superheroes are fighting it out amongst themselves over what to do with Royal Dutch Shell’s rich oil holdings in Sumatra, guerrilla bands sweep down from Galdengoen Mountain hideouts south of Jakarta and murder sixty villagers. As Uncle Sam has often said, muttering through a rubbery jaw, his thumb hooked under a sheriff’s badge: “It is a condition what confronts us — not a theory!”

WORLD NEWS PUTS DAMPERS ON STOCKS, The New York Times has revealed this morning. The instability of the world is frightening people. So are the Soviet “peace offensive” and the threat of a Korean truce. Volume on the Exchange dwindled to a nine-month low yesterday, and is off to an even slower start this morning. The value of such A-bomb stocks as Du Pont is sinking. General Motors, American Telephone, U.S. Steel, General Electric: all down. There’s a rash of strikes, new taxes, and rising prices, including hikes in the cost of crude oil, steel, cigarettes, and linoleum. Store sales are down and the profit ratio is at a nineteen-year low. There is frank talk of a coming recession. The American Management Association, ingathering at the Statler, is told that “American industry should prepare now to weather a business recession in order to ward off government intervention, should one occur.” Companies are warned to get rid of undesirable personnel now: “Don’t discover them when you are trying to cut expenses in a depression!”

In an attempt to offset these fears, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey has let it be known that there is “no reason to fear peace, U.S. military spending is still necessary, armistice in Korea or no.” Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson has backed him up on this with talk of the arms race and the need for a lot of new weaponry, and General Gruen-ther of SHAPE has announced his plans to make use of new atomic weapons in the defense of Europe, few ground troops: a proxy attack by one of Russia’s satellites is expected there any day, and a lot of gear is going to get shot up. This morning, in a fresh move, two U.S. admirals — Combs and Oftsie — are sent into the arena: testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, they urge approval of Ike’s request for $115,000,000 in new funds for guided missiles and planes capable of delivering “small” atomic bombs, and lean irascible Admiral Oftsie, pushing for more new supercarriers like the Forrestal, says: “Small atomic weapons have created unlimited possibilities for naval aviation,” because there are many targets against which the “small bomb is the preferable weapon.” Which encourages the First National Bank of Boston to issue this statement:

The pessimism in some quarters, based on a belief that a Korean truce would have a depressive influence upon business activity, has been substantially modified.… It is now clearly indicated that there has been no fundamental change in the Soviet objective and that we must maintain a strong defense program. While savings will be made by the elimination of waste, indications are that no sharp curtailments are expected in our military outlay for some time to come.

And there are other reasons to modify the pessimism down at the Exchange this morning. Television set production is up 70 percent, for example, doing even better than pornography and missiles. Births are still outnumbering deaths nearly two to one, assurances of an expanding market. And there’s always American ingenuity: already this year it has come up with such products as plastic carpets, paper snow fences, blind-men’s canes that glow in the dark, cockpit listeners, 3-D movies, propane locomotives, chlorophyll cigarettes, and Eisenhoppers. Net sales of General Foods is up from $196 million in 1942 to $701 million today, and mainly, they say, thanks to research and packaging. A packing company has designed a new hide puller, a revolving safety knife, hydraulically operated, that tears a carcass right out of its birthday suit without injuring either suit or meat, a real breakthrough, while out in the nation’s meat-packing center a photo of Marilyn Monroe, still in her hide but nothing else, has been uncovered by a horny young cartoonist — and who knows? if he can come up with a magazine to go around it, he may well have the publishing sneak hit of the year with it.

This sensationalist trend in the nation’s magazines is worrying to some people, of course. The sex and violence in them have been attacked by everybody from the Phantom’s Daily Worker—which claims to be offended by “strip cartoons” and “hate campaigns” and “sex reports” and shocked at stories like “Girls in Gangs” and “Love Harvest in Blood”—to Arkansas Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings, whose House committee, investigating salacious pocket books, comics, and cheesecake girlie mags, finds that the industry has “degenerated into a medium for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.” The cheap pornography of the likes of Steinbeck, Farrell, Caldwell, and Moravia is cited by Gathings’s committee, along with the depravity of such newsstand successes as Whisper, Keyhole, Foo, Nifty, Zip, and Wham!, just as the Worker goes out after Flirt, Titter, Wink, and Climax, The Saturday Evening Post, G.I. Joe Comics. But, as Zeke Gathings himself has to admit: “Pornography is big business.” And in times like these, one must not, as they say, look a gift horse in his private parts. “Make money,” Mother Luce has said, “be proud of it; make more money, be prouder of it! School yourself for the long battle of freedom in this country!” And so, if it works, who can blame the American publishing industry for running pictures of girls in their panties, dead soldiers bubbling blood, or violated virgins, or for keeping up with current events by printing timely stories this week like “The Bride and the Hangman,” “The Night Love Turned to Terror,” or “We Played and We Paid — the truth about two who took the easy way”?

Likewise the movie-palace managers, struggling against the very TV boom that’s cheering others: they’re also swinging with the new tits-and-blood trend, what else can they do? and this weekend — at least in the area around Times Square — have booked timely films like High Treason, A Slight Case of Larceny, Devil’s Plot, Three Sinners, and The Atomic City, a flick about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. They have no illusions, of course, about drawing away any of the nighttime trade from the Times Square burnings themselves. But it’s not yet certain just when that show will go on, maybe not for weeks, and meanwhile the streets are filling up with restless undirected masses and the summer sun is climbing in the sky — they can hardly be blamed for trying to lure in a piece of the popcorn action at the very least. If they don’t get it, after all, the pickpockets will. Indeed, it’s a service to Uncle Sam to keep these potentially inflamed and aimless mobs off the streets and air-conditioned while he’s sorting things out at the Supreme Court and the President’s Cabinet meeting. So some play the sex angle, others the executions, and many attempt a bit of both at the same time. Rita Hayworth dances for the Baptist’s head in Salome at the Rivoli, for example, and “Terror Stalks the Screen in 3 Dimensions” at the Paradise in Man in the Dark. Three-D “THRILLS that almost TOUCH YOU” can be had all over town today, but the one that’s lining them up in the streets is House of Wax, which, made by a one-eyed man, is all about reality and illusion and famous people going up in flames. Julius Rosenberg and his boy used to play a kind of baseball game in their ghetto flat using a paddle and a ball on an elastic string, and House of Wax pays tribute to this with a stunning bat-and-ball sequence that sends people leaping right out of their seats. “The Year’s Shock Drama,” Invasion USA, is on at the Fox, and O.K. Nero!, “A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle,” is at the Globe. Murder Without Crime at the Beekman shares an imaginative twin bill with Double Confession, starring Peter (“the droop-eyed cinemenace,” as TIME say) Lorre, whose wife, Karen, is out in Las Vegas this week, suing him for divorce. The Grande puts on an FBI thriller, Walk East on Beacon, said to be the story of the original Groun’-Hog Hunt, and at the 6000-seat Roxy, that palatial old queen from the movie heyday of the twenties, Titanic gives way to Pickup on South Street, “The Double-Barreled Triple-Powered Forty-Five-Calibre Rocker-Socker of the Year: IT’S A BLOW-TORCH!” A veritable paradigm of the times! As TIME, open-eyed, sums it up:

a pickpocket (richard wid

mark) slaps a former road

house entertainer (jean

peters) in the teeth

knocks her out with a right

to the jaw and revives her by pour

ing a bottle of beer in her face

the b-girl retaliates

by conking him over the head

with another beer bottle a communist

spy (richard kiley) beats up

and shoots the girl hits a cop

over the head with a pistol

and kills an eccentric old necktie

peddler (thelma ritter) the pick

pocket knocks out the spy by smash

ing his head against a wall

slugs it out with him on a sub

way platform and on the tracks

in front of an oncoming train

all this mayhem is brought on when

the pickpocket discovers some micro

film containing military

secrets in a wallet he has lifted

from the b-girl’s purse by the fadeout

the pickpocket and the b-girl have found

true love and government agents

with the pickpocket’s help have smashed a

red

spy

ring

Yes, there are happy endings, but the world is tough and you have to work for them. No one knows that better than Uncle Sam, who has been flying about the world all morning, coping with the Phantom’s overnight malice, sweeping up the Free World streets ravaged by an alien ardor, hurling abuse at Russian tanks in East Berlin, rounding up prisoners in South Korea. All night long, on the battlefront to the north, transport planes on flare sorties have been turning night into day in one of the brightest pyrotechnic displays of the war, dropping million-candlepower flares at short intervals for hours on end, surprising gooks in their nighttime mischief and giving them a kind of preview of the Apocalypse before picking them off. Then, with the dawn’s early light, the battleship New Jersey and cruiser Bremerton have led surface ships in an artillery assault on the Korean east coast, and the west coast has been hit by the Polkadot Squadron from the USS Bairoko. In the daily air battle, Major Jimmy Jabara, the Wichita Ace, bags his twelfth MIG. In fact, Yanks are reportedly downing fifteen enemy MIG-15s for every Sabre Jet lost…

when the migs offered battle

in numbers [TIME say] they were being

knocked down like grouse

on a scottish moor

one cocky pilot snorted

that the requirement for ace

hood ought to be raised

to ten kills then added:

“ten hell make it fifteen

or twenty and put a hundred

pounds of cabbage in our tail

assemblies as a handicap!”

Wall Streeters might prefer narrower odds, but still, for every fifteen MIGs down, there’s another Sabre Jet to be built, and anyway, the replacement demand for some reason seems higher than that.

At home meanwhile, the President’s Cabinet has been called into morning session, the Sing Sing prison officials and Times Square program committees have been put on alert, the Nine Old Men have arrived at the Supreme Court. The Senate, not to miss any of the action, is in recess today, but the House of Representatives is heavily engaged upon major legislation, and the situation there is reported to be “one of anxiety and suspense.” Between votes, Congressmen spend a lot of time at their phones. At the White House, queues of visitors are already forming up, waiting for the doors to open, and the guards are jittery: almost ten thousand tourists out here this morning, what if just one of them—? “Simple duty hath no place for the twitters!” Uncle Sam admonishes them in firm Quaker cadences, watching the Vice President squirt across Pennsylvania Avenue from Lafayette Square out of the corner of his eye. “Chins out, chests up, lads, discipline is the soul of a army, and if any strange fruit attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot!” He grins thoughtfully to himself as the Veep bowls over a little kid; then he ducks into the White House through a back entrance, meditating on Moe the necktie-peddler’s observation in Pickup on South Street: “He’s as shifty as smoke, but I still love him!”

At the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Fred Vinson takes his seat under the clock in front of the tall Grecian columns and red plush curtains, hastens perfunctorily through the opening rituals, and announces abruptly: “We think the question is not substantial. We think further proceedings to litigate it are unwarranted. Accordingly, we vacate the stay entered by Mr. Justice Douglas on June 17,1953!”

There’s a moment of shocked silence in the packed courtroom — it’s come so fast it’s caught everyone by surprise, some still haven’t taken their seats — then a burst of cheers and boos. The defense attorneys, dark with anger, leap from their chairs, tipping them over, scramble toward the bench — but Justice Robert Jackson objects to the “irregular manner” in which the new lawyers have entered the case, and they are ordered to carry on their unpleasantries elsewhere. Justice Tom Clark notes that the Court has now considered this case seven times, and a moment of awe grips the courtroom—the seventh occasion!

But Justice Hugo Black, dissenting from the 6-to-2 majority opinion and doubting the Court even had the right to vacate the stay of a fellow Justice in the first place (“…so far as I can tell, the Court’s action here is unprecedented…”), argues crabbily that “it is not amiss to point out that this Court has never affirmed the fairness of the trial!” There he goes again. “What,” the people mutter, “is Black and white and Red all over?”

Justice William Douglas, facing possible impeachment, insists bluntly that “the cold truth is that the death sentence may not be imposed for what the Rosenbergs did unless the jury so recommends,” but before he’s even had a chance to get it all out, Manny Bloch is on his feet, asking for more time to rewrite the clemency appeal, arguing that the doubts of three Justices (Frankfurter has snuck out unnoticed for the time being) is “a matter which is appropriate for consideration on a petition of mercy.” He’s wearing a brand-new suit, having dumped coffee on his old one this morning: no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked.

U.S. Acting Solicitor General Bob Stern snorts at this argument, but Justice Black, cantankerous as ever, points out that clemency from the President is all but pleaded for in the majority opinion itself, which says plainly: “Vacating this stay is not to be construed as endorsing the wisdom or appropriateness to this case of a death sentence.” Stern, who is as aware as Black is that this is a mere protective maneuver by the Court to avoid any hint or complaint of error, says flatly that no more time is needed, and the Court, thinking about this for fifteen minutes (the stage is built, after all, and this show is ready to go on), agrees. No more delays. Even Douglas caves in now and votes with the majority, leaving Black alone in his bilious dissent.

The spectators, reporters, court buffs rush from the courtroom, spreading the word to the thousands left outside, all of whom now grab up their children and cameras and race to the White House: It is nearing High Noon, and now President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone stands between the atom spies and death.

13. The Cabinet Meeting

Wrinkling his brow and bulging his blue eyes in mock amazement, the President interrupted Foster Dulles and said: “This thing is so foolish as to be fantastic!”

I jerked my head up. What was he talking about now? The Rosenberg stay, Rhee, Berlin? Double-breasted suits? He was chewing his lip, a bad sign, and doodling on his little white pad: some kind of face with a careless black beard. Guiltily, I touched my own cheeks: already a little bristly, and it wasn’t even noon yet. I was still nervous and distracted from having run that gauntlet outside — in fact, I’d barely made it to the White House in time for the opening prayer, slipping through the door just as Jerry Persons was getting ready to shut it — and so was able to tune into the Cabinet meeting with only half my mind, but as usual that was enough, they were never much more than diffuse and errant bull sessions. We sat around the long coffin-shaped table in our high-backed leather chairs, shaking our heads in commiseration, blowing smoke, digesting our breakfasts, struggling to get awake enough to face the inevitable assault of newsmen after the meeting broke up, agreeing with the General whatever he was talking about. Maybe he was only complaining to Foster about waking him up at two in the morning yesterday to tell him about Rhee’s release of the prisoners. Dulles made few mistakes, but that was one of them. He wasn’t apt to make it again.

Earlier, after the usual opening minute of silent prayer, the old General had raised his head solemnly, taken a drag, and told us all that the last forty-eight hours had been a particularly trying time for him. We all knew this, but we’d listened appreciatively. In South Korea, he’d said, President Syngman Rhee’s insubordinate release of 26,000 prisoners of war was wrecking his truce negotiations and had cast serious doubt on the entire Free World chain of command. Then, Supreme Court Justice Douglas’s last-minute stay of the Rosenberg executions had made a mockery of all the elaborate preparations this week and brought that whole case to a new crisis — damn it, he’d written his son John a great letter all about the Rosenbergs on Tuesday, had assured Gene Autry on Wednesday that the burnings were all set, and then had gone ahead yesterday right on schedule and issued that cautionary “Statement on the Prevention of Forest Fires,” and now he was going to look like a darned fool. And finally, as if these weren’t troubles enough, someone had advised him last night that he should stop wearing double-breasted suits! He’d glanced gloomily at the ceiling and then at old Ezra of the Council of Twelve Apostles and said that he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he felt more in need of help from Someone much more powerful than he. We’d all nodded our assent, exchanged worried glances, feeling the chill of our adversary’s presence, his power and his wile: to derange a trusted ally, penetrate the highest court in the land, and mock the disguise of Uncle Sam: where would he strike next?

Whichever crisis the President had been talking about, Foster now resumed his briefing on the one in Korea, saying that the situation there was the gravest since the day the Communists first invaded the Republic back on June 25, 1950. We all knew this but were somehow reassured by Dulles telling us so. His remarks, however, kept getting interrupted by messengers from Foggy Bottom who came running over with fresh and apparently alarming communiqués. It was hard to know what was in them, but each one made his head jerk and his glasses skid down his nose. John Foster Dulles. The Gray Beagle of Foggy Bottom. Outwardly austere and even obstinate, he was inwardly an emotional and ambivalent man, a masked manic-depressive, lacking conviction and uncertain of his principles, a typical weakness of high-church Protestants. But we sat there listening to him make his agonizing reappraisals and nodded in gloomy assent. Terrible situation. That damned Rhee — who did he think he was? There were even mutterings around the table about the merits of good old-fashioned assassination: Ike himself had often said aloud that he wished the Koreans would overthrow that “monkey,” and he had that look on his face today, which we all mimicked — but in fact, down deep, we all appreciated Rhee’s act. As Joe McCarthy said yesterday: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” And we all loved freedom and a good buffalo hunt as much as the next guy. It was as lawyers we were upset: the scenario we’d been constructing since Ike’s trip to Korea last fall had had all the props knocked out by our own client. Ike had led with strength, secretly telling the Reds to negotiate or Pyongyang would be our next H-bomb test site — and now his own shill had called his bluff.

“There’s one thing I learned in the five years I served in the Army out there,” President Eisenhower said, shaking his head dumfoundedly, “we can never figure out the working of the Oriental mind!”

Foster stared dully at the President over the tops of his spectacles a moment, then turned back to his latest communiqué, while others around the table picked up on this newest theme of Oriental inscrutability. I participated in these discussions as usual, making occasional observations on detail, crisp and to the point, avoiding generalizations and speech-making, and so keeping up a certain reputation, but my mind was on the excitement outside, the demonstrators and counterdemonstrators, the Supreme Court now or soon to be in session, the trial and the executions, and those dreams last night, those memories of an unspent youth which had left me feeling so edgy and reckless. I developed the ability long ago to do this, to say or do one thing while thinking of another. It’s a political expediency, like appearing to answer a question emphatically while in fact evading the whole point of the question, or learning to repeat verbatim questions from the floor in order to have time to think of answers. I leaned forward and said that, bad as things were, they nevertheless all but assured the passage of our foreign-aid bill through the House today, but I was thinking: What are all those people doing out there? Why has Uncle Sam let this thing get so out of hand? What are the dirty pictures that they’re all joking about? Why is George Humphrey laughing so loudly — are the others feeling what I’m feeling, too? Why is old Foster sitting so hunched over, why is Oveta’s throat so flushed, what’s Ezra Benson doing with his hands in his lap? Why is the President humming “One Dozen Roses”? “We mustn’t forget,” I said, “that the principal enemy in Korea is still Communism.” The General glanced up sharply. I realized that he had just said this himself. “Like the President says,” I said. Around the table, the others nodded solemnly. Charlie Wilson, sitting beside the President, gazed straight at me, his eyes crossing with sleep.

The President reminded us—“bear in mind,” he said, wagging a finger at us — that South Korean forces at this moment held two-thirds of the United Nations line in Korea. If Rhee ordered them to attack, what could we do to stop them? How could we prevent this near-truce we’d come to from collapsing into a full-scale resumption of hostilities? We could hold back ammunition, but that would only mean that the attack would flounder and the inevitable Communist counterassault would overrun the remaining U.S. troops. Likewise, if Rhee pulled his forces back altogether, the rest of us could not hold the line. We simply had to get Rhee back in the harness. Much of this was directed at me. I’d had the job all winter of winning over the Asia-first hardliners on this truce idea — they kept calling it a “peace without honor”—and so Rhee had put me in a bind, too.

I pretended a certain personal frustration — everyone knew I’d taken a public stand with those who wanted to liberate the captive nations of Europe, unleash the democratic forces of Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese mainland, and press for total all-out victory in Korea, hitting them, if necessary, with everything in the bucket — but to tell the truth, I was secretly relieved that being Eisenhower’s Vice President put limits on me. I could use a word like “liberation,” for example, and get read a thousand ways at once — I’m a rhetorician, not a general, and for me that’s power. But today, all those shades of meaning demanded a certain gloominess, my best face in fact, so no one at the table could be surprised I was wearing it.

“It’s one of the lessons of politics,” I said grimly. “Those one thinks are his best friends often turn out to be the heaviest cross he has to bear.” A few heads bobbed up around the table to glance at me suspiciously — I gazed steadily at each of them. Which of them would challenge me, I wondered? Which would stand in my way? I knew that those who reached the top had to develop a certain tough realism as far as friendships and loyalties were concerned — there are no enduring loyalties in politics excepting where they are tied up in personal interests. “What happens any place in the world affects our freedom,” I said, “and it might affect the peace of the world. I think that we can keep our freedom, and I think that we can win the struggle against slavery and for freedom throughout the world. I think the way to have peace is to be strong and be prepared to resist those who threaten peace.” Amazingly, they all listened to this without batting an eye. I wish I had a friend, I thought. One real friend. I took out my handkerchief and mopped my brow. Then, with a shudder, I realized I’d used it to wipe that little kid’s snot, and I stuffed it back in my jacket pocket. I was still very sweaty and shaken from my encounter with that mob — CHAPFALLEN, as it said in the Times crossword puzzle: Weary to an extreme. The only sensation I could recall like it was when Pat and I had got caught up in the crush of the crowd celebrating V-E Day in Times Square in 1945.

Now, in the Cabinet meeting, in fact, they had started talking about Times Square. I didn’t know how they’d got there, it was just the way these meetings went. Sinclair Weeks was complaining about the shambles up there. I tried to tune into this because I knew that a man was at his best in a crisis when he was thinking not of himself but of the problem at hand. Weeks’s problem at hand was that his son was getting married tonight as part of Uncle Sam’s in-depth campaign to reaffirm the social order in the face of the Phantom’s disruptions, and he was therefore quite naturally distressed about what was going on: could we hold the stage or couldn’t we? We’d all complimented Weeks on this marriage tactic right after the prayer this morning, and I’d wished for a moment that I’d had a daughter old enough to give myself. Weeks was bald-headed like a lot of guys around this table. LIFE had said it: “Ike likes them balding.” Benson. Brownell. Humphrey — the first time the General saw George, he threw his arm around his shoulder and said: “I see you part your hair the same way I do!” He’d never greeted me that way. I sat between Brownell and Humphrey at the Cabinet table, feeling like the Hairy Ape. I ran my hand through my thick hair, tracing the scar there and wondering: What is it suddenly about baldness? That image of Bob Taft’s glowing pate as he turned to walk away from me yesterday in the Capitol flashed to mind. This was something all recent Presidential candidates had in common, I realized, even Adlai. Some personal vanity on Uncle Sam’s part? Or did it make the transformation easier somehow? It didn’t matter, Uncle Sam surely knew that I’d pluck it all out if it came to that. Weeks’s son, of course, was not alone in this endeavor tonight — literally thousands of America’s sons and daughters had been pledged to this nationwide ritual of sanctification, including the son of a deceased Republican Congressman, who was marrying the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller himself.

“Thank God for our young people!” I said, and Eisenhower said: “Amen to that!”

“Say, Dick, what the hell did you do to your nose?” asked Charlie Wilson, uncrossing his eyes long enough to get me in focus.

“I, uh, some demonstrators outside, they had picket staves, and, it, uh, it’s nothing…”

Eisenhower took notice then for the first time and I thought I was about to pick up a few points, but then Cabot Lodge leaned forward and said he deplored “the flood of propaganda instead of factual information about this Rosenberg case,” complaining that left-wing groups all over the world were distorting the facts and arousing a lot of hostility toward the United States, even building it up into a case of official anti-Semitism. Why weren’t we making better use of the Voice of America? Of course, Lodge was under a lot of pressure about this in the U.N. He was very effective, a little too boyish and simple maybe, but an appealing politician. He’d just been named “Father of the Year,” part of a gathering campaign probably. I knew he was one of the favorites around here, and of all the guys around this table, he was the man most likely to challenge me — maybe even three years from now. I knew that was my real task: staying on the ticket in 1956. The chances were good that the General would pass away before 1960, and even if he didn’t, it would be an uphill battle for anybody in the Party to unseat me by then. Everybody else in this potbellied timocracy was too antiquated. Lodge used to sit beside me on the Senate floor — I knew just how he breathed, snorted, moved, smelled, fretted. He’d worked hard last fall for Eisenhower, so hard he’d done what no politician should ever do: he’d neglected his own campaign and lost his Senate seat to Jack Kennedy. On the other hand, maybe that was inevitable, and meanwhile he’d scored a lot of points across the country, Ike had provided him a good national forum in the United Nations, and he even had the aura these days of a “what-if” President: had Taft beat Eisenhower out at the Republican Convention, Lodge would have been a logical Party-unifying Vice Presidential candidate, and with Taft dying now, Cabot would be getting ready to take over the country. I worried about the almost complete ambiguity of his past record and the dapper three-piece suits he wore. Those cool narrow ties: you couldn’t even buy ties like those out in California!

“We must mount a mighty ideological offensive,” I said, “which will prove to peoples everywhere that the hope of the world does not lie in turning toward dictatorship of any type, but that it lies in developing a strong, a free, and an intelligent democracy.”

Not everybody was pleased at this. I rarely said anything at these meetings, and then only about tactics. Why was I sounding off like this? If I was trying to speed things up, I wasn’t succeeding. I sat back, letting my gaze float out through the tall glass doors and on down the long soft green slope of the White House lawn, determined to say nothing that would prolong this goddamned meeting any further. They were terrible, these Cabinet sessions, the consequence of Ike’s “team concept”: get all the “best brains in the country” around a table and reach an inspired consensus. They lasted forever and resulted in lowest-common-denominator policy-making and an appalling dilution of power. Or so it always seemed while sitting in one. Just a screen, probably. Our very drowsiness must have given the American people added confidence: faiths fall when the priests get nervous. Thus, when I took over a couple of months ago and spent the whole time harping about the urgent need to get the next campaign started now, I was only rocking the boat.

I sighed, fished the crossword puzzle out of my pocket, as though consulting statistical notes. Down and through, these clues, from Burning Tree activity to “—in Boots,” like some kind of tortuous labyrinthine sentence. Meaningless, silly even — yet why did it make me think of my dreams again? I found AVER, ASSUAGE, TURN, STOP, and ROAR. Arthur Summerfield was there: his “responsibility”—I glanced up at him uneasily, but he seemed to be sleeping. When I got in trouble last fall, Art was the only major Republican official on the Eisenhower train who was arguing openly and strongly that I should be kept on the ticket, defended, and supported. Of course, we’d all turned up in these puzzles (I wondered in fact if VEEP was not an invention of crossword puzzlers), but why had Art been singled out today? 53 Down: Player chased in a game. HERO? HEIR? HEAD? And who was the Duncecap wearer, the Companion of humidity, who the Hardy heroine, the Candidate for worst dressed woman? This last one was a five-letter word, but luckily it began with “F”—but on the other hand, there was 61 Across: Be superior to, and for this one I already had some of the letters: E — EL!

Beside me, Herb Brownell was bringing up the possibility of issuing a “white paper” on the Rosenberg case, but he interrupted himself momentarily to ask dryly if that crossword puzzle I was working was going to be the next order of business?

I’d been deep in thought, trying out “T” and “H” in those blank spaces, and his question startled me. But I was prepared for it. “No, not the puzzle, Herb,” I said, then sat forward to look around at the others, “but this advertisement beside it.” The others turned to me expectantly, leaving a chagrined Brownell momentarily eclipsed and biting his lip. “It’s for a book ostensibly about Soviet Civilization,” I said, “but in fact it’s a blatant plea for ‘co-existence’—and we all know whose kind of talk that is! It’s published by an outfit up in New York which calls itself the Philosophical Library and they’re not only out to peddle this propaganda, they’re also trying to whip up another new letter-writing campaign to the President!”

“Oh, no!” groaned the President. “I thought when this Rosenberg thing was over, I’d — what do they think I am, a darned mailbox?” Summerfield woke up at this reference to his own Cabinet post and glanced about in panic as I passed the ad around. “Can’t we classify it as obscene mail or something? Nobody reads all this foolishness, nobody could even if they wanted to, the most we can ever do is weigh it and burn it, and the incinerators are all stuffed as full as we can get them as it is!”

Summerfield snorted and coughed, and snatched up the clipping to see what we’d been talking about. He studied it blearily, somewhat amazed. “You mean OAF?” he asked finally.

Our laughter was interrupted by a messenger from the Supreme Court: all nine Justices had arrived and the Court was sitting. The Attorney General glanced coolly at his watch, then said: “In just a few moments, Chief Justice Vinson is expected to announce that the Supreme Court is vacating Douglas’s stay. As soon as possible after that, the President must issue a final denial of clemency, which we’ve already drafted, and then the Justice Department will follow with its announcement that the Rosenbergs will be executed tomorrow night at the latest.”

Someone pointed out that that was the Sabbath.

“We’re not going to burn them on Sunday!” the President shouted, rearing up from his doodle, his blue eyes flashing.

“No, General, the Jewish Sabbath,” Herb explained. “These people are Jews.”

“Oh, all right, then,” said the President.

All of this was just a joke, everybody was just trying to calm down.

The Attorney General pondered the problem a moment, then said: “Well, in that case, we’ll finish it tonight. We’ll set it up as soon as the Court stops sitting.”

“Before sundown,” someone said. “It starts at sundown, their Sabbath.”

“Right, sundown. Thanks.”

Friday. Sunset. The two thieves. Jews condemned by Jews. Some patterns had been dissolved by the overnight delay, it was true, but others were taking shape. Uncle Sam could not be entirely displeased, I thought. But the President only belched grumpily and shifted in his seat. He said he still didn’t understand what the issue in the Supreme Court today was, still didn’t see why there had been this delay. If they were guilty, they ought to be punished; if not, let them go. The speech-writer Emmett Hughes, once part of the retinue surrounding the National Poet Laureate, scribbled away, his dark brows bobbing, taking notes on all this for posterity — not what he was being paid to do, but you could spot these parasites a mile away. I supposed, no matter how tight a ship you ran, there’d always be one of these guys slipping in. “I must say, I’m impressed by all the honest doubt about this expressed in the letters I’ve been seeing,” the President said. Was this true, was he really unable to understand so simple a point of law, or was this too part of his disguise? The good soldier, forthright and true, the man of arms too honest to grasp the devious men of letters? Sometimes simple people are more mysterious than those of us who are more complex.

Herb explained once more about the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 Atomic Energy Act. As soon as he said that the issue was purely technical, I thought: he’s just given it all away, he’s just told them Douglas was right. Just as, in a purely technical sense, Don Wheeler was also right in calling for Douglas’s impeachment. But I also knew Eisenhower would not realize this, or would not seem to. Was he testing us, I wondered? I recalled his offer — his challenge, rather — to reopen this case at any time before the executions if any one of us believed that to do so would serve the best interests of the United States. Thus, each of us was on the spot….

“Well, the proof of admission there’s no frameup,” I said, “is the complete silence of the Phantom-controlled press in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It’s obvious they’re expecting the Rosenbergs to confess and they don’t want to look like a bunch of clowns. And I’ll tell you something else. Morton Sobell’s wife said something very funny recently out in Far Rockaway. She said: ‘Julius and Ethel could save their own skins by talking, but Julius and Ethel will never betray their friends!’ I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Of course, I’d got this from a guy who’d got roughed up at that meeting and so was pretty biased, and a right-wing Jew at that, nervous about the anti-Semitism the Rosenbergs could arouse, but that hardly mattered, I understood the essential truth of it and so did everybody else around the table.

Except perhaps the President. He scowled and unwrapped a cigar. “Well, now,” he said, “if the Supreme Court decides by, say, five to four or even six to three, as far as the average man’s concerned, there will be doubt — not just a legal point in his mind.” He was himself that average man he was talking about, of course. This was the secret of his success. He really was average, a cheerful unimaginative boy from Abilene, and yet he was also the man who won World War II, so that just showed what an average man could do. So long as he was an American. Uncle Sam always chose his disguises to fit the times.

“Well, who’s going to decide these points,” Brownell argued, “pressure groups or the Supreme Court? Surely, our first concern is the strength of our courts. And in terms of national security, the Communists are just out to prove they can bring enough pressure, one way or another, to enable people to get away with espionage. I’ve always wanted you to look at evidence that wasn’t usable in court showing the Rosenbergs were the head and center of an espionage ring here in direct contact with the Russians — the prime espionage ring in the country!”

The President stared blankly at Brownell, then lit his cigar. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft,” he said. “The effect of the action.” He understood: it was as though he hadn’t even heard Brownell’s offer to look at the secret evidence. If there was any. It was strange that no one questioned Brownell on this, even though nobody had ever seen this material, Eisenhower especially. I watched this short-tempered old man, Uncle Sam’s new real-time disguise, and thought: the important thing is that there be room for the Incarnation to take place. A man can’t be solid and a mask at the same time. Yes, image — I knew all about that. The essence of power is paradox and ambiguity. Learning to live with this was the hardest thing of all — I was still too precise, too self-critical, too anxious to make everything perfectly clear. While I worried and sweated over every phrase, Eisenhower just leaned back and let fly. “The area of statecraft…the effect of the action…”

I feared I would never be able to deliver these homilies with such ingenuous sincerity. “All I do is belabor the obvious,” he said, but with him it looked easy. Take “enlightened self-interest,” that maxim he stole from George Washington, and which was still one of his favorites. Uncle Sam once explained this to me. He said that it had long been recognized that self-interest was like some kind of sin, something born of the devil, the source, like money, of all evil — the Greeks knew this, indeed so did the Mana-hatta Indians. Self-interest was irrational and man had long dreamed of the rational utopia, free of self-interest. But reason was also known to be the source of all evil. Enlightenment did not illuminate, but spread a greater darkness. The dream of utopia made men miserable, both through disappointment with their flawed existence and through the horrors they inflicted on each other through pursuit of the rational — and therefore unattainable — ideal. Thus, “enlightenment” and “self-interest” were two sides of the same coin, and if there was evil in the world it was due to our failure to see both sides at once. “Enlightened self-interest” was a stoic formula of acceptance, part of the tragedy of history. But for Eisenhower, it meant: Don’t take any wooden nickels.

He’d traveled the world, this man, and now he was running it, and he still hadn’t progressed past the simplest kind of home-town table talk. In his cowtown world, he could use words like “instinct” and “freedom” and “sincerity” and “decency,” and assume any darn fool would know what he meant by them, and if they pretended not to, they were either cantankerous or nincompoops. Free economy was God’s truth, that was all, plain as the nose on your face, and he figured if you’d just show the Soviets the facts they’d agree with you, they’d have to. After all, as he said when he called on the Almighty to watch over the Communists when Stalin died: “They are the children of the same God who is the Father of all peoples everywhere.” It was easy. “Now let us begin talking to each other,” he’d say. “And let us say what we’ve got to say so that every person on earth can understand it. Let’s talk straight: no doubletalk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let’s spell it out.” Then he could never understand why this didn’t seem to work: “We are trying to present certain salient facts to the world, facts for example as to what our purpose is, our intent, that we are not imperialistic, we are simply trying to help create a world in which free men can live decently, and they have not understood; we have tried to be helpful and have earned nothing but vituperation!” In fact, he even seemed to blame me somehow when things went wrong, as though I were responsible for corrupting the language of the world so that it obscured all these self-evident truths. He thought almost any problem could be solved if America would just keep its heart right into the job, as he put it, and do the right thing. “Heart, Determination, and Productivity.” He cherished old proverbs about the good life and rags to riches, thought the first World War even more glorious than the second, truly believed in Manifest Destiny. He liked to fish and hunt! He still remembered the Alamo! Businessmen to him were simply people who knew how to solve problems and save money, so he filled up his Cabinet with them and admonished them to remember the little fellow — my God, how could you not like him? Laborers were like foot soldiers in the forward march of free enterprise, and he talked about creeping socialism as if it were some kind of mole eating up the golf course. “Before I appoint anybody to any important position, I call him in and ask him about his philosophy,” he’d say with a straight face. It’s amazing how little some people can understand about the world we live in, even on the simplest level!

By grunts and nods, we’d seemed to come to some agreement that there was no need for a white paper, but that we should enlarge some on the President’s clemency denial previously drafted by the Attorney General, acknowledging the worldwide “concern” over the case, but answering this Phantom-inspired ruckus with a vivid depiction of the horrible nature of the Rosenbergs’ crime (millions of innocent people may die, etc.) and a little self-congratulatory canticle on behalf of the generous and humane system of American justice and due process of law. I pointed out that the case had had 23 applications to the courts and 112 judges had reviewed it, but no judge had ever expressed any doubt that the Rosenbergs had in fact spied for the Russians. Of course, I knew as well they’d never asked themselves the question and so had had no cause to answer it, confining themselves to legal technicalities, not questions of fact, scrupulously avoiding any improper opinionating about “guilt” or “innocence,” as indeed they had to, but I counted on the General’s ignorance of the appellate system, and sure enough he smiled and said: “Put that in, Herb: ‘No judge has ever expressed any doubt…’”

Conversation shifted now to the ceremonies tonight in Times Square, the seating arrangements, special events, electrocution protocol, and Doug McKay, as Secretary of the Interior, gave a brief report on the problems of security and set reconstruction, apologizing somewhat abashedly for his failure to solve the Statue of Liberty boat strike. The more this dragged on, the more anxious and annoyed I became. My staff would have arrived by now and discovered the Rosenberg mess in my office. I worried about that, worried that they’d see it and gossip around the Senate Office Building about what they saw, or, worse, that they’d try to do me a favor and clean it up. They knew I liked a clean room. My desk is always clean. You can’t let your mind get cluttered, I believe that, you have to live like a Spartan, spare and clean, be at your best at all times, be physically and mentally disciplined to make decisions in a balanced way, and people who have messes around them all the time also have messy minds. I have a note to myself somewhere on the subject. But right now, I knew, my office was a goddamn disaster area, the Rosenberg letters strewn everywhere, the trial transcripts, secret FBI reports, my notes, books on the floor — if anybody who knew me well saw it, they’d think old Dick Nixon was losing his mind. Or else that somebody hostile to me, malicious, vindictive, had got in while I was out. But there was nothing I could do about it until this meeting broke up, and at the present rate, I’d be lucky to get over there before it was time to show up in Times Square. I really blew it with that shave this morning, I thought irritably, watching Ike doodle that blackbearded bum. Is he stretching it out on purpose, I wondered — is Uncle Sam just toying with me?

Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson now suggested ringing the area around Times Square an hour before the executions with atomic tanks, which he said he thought he could supply. Joe Dodge, the Budget Director, doubted that this would be economical. Wilson said he just thought he’d throw the idea out to let us kick it around. Watching all these theatrical performances, I thought: Only Uncle Sam is real: there’s no one over his shoulder. An awkward situation, though — he had nothing to believe in except himself. An audience of one. Herb Brownell informed us that the old Look Ahead, Neighbor Special was being rigged up for VIP runs to the city, and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks said that the subway system there had been commandeered to assure us all easy and safe access to the center and out again. Oveta Culp Hobby expressed her appreciation of this. Of course, the whole Cabinet out in public and in one place like that — not to mention Congress, the Supreme Court, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and indeed the better part of America — we were very vulnerable, the Phantom might even throw the big one at us. Foster Dulles gloomily discounted this likelihood, and Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, smiled and said there was nothing to worry about.

After that, the President, apologizing, read through the speech he planned to deliver at the electrocutions tonight for our approval. It was okay, his usual bumbling incoherent but plainly sincere style, and when he was finished I clapped along with all the rest. I was wondering, though, how to get the discussion shifted back to my injuries. “I read it far more for your blue pencils,” he said, as though genuinely embarrassed, “than I did for your applause.” Why is it, I wondered, that people think of me as the cagy and devious one? “Because at first, in our attempt to state a philosophy of government, we were not close enough down to our daily living. One reason I wanted to read it now is so that you can think it over and be ready to tear it to pieces.”

“I think it is wonderful,” said Charlie Wilson. “I am in favor of flying the flag pretty high.”

“I am, too,” boomed Eisenhower, clapping his left hand to Wilson’s shoulder. Art Summerfield awoke with such a start he nearly fell over backwards in his chair. “I would get out and shout it out loud but you have also got to bring basic principles down to living because here is this thing going out to probably one of the greatest audiences that has ever heard a speech. It is going in the papers, here are thousands out in front of us. You want every person there to carry home with him a conviction that he can do something.”

“A free society stimulates the efficiency of millions,” Wilson said. Engine Charlie smelled the end of this meeting, and his eyes had come uncrossed. So did I, and I leaned forward to gather up my papers. “We should urge that we accomplish more with the same effort for the good of all!”

“It is on a high plane and for the occasion it is very good,” said Ezra Benson, understanding Wilson’s remarks as a criticism. It would be Ezra’s role to deliver the invocation tonight and to ask God to forgive the Rosenbergs for their sins, a touch of charity we all approved of. “I think it is wonderful.”

“We want to keep it largely on a high spiritual plane with exhortation, but at the same time,” said Ike, gesturing broadly, “trying to relate it to our everyday living.”

“I did not see anything I would want to change,” Wilson said.

I got ready to stand up, but then Cabot Lodge objected to a reference to Moscow as having been formerly the center of autocracy and as being now the center of revolution. He said he thought that implied that the Russian government was no longer autocratic — and as for revolution, well, that was a word that appealed to a lot of downtrodden people in the world.

“Despotism?” suggested Ike. “You are right.” He seemed pleased at Lodge’s suggestion, and cast a brief curious glance at me. In my resolve to keep quiet, I realized, I’d let Lodge steal a line from me there.

“If you gave us a flip from autocracy to despotism,” Wilson chimed in, “it would be better.” Now that he was awake, Charlie couldn’t seem to stop talking.

It suddenly came to me what my problem was: I’d spent too much time on reviewing the trial, not enough on everything else. Hadn’t Uncle Sam warned me about this? Nothing had been or could be proven. I could have challenged Brownell on that suppressed evidence, for example, but I’d sensed somehow it wasn’t relevant — it might have been a week ago, or even yesterday, but it wasn’t any more. Why had I been so slow to see this? Why had I waited so long to get into this case at all? I wasn’t just a Congressman from Southern California any longer, I was a heartbeat away from the Incarnation! Everything mattered! This was the central problem as one rose higher in the echelons of national power: how could one continue to isolate and define the essential debate, keep it clean from diffuseness and mind-numbing paradox? I’ve only begun, I thought. There’ll never be time enough! I had to reread the letters, the biographies, search out the hidden themes, somehow reach a panoramic view of the event, and write a speech! That was the point: I had to go before the people tonight and unleash a real philippic, communicate the facts, publicize the truth, help them all stand taller and feel proud to be Americans! That was what Uncle Sam was expecting of me! That was what language was for: to transcend the confusions, restore the spirit, recreate the society! Ahead of me, I knew, was a day of almost superhuman effort.

“I personally am a little bit reluctant ever to talk,” said the President, “in terms that look like we are running a school. I do believe in this particular one — Lincoln himself didn’t say, ‘Eighty-seven years ago.’ He said, ‘Fourscore and seven years ago.’ He, instantly on the opening of that speech, established a certain stateliness, he didn’t use the language that he knew better than anybody else — if you will read some of the stories that he told. I am open to argument on this, but in this speech I deliberately tried to stay in the level of talk that would make as good reading as possible at the Quai d’Orsay or Number Ten Downing but I particularly tried to make the words that would sound good to the fellow digging the ditch.”

Wilson, beaming (we were all beaming): “You flew the flag! It was wonderful!”

“Uh, my nose…” I began.

But just then in burst Sherman Adams with the news: The Court has met! The stay has been vacated! The crowds on the Hill and in the Mall are on the move—and they’re headed this way!

14. High Noon

Here they come, streaming up the Mall toward the White House, and leading them it’s TIME himself, America’s laureate balladeer, carrying a blow-up of Gary Cooper crashing through a door with the legend “BLOOD, SWEAT AND TENSION,” and singing his own words to the famous tune:

high noon united artists creeping

on hadleyville pop four oh oh

one hot sunday morning is the

moment of crisis

of crisis for the

the little western cow-ow town

desperado fra-hank miller

whose jail sentence has been commuted

through a political deal is coming

on — the — noon — train

the marshal is no hero he is

g cooper leaving with his wife

grace kelly to open a general sto-hore

but he turns ba-hack

there is a jo-hob

law and order-her are at stake

the solid citizens of hadleyvi-hille

are laying odds that the marshal is dea-head

five minutes after miller gets off

off — the — noon — train

left high and dry in a town para

lyzed by fear and morally

bankrupt the sweating marshal has to

face miller and three

three of his fellow

fellow desperadoes alone

the picture builds to its high noon climax

in a crescendo of ticking clo-hocks

railroad tracks stretching long and level

hushed — deser — ted — streets

throughout the action dmitri tiomkin’s

plaintive high noon ballad sounds

a recurring note of impending doo-oom

as the heat and drama

mount relentlessly to

to the crisi-hiss of high noon…

The poet shows none of Lloyd Bridges’ shameful funk, but moves jauntily, a proud and eager Deputy, grinning like Jack Palance and shaking his hips to Tiomkin’s thumping music like Smiley Burnette, and the people follow. The law has prevailed. The law and the spirit. Judge Fred Vinson’s court, its subversive heavies Douglas and Black shot down, the Jew Judge Frankfurter locked up in uncertainties, has spoken for the last time. The lives of the A-bomb rustlers are now in the hands of that gangly wire-tough old general, Ike (Swede) Eisenhower, who’s seen a lot of border action himself in his day, in Eisenhower’s hands and the hands of the old clock on the wall. In the House of Representatives, Democrat Frank Chelf of Kentucky rears up like Tom Mix on Tony to interrupt the debate on the foreign aid bill with the excited announcement that “the Supreme Court has just voted to set aside the stay of execution in the Rosenberg case. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow! We thank the Supreme Court!”

Not that it’s all over. No, already the Phantom’s desperate last-ditch mob action is mounting. A steady trickle of unwholesome-looking extras leaks out of Inspiration House on Kalorama Road, moving toward Pennsylvania, like Miller and his gang debouching from the noon train.

Pickets appear: WE ARE INNOCENT! WE WILL NOT TRADE DECENCY & TRUTH FOR LIFE! DON’T LET THE ROSENBERGS DIE ON THE WORD OF A LIAR! The air, as in Hadleyville, is oppressive, weighted with the stagnant threat of time and swarthiness. Something is not yet clean. “Ah nevuh believed ah would li-yuv to see whut ah have seen in WAW-shinton in the past few days!” The people streaming from the Court to the White House pause to listen to the elegant old cadences of Congressman E. L. Forrester, Democrat from Georgia’s Third District, pouring out at this instant from the Capitol, as though through the swinging doors of the town saloon…

Last Sunday I saw six or seven thousand mongrels picketing the White House, parading with banners, charging that our Government had bribed witnesses, and with banners demanding that two particular children not be made orphans. Not one of that crowd was concerned over the widows and orphans of our fine young men who died fighting communism in Korea. Yesterday the Capitol Grounds were alive with hundreds of people who have no interest whatsoever in our country except to destroy it, even to take our country over. Today as I came down to the office, I saw that riff-raff picketing the President of the United States!.. Mr. Chairman, I despise communism! And the people I represent despise communism!.. I want you to know that the section, which I come from—the section where there is no communism—will gladly make every sacrifice and risk every danger and fight until this scourge is completely removed as a menace!

Fighting words, worthy of Johnny Mack Brown and Tim McCoy before him, even the lazy old Chief Doorkeeper Fishbait Miller is on his feet: time to strap on your shootin’ irons, boys, give the Sheriff a hand! But even here, here in the town meeting hall, there is cowardice and indecision, maybe even treachery — else the enraged Georgian wouldn’t be laying all this heated-up rhetoric on them. There are those who aren’t even here, ducking out just when it’s time to stand up and be counted. Moreover, the foreign-aid bill under debate this morning includes payoffs to Communist outlaws like Tito of Yugoslavia, and Wisconsin Congressman Alvin O’Konski is jumping up and down, trying to get the floor to raise hell about that: whoa! what kind of a Congress is this anyway? Congressman Forrester eventually yields to him, but not before laying the blame for all the street fights looming up today squarely on Justice Douglas and the “civil rights Congress”: “Too many have gawn CRAY-zy ovuh so-cawled SS-EVIL rahhts, a CUM-yunist propaganda FAY-vrit, and this heah class a PEE-pul is most ri-SPAWN-subble fer this heah FOO-lishnuss!” O’Konski’s target this morning is those “Communist devils” who were sent to instigate and “engineer a civil war in Spain,” and in particular the “unwanted Communist horror and terror” of the priest- and nun-killer Josef Tito, who’s in for a piece of cash from the foreign-aid bill, and as the crowds rush anxiously on toward the White House, uncertain even of the loyalty and backbone of the town’s leading citizens, they can hear Alvin’s angry words ringing in their ears…

I am wondering how it feels to aid and abet Communism and help kill freedom-loving people? I am wondering if this Congress has any heart or conscience?

And so, as they gather on the White House lawn, mingling with the last of the sightseers just emerging from their guided tour, there is a tremendous excitement, a sensation of being overswept by something larger than oneself, something divine and magnificent, beyond history even, roaring this way like the noon train. The people glance at each other, nervously, excitedly, smile at each other in recognition, their hearts beating in pride and anxiety to some half-heard drumroll, the clickety-clack of train wheels, galloping hooves — yes, it’s as though the frontier is doubling back on the center, bringing wildness and danger, the threat and tumult of the wide open spaces, disrupting system with luck, law with the wild card. As they shuffle about under the White House balcony, they feel like they’re back in Arizona with Wesley Ruggles, joining up with Roy Rogers’s posse in Bells of Rosarita, marching down western streets with Barbara Pepper and Patsy Montana to vote for Sheriff Autry, riding The Big Trail with John Wayne. Something great is happening. Yes, they all feel it. It’s like being with Sam Houston at the San Jacinto or with old Rough-and-Ready at Resaca de la Palma. Drinking buffalo blood with the free trappers along the Snake, fighting with Sam Brannon’s vigilantes, massacring Comanches at Plum Creek, Kiowas in Palo Duro Canyon, Pueblos in the mission church at Taos. A great day for America, something out of the past to revive the future, fired with risk and destiny. But then again, perhaps a terrible day…

It’s all up to Ike.

And what about the President? Is he still the man they say he is, or has he too been Phantomized like the rest of them, Truman and Acheson and Alger Hiss, all those people the Vice President himself has described as supporters and defenders of the Communist conspiracy? Senator Joe McCarthy has said: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” Then why isn’t the President applauding it? Why does he want to give money to that spic Tito? On the other hand, can one finally trust two characters as dark and grizzly as Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon? Do they give you the feeling of being around Buck. Jones or Sunset Carson? Hardly. The President is no mere Marine rowdy, after all, no Navy shyster — this is a foot soldier, a gunslinger, a tall, handsome, blue-eyed Westerner who looks a lot like Bill Boyd. Harry Carey. Randolph Scott in The Frontier Marshall. This is the man who said in Indianapolis: “No American can stand to one side while his country becomes the prey of fear-mongers, quack doctors, and barefaced looters! He doesn’t twiddle his thumbs while his garden is wrecked by a crowd of vandals and his house is invaded by a gang of robbers! He goes into action!” You can hear those swinging doors slap and flutter. “Neither a wise man nor a brave man,” he told them in Cincinnati, “lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him!”

He is the Man Who Won the War, but he is also a man of the people, born and reared on the lonesome prairie, a man who knows what it’s like to sleep out under the stars, listening to the howling of coyotes and the lowing of little dogies, a man who can ride and shoot and use his fists, a man who’s walked through acres of dead men and kept his chin up to fight another day. “We live,” he was saying just last week in Minneapolis, “not in an instant of peril but in an age of peril — a time of tension and of watchfulness,” and his answer to the Phantom is strength: “The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength — and strength alone!” As a boy, he learned how to lick the bullies of Abilene, saw a shootout in the dusty streets of that cowtown, got a pistol in his own ribs in St. Louis. An old trapper-guide named Bob Davis, whiskery as Chill Wills, taught him how to shoot two ducks at once with a double-barreled shotgun, feather a flatboat paddle, win at poker, trap a musk-rat…

“Eh bub, how do ye catch a muskrat?”

“I don’t know, Bob…”

“Well, I’ll tell ye, ye go and look fer his slides, and then ye put yer trap on a short chain, see, so’s he’ll drown…”

“Gee, Bob…”

He packed up his one good suit and went off to West Point, where he got assigned to the Awkward Squad and Beast Barracks, clumsy as old Coop himself. He clowned around, got in trouble, gawky fun-loving Western boy amid fancypants Southern dudes. His injured knee was ruined in monkey drill, his grades fell off, he took to rolling Bull Durham and sowing wild oats for miles around, he got busted from sergeant to private and would have been dismissed had it not been for Major Poopy Bell’s timely intervention, not unlike the good works of Wallace Beery on his better days. He was getting as reckless as Doc Holliday and might have gone that handsome scoundrel’s route had they booted him out of there. He was already laying plans to go ride herd on the Argentine pampas, when his commission in the Infantry came through after all and he got sent out to join General Pershing and the Carranzistas on the Mexican border in Superchief Wilson’s “Punitive Expedition,” a little moral exercise to keep everybody busy until a real war came along.

Well, he was a full-grown man by then, but you wouldn’t know it, he was still the same old irrepressible Ike, a cocky shavetail with the proverbial wild hair up his ass, hungry for any kind of excitement and screw the consequences — but then, in ole San Antone, he met Mamie Doud, in those days still as saucy and sober a Belle as the West had seen since Blanche Sweet. No more crap games, no more restless whoring, no more barroom brawls, it was like the conversions of badguy Bill Hart as he first gazed on Eva Novak or Clara Williams or Bessie Love: “One who is evil,” the captions would read as the lovesick villain melted saintward, “looking for the first time on that which is good.” Not that either Bill Hart or Ike Eisenhower were ever really evil, of course — no, you might as well say that America itself was evil. What they both experienced was rather that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which, in effect, is what the West is all about. On Valentine Day in 1916 Ike gave Mamie his class ring and a year later he got struck by lightning.

Now, over loudspeakers, as the clock ticks inexorably toward twelve noon, comes the friendly rumbling but worried quaver of Tex Ritter, the Texas Cowboy:

I do not know what fate awaits me,

I only know I must be brave,

And I must face a man who hates me

Or lie a coward,

A craven coward,

Or lie a coward in my grave…!

There’s a strange unsettling drumbeat in the song, maybe that’s what they’ve been hearing all along. The crowd shifts about uneasily, like a movie audience deep in the third reel. Men feel their cheeks for signs of bristle, pat their hips as though reaching for six-shooters. Women hug their children to their skirts. It’s not the same, of course. They’re not like those yellow-livered cabbageheads in the Hadleyville town saloon, not at all. The President, unlike Gary Cooper, is not alone — no, the nation is ready for this, the whole damn town will be marching down Main Street tonight behind Uncle Sam and Ike and Dick and Edgar and Joe and Irving and all the rest, no one’s forsaking anybody, oh my darling, we’re all in on this one, everybody from the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Cabinet, down to your average housewife, ditchdigger, man in the street, give or take a skunk or two. Who will be dealt with. HUAC has already launched an investigation of all those protesting the executions, noting that “nowhere has the craven hypocrisy of Communism been exposed so tellingly as in the monstrous campaign organized in behalf of atomic espionage agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!” Why, it’s as bad as Billy the Kid protesting against “mob law” when he got sentenced to be hung for twenty-one murders. The essence of the Phantom’s campaign, says HUAC, alerting the Internal Revenue Service, is deception and fraud, “fraud with sinister purpose and spectacular profit, [seeking] to blacken the name of America throughout the world, and [milking] the American people of some half million dollars while it did so!” Not that they’ve loosened the bonds on these two copperheads. On the contrary! As The Commonweal has noted:

They have maneuvered the President into a position where if he did grant a stay it would be widely interpreted as succumbing to Communist pressure in this country and the pressure of Communist propaganda abroad — which is precisely what the United States cannot afford at this time….

No, it cannot. The American press is unanimous: “The switch must be pulled!” The people, a poll shows, agree. “The will to execute them,” in the words of the Catholic weekly America, is “an affirmation by America, as the voice of humanity, of its will to survive…. Such conspirators against humanity must either die or relent if humanity is to live!” Eisenhower knows this. He’s in complete agreement, he has said so. Then, why this strange titillation, this odd anxiety, this recurring note of impending doo-oom that makes one want to giggle and clutch his balls? Of course, there are precedents for last-minute clemency. During the Civil War, for example, General William Tecumseh Sherman, never one to fuck around about such things, arrested one of Horace Greeley’s newspaper correspondents, charged him with spying, and was about to shoot the man, when Abraham Lincoln stepped in and saved the reporter’s life. Of course, Abe himself got shot after that, the lessons should be clear. No, it’s something…ah! the woman perhaps! And the children, the two boys…

The Rosenberg case focuses attention once again on the fact that Communism is a profound spiritual and psychological evil as well as a conspiratorial and military force…. “He that loves a son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Communism has proven to be a vicious caricature of Christianity. The Rosenbergs, who were willing to betray their people, their country, and humanity itself, stand ready now to leave their own two children orphans….

Yes, The Commonweal is right, something so malignant here as to fall beyond a decent man’s understanding: who can account for a Spirit so perverse that it turns Jesus on His head and tears perniciously at the roots of parenthood all at once, mocks sainthood and the social contract at a stroke? These two boys, so cheaply exhibited these past few weeks, yet so pathetic…and the President himself is a father, is he not, a grandfather, an affectionate man who tragically lost his first little boy; only a day or so ago there was that touching scene with Smokey Bear, and now Father’s Day coming up Sunday — who in all this crowd can truthfully say he or she would deny these boys their parents, this family their longed-for reunion? And who is not, at the same time, flushed with awe and excitement at watching this real-life drama, its tragic end foretold, unfold inexorably before their very eyes? And listen, not only must the President orphan these two small boys, he must — this gallant lover from the border wars — kill a woman in cold blood. Could Bill Hart have strung up little Eva — or even the town trollop? Could old Lafe McKee or Bill Farnum bring such a judgment down on a lady, even were she Belle Starr herself? Of course, a lot of women died in the West, not all in their beds, but more often than not it was an accident, a stray bullet, or a whore’s impulsive sacrifice. Not even villains like Walter Miller or Arthur Kennedy ever dragged them out to the tree and slapped the horse’s rump. There’s only one woman who’s ever been put to death by federal authorities in American history before, and that was Mary Suratt for helping to murder a President. True, like the Judge says, a “crime worse than murder”…yet there is a softness here, deep in the heart of the American soul, that is being probed, pinched, palpated…

Oh to be torn ‘twixt love and duty!

Supposin’ I’d lose mah fair-haired beauty!

Look at that big hand move along,

Nearin’ high noon…!

And then he appears: the President of the United States of America. High up on the White House balcony, surrounded by family and friends. Tall, gentle, handsome, shy, his blue eyes twinkling.

The crowd is at first silent, momentarily awed, train wheels pounding through their heads — then they shake off the strange spell and break into thunderous cheers.

“WE LIKE IKE! WE LIKE IKE!”

Already, distantly, bells are tolling.

“Put your trap on a short chain, Ike!”

“Change trains for the future!”

“Whoo! Whoo!”

The President smiles, lifts his arms. “Friends…”

The crowd falls silent. Expectant.

TIME say: “At the focus of pressure, / Dwight Eisenhower did not flinch….”

Загрузка...