PART THREE: FRIDAY AFTERNOON

15. Iron Butt Gets Smeared Again

I left the President out on Harry’s Balcony, delivering to the sunburnt and straw-hatted crowds below his “Statement Declining to Intervene on Behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” to return to my office, taking as circuitous a route out of the White House as I thought I could get away with — when was the General ever going to show me around this place, I wondered? What I’d been allowed to see of the White House, I’d liked: it was roomy and comfortable, if maybe too public, and it had a lot of interesting corners. I especially liked the Lincoln Sitting Room. There was an old chair I had that would look good in there. I’d never been up to the Solarium where Ike held his stag parties, but I hoped it was like my bell tower back in Whittier, only fancier.

On the way out, I passed Eisenhower’s valet polishing up the Presidential golf clubs for an afternoon on the course. Or maybe to pot around on the White House lawn when the mobs had left. Familiar sight this spring: the Man of Destiny out there in his white sport shirt, tan cap, and gray slacks, whopping golf balls around the grounds like popcorn, like snow-white Eisenhoppers, while his faithful old Army sergeant, now his valet, chased about after them with a yellow bag, reminding old-timers of Woodrow Wilson’s shepherd out on the White House pasture gathering up sacksful of scattered wool tufts and dung for the vegetable garden. His valet did everything for him: helped him on with his clothes, put paste on his toothbrush, buttoned his fly, ironed his shoe strings, probably even wiped his ass when he shat, if he even did that for himself.

A tremendous cheer exploded out on the White House lawn. He’d got to the main part. This, I thought, was what made Eisenhower great, this was why he was our President: he knew how to kill. He knew how to deal with valets and orderlies, and he knew how to kill. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft…” Just close the switches, smile like a monkey, then go out and swat a few. Of course, it was easy for him, growing up in a town that had had Wild Bill Hickok for its sheriff, he probably had it in his blood. I had naturally put myself in his position: could I have refused them clemency? I wasn’t sure. I knew what the national consensus was and I rarely bucked it, but I could see Grandma Milhous shaking her dark head solemnly from her rocking chair, Mom watching me wistfully from a distant room, softening my heart. But then, as I held out my hand to them in reconciliation, there was Dad, rearing up red-faced in front of me with the strap in his hand. Certainly, no matter what choice I made, I would have been troubled and depressed by the decision long before and long after. Eisenhower merely weighed the effects their deaths would likely have out in the world (mainly positive, he supposed: show them we mean business), affably declined to intervene, and departed for the golf links. Nothing more complicated than sizing up the distance of an approach shot and choosing the right iron. And everybody loved him for this. Even Ethel Rosenberg, about to be wired up and wiped out by the callous sonuvabitch, saw him as “an affectionate grandfather” and “sensitive artist.” The Supreme Court had just warned him, I’d read it myself: “Vacating this stay is not to be construed as endorsing the wisdom or appropriateness to this case of a death sentence”—all but a plea for mercy, but the sensitive artist, with a blank happy smile, ignored it. He probably never even read it. Well, he’d been hit by lightning himself, after all, maybe he underestimated the effects.

I first met the General at the Bohemian Grove near San Francisco in 1950, shortly after I’d won the Republican nomination in California for the Senate, and instinctively, with that first handshake, I’d known him: the most popular boy in school, star of the team, reluctant grinning stud, the easygoing joker who was always getting into the kind of funloving trouble I shied from but envied, pulling shenanigans that made the old folks grin and shake their heads, making out with everybody, the natural leader. Oh, I was a leader, too, of course. If there was an election, I ran, and often as not, because I worked my butt off, I won. But a vote isn’t love, an election is not an embrace. The girls looked up to me, but if I grinned or kidded with them like the other guys, they’d get puzzled and upset, push my hands away. It was like we were in some kind of play, like they knew already how things had to come out and I was threatening them with a disturbing change in the plot. Growing up was difficult for me. Of course, I soon discovered that Eisenhower and I had a lot in common, too — we both came from small towns out west and families of brothers, both dreamed of becoming railroad engineers or seeking adventure in Latin America, both loved football, suffered from nervous stomachs, became military officers, played poker, and had had genuine Horatio Alger careers. But there was always a difference. I dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer because I knew I ought to — Eisenhower actually would have been happy throwing his life away on a goddamn train. Or punching cows in Argentina. The only reason I wanted to go to Cuba was to make money and become respectable in Washington and New York. Also I was in trouble with a judge and getting my ass sued off by an irate client in Whittier for fucking up my first big law case, and I figured I might want to go where the rules were less suffocating. And quickly. This could never have happened to Eisenhower, he was too dumb. As for the football team, I sat on the bench and cheered till my lungs hurt, and sometimes they told me they couldn’t have won without me there, but just the same my name wasn’t in the newspapers next day, and nobody carried me off the field on their shoulders, like they did Ike. The only action I ever saw was in practice when they used me as cannon fodder, a tackling dummy with legs. They wouldn’t even give me a school letter, the fucking tight bastards. And so there I was that day in San Francisco, on the very threshold of such fame and glory rarely even dreamed of by one so young, and yet utterly subdued, held in total wonder by that loose-witted old man-He’s been chosen! I thought, though at the time I wasn’t thinking so much of the Presidency.

We were luncheon guests that day of former President Herbert Hoover, who, though shrunken, still emanated vestiges of that ancient power. Like a shadow behind the eyes. He liked me, as most old men did, we were both California Quakers, after all, and believers in the Four Selfs. I’d actually had direct correspondence with his wife some years before when I was student body president at Whittier College, her alma mater, and when I’d first had a chance to meet him, I’d boned up before on all his writings in order to quote back at him some of his pet phrases about “rugged individualism” and “economic liberty,” winning the old boy’s everlasting support, only hoping all the time it wouldn’t some day prove an embarrassment. We’d even got so close he’d confessed to me what it felt like, that awful day in 1932, when he first felt the power going out of him. The strange hollowness, the painful deflation as his body closed in upon the void, the headaches, back trouble.… Naturally, I’d wanted to know everything, what the Incarnation felt like, how you knew when it had begun, the possibilities…

“How did it happen, Mr. Hoover…the first time?”

He’d given me a strange look then, pity maybe, or envy, I didn’t know what it was, but it had seemed somehow unbecoming for a former President of the United States. “I’d, uh… I’d rather not say, son,” he’d said.

Anyway, he was pleased to make the introductions that day at the Bohemian Grove, and had even tossed a few familiar superlatives about me Eisenhower’s way, saying my election to the Senate would be “the greatest good that can come to our country”—but I don’t think the General even saw me during that handshake. A bright friendly twinkle in his blue eyes, but they were restless, took in everything at once, and nothing. What was he looking for? Comradeship? A way out? He laughed so easily. Everything he said was dumb, yet somehow attractive. And he seemed completely in awe of politicians, held his expletives in check as though among priests, made fun of his own political ignorance. “What does an old soldier know about such things?” he grinned. He’d be hell to beat in a poker game, I thought.

Actually, I’d seen him before — but from a distance — five years earlier, and then my impression of him had been that of every other American: he was not only a great hero, but also a real good guy in the best tradition of the American heartland. It was just after V-E Day and I was still celebrating my own survival: I couldn’t complain, in spite of the exile I’d had a fairly soft tour — even enjoyable at times and wildly free from the restraints of home — and now, sane and whole and with a pocket full of poker winnings, there I was, just thirty-two years old, about to become a father for the first time, and the whole wide world spread out before me. I was finishing out my Naval duty by negotiating settlements of terminated war contracts in the Bureau of Aeronautics office in New York City, and from a twentieth-floor window of that dreary building I’d watched General Eisenhower go motoring by, standing up in the back of his car, both arms raised high over his head. Instinctively, I’d raised my own: it had felt good. That’s a terrific gesture, I’d thought then. Churchill raises two stubby fingers, a Texan raises both his arms. But even from that distance, I could see that this man was no intellectual giant. No man who thought seriously about things could smile like that.

For the past year and a half now, since my historic trip to his SHAPE headquarters in Paris, I’d got to know him a lot better. After all, we’d suffered the rigors of a tough campaign together, had won an election and now ran the country together, we were a team. Yet that San Francisco luncheon seemed to have set the tone and conditions of our relationship ever since: he was the General, I was the deferential junior officer; I was the professional lawyer and politician, he was the reluctant amateur, acknowledging my know-how but skeptical of its source; he was the Old Man, I the son he was surprised by once a week at Sunday dinners. He had his cronies, old and new, people like General Clay and George Humphrey, and he laughed and snorted with them, but not with me. Whenever I drew near, they stifled their laughter, interrupted their conversations, broke their back-slapping huddle, turned to give me their attention, scarcely concealing their impatience and disapproval. He liked people around him who were confident and cheerful, and I could never be both at the same time. The trouble was, most of those smug pals of his didn’t know shit from Shinola around here — politics is a science and a skill like any other, and I was one of the best professionals in the business, but he never seemed to give a damn about my opinions, only asking me for them because he’d been brought up in the military to do that, consult your juniors so they don’t get too restless. Everyone always admired how hard I worked, but Eisenhower seemed to accept this like he accepted everything else: he measured my capacity and then took it for granted, as a fact he could work with. Typically overeager, though, I’d tried to take on the world during those early days and so had set a standard for myself I could never live up to and survive. When overstretched, I needed praise or pity to keep going, but I learned very early not to seek it from the Old Man — nothing turned him off faster. I had to go to Bill Rogers or Bert Andrews or Pat instead. I learned to move at the periphery of his vision, in profile as it were: self-assured, intense, preoccupied, businesslike. He watched me as though from another room, somewhat amused.

Maybe, taking a few chances, I might have cracked through this condescension and made out with him on some deeper, more intimate level — but I couldn’t take those chances, I couldn’t take any chances, not now: I was waiting for the big one, and I couldn’t risk blowing it. There are people who do not wish to surrender to the Incarnation, who do not wish to he possessed by Uncle Sam, be used by him, moved by him, who do not wish to feel his presence pushing out from behind their own features, distorting them, printing them on the blank face of the world, people who fear the forces leaking out their fingertips, the pressure in the skull, the cramp in the groin. Let me say right here that I was never one of them. It’s true, sometimes I envied these people: they were free of constraints I too had once been free of, they could blaspheme and grow beards, trade wives and mink coats, go on a bender, be emphatically inconsistent — the paradox of power: to lead a nation of free men is to be the least free among them. Jefferson once said that when a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. Property! Jefferson knew how to choose his words. To lead a land of free-enterprise entrepreneurs was to be their communal socialized possession. But this was what I wanted and so to that extent I was free: if these were chains, I chose them.

Eisenhower, who thought himself free, was in fact the real captive, much more the victim than I would ever be in his place. Because — and this was the central truth about Dwight David Eisenhower and that by which his whole role in world history must be judged, far more important than his deviousness, his lack of sophistication, his gregariousness, his selfishness, his bumbling style or calculating ambition — he was unconscious. Oh, alert, yes, and he wasn’t stupid — our best historian and mathematician, his classmates at Abilene High had called him back in 1909, bad as his grades had been — but in any larger sense, he was simply unconscious. He didn’t know what was going on. And maybe in fact this was why we all liked him. He really supposed he’d done his duty to God, country, and Abilene, won the war in Europe for all the good guys, treated his juniors and Mamie fairly and squarely, and now led his people as their President by holding these weekly bull sessions in the Cabinet Room, their team captain and cheerleader. He even thought that people were listening to him and doing the things he suggested they do! He sat in the Oval Office, signed bills, received ministers, set the barometer, and kept his desk clean, and he didn’t even grasp what it was he was doing, people had to explain it to him. Whenever Uncle Sam shazammed himself hack into the General, the General would blink, glance around in amazement, then shrug and say something like: “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing.”

I’d been a witness to an occasional transformation as that stern old steel-fisted top-hatted Superhero submerged himself into Dwight D. Eisenhower: there was always a certain broadening of the nose, softening of the mouth, hair falling out, elongation of the ears, slumping of the shoulders. And then back again the same way. It looked easy, and as far as I could tell, Eisenhower didn’t suffer at all, though there was a perceptible aging each time. I’d tried it myself, at home, alone — except for Checkers, who, it seemed to me, was closer than I was to making it — but nothing had ever happened. Ever since the Checkers speech, I’d had the feeling I could do it if I tried hard enough, and I’d crouch in front of the bathroom mirror and grunt and push, but all that ever came of it was that I’d get Checkers overexcited, and he’d start barking his damned head off, wake the whole house up. “What are you doing to that dog, Dick?” Pat would scold sleepily from the bedroom. I often wondered if it was bad luck to live on a street named after Sam Tilden. The neighborhood had jinxed Kefauver and Sparkman, after all… I’d have to think about this.

Outside, the grounds and streets around the White House were jammed with noisy people, tourists mostly, probably friendly, and on an ordinary day I’d enjoy emerging from an important meeting, still wreathed in authoritative sources, informed circles, those close to the center, and moving boldly into their midst, shaking hands, exchanging small talk. I have a strong emotional feeling for the problems of what I’d call ordinary people. I’ve known unemployed people, for example, and I know what their problems are. As to shaking hands, I like to do that — it brightens people’s lives to meet a celebrity, and besides, I’m rather good at it. I’m able to treat each person as an individual. As a matter of fact, I have even shaken hands with some Communists. But today I was in a hurry: my own skull was tingling with the imminence of the electrocutions and I knew I’d have to work fast to get everything sorted out. Besides, I’d had enough scary encounters with mobs for one day. There are tricks in dealing with crowds, and if they begin to press too hard, I look around for a thin spot and move hack through it toward a car. I didn’t see my own car anywhere, John apparently hadn’t got through, so I slipped through a gap in the mob created by the mounted Park Police, between the ass ends of a couple of horses, past the farmers posing for snapshots and the guys in checkered caps hustling bus tours, and grabbed a battered old Coastline cab, just clattering by. Perfect! I was buoyed up by all the excitement, I had a very “up” feeling, very positive, it was as though the day were getting under way at last, an important day: this one might mean the Presidency for me or no! “Senate Office Building,” I ordered, leaping in, “and, uh, step on it!” Just like in the old George Raft movies, I felt pleased by my luck and aplomb, the perfect timing, all I needed now was a fat black cigar, everything was clicking, I might even pick up something from the cabdriver, touch the pulse of the nation, so to speak — eight hours to go, and by God I was going to make the most of them, I was already making the most of them. The only thing that spoiled this great feeling was the pile of horseturds I’d apparently stepped in on my way past the mounted cops.

“Step on what, mac?” growled the cabdriver, rolling around to glare sourly at me. Ugly man, hard, looked foreign. Pimply, unshaven, thick dirty glasses, fat lips.

I glared back at him, keeping my cool, then hauled the door shut, but it was loose on its hinges and it just whumped up heavily against the frame and swung open again. People had turned to stare at us, some seemed to recognize me, they were moving toward the cab. I grabbed the door with both hands and yanked it hard — it slammed to with a crumping smashing noise, and the window dropped three inches, a crack branching through it like a pencil drawing of a tree.

“Nice goin’, big shot,” said the driver drily. “Ya broke it. That’ll cost ya five bucks.” He stuck out his hand at me, grubby, short-fingered. “Right now, or we don’t go nowhere.”

I sighed irritably. Trick window, I supposed, I was just getting taken, but what could I do about it? This was the only cab in sight and I did not want to get out there with those people again. I reached into my pocket for my billfold, pulled out a five-dollar bill. The Raft movie was over and I was into something more familiar.

He snatched the bill out of my hand with a grin, started to swing around, then turned back, wrinkled his nose, sniffed, winced at me: “Is that you makin’ that smell, chief?”

“I… I stepped in…something,” I explained.

“Yeah? Well, that’ll be another five bucks,” he said, and whipped another bill out of my wallet — it looked like a ten.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said, but he had already pitched around, shifted gears, gunned the motor, honked the horn, and was moving aggressively into the crowd. To hell with it. Cut your losses. I could probably get it back out of my office expense fund.

“Say, what’s the high muckey-mucks doin’ in there,” he asked, scowling and shaking his fist at the crowds that clotted the streets, “givin’ away free nookie?”

“The atom spies,” I replied stiffly. “The, uh, President is delivering his—”

“You mean Eisenhower?” he shouted back over his shoulder. “Hey, I hear Mamie’s askin’ for a divorce!”

“A divorce—? No, I—”

“Yeah, she says she’s gettin’ sick ’n’ tired of him doin’ to the country all the time what he oughta be doin’ to her! Haw haw haw!”

Ah, screw the pulse of the nation, I thought, sitting back, scraping the horseshit off my shoe on the back of the seat in front. The cab was edging slowly around past the Ellipse, General Sherman rearing up on my left like his pants were on fire, lumpen pioneers and the Washington obelisk holding the right. Washington had got the obelisk, Jefferson the dome and circle, Lincoln the cube, what was there left for me? I wondered. The pyramid maybe. Something modern and Western would be more appropriate, but all I could think of were the false fronts in the old cowtowns.

“Hey, speakin’ a horse manure,” the driver hollered, lurching and braking through the milling crowds, “Harry Truman got in trouble with his daughter about that! Margaret come to her old lady and complained that Harry had disgraced the family by sayin’ ‘manure’ insteada ‘fertilizer’ when he come to present the prizes at her Ladies’ Horticultural Club. ‘Hell,’ says Bess, ‘that’s okay, it’s took me thirty years to get him to say manure!’”

I humph-humphed ambivalently. A stupid joke, but it was enough to remind me that I had my own speech to think about: should I take the high road or the low road? I ran over some phrases in my mind: uh, peace in the world…reduce the danger… I cannot and will not, uh, I have determined that, reached the conclusion…uh, with the help of a mobilized public opinion…what I am suggesting, just running it out hypothetically, is that, uh, some very strong medicine…getting down frankly into the arena…moving upward strongly…

“Bess, ya know, has decided to become a model! Ycah, now that Harry’s out of a job, she’s gonna he a model for dowager styles, see? A friend asked her: ‘But whaddaya gonna do about that big ass o’ yours, Bess?’ And she says: ‘Oh, he’ll stay home on the farm!’ Hoo hah!”

Ah, some of our good partisans…many decent, uh, decent Americans…gathered here…something about, let’s see, we must, uh, we must seize the moment, yes, not just cosmetics, but…ah, on the brink, yes, I think we would he less than candid were we not to admit…

“I got three little girls, ya know — well, they ain’t so little any more, in fact they just got married the other day. All on the same day, a cute idea!”

“Oh? Yes…yes, it is…” I could get a lot fancier, of course. But people have known me too long for me to come on all of a sudden talking like Adlai Stevenson. If I’m to convince people, it’ll he in simple declarative sentences, by the force of facts.

“Yeah, and they all spent their first night in my house, see? When they come down to breakfast the next morning, I ask ’em, I says: ‘Honey, whaddaya think o’ married life?’ Well, the first one, she says: ‘Daddy, with my husband it was just like Winston Churchill, all blood, sweat, and tears!’ And the second one, she says: ‘My old man was like Roosevelt, I thought I’d never get him out — four times, before he finally died on me!’”

Roosevelt had a lot of style, all right, I thought as the cabbie jerked and wormed through the crowds. I wondered if there was something of his I could borrow for tonight. Maybe a variation on that four-freedoms idea — the freedom of the modern housewife, for example, or the freedom to hear Ike pray at the Inauguration, the freedom of television, and so on. Work the Rosenbergs in somewhere maybe. The main thing, though, was: keep it short and blunt, sound a warning note or two, and tell ’em what they want to hear. My greatest weakness was getting over-intellectual in my speeches. I’m known as an activist and an organizer, but some people have said I’m sort of an egghead in the Republican Party. It’s true, I’m more on the thought side than the action side — I’m like Wilson in that regard, except that he always overdid it. I know how to avoid that, I can tame and coddle the intellectual Dillingers as easily as I can outsmart the double domes….

“So I asked the third one, ‘Well, what about you, honey?’ And she says, ‘Well, mine was just like Harry Truman, Daddy. He wanted out before he’d ever got in, then when he did get in, he didn’t know what to do there. Finally, he just rolled over and quit, and when I asked him why, he says: “Lady, the fuck stops here!”’ Haw haw haw!”

Well, at least it wasn’t about me, I thought. My shoe seemed to be caught under the front seat. Shoestring snagged or something. As I twisted it back and forth, trying to get it free, it suddenly came to me that the roller coaster in my dream last night had not been a roller coaster at all, but one of those rides they call an Octopus, and it had had a sign on it that said MOSAIC OF HISTORY. Funny how dreams kept developing after you’d dreamt them… I seemed to remember that little Ethel was wearing an “A” on her chest, too. And that she looked a lot like my first girlfriend back in Whittier. Maybe because of Sheriff Street…my girlfriend’s old man was the local chief of police…

The cabbie, leaning on the horn, hulled his way around a bus, through an onrush of latecomers pouring over from the Hill, and suddenly we were free, shooting up toward the old Willard Hotel. “Hey, pal!” he shouted back over his shoulder: “Am I steppin’? Am I steppin’?”

I let myself smile. I wondered if I was going to have to take my foot out to get the shoe free.

“Say, I heard a good one about the Vice President,” he shouted back.

“What—!?”

“Back in the war, see, when he was tryin’ to dodge the draft, he went to work for the OPA. And while he was there, he picked up this chick and took her out by the old quarry and parked with her. He says, ‘I hope ya don’t mind if we park here a little while — it’s okay, cuz I am Dick Nixon of the OPA!’ And she says, ‘Well, I don’t usually do this sorta thing, but I guess it’s all right, so long as you’re Dick Nixon of the OPA…!’”

“Uh, listen…”

“So he puts his arm around her, see, and he says, ‘I hope ya don’t mind my puttin’ my arm around ya like this, it’s really okay, on accounta I am Dick Nixon of the OPA!’ And she says, ‘Well, I usually don’t allow—’”

“Yeah, listen, I’ve heard that—”

“Wait a minute! It gets better! He puts his other hand on her knee, see, and—”

I said I’ve heard it!” God, I hated this small talk. “Don’t you know who I am?

“All right, all right, don’t get sore! Just tryin’ to cheer ya up. Jesus…!” He was grimacing at me through the rear-view mirror, not watching the street. There were people wandering back and forth in our path and I was afraid he was going to kill somebody. Mrs. Fillmore, I remembered, died in the Willard Hotel. Uncle Sam was through with her by then, though.

Suddenly, the cabbie spotted a pair of copulating dogs in the street—“Whoopee!” he cried, took aim, and roared forward. I was thrown back, anchored by my stuck foot, into the hard rusty springs of the old ruptured rear seat. The cab had no shocks left at all. It was like a jeep ride I’d had through a shelling near Bougainville, only the jeep had been in better condition. The dogs saw us coming, wound about frantically trying to get separated, finally lurched in a six-footed panic across the wide avenue toward the distant curb, hopelessly hung up on each other. I noticed, as the cabdriver, yowling like a wild Indian, reeled cross-traffic after the dogs, that we were near the FBI building, and I hoped I wouldn’t be recognized.

I cried out something, I don’t remember what, didn’t matter, I couldn’t even hear myself over the cabbie’s hallooing. I was hanging onto the door with one hand, the seat with the other, and I saw as I glanced up at the rear-view mirror that I was grinning madly. Oddly, the cabdriver was looking back at me, not out at the street. Buses and automobiles swung in and out of our path like the crazy cars in the old Keystone Kops movies, the dogs blundering through the screeching wheels, yelping with pain and dismay, scrambling miserably for a foothold. Some people ride in taxis all the time. They say they like it. They like to make contact with the man in the street, they say. They must be crazy.

We were closing in on the dogs. The one on top was half twisted away now, both front paws down on the pavement to one side of the bottom dog, but his left hind leg stuck straight up in the air. They seemed to be trying to go in two different directions, and each time the top dog kicked, the bottom dog’s back legs splayed out. I watched aghast as we bore down on them. I no longer even knew which direction we were headed. I was afraid I might get carsick. We crossed paths with a trolleybus, sideswiped an open police car, and caught the dogs just as they reached the curb, clipping the top one in the butt and sending them both skidding, still locked up, spraddle-legged and yipping wildly, right into the doorway of the National Theater. Closed, I saw. Guys and Dolls coming June 29. Cast Intact. Interrupting Its Sensational New York Run. “Goal!” the cabbie cried.

The cab had spun sharply and stopped dead. I sat back in a cold sweat. I was too weak to open the door and get out. “Hoo-eee!” the driver crowed happily, leaning back over the seat and slapping me on the leg. “That’s one piece o’ ass them old houndawgs won’t soon fergit!” I winced at the contact. I’m no shrinking violet, I’m a political animal, after all, I know what it is to be down in the arena — but I can’t go out and grab people and hug them and carry on, and I don’t like them grabbing me. Especially on the leg. It doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy, with cabdrivers least of all. He winked and squeezed my knee. Reflexively, I jerked my foot right out of its trapped shoe. “Yeah, I know who ya are, Nick,” he said.

“Nick…?” I squeaked. Nobody had called me that in eight or nine years. Not since the Navy, the South Pacific…

“Green Island, remember?” he grinned. He turned back to restart the motor. “I guess it’s Commander Nick now, ain’t it? Haw haw! Just read about your promotion!”

I stared numbly at him in the mirror, trying to place him. Some guy I’d cleaned out in a poker game out there? Was that it, had he been lying in wait for me all these years? I tried, feebly, to smile. “Do I, uh…?”

He pushed his way brusquely back through oncoming traffic to the right side of the road. “Ho ho, Nixon’s by God Hamburger Stand, remember that? You sure had it made out there, Nick! Green fuckin’ Island, no shit — you musta hated to see the war end!”

“What do you mean?” There was a tightness in my chest. I felt a little like that guy wrestling a horse in front of the Archives Building we’d just passed. “It wasn’t…there wasn’t—”

“Everything from cunts and whiskey to captured Jap rifles, cupcakes and influence, you spread an amazin’ menu, Nick! A livin’ legend! They say ya socked away a cool hunderd grand on that tour!”

“Ten thousand, that’s all,” I protested, but he seemed to laugh harder than ever at this. “Besides, that…that was from poker.”

“Sure it was, Nick! Sure it was! Haw haw! And where’d all that famous chopped meat come from you was boondogglin’? Most of it was headed for those poor dumb cocksuckers out to sea and off in the battle zones, wasn’t it, Nick? Booze for the enlisted goddamn men, am I right? Eh, Commander?”

“Well, if I hadn’t…somebody else…”

“Haw haw! Right! I believe you, Nick! I’m with ya! The only fuckin’ goddamn legitimate American hero in the war, Nick, I mean that! Hairy Dick, the Hamburger King a the South Pacific! The Big Bug a Green Island, the Sultan of SCAT — they shoulda give you a medal, Nick!”

“It wasn’t like that at all—!” Why was I arguing with him? I knew no one could keep pace with a concerted smear campaign. The man in political life must come to expect the smear and to know that, generally, the best thing to do about it is to ignore it — and hope it will fade away. “I was only doing my—”

“Duty! Right? I know, and you couldn’t stop doin’ it! We hadn’t even got around to makin’ them Jap warlords cry cockles, and you was already down there in Los fuckin’ Angeles, all duded out in your gold-braid monkey suit and good-conduct ribbon, runnin’ for a suck at the public teat, tellin’ the yokels hack home how it was in the fuckin’ foxholes! ‘The clean forthright young American what fought in defense of his country in the stinkin’ mud and jungles of the Solomons!’ Hoo hah! — Nick, ya break me up! Fuckin’ genius, you are, a real bullwhacker — you shoulda been in show business!”

“Now, see here—!”

“Aw, Commander, don’t — haw haw! — don’t gimme that look! Save it for your dumb fuckin’ mutt!” He seemed to remember something and broke into more guffaws. The two dogs we ran down probably. I recalled there was a drugstore hack there across from the Willard Hotel, and I needed more antacids. Not the time to go hack, though. Do it later. I was furious, but I knew I couldn’t let myself he seen to lose my equanimity. The burdens of life sometimes outweigh the pleasures, you can’t let it get you down, makes a bad impression on the public. After all (I told myself) I believe in the battle, it’s always there wherever I go. I perhaps carry it more than others because that’s my way. Besides, this would soon he over, we were coming onto Constitution now. Lot of activity up there, toward the Capitol…. “And now, by the sweet cock o’ Uncle Jesus, you’re the Vice fuckin’ General Manager of the whole — WHOA!”

He swerved suddenly over to the curb where a lady was handing out pamphlets. She looked like a Jehovah’s Witness type. This was my chance to get out. I reached down and tugged at my shoe. But he rolled on by, grabbing one of her pamphlets on the run, dragging her along a few clumsy steps, then roared ahead. “What…what is it?” I asked.

He peered at it, turned his nose down. “Ahh, it ain’t nothin’,” he grumped. He handed it hack over the seat to me. It was Ethel Rosenberg’s final appeal for clemency, with two sketches above, one of her and the other of Julius, signed by Picasso. I’d seen them before. Picasso was a notorious Red, the Rosenbergs were just hurting their own cause with blatant associations like this, but it was nothing they hadn’t been doing all along. “You shoulda seen the ones they was handin’ out last night! Haw! There was some cute ones of you, Nick! You’d be prouda the dong they hung on ya!” He winked at me in the rear-view mirror and spread his hands out like he was measuring some big fish. “Of course, I can’t say it was gettin’ put to the best use! R-raw-haw-haw-haw-haw!”

“Now, that’s uh, just about—!”

“Easy, Nick, haw haw, don’t let it go to your head! I mean, there was a lot of ’em showin’ you with your face smeared with shit, too. Or eatin’ it — I gotta admit the shit looked good there, Nick, you’d make a terrific President! Yaw-haw-haw!” He was crumpled up over the wheel with laughter. “Hey, ya know? I seen that lady back there before! She was up at the White House tryin’ to get in!”

“The White House—!”

“Yeah, she said she wanted to have an intercourse with the President!”

“You mean, interview…”

“Yeah, that’s what the guard said, but she says, ‘Naw, I mean intercourse! I wanna see the nuts that’re runnin’ this country!’ Waw-haw-haw!

We’d stopped behind a sightseeing bus and I meant to jump out, but I couldn’t get my goddamn shoe loose from under the seat. He reached around suddenly and nearly poked me in the face with a big cigar. “Woops! Excuse me, Nick! Whaddaya doin’ down there on the floor? Here, no hard feelin’s, have a cigar! I remember how you loved to blow through these things out on Green Island, I been savin’ it for ya!”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t—”

The bus started up. The cabbie thrust the cigar in my hand, swung around to get moving again.

I sat back, I had to think, I had to keep my head. It would have been stupid to have jumped out there anyway, the place was full of demonstrators. No mistake about it this time: they carried pictures of the Rosenbergs with pleas for mercy printed on them. All along, I’d been noticing something peculiar about these pro-Rosenberg people, I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it, but suddenly it came to me: they were all middle-aged! There was hardly a kid among them, the young ones were all over on the other side, my side, these Rosenberg people were all…well…my age.…

“Hey, you may not believe this, Nick,” the cabdriver said, “but I know that broad on all them posters there.”

“Who, you mean—?”

“Yeah, Rosenblatt, the atom spy. I went to fuckin’ school with her!”

“You mean, uh, Rosenberg—?”

“Yeah, she lived around the corner from me there on Whatchamacallit Street…”

“Sheriff?”

“That’s it! Sheriff Street! Ain’t that a laugh, Nick? Just goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, don’t it? Sheriff Street! Jumpin’ Jesus, lemme tell ya, she had a sweet ass on her, Nick! We useta sneak into the back lot there and peep in her window—”

“But she slept on the second floor, didn’t she? I think I read—”

“We used ladders, Nick! We climbed trees! There was a fire escape. I had a buddy in the building behind — shit, we saw everything!”

“The other rooms, too?”

“What other rooms, Nick?”

“They say that sometimes, uh, prostitutes rented out—”

“Right, Nick! It was a kinda whorehouse! Did I forget to mention that? That’s probably where she learnt her game, right? Listen, by the time she was fifteen years old, buddy, she could do more things with a banana than you and me could ever dream a’ doin’ with our dingdongs in a lifetime! She sure showed all us boys a trick or two — I mean, I’m lucky to have a cock left at all, Nick, she subverted the goddamn thing to ribbons!”

“Really? But they always said she never even had a boyfriend until—”

“Don’t you believe it, Nick! She was one hot little twat — all them Commies are, you know that! It’s part of their religion! Sweet Betsy, she couldn’t keep her pants on! I mean, it turned into a real act, she got famous, she went all over the fuckin’ town doin’ it in the moviehouses!”

“You mean the Major, uh, Bowes Amateur Nights—?”

“Haw haw! Amateur, my ass! Amateur, my ass, Nick!”

“I… I thought she always sang ‘Ciribiribin’—”

“She didn’t sing it, Nick — she did it! God in ass-fuckin’ star-spangled heaven, she was a sensation! They finally had to move her into the burlesque circuit to accommodate the mobs, it was worsen back there at the White House! We useta catch her act ever Saturday night. We was pretty dumb, don’t hold it against us, Nick, but we thought it was innocent—ya know, just dirty sex, twirlin’ her tits, suckin’ up quarters with her cunt, things like that. We didn’t realize she was suckin’ up a lot more than quarters, and then flushin’ it all straight to Russia! You read about it, Nick: she had A-bombs up there, Jell-O boxes, Red herrings, passport photos, Klaus Fucks, the Fifth Amendment — shit, she could probably get a whole fuckin’ P-38 up her snatch and have room for Yucca Flat and the Sixth Fleet to boot! They say there was a ray gun in her navel, a walkie-talkie hid in her G-string, and a camera stuffed up her ass — when she spread her cheeks at us, we always heard this click and thought she was blowin’ kisses at us out her rectum! What fuckin’ innocents we was, Nick! Never again, hunh? I mean, we’ve grown up, ain’t we, Nick? We’re through suckin’ Russky hind tit like babies, ain’t we? We ain’t on Green Island no more—!”

“I don’t think this, uh, has any—”

“You tell ’em, Nick! By God, you tell ’em! You remember that persecuter — what’s his name?”

“Saypol?”

“That’s it! Saypol! ‘Imagine a wheel,’ he says. Remember that? ‘In the center o’ the wheel, Rosenblatt, reachin’ out like the tentacles of a octopus—’”

“Uh, Rosenberg…”

“Right! Well, that sonuvabitch knew what he was talkin’ about, Nick, he musta caught the act! She was like Plastic Man, I shit you not! Her hair wriggled out at ya like snakes, wrappin’ ya up, ticklin’ your ear, creepin’ down your shirt, her toes jigged in all the aisles at once, she’d clip your foreskin with fingernails willowy as reeds, sock ya in the snoot with her clit!” I used to go to the burlesque in Los Angeles with my cousin. We must have gone to the wrong shows. “What an act! Her tits popped out at ya and lit up like beacons: one if by land, two if by sea — and Iemme tell ya, those weren’t the only two fuckin’ options Julie had, Nick, not with them bazooms! She’d do the Dirty Crab on her back, slappin’ out Morse-code spy messages with the cheeks of her ass and then—”

“Did you say, uh, Julie…?”

“Yeah, right, Juliet. Juliet Rosen—”

“His name is Julie. Her name, uh, is Ethel.”

“Oh…?” He looked confused, crestfallen; but there was a sly grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Musta been a different Juliet Rosenblatt…” I realized we’d been stopped in front of the Senate Office Building for some time. I reached into my pocket for some money, noticing too late that my hand was smeared with horsedung. “Forget it, Commander. It’s on the house. For old time’s sake. Anchors aweigh, Nick. Lest we forget…”

“Oh. Well…” Some vague suspicion troubled me. Then, as I reached down to work my shoe free, I noticed for the first time the label on the cigar he’d given me: OPTIMO! I glanced up in alarm. He was gazing at me, the grin gone, his eyes dark with a kind of weariness, a kind of resignation, as though…as though he knew too much. I’ve got to keep calm, I cautioned myself. And I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

“Look,” he said, his voice mellowing, losing its hard twang, “can’t we get past all these worn-out rituals, these stupid fuckin’ reflexes?” It wouldn’t do any good to grab him, I knew. The ungraspable Phantom. He was made of nothing solid, your hand would just slip right through, probably turn leprous forever. “They got nothin’ to do with life, you know that, life’s always new and changing, so why fuck it up with all this shit about scapegoats, sacrifices, initiations, saturnalias—?”

“I know who you are,” I rasped. I could hardly hear myself. “The game’s up!”

I braced myself. I expected him to flash back in fury, I expected demonic sparks to fly from his eyes, fire from his parted lips, something violent and amazing. I was ready to die. But he only sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m only a lousy cabdriver. Shit, I don’t know everything. But I think you’re on the wrong track. Easter Trials, Burning Tree, morality plays, cowtown vendettas — life’s too big, you can’t wrap it up like that!”

Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned, victories arc never final so long as he is still able to fight. There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down. How had I let myself lose my shoe under his seat like this?

“I seen that mess you rigged up in Times Square. It’s frivolous, Nick! You oughta burn Connie Mack and Sonja Henie up there. Or Native Dancer and Elsa Maxwell…”

I should carry a gun in my hip pocket like Irving Saypol, I thought. But you couldn’t shoot him either, bullets just go through him. I fought to tear my shoe free — was he holding onto it somehow?

“Listen, it ain’t too late, Nick, there’s still time to turn back — forget this dumb circus, get on to something more—”

The shoe came loose! I threw my shoulder against the door and tumbled out. “You’ll never get away with this!” I cried, shaking my shoe at him. I didn’t know exactly what I meant by this, but I needed a line for the other people on the street and this was the first one that came to me. I jumped up and brushed myself off. Chief Newman would have been proud of my form. He always said I played every scrimmage as though the championship were at stake — and now, literally, it was. My shoulder hurt like hell, though.

He was shouting at me, something about the war, or the whore, or maybe he was hollering at me to shut the door, but I scrambled to my feet and made for the Senate Office Building — and crashed into a crowd of newsguys just coming out: Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, Elmer Davis, Bob Considine, Gabriel Heatter, the whole goddamn Fourth Estate.

“Whoa, what’s up, Dick?” Pearson asked.

“The Phantom!” I cried. “He tried to get me!”

“What Phantom, Dick?” Pegler asked. “Where?”

“That driver, watch out—!” But the cab was gone. I swallowed, tried to stop gulping air. Couldn’t let these bastards get the wrong impression. “There was a cab…”

“What’d he try to do,” Pearson asked, “steal your shoe?” He was stifling a grin, bugging his eyes. Making fun. Was this the thanks I got for saving his life when Joe McCarthy tried to kill him?

“Hmmm,” said Winchell, taking it from my hand and sniffing it. “Seems like he tried to take a crap in it.”

“That’s pretty serious, all right,” said Elmer Davis, mock-solemnly. “Maybe we oughta tell Louella about it.” They all yuff-huff-huffed.

“You newsguys are all the same,” I said, snatching back my shoe. I was disgusted by their cheap cynical laughter. It wasn’t me I was thinking about, it was the nation. Didn’t they understand that the Vice President of the United States of America had just been locked in a one-on-one battle with the Phantom? That the security of the whole country and the cause of free men everywhere were at stake? They were sick with their own self-importance — I knew I had to blitz them, I had to shame them. “You think you’re such big public heroes, but ultimately you’re all dupes of the Phantom!” I cried. “What do you know about the truth? It’s all sensationalism, cheap scandals, a lot of irresponsible rumor-mongering in the name of a free press!” I took out on them all of the fury and frustration that had been building up within me on the ride over. “That’s just the kind of loose fellow-traveling attitude that got us into the mess we were in in the forties! Well, just wait! The people of this country are getting fed up with hucksters like you! There’s going to be a day of reckoning—!”

“Whoa there, Dick,” said Pegler. “If you’re gonna fling your hand around like that, use your clean one!”

This wisecrack brought a few guilty titters, but the audience gathering around us now were there, I knew, to hear me. Opinion makers, people in all walks of life…. “The Pentagon Patriots have got you bums pegged,” I declared. “Preachers of lies, prophets of deceit, garblers of truth—”

“Say,” said Winchell, sniffing, “did anyone ever consider that the Phantom might be a horse?”

“Dick the Horse?”

“Alan (the Horse) Ameche?”

“Horace Greeley?”

“Some donkey, more likely,” said Heatter wryly. “One of the Phantom’s more famous disguises…”

“Can’t you SOBs take anything seriously?” I demanded. “I’m telling you, the Phantom is out to destroy this thing today! The heat is on! Look what’s happening around the world! Germany, Korea, Africa — you saw what he did up in Times Square last night! This place may be next! He’ll do anything to stop us! We have the fight of our lives on our hands! I was lucky to get away from him just now — and it’s not just me he’s after! He’s after us all! He…he even wanted to get Sonja Henie!”

“Gee, that’s terrible, Dick,” said Pearson, winking at the others.

“Maybe he wants to take a crap in her ice-skate,” said Winchell.

“Ah, go to hell!” I muttered, and brushed on past them. I moved quickly, planning my next move. I was tensed up, I admit, and my shoulder was nagging me, but I still had control of my temper. The kind of treatment I was getting was pretty hard to take, but I knew the greatest mistake I could make would be to lose my head. I’d suffered these smear attacks before, I’d suffer them again. But the people on the street, I knew, were with me. Some of them applauded as I jogged away, rocking somewhat with only one shoe on, but feeling sure of myself, confident of my timing, pleased with the points I’d made. Maybe I should throw a line from Lincoln at them, I thought.

But before I could come up with a good one. Bob Considine forced the issue: “Hey, Mr. Vice President!” he called from behind me. “Give us a hint! Who’s behind the Rosenbergs?”

I spun around at the doorway. “I don’t know,” I said gravely, “but I do, uh, know this: you guys are so lost in your Fourth Estate fantasyland,” a good line, I thought, a damned good line, “that if he were standing right here in front of you as obvious as King Kong, you wouldn’t recognize him!”

“Is that a clue, Dick?” asked Winchell.

“Straight from the horse’s mouth,” said Gabriel Heatter.

“Anyway, it explains King Kong’s five-o’clock shadow,” said Pearson.

With that I really blew my stack. I just couldn’t take any more. Those vicious mudslinging irresponsible Commie-stooge idiot bastards! But even as the circuits popped and sizzled in my head, I hung onto myself, clung to the old debate discipline, bit my tongue, kept my movements in check. As best I could — I kept flashing from smiles to scowls and back faster than I would have liked. I jabbed a finger at Pearson through the ugly laughter, even though it hurt my shoulder, and cried: “All right, gentlemen, you’ve had a lot of fun with all this jackassery, but when it comes to the manure hitting the fan, let me just say this, you can give me the shaft, I expect a lot of blood to be spilled and you have a right to call it as you see it, but make no mistake, you’re not just giving me the shaft, you’re sticking it in the butt of the whole American Way of Life!” I tried to smile, scowled, found myself smiling again. “I won’t say you’re traitors to your country, but I will say I’m not known for being rough on rats for nothing, and when you go out to shoot rats, just remember, if an egg is bad, then let’s call for the hatchet!”

I let that sink in a second, not quite sure just what I’d been saying, but trusting my reflexes, then brought my hand down to my side, chopping off any rejoinder they might have thrown back (but in fact they seemed speechless — well, they asked for it and they got it), turned sharply on my stockinged foot, and made my exit. Entrance, rather. Yet another ordeal. Fortunately, I thrive on them.

16. Third Dementia

It is on. The Rosenbergs are to die at last. Television networks interrupt scheduled programs with the announcement: “President Eisenhower and the Supreme Court of the United States of America have refused to spare the lives of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” At the Bernard Bach home in Toms River, New Jersey, a small ten-year-old boy is watching the baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Detroit Tigers on Channel 11 when the announcement is made. The score is 0–0, but Yankee first-baseman Joe Collins has just beat out a drag bunt in the bottom of the fourth. It is a sunny day and the boy is thinking about going out to play baseball with friends in the neighborhood. That’s what Sonia Bach wants him to do. But he’s fascinated by the television and can’t pry himself away from it. The announcer says the executions are scheduled to take place tonight. He looks very intent and serious. The boy tries to see past him to the ballgame again, but the announcer won’t go away. “My Mommy and Daddy,” the boy whispers, feeling that someone or something is watching him. But he doesn’t know what to add. A prayer? A seventh-inning stretch? At the ballgame, nobody seems even to have noticed that the announcement has been made. Yankee outfielder Gene Woodling has come to the plate during the interruption, and he now watches a ball go by. There’s something very magical about TV, everything seems to happen at once on it, the near and the far, the funny and the sad, the real and the unreal. Tonight! Collins, taking a big lead off first base, is not thinking about this. He doesn’t care. The boy hates Collins for his cheap hit. Just like the Yankees. His Mom and Dad like the Brooklyn Dodgers; the New York Yankees are Judge Kaufman’s team. Judge Kaufman is rich and lives on Park Avenue and takes his sons to see them play. The boy feels that awful lump growing in his stomach again. His little brother is out on the front porch with Leo painting a homemade Father’s Day card with watercolors. Father’s Day is Sunday, a long time away. “That was their last chance,” the boy tells himself, trying to picture this new finality in the same way he sees the Tiger pitcher stretch, study Collins at first, then whip the ball toward the plate: ball two! Are the other guys in the neighborhood watching the game, did they hear the announcement? His Mom and Dad have told him it’s not manly to be afraid, but he is afraid, he can’t help it. He feels like there are two of himself loose in the world, one who likes to play baseball with friends and come home to Mom and Dad and sometimes push his little brother around, and another one on television and in the newspapers who is threatening to eat the other one up. Both of them, the one eating and the one getting eaten, are frightened, because they both believe the world is not crazy, how could it be? and yet why is it doing these maniac things? why is it killing his Mom and Dad like this, and why is everybody so excited about it, and what is it they want with him, a plain ten-year-old boy who’s still learning his fractions and doesn’t even know how to fix a television or throw a curve ball yet. “Why don’t you go play catch with Steve?” says Sonia gently. She is being too nice to him. Like everybody else of late, even Mr. Bloch. Sometimes he feels like shouting at them: damn you all! Woodling slams a one-strike, two-balls pitch clean out of the ballpark, and the Yankees lead, 2–0. The television camera shows people cheering and waving and having a terrific time. If people really loved one another, he wonders, would the world be like this? His poor Mom! What is she thinking? How does it feel? What is love in a world where people behave like this as if it were normal? Woodling circles the bases. His little brother comes in, wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt all smeared with paint, and asks Sonia for a glass of milk. “That’s it. That’s it,” the boy says. “Good-bye. Good-bye.” Nobody’s listening.

His folks’ lawyer Manny Bloch is having the same experience: he and his defense team are flinging themselves frenetically at any judge they can find at home or in chambers, but they all seem to have either vanished or gone deaf. A stone wall. Manny fires off a telegram to President Eisenhower, raising the Hugo Black point that the case has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court, but this wire is short-circuited by Special Counsel Bernie Shanley and “transmitted to the Justice Department”; Eisenhower never sees it. Bloch, who has fallen unprofessionally in love with this entire family, is beginning to lose his forensic cool and is having flashes of self-destructive temper, as the doors slam shut in his face. He and others plead for a stay of the eleven-p.m. executions tonight because of the Jewish Sabbath which begins at sundown. Kaufman, playing it close to the chest, says he has already spoken with Attorney General Brownell about that: the executions will not be carried out during the Sabbath. The lawyers take this to mean a delay is in the offing, past the weekend at least, and relax a moment: at Justice, they exchange knowing winks.

The Rosenbergs themselves, locked away in the stillness of the Sing Sing Death House, are remote from all this noisy maneuvering, but they are not unaware of it. One thing they know: they are not alone in this world. Julius even clings yet to the mad hope that justice will be done, that they will both be vindicated, these walls will come crashing down, and they will ride out of here on the shoulders of their friends, the people, but Ethel, though never more strong and serene, shares her son’s mood of grim resignation: that’s it, good-bye, good-bye. She sits with Julie, separated from him by a wire-mesh screen, composing a farewell letter to the two boys. What she wants above all is to save them from cynicism and despair, and so she speaks of the fellowship of grief and struggle and the price that must be paid to create a life on earth worth living. Julie, watching her, nods in agreement, awed by her radiant tranquillity…

…Your Daddy who is with me in the last momentous hours, sends his heart and all the love that is in it for his dearest boys. Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength.

Lovingly,

Daddy and Mommy


Julie Ethel

Julius’s mother, Sophie Rosenberg, turns up meanwhile at the gates of the White House asking to see the President, but they don’t let her even get close — her emotional behavior is notorious, and besides, she’s not in good health, and people near the end are capable of anything — so she has to do her scene in the streets. Much is happening out there. Demonstrations are building up in Washington, New York, around the world. Riots are expected and police everywhere are put on special alert. Bloch blames Judge Kaufman for stirring up all this trouble through his merciless intransigence: “Tens upon tens of millions of people in this country, in Europe, in Asia, know about this case!” The Boy Judge is not taken in: “I have been frankly hounded, pounded by vilification and by pressurists — I think that it is not a mere accident that some people have been aroused in these countries. I think it has been by design!” On a crepe-paper banner strung out above the Republic Chop Suey eatery in Times Square, Senator Frank Brandegee’s immortal rejoinder to Woody Wilson:

I AM NOT GOING TO BE BUNCOED BY ANY OLEAGINOUS LINGO ABOUT “HUMANITY” OR “MEN EVERYWHERE”

Things are heating up here in the Square: in the 80s now and still climbing. The masses moving into the area are no longer scudding through, but pressing toward the center. There’s a certain unwonted recklessness in the air, something left over from a restless night, and many merchants close shop early, fearing that American business and consumer ethics might not be taken as seriously this afternoon as they ought. Most of those arriving now are young, their elders having to finish out their workday before coming — boys in jeans and crew cuts, girls with ponytails and Woolworth pearls: the youth of America, cracking gum between their strong white teeth, jostling each other aggressively, scratching their crotches, trying to keep their bra straps from peeking out under their white summer blouses. They carry portable radios on which Nat (King) Cole sings “I’m Never Satisfied,” interrupted by newscasters who report that American Sabre Jets in Korea have bagged six more MIGs, the atom spies still refuse to talk, and B-29 Superforts have bombed Pyongyang. The boys laugh at this and elbow each other knowingly, because they think the announcer said “poontang.”

Up by the Times Tower, workmen are putting the final touches to the Death House set, refurbishing the executioner’s alcove, straightening and oiling the gurney wheels, polishing the brass studs in the leather seat of the electric chair. The props committee has come up with an old mahogany table with turned legs and center drawer to fill the empty space against the wall upstage right, just like the one at the real Death House in Sing Sing, though most people in the Square mistakenly assume this is the notorious Rosenberg console table and meant to be used for kindling. The set has no ceiling, of course, but since one of the principal features of the Sing Sing electrocution chamber is the greasy skylight above the chair, this has been ingeniously suggested by a floating glass bell, suspended on wires, which also contains, out of sight, the stage spotlights. This mock skylight will actually trap, ironically, those same fumes that the real one at Sing Sing is designed to let out, though the illusion after nightfall will be the opposite. And this, after all, is what counts, as Cecil B. De Mille explains patiently to a disturbed Warden Denno, a practical-minded man, unaccustomed to the magical razzamatazz of showbizz. “See, life and the real stuff of life aren’t always the same thing, Warden — like, one don’t always give you the other, you follow? So sometimes, to get your story across, you gotta work a different angle or two, use a few tricks, zap it up with a bit of spectacle — I mean, what’s spectacle? it’s a kind of vision, am I right?” It’s like the character Matty Burke is saying in the 3-D movie House of Wax over at the Trans-Lux. He’s the business partner of the wax-museum artist Professor Jarrod, and he doesn’t like Jarrod’s style. Too tame, too cute. He wants a Chamber of Horrors. Jarrod, who’s played by Vincent Price, argues effetely: “There are people in the world who love Beauty.” “Yeah,” snaps Burke, “but more who want sensation!”

Up and down the streets leading into Times Square, there are makeshift sideshows catering to these sensation-seekers and visionaries — a tentful of freaks from Hiroshima, the Rosenberg prison cockroach collection, the iconography of J. Edgar Hoover — even the old-time flea circus at Hubert’s Museum is enjoying a revival. The fleas have all been temporarily renamed after characters in the Rosenberg drama, and there’s a courtroom scene of the sentencing that has everybody in stitches. In one of the sideshow tents near the stage, amid Russian T-34 tank models from East Berlin, burnt and pissed-on posters from Czechoslovakia, and the ripped-off ears of a Red Brandenburg judge, a body is displayed, said to be that of the West Berlin vagrant Willi Goettling, shot by the Russians for allegedly provoking the East Berlin riots, though skepticism about the genuineness of this body is expressed by some visitors to the exhibit: something shabby and ordinary about the corpse, they say. Something, well, profane…. Skeptics everywhere. There are those who doubt the authenticity of bearded ladies and wild men from Borneo, after all, and who think levitation is done with mirrors.

The genius behind the sideshows and vendors’ gimmicks is the Grand Master of the Spin-Off, Walt Disney, and needless to say, he and his Disney Imagineers have reserved a number of key corner locations for their own Mouse Factory specials: a rocking model of Steamboat Willie’s tub, the Dwarfs’ cottage, the belly of the Whale, and an adults-only show of the girl centaurs from Fantasia with their nippleless breasts and oddly disquieting horse-rumps. Not that the spin-off is original with Walt: he learned the trick from the great granddaddy of them all, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But Disney, a semiliterate cartoonist who can’t draw a straight line and color it brown, seized on the G-man’s invention with all the desperation of a drowning wood-carver and turned it overnight into one of the monumental fortunes of the Western World — already back in the Depression he was admitting to gross sales of over $300,000,000 in Disney products, and there were reported to be tribes in Africa who wouldn’t even accept free bars of soap from missionary doctors if they didn’t bear the Mickey Mouse imprint. Here in Times Square today, his beautiful-beasts exhibits run from pure political drama like “The Three Little Pigs” to good old-fashioned Americanist celebrations, as in the tent where Donald Duck keeps playing “Turkey in the Straw” while Mickey Mouse is trying to conduct everybody else in a performance of the William Tell Overture. He has also built a scale model of Sing Sing prison, using all the little braying schoolboy truants from Pinocchio for the prisoners, and an imaginative simulation, using life-size models with moving eyeballs, of Harry Gold’s complicated fantasy love life. A little far out maybe, but as Professor Jarrod says: “A man has to be a little nuts to be a good showman.” Some say he’s just a quick-buck hustler, but that only means Walt Disney is a man in tune with himself. Hucksterism after all is part of the human constitution: repress it (as that old Yankee Peddler Uncle Sam himself always says, explaining what’s sick about socialists), you get the same results as repressing sex.

While Walt sits in the Whale’s mouth, studying the Death House set and dreaming up further novelties, and Matty Burke burns down Professor Jarrod’s wax museum to collect the fire insurance (“All you have to do is strike a match and the thing is done!” he chortles), New York State Troopers deploy themselves in a concentric series of barricades and roadblocks to defend the Square against protest marches. Commissioner George Monaghan puts his city cops on alert, and all precinct captains and detective squads are ordered to remain on duty through midnight. Newsreel cameramen move cameras and klieg lights into position, and TV generator trucks are brought in before the thickening crowds make it impossible. A concert is arranged up in Central Park — the Goldman Band opening their thirty-sixth season with Honegger’s “March on the Bastille”—to take, up part of the overflow; indeed, the crowds are already pushing north into the Park, east and west toward the rivers, south to Macy’s, which is jammed to the walls this afternoon with shoppers seeking those novel “Dr. T Caps” with five rubbery fingers sticking up on top, inspired by the new Dr. Seuss movie premiering this afternoon at the Criterion. These caps are the occasion among the boys for a lot of wisecracks and naughty monkey business, all of which causes the girls to groan and shake their ponytails and snigger conspiratorially amongst themselves, fanning themselves with movie magazines and shaking their skirts out: my, but it’s hot! The boys agree, but that’s how they like it. They don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tonight, but all squeezed up like this, they can hardly wait. They’ve got knuckledusters and cherry bombs in their pockets, carry signs that read TWO FRIED ROSENBERGERS COMING RIGHT UP! and IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN!

Which is just what the House of Wax heroine Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) would like to do…but not a chance. She has been stripped naked by Professor Jarrod and is about to be plunged into a bath of boiling wax: “There is a pain beyond pain, my dear, an agony so intense it shocks the mind!” Jarrod knows what he’s talking about. When his partner set fire to the wax museum, he tried to save his beautiful creations and was horribly mutilated in the conflagration: his flesh was literally melted. So much for idealism. Unable to use his hands after, he conceived the idea of murdering his models and fixing them in a wax bath, and it’s now his heart’s desire to metamorphose Sue into Marie Antoinette. Her boyfriend, unwaxed, is out cold with his head in a guillotine and is about to get sliced like Globaloney by the Professor’s mad-freak assistant. The cops arrive and break it up, but not before enjoying a stupendous brawl in Natural Vision 3-D in which everything but Sue’s pudicity gets thrown out at the audience. It’s as though, without this moment of unmitigated whoopee in the last reel, it would all be for nothing. Finally, of course, Sue and her boyfriend are rescued as they must be, Professor Jarrod himself perishes in his tub of hot wax, and his crazy assistant gets busted. Lieutenant Brennan (Frank Love-joy) picks up a sculpted head of Jarrod’s assistant and remarks with a wry grin to a fellow cop: “Ya know, Shane, by the time that guy gets outa Sing Sing, this head will grow a long beard!”

The movie lets out and the people pour out onto the street, moving as one aroused body toward Times Square. The sun’s at its hottest, and they gasp for air after the refrigerated atmosphere of the Trans-Lux. One man, still somewhat possessed by the images of famous historical persons going up in flames, their waxy faces melting horrifically, their stiffened bodies crashing forward into his lap, is disoriented by this new swirl of pictures out in the street. Sometimes he staggers forward, sometimes he gets turned around and pushed backwards. It doesn’t help that he has forgotten to remove his 3-D glasses with the cardboard frames, and so sees everything through the eye-straining H-Polarizer haze of alcohol and iodine. He gets swept along in the rush, spinning and stumbling, feeling like Vincent Price lurching about out of his wheelchair. He has had no difficulty in bringing the two film images together in the theater, and in fact he still has an ache in his forehead and the back of his neck from trying not to flinch when the fellow with the bat and ball started whacking the thing right between his eyes, but now, tumbling along out here on the street, he seems to see two separate and unassimilable pictures, each curiously colored. Everything is flat, distances are deceptive, and he keeps crashing into people, getting angry wary stares in reply. An elbow, while remaining very plainly at least eight theater rows out in front of him, nevertheless hits him in the nose. He feels like he’s grown a beard from his forehead down. Somewhere Julius LaRosa is singing “Anywhere I Wander,” and he wonders if it’s possible after all that the world is turned by some malevolent design.

The scene to the right now seems to show a street with laughing shouting people, and the sound track confirms this; the scene to the left, a long row of buildings with large doors and display windows full of flashing reflections. He leans to the left — but he is again deceived: he stumbles off an unexpected curb into the mob’s path: now I’m John Wilkes Booth slumping forward on melting ankles, he thinks, attracting more attention for some reason than usual and worried about his inability to get his own extremities and the feet pounding over them into the same picture. He crawls hand over hand through the stampede, recalling that moment, early in the picture, when the wax museum is ablaze, waxen heads are melting and tilting bizarrely onto collapsing shoulders, glass eyeballs are bulging and falling out, fingernails are dripping, and Vincent Price is dragging himself painfully across the floor in all the fiery havoc, past a little sign that reads MOTHER LOVE. And then the whole room explodes, strewing the audience with burning debris. He reaches, his clothes smoking, feeling like one molten in the furnace, hit by the winged shaft of fate, and run over on the tracks of history, a curb: he pulls himself up over it and presses on until he smacks up against a building which wasn’t in either of his lenses, but which now appears in the right one. He slumps there briefly, thinking: God has not favored my undertakings, my condition is not fundamentally sound.

He stands when he’s able, and, leaning to the left, brushing the wall with his shoulder so as not to fall back into the crowd again, moves on down the street. He assumes a very serious and meditative expression so that people will not think him drunk, and does his best to walk along like any normal self-confident American, while still keeping contact with the buildings by way of his left shoulder. Thumping along like that, shredding the padding from the shoulder of his New Look sport jacket and thinking about the heroine in the movie out on the foggy streets, pursued by the artist-monster, he stumbles upon a shop selling fresh fruit and vegetables. Since he seems to be inside the shop, he buys six golden oranges, remarking in a friendly manner that they are as big as grapefruit. The fruiterer stares at him curiously, perhaps in part because he now seems to be standing in a box of ripe tomatoes, and says: “Those are grapefruit, Mac!” People stare at him as though his brow were branded with marks of guilt. He is reminded of the guillotine in House of Wax—CRASH! — and concludes, as he pays for the grapefruit and tomatoes, I must be the nice guy who always finishes last.

He’s about to exit by way of a plate-glass window when the fruiterer collars him and pushes him brusquely out what is probably the door, plunging him reeling back into the heart of the maelstrom, past a newsstand where, grasping for support, he acquires some newspapers and magazines, and then, though this is not exactly his intention, on into a subway entrance. He tumbles, clutching newspapers and grapefruit, down the stairs, one lens showing him an advertisement of Dangerous When Wet with Esther Williams in a swimsuit, a moustache under her nose and a Ulysses S. Grant beard between her legs, the other a time-lapse overview of traffic patterns on the subway platform. At the bottom, pausing to wonder if “the Balance of Terror” is a communicable disease which he’s somehow caught, he tries to locate himself — without success — in a gum-machine mirror. All he sees there is Abraham Lincoln with his beard on fire. A train pulls in, arriving from separate directions in the two lenses, and he allows himself to be swept aboard by the crowd. Or perhaps he wishes to take the train, he can’t be sure. He finds an empty seat, but when he sits down it isn’t there. The bottom of his paper bag splits open and the grapefruit roll about on the floor. He tries to pick them up but they’re never just where or what they seem to be. Sometimes they change color before his very eyes, turn into people’s feet which kick him or step on his hands, roll out opening doors at one stop and back in the next. What am I doing down here on the floor of this subway train, he asks himself, chasing grapefruit? I don’t even like grapefruit! He stands and proceeds nonchalantly to read his newspapers and magazines, disowning the grapefruit, as the train rocks along. Through one eye he learns that President Eisenhower has encouraged the reading of Marx and Stalin and a mad artist-professor in Rome has discovered the tomb of Saint Peter, and through the other reads about a plot to liquidate Senator McCarthy. Liquidate! Perhaps they hoped to use his body as a model for Joan of Arc. There are articles, severally, about electrocutions, creeping socialism, frozen bull semen, and “The Night Love Turned to Error.” “Terror,” rather. He cannot seem to focus on the atom-spy news, but keeps getting a composite picture of the two spies: a small dark woman with gold-rimmed spectacles, moustache, and fake fur collar, who for some odd reason reminds him of Marie Antoinette in a black string tie, going up in oily smoke. It must be the circles around the eyes, the gold rims. The coat, he observes, is a good Republican cloth coat, the Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt underneath notwithstanding.

The doors slide open, he gets shoved out of the subway car, slips on a revenging grapefruit, slams into an I-beam that bears the legend TRACK 3, and then staggers on up the stairs into what turns out to be the exercise yard of a federal prison, if his left eye is to be trusted, or else the New Jerusalem. Police are protecting some construction or other from the souvenir-hunting zeal of summer tourists. What is it? It appears to be a stage with an electric chair. Or else a movie lobby with sawdust on the floor. Above him, a billboard seems to read I TELL YOU, FOLKS, ALL POLITICS IS APPLESAUCE, but he no longer trusts what his eyes tell him. I’ve walked through that 3-D movie, he thinks, and I’ve come out the other side. He doesn’t really believe this, it’s just a joke to lighten a little his sinking heart. Sinking because it’s all coming together — the stampeding masses, the creeping socialism and exploding waxworks, the tracks of history and time-lapse overviews — into the one image that has been pursuing him through all his sleepless nights, the billowing succubus he’s been nurturing for nine months now, ever since the new hydrogen-bomb tests at Eniwetok: yes, the final spectacle, the one and only atomic holocaust, he’s giving birth to it at last. Like the mad artist, we’re all going to die horrible fiery deaths, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, nothing we can do to stop ourselves, it’s in the script, in the frozen semen, the waxen MOTHER LOVE. What does it mean that Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar or that Edison invented the light bulb? Nothing, it’s all over, the human race is shutting itself off, it has a craving for emptiness and futility, we’ve grown too much brains and we can’t cope, it’s all wasted, my life is wasted! Thus, he laments the waste of his life and Shakespeare’s. The theater marquee above him reads A GOOD MANY THINGS GO AROUND IN THE DARK BESIDES SANTA CLAUS.

In the lobby, he feels safer. It’s not as bright in here, things are not so clear. He finds display blow-ups of what he takes to be pages from the Books of Knowledge but turn out to be transcripts of the record of the Easter Trial. He concentrates on them, thinking: At last I’m going to do something with my life! On page 493, someone called THE WITNESS is saying: “He said there was fissionable material at one end of a cube and at the other end of the cube there was a sliding member that was also of fissionable material and when they brought these two together under great pressure, that would be…” He cannot find page 494. But he knows, he knows; he feels his body full of cubes and sliding members. THE COURT is asking about Jell-0 boxes. Imitation raspberry! There is testimony about smallpox inoculations, implosion lenses, and flushing money down the toilet. The statue of Columbus. Stop Me If You Have Heard This. Doris Day is singing “I Didn’t Slip, I Wasn’t Pushed, I Fell.” Somehow, this all makes sense, THE COURT says: “It is so difficult to make people realize that this country is engaged in a life and death struggle with a completely different system!” He blinks. He realizes he has come upon some radical truth. In one eye, anyway. But then THE COURT says: “Yet they made a choice of devoting themselves to the Russian ideology of denial of God, denial of the sanctity of the individual and aggression against free men everywhere instead of serving the cause of liberty and freedom.” This he doesn’t understand at all. The fault of the cubes and sliding members maybe. He is feeling lightheaded. The walls seem to be full of groundhog holes. The theater air-conditioning is off and the lobby is stuffy. He staggers out into the street again, gulping for air, pursued by a recurring note of impending doooom.

The area is full of people who shove and push. Perhaps they are actors pretending to be prisoners in the prison yard. Peddlers are hawking Cherry-Oonilla ice cream and miniature A-bombs that produce edible mushroom clouds. He samples the ice cream, but as he bites into it, his right eye tells him it’s Marie Antoinette’s left pap from the wax museum — no telling which eye to trust, it tastes milky and waxy at the same time. People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read SAVE THE ROSENBERGS! and HEIL EISENHOWER! his left BOMB CHINA NOW! and ETHEL ROSENBERG BEWITCHED MY BABY! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth. The faces of the earth, because he still sees two of them. He plunges forward through the Community of God, crawls over a barrier that says DIG WE MUST FOR A GROWING NEW YORK, is struck down by the Preamble to the United States Constitution. “I did it!” he cries, rearing up, his face smeared with the bloody remains of his Cherry-Oonilla ice cream cone. “A crime worse than murder! I’ve altered the course of history!” He knows this is true, knows he’s done it, because he has imagined it: sanity is murder. “I’ve brought on the holocaust!” He staggers to his feet, slams into the stage, clambers up on it. One eye shows him a distant policeman, his limbs outflung, caught in a web of concentric circles, intersected by pointer lines indicating the relationship of the planets to the human microcosmos; in the other eye, the electric chair, identified by a small brass National Parks sign as THE LIBERTY TREE, comes bounding toward him, then recedes, like a ball strung to a bat with elastic. He realizes he has grown a moustache and a fake-fur collar, a pair of spectacles. “Don’t be afraid!” he shouts, staggering about, searching for the chair. “The Court is innocent! Doris Day is innocent! Go home to your children!” For all his bravado, he feels like a dreaded outcast, the last pariah, a scabbed sheep, the target of a punitive expedition, the victim of Martian theory, chapfallen, weary to an extreme, his human decency violated, his human dignity trampled on — only Beauty sends him reeling so earnestly around the rocking Death House. “I shall do my duty, distasteful as it may be! I will save you all!” The chair hits him behind the knees and he falls into it as into a vat of boiling wax, a miracle of fit and flattery. I am the coward who dies many deaths, he weeps, as police with flailing nightsticks crash forward on melting ankles, trailing stars and planets like small balloons. “The President said it: ‘The one capital offense is a lack of staunch faith!’ THROW THE SWITCH!”

But they drag him out of there, whacking and prodding with their sticks, push him into a long white car. “BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST!” he wails, but they’re all laughing.

“Jesus, that’s the thirty-second nut we’ve had in the chair today,” a policeman is saying, tipping his cap back.

“Hope we don’t see no more. That’s the last loony wagon we’ll be able to get in here through that pack-up!”

“They’re cleaning out the Whale’s belly for us, and once the show starts, we can stow ’em there.”

“Whew! Didja check those weird cardboard specs, Chief?” says another. “He looks like that silly little character with the big glasses who’s always turning up in those Herblock cartoons, asking stupid questions!”

“Yeah, I know. He probably thinks he’s Albert Einstein. The last one claimed to be John Wilkes Booth in drag and wanted to set himself on fire, and the one before that had horns, a tail, and the face of Leon Trotsky painted on his ass. Okay, boys, take him away!”

They punch him in the arm with a needle and he passes out, thinking: Well, that does it. I’ve done everything I can, and what’s come of it? A few bruises. A few laughs for the condemned. A misspent Friday, a curious episode on the way to Armageddon, nothing more.

17. The Eye in the Sky

I had to stop in a washroom on my way to the office to clean up, couldn’t let my staff see me like this. I slapped through the swinging doors, still keyed up, ready for battle, but the place was empty. Those goddamn organ grinders out there pissed me off, Pearson especially — Winchell wasn’t so bad, he’d never got past the sixth grade, after all, never read a book, probably couldn’t, you had to make allowances. Understood his role, too: an entertainer; you could work with that. Apparently we were in the same class of reserve Lieutenant Commanders, he also was up for promotion. Shit, maybe I ought to quit politics and go back in, the Korean War’s nearly over, shouldn’t be too dangerous, and it sure as hell would be easier than this. I recalled those days in the Navy with a lot of affection, I’d grown up there, tried everything I’d been scared to try till then — I hated to think how square I’d been before, a silly little Sunday-school bigot, ranting about the disgusting evils of tobacco and alcohol and gambling, never saying anything worse than “hell” or “damn,” shying from women, hadn’t even gone with a whore — well, all that’d be different now. Commander Nixon of the USN. I was still young enough to cut the mustard, so why not? Well, for one thing, the seasickness…and having to kill all that time, kiss the asses of a lot of clowns who kissed mine now — no, it was a drop in rank, I was better off here, in the thick of it, no matter how rough it got: once you get used to the fast track, once you’ve hit the big leagues like I have, you can’t resign yourself to just puttering around. Anyway, I’m at my best when the going is hardest — that’s when you find out who has what it takes. I once wrote a note to myself, I made it up myself, I still have it somewhere: “Live so that you can look any man in the face and tell him to go to hell!” I looked up at myself in the mirror. “Go to hell!” I shouted.

I realized I was still very wrought up. Something of a mess, too. My shirt was limp with sweat, face and hands streaked with horseshit, some on my suit, my jacket shoulder scuffed and splitting at the seam, jowls already darkening with bristle, hair mussed, face bruised, Jesus. I’ve always been very particular about my physical appearance, even as a little boy. Something deep in my character. I used to get up at least half an hour early on school mornings so I’d have plenty of time, my mother always remarked on this. I brushed each tooth, using all the right motions, gargled ritually, made Mom smell my breath to make sure I wouldn’t offend anybody on the bus. I was always afraid this might be part of my problem with girls. I never could get used to kissing them on the mouth — I thought I could smell my own and worried that they did, too. Even at Duke, where we had no running water in our cramped room, and where a certain unkemptness was fashionable, presumably bespeaking a student too involved in his studies to take proper care of himself, I maintained my tidiness. The other guys thought, when I snuck out of bed early every morning, lit their fire for them, and disappeared, that I was off cracking the books somewhere, but in reality I was in the gym using the showers. Had the whole place to myself then, I liked the feeling of it, stalking around in the dawn light like a wild animal, it set me up for my day in the law library. In fact it was in there, in front of the gymnasium mirrors in the morning grayness, where I first tested out some of the great trial-lawyer gestures that became my hallmark as a politician.

I washed up as best I could, combed my hair, straightened my tie, brushed my clothes off with toilet paper. I found my handkerchief stuffed in a jacket pocket, remembered where it had been that day, and flushed it down a stool. Weirdly, as it got sucked down the hole, I seemed to hear a child cry — I realized my imagination was working overtime, like I still hadn’t come out the other end of those goddamn dreams. Have to take a vacation when this thing is over. I cleaned my shoe with soap and water. The lace was crusted with the stuff and had got broken when I tore the shoe out from under the cabbie’s seat, so I threw it away. To get at the crud in between the sole and top of the shoe, I wrapped toilet paper around a pencil point, an old trick I learned long ago on those long hot evenings after cleaning out the stables at the Prescott rodeo. Sooner or later, my enemies in the press would try to use that rodeo job against me, too — he got his start in life with both feet in the shit, they’ll say. Just as they’ll claim that I learned all I knew about politics when the bosses took notice of my good work and promoted me out front to bark for the Wheel of Fortune. Well, that’s fair game, you’ve got to be able to take it in politics, but they’ll be wrong about it, as usual. The stables taught me discipline and silence — the best test of a man is not how well he does the things he likes but how well he does the things he doesn’t like — while the Wheel of Fortune gave me an appreciation of risk and the rudiments of mob psychology. I learned out there how to make my mark among total strangers, people whose lives were totally different from my own, and how to keep quiet about it after. The whole Frontier Days Rodeo scene gave me a special ceremonial perspective on the legend of the American West, too, and it ended once and for all whatever squeamishness I might have had toward the cruder side of life. I can be around blood, shit, dead bodies, beatings, tragedy, any kind of garbage or ugliness, and not be bothered like most. In a concentration camp, I not only would survive, I would probably even prosper. And it was why Uncle Sam, I knew, could count on me tonight at the electrocutions, where others might lose their color, if not their courage and suppers as well. Tonight! Whew, it hardly seemed possible that it was really going to happen, after all, just a few hours from now! I didn’t know if I was pleased or not. I felt like I used to feel when an exam was rushing up on me I wasn’t prepared for. Hey! I had to get that speech written!

I hustled out of there and on up to my office. The girls greeted me as usual, but they were less than natural about it, something in the way they ducked their heads, glanced at each other, fussed with the pamphlets and brochures stacked out for tourists. Had they spotted so quickly my laceless shoe? Caught a whiff? Or — ah! I’d forgotten to lock the door to my inner office last night, they’d witnessed the mess in there. Encountering so much disorder in an office kept as neat as mine must have been as shocking to them as finding Foster Dulles’ office filled with empty gin bottles or Cardinal Spellman’s quarters littered with lace panties. I should get them out of there, I thought. I didn’t have much time left, and they were no help at a time like this. A nuisance, in fact.

I checked the mail, signed some letters, remarked favorably on a peculiar-looking beanie with five fingers sticking up that one of them had bought for a nephew, asked for a cup of coffee, looked over the advance copy of a special feature article on me for this Sunday’s Washington Post, apologized laughingly for the confusion in the other room, glanced at the appointments calendar. “I was working late last night on a report for the President, and let me say frankly, I, uh, didn’t get a chance to straighten up after,” I said with a loose chuckle. For some reason, I didn’t recognize a single name on the appointments calendar. “This Rosenberg thing, you know — the President wanted all the, uh, facts before making any final, I’ve been working sixteen hours a day on this thing, any final judgment on their petition for clemency.”

“What’s going to happen, Mr. Nixon? Has it been postponed again? We heard all the shouting—”

“No, the Court has held the line and the President has refused clemency. Everything’s all right. It is my understanding that they will be executed tonight, sometime around eight, if all, uh, goes well.” It was cold in here, the girls had the airconditioner on, and my shirt was sticking damply to my skin. I hoped I had a fresh shirt somewhere in my office. I realized I was reluctant to go back in there. One glance brought back everything from last night and my butt even began to ache again. I sat down on one of the tall black leather chairs out where the girls were.

“A pity,” one of the girls said. “Those two little boys…”

“Well, let’s not deceive ourselves, they should have thought more about those little boys when they started working for the Phantom,” I said with a smile. I leaned forward earnestly. “We’re fortunate that we have a President of the United States who isn’t a sucker and who isn’t going to be made one. I think the only man that can save America is Dwight, uh, Eisenhower.”

“Well, maybe,” the girl said, handing me a cup of hot coffee, “but it seems like it should be enough if they just electrocuted the man and let the woman go take care of the kids, maybe just cut off one of her arms or her tongue or something — I mean, it was probably mostly his fault anyway, women always do what men tell them to. I certainly do!”

I laughed jovially. “That’s funny,” I said, standing up. “I always had, uh, the idea it was just the opposite!”

The girls laughed. “Oh, you men!” one of them said.

I felt pleased with myself. I sat down again. I wasn’t usually so successful with this kind of banter. Maybe that encounter with the Phantom and the reporters had loosened me up: a good fight stirs the blood. And other things, too. Certainly, everybody was in a jocular — almost holiday — mood now, and whatever uneasiness there might have been when I entered had apparently been forgotten. “Well,” I grinned affably, “if the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body, uh, politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet — then let’s call for a hatchet!”

This was less successful. “My goodness!” said one of the girls, breaking the silence. “Eight o’clock, did you say? That’s only about seven hours from now!” I stood and looked at my watch. “And people are probably going there right now to get the best places!”

“All right,” I laughed in a yielding manner, “I can take a hint! Go ahead and cancel all my afternoon appointments and take the rest, uh, of the day off.” Things were working out better than I might have hoped. I felt freer now — I’d be alone, and alone I could work this thing out, bring it all to some kind of summation, find the words I’d need tonight at the ceremonies. I sat down. But I didn’t mean to. I got up again. I chuckled. I tried on the beanie with the five fingers and then handed it back. I strode cheerfully, chin high, into the maelstrom of my office, threw open the heavy red drapes, turned upon the debris as a manager might turn upon his ballplayers — trailing, exhausted, dispirited, but not yet defeated — in the bottom of the seventh. All right, boys, they’re all watching us now, let’s pick it up and put it together.

While the girls bustled about in the other rooms, tidying up their desks, freshening their makeup, making the necessary phone calls, I pretended to clean up my own office, snatching up the papers disinterestedly from the floor and chairs, stacking them more or less by date, dumping part of them as though carelessly into the wastebasket. “Early hath Life’s mighty question thrilled within the heart of youth,” I mused, recalling that Whittier quotation from over the mantel outside the President’s office back at college, “with a deep and strong beseeching…what and where is—?”

“Shall I empty that wastebasket for you, sir, before I go?”

“What? No! Er, I mean, no, thank you, Rose, that’s very kind, but I’ll take care of it.” I gave her a fatherly look. “You can run along and, uh, enjoy yourself.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“Of course, I’m sure.” I forced a smile and gestured casually — wrong arm, it was the shoulder I’d struck the cab door with. I winced.

“Oh, Mr. Nixon,” she sighed, “you’re just going to make yourself sick again!”

“If you believe in certain principles of government,” I said in all seriousness — I remembered having said this to my mother once, “you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself if necessary.”

She looked at me. The coffee tasted sour, but I sipped at it nervously. In the outer office there were drawers opening and closing, filing cabinets clicking shut, low hushed titters. “And, uh, anyway…” But she was gone from the room. Well, let them giggle. We all have our liabilities, I thought, I know I won’t win any personality contests, each man has his strong points and his weak points. Public-relations experts have advised me to take speaking lessons, to get in more quips and so forth, but like Lincoln I’m at my best when I’m using the language of the people. Only the people aren’t the same as in his day, they’ve all been to college for one thing, and I don’t have his appetite for building up to climaxes, I hate all those heroics, those fancy rhythms. Anyway, when you really have a crunch, when it is really tough, when the decision to be made may determine the future of war and peace, not just now but for generations to come, people are going to make the choice in terms of an individual who is totally cool, detached, and with some experience, like me, and not some breezy Adlai Stevenson type or his gag writer. And that goes for my goddamn secretaries as much as anybody else.

Charisma, basically, I think most sophisticates say, is style, and mine is robust, intelligent, determined, articulate, aggressive, clinical, thorough, industrious, conscientious, courageous, and cool. This is not merely my opinion, others have said this of me — I have a rule that I’ve always followed in political life, never to attempt to rate myself. That sort of juvenile self-analysis is something I’ve never done. I think that’s the responsibility of others. That feature article planned as a wedding-anniversary gift for Pat and me in the Sunday Post, for example: I could see that it focused on my long workweeks, my coolness under pressure, my popularity as a public speaker, my modesty, and my trouble-shooting talents on behalf of Ike’s amateurs: “catching foul balls and line drives for the administration on the Hill, so quickly that few knew he was in the Capitol outfield.” But especially the workweeks, the discipline: there’s no public-relations gimmick, in school, politics, or just growing up, that will take the place of hard work. In order to pass an exam or make a decision, one must sit on his rear end and dig into the books. In this respect, I was like Stevenson: he was an intellectual and he needed time to contemplate. People liked that “old shoe” image of his — the sole with a hole in it — because it reminded them of a butt worn raw by a lot of laborious and conscientious sitting. But there was no iron there, beneath the hard leather surface Stevenson had a butt of cork, a butt of soft rubber, of warm oatmeal, he was all veneer and no substance, a man plagued with indecision who could speak beautifully but could not act decisively. I could do both, and if my style wasn’t as euphonious as Stevenson’s, it wasn’t as phony either: and it got the votes. I’d won oratorical contests, debates, and extemporaneous speaking contests from grade school to law school, and I was, in effect, still winning them.

This was not to be sneered at. I learned a lot from those debates and contests, the plays I was in, too. You’re not born with “character,” you create this as you go along, and acting parts in plays helps you recognize some of the alternative options — most people don’t realize this, and that’s why they end up with such shabby characters. We’re all conscious of the audience from an early age — but we’re not always aware of the footlights between us. The extempore contests taught me agility, coolness in crisis situations, and how to manipulate ambiguities when you don’t have the facts and aren’t even sure what the subject matter is. I learned in debates that the topic didn’t count for shit, the important thing was strategy, strategy and preparation: to marshal your facts, an army of facts, present them in pyramidal fashion to overwhelm your enemy, undercut his pyramid with slashing attacks on his facts or reasoning, pull off a climactic surprise if possible, and then, win or lose, forget everything and start over again the next morning. Voorhis and Douglas didn’t stand a chance against me. Neither did the Republicans, for that matter, when I got invited to give the main speech at their fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria a year ago. Our dinner, I should say. I knew what was at stake. I knew Dewey had his eye on me. I devoted a full week to preparing that speech, and it turned out to be one of my more successful efforts. When I concluded, the audience gave me a standing ovation. As I sat down, the old kingmaker Tom Dewey grasped my hand and said: “That was a terrific speech. Make me a promise: don’t get fat; don’t lose your zeal. And you can be President some day.”

Me, lose my zeal? Zeal is my charisma! Coolidge liked to say that “four-fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would only sit down and keep still”—but I could never understand why anybody would want them to disappear. I‘m like Teddy Roosevelt, I like to be down in the arena. They used to say of Roosevelt that “when Theodore attends a wedding he wants to be a bride; when he attends a funeral he wants to be the corpse.” I‘m like that. And what’s most important, I have the faith: I believe in the American dream, I believe in it because I have seen it come true in my own life. TIME has said that I‘ve had “a Horatio Alger-like career,” but not even Horatio Alger could have dreamed up a life so American — in the best sense — as mine.

Boy, just thinking about this got me all fired up. As soon as the girls had vacated the place, I locked the door, switched off the airconditioner, threw open the windows, emptied the pockets of my jacket and hung it neatly up, put the cigar in the fridge, loosened my tie, removed my cufflinks and folded up my shirtsleeves, unbuckled my belt, retrieved the notes and letters from the wastebasket, spread everything around me again, and sat back to contemplate it all. Outside, I knew, the tensions were building. The streets were filling up fast, Inspiration House was leaking demonstrators like some kind of insidious spore, the city was becoming a thicket of angry placards, a forest of diatribe — reaching the center today had been like negotiating some terrible free-fire zone, and my own home out in Spring Valley now seemed far away across an impassable no-man’s-land. Vengeance Valley. The Badlands. Which existed, I knew, not here in the Capital alone, but wound its serpentine way through the whole world, coiling about our periphery, dripping poison as it slithered through the more vulnerable points in the Free World, threatening now to strike at the very heart. Uncle Sam’s countermoves had been dramatic and effective, momentous even, but the Phantom was still dangerous — maybe, backed up like this, more dangerous than ever. This was bigger than anyone had anticipated, perhaps even a tactical mistake, but we were committed now, there was no turning back. It was exactly the kind of desperate situation I was best suited for. I began to understand that Uncle Sam had until the last few weeks protected me from this case so as to maneuver me first into this key role, but that now he needed me, needed my skills and talents, my rhetoric — there was something he wanted from me up there tonight that only I could provide.

A cold chill passed through me: was Eisenhower’s life in danger? Was the Incarnation to come to me even sooner than I had expected? I sat there for a moment in a kind of mindless shock, staring blankly into space, unable to think of anything but the Inauguration ceremonies, Pat at my side, Mom in the front row, my hand on the family Bible, the blinding light…and then slowly I calmed down. I realized that this was not the best way to get started. I recalled that I was fatalistic about politics, I made myself remember that. I brought my attention carefully back to the Rosenberg papers, my speech for the ceremonies. I picked up a letter from Julius to Ethel. I read: “Somewhere in the long ago I had a normal life with a sweet wife and two fine children and now all is gone and we’re facing death….”

I stood, stretched, went to gaze out the open window, get my thoughts in order. I knew better than to try to psyche out Uncle Sam. The important thing was to do my duty here, be prepared, know the facts, find the phrases. I recalled my high-school paper on the Constitution: “There are those who, under the pretense of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, have incited riots, assailed our patriotism, and denounced the Constitution….” Yes, I should look that up, get back to the origins — and I should read the Rosenberg letters again, more seriously this time, also the FBI dossiers, the news clippings. Some mosaic out of all that, a succinct rebuttal, something on brainwashing maybe (I was watching the demonstrators down below), “the deadly danger of the propaganda that warps the mind…destroys the will of a people to resist tyranny….” Needed to rethink the trial through from some fresh angle, too, assimilate more of the background material, examine the Death House years, get an overview. Why, for example, was the campaign to save the Rosenbergs so designed by the Phantom’s agents as virtually to ensure their deaths? What was the Phantom up to? Was this some kind of trap?

The people down below seemed to be having a picnic, listening to popular songs on their portable radios, eating ice cream and box lunches, playing checkers, sunbathing. Some of them had placards protesting the executions. Were they all dupes? And the Rosenbergs? Who was behind them? Were they really as transparent as they seemed? Or were there strange patterns of depravity concealed behind the middle-class clichés of their trial testimony, secret messages buried in the banalities of their Death House letters? How had their son managed to get elected president of his fifth-grade class in the middle of all this, and what did this signify? Was he on his way to a Horatio Alger-like career, too? All these questions: why did I feel I had to ask them? Why did I have to keep going back over this material, starting over, driving myself? I felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty…but duty to what? My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had what it takes, that I deserved, no matter what I got….

This dogged sense of purpose, this conviction that easy wins are tainted, lay behind most of my difficulties with girls, I realized. The problem was, all the girls I met when I was young seemed to be living lives that were out of mesh with my own. Out of sync, I think they say in the movies. They seemed to be on some other plane, moving at some other angle. Not that I understood much about where I was going, I admit. I never thought about national politics, for example, didn’t even vote when I was old enough, in spite of all the preaching I used to do in high-school essays about it, had no idea I’d be where I am today, nor even had any specific ambition to be here. Yet I knew instinctively that those girls weren’t going where I was going. I was driving toward the center, they were spinning around on some merry-go-round out at the edges. And because of that, I was afraid of too much intimacy with them, more afraid than they were, afraid of getting lost in some maze of emotions, of surrendering my self-control, afraid of…afraid of exile. From myself. Even though I craved that surrender, ached for release from my inordinate sense of mission. Those long lonely nights up in the bell tower, dreams deep and dangerous…

My weakness, I knew, was an extreme susceptibility to love, to passion. This is not obvious, but it is true. A politician cannot display his emotions in public, this is part of the job. Nor can you enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can’t confide absolutely in anyone. You can’t talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings. I believe in keeping my own counsel. It’s something like wearing clothing — if you let your hair down, you feel too naked. Yet, I longed for this nakedness. My testing ground was Ola, the only steady girlfriend I had before Pat. She was pretty, lively, exciting, she brought out my more reckless side, in fact I loved her, but she wouldn’t get off the merry-go-round, and I couldn’t get on it. It took me six years to realize that — we went together, off and on, all through my senior year in high school, four years of college, and my first year at Duke — or maybe I realized it all the time, maybe the six years was for something else….

Ola was the daughter of the local police chief, and maybe that was why I started going with her. However far we went, I thought, it would be somehow legal. Under the arm of the law. At the same time, it seemed dangerous, dating a cop’s kid like that, a challenge worthy of the class president and wingading honors man. Sometimes I walked around school feeling a little bit like Douglas Fairbanks slipping into the caliph’s harem. I admit, I knew nothing about girls, I had only brothers, I didn’t even know what their underside looked like or what you were supposed to do when you got there. “Menstruation” was a distant rumor. I expected holes of some kind, but I wasn’t sure how many — at the burlesque shows, all you saw were tits and bottoms, and even then we were too nervous to sit down in the front rows. I didn’t know what a clitoris was until years after I was married. In fact, I’m still not sure I’d know one if I saw one. Ola had no brothers, perhaps we started even, but I supposed at the time she knew everything, she was cute and popular and very self-confident. And a Democrat besides, which suggested a lot to me at the time. Also, she liked all the dangerous things — which in those days were the movies with their “jazz babies” and “red-hot mamas,” beach parties, and dancing — I was clumsy as hell at dancing, but it always made me hot, I could see why the wild people liked it.

We got off to a terrific start, playing the romantic leads in a high-school Latin Club production of Aeneas and Dido. There were omens in this: Dido was abandoned by Aeneas and killed herself. Not that Ola had it in her to kill herself, far from it — but she did marry a guy who locked her into that small town forever, a kind of suicide, and I’ve always thought she did it to spite me. On the other hand, to be accurate, it was really she who abandoned me. But that was years later; the end came slowly. At the time, the play gave me a vocabulary different from my own that I was able to use for a while with great success. And those white togas, they were like flimsy nightshirts, like bedsheets — I had to wear a jockstrap so as not to make a spectacle of myself. Those goddamn Greeks and Romans, they must have been at it all the time. I got a handful myself every time I threw myself on Queen Dido’s bier at the end, best part I ever had. Everything was great — but only so long as the play lasted. Then she fell into the same clichés about me as all the other girls. Maybe they’d been talking to her too much. I fought against this, acted silly or loud or flirtatious or belligerent. I hated myself at these times. I assumed an air of possession wherever we went, looking old and already half-married, hoping she would fall into the same patterns and find herself past the barrier without remembering when she’d crossed it. She looked up to me, more than any other girl, even Pat, she went with me everywhere, said I was a man of the world and she felt so stupid around me, sometimes even almost afraid, but she wouldn’t give in, stop being frivolous, and just be mine. She was even more goddamn stubborn than I was.

We had arguments. About religion, politics, friends, what to do. But we didn’t argue about what was really the problem. We didn’t even mention it. I tried everything. When my brother Harold died, I even suggested I might get TB too, might be dead soon… This was even less successful than the political arguments. Each day the opportunity receded. I had black moods and unhealthy imaginings — I felt she knew what was wrong and was only taunting me. And it wasn’t her virginity I wanted, no, I was frightened in fact by the prospect — what I wanted was her surrender. I wanted her to give herself to me, utterly, abjectly, deliriously. That was all. She had nothing to fear. And perhaps much to gain. Our political arguments were surface manifestations of this deeper struggle. I thought if I could so break her self-assurance as to make a Republican of her, the rest would follow. She did not understand the importance of these arguments. She would get flippant about them, make fun of my seriousness. I would become ill-tempered and bark at her. She’d start to cry. But I wasn’t being doctrinaire — all of us Quakers were for Hoover in 1932, that was natural, but I hardly noticed when Roosevelt smashed him that fall. We were in the middle of final rehearsals for Bird-in-Hand and I gave the greatest performance of my life on opening night, just two days after the elections (admittedly, I got a certain perverse pleasure out of the line about what kind of Conservative I was: “Governing folks as isn’t fit to govern themselves!”). And then a week later I entertained my entire fraternity in Grandma Milhous’s home, the whole football team was in the fraternity and the party was to celebrate the Poets’ victory over Loyola, forty guys were there — Christ, what the hell did we care about politics? Couldn’t Ola see this?

In the spring we even had the romantic leads in a revolutionary play about the sordid life of Scottish coal miners, a thing called The Price of Coal. It was mostly my idea, in fact I thought we might recapture the spirit of Aeneas and Dido, but somehow we got lost in the dialect. Also the lighting was fucked up something awful, it was a disaster. As usual, we put it on in Founders Hall. There was something wrong with that building, my whole romance was tied up in it and there were thousands of places to hide, but somehow nothing ever seemed to happen, we always ended up out in the corridors or on the benches built into the stair landings — already mine was a public life. I was running everything, arranging picnics, staging plays, bringing bands to campus, winning debates and scholarship honors, holding the fraternity together, participating in clubs, running for offices, literally working my ass off, and somehow this only made Ola laugh gaily and go off and date some other guy. I remembered walking around on that tight little stage on the second floor — it was Friday-morning chapel and everybody out front was still half asleep and bored shitless — thinking: Goddamn it, she has no sense of value: Jock the Miner or Aeneas the Father of the Romans, it was all the same to her, let’s face it, she’s too flighty, I could never marry her. But I still wished to break her down, prove to her she needed me. And then, probably, I would marry her. Back in the wings, sweating under the greasepaint smudges, aroused by the musty odors of the costume racks, I’d give her long deep looks. She’d sigh and complain about the electricians. Or glance over my shoulder and wave at a friend.

And then we got into a fight one night at a dance. I walked out on her. I expected her to follow me. She didn’t. She called her folks to pick her up. That should have been the end but I kept trying. I don’t give up easily. Then we suddenly had the best night we ever had together. It was the night I found out about winning the scholarship to Duke. I felt so terrific I wasn’t even trying to make out — and then I almost did. I’d bought an old 1930 Ford and we rode around in it all night. I think she was really in love with me that night. But I was so in love with myself I didn’t notice until it was too late. By then we’d celebrated too long and she was sleepy, wanted to go home. I didn’t want to spoil anything, we were both so happy, there was always tomorrow…but there wasn’t. When I went away to Duke Law School, I wrote her every week, went home on holidays to see her. Clear across country. She was going with other guys. I was desperate and tried to ignore this. But when she wouldn’t even let me come see her, I lost my temper and broke it off. As I slammed the phone down, I thought I heard her giggling. Yet I was relieved. I’d been saved. I realized I’d been pursuing my passion like a career — I’d even considered throwing over law school and going back to Whittier for good! — but now I used my stifled passions as energy in my pursuit of a career in law. Oh, I never doubted I would marry, keep a woman beside me, have children, I was normal — but the law degree, I knew, was like a potent aphrodisiac, obtainable through abstinence. I remembered that history book that Aunt Edith gave me when I was ten years old: lawyers ran the world. And could have, I assumed, whomever they pleased. Even there, in that dismal unlit room in Whippoorwill Manor without toilet or running water, burning crumpled newspapers in the old sheet-metal stove to stay warm, sharing a double bed with old Bill “Boop-Boop” Perdue, listening to Brownie and On-the-Brink Freddie over in the other bed spinning off their horny tales of coquetry and conquest, worrying about the next round of exams, cold, miserable, and poorer even than Jock the Miner, I knew this mating must happen to me. And it did. In The Dark Tower. Not Ola, of course, but I didn’t forget her. Years later, out on Green Island, I wrote a note to myself: “There’s a kind of love for permanence. There’s another kind that’s just champagne bubbles and moonlight. It isn’t meant to last but it can be something to have and look back on all your life….”

I yawned. I was drifting. It was a beautiful day out, lush and warm, the kind of day to get out the old glove and toss the ball around. Probably be good for my sore shoulder, get the kink out. Stupid as hell to hit the door like that. Yes, go out and shag a few, the Capitol outfielder. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg often did that: went up on the Death House roof to toss a ball around. Not both at the same time, of course — give them half a chance and they went at each other like animals. Maybe one of them was up there now…warming up in the bullpen, as it were, loosening up for the big one. “At lunch,” Ethel once wrote, “the up and coming athletic star of this jail went up on the roof and hit three home runs. It is wonderful to punch a ball and run and enjoy wind and sun.” I supposed a home run was when you knocked the ball off the roof. Dangerous place to chase a fly, there were probably a lot of homers. In fact, the matrons playing with her were probably a little peed off that the aggressive little wat kept knocking the damned ball away. “Come on, Mrs. Rosenberg, play nice.”

The Rosenbergs were Brooklyn Dodger fans. Or pretended to be. They talked about it in their letters. Of course, I understood the emotional and political motives, it was rhetorically sound, I’d used much the same techniques myself — but what was wrong with the Rosenbergs’ appeal was that it was obvious they didn’t know the first thing about baseball, had no feel for the game at all. The Dodgers had won three pennants in the last six years and were a close second so far this year, and the only thing that excited the Rosenbergs was the fact that Brooklyn had broken the color barrier when they brought up Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. As Ethel wrote, after allegedly “chewing her nails” over a boring 10-0 rout: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to the eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.” Now, I ask you, what kind of baseball talk is that? Maybe they called it “beizbol” now that the Russians had laid claim to inventing it. This, after all, was part of their defense. The National Guardian had argued that, just as the Russians had invented everything first, including baseball, they also knew all along how to build atomic weapons, but humanistic considerations had deterred them from doing so.

True, some of our own eggheads were contending much the same thing, Harold Urey for example: that there was no secret to the A-bomb, and that the Russians could have got more out of a Flash Gordon comic strip than out of Greenglass’s famous diagrams. It was Urey’s argument, and that of other offbeat scientists like him, that anyone could figure out how to build the Bomb, the important thing being to have the wherewithal to put what you knew into hardware. The Russians were presumably slow in developing the A-bomb because their industrial establishment had been wiped out by World War II. Well, Urey was a Nobel Prize winner and all that, but he had heavy water on the brain. Even if he was telling the truth, it was interesting that he had waited until now to spring it on us — he and his buddies had built up a profitable and very private sinecure for themselves on the assumption all this time that there was a secret. Even their goddamn budgets were so highly classified that in Congress we rarely had any idea what we were giving them money for. For all we knew, we were buying them retirement homes in Odessa. And anyway, it wasn’t likely Urey was telling the truth. J. Edgar Hoover had said there was a secret, and so had Truman and Eisenhower, it was on the record. Even the Rosenbergs and their lawyer obviously believed there was such a secret, this much they’d effectively confessed to. I remembered from my days at HUAC that Urey had had a long association with fronts for the Phantom, had even helped to launch a few. Maybe he was even one of the mystery spies behind the Rosenbergs. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Albert Einstein. Paul Robeson. The Hollywood Ten. I gazed down at the demonstrators parading in the sun. Only a few years ago, there were 1,157,172 people in this country willing to vote for Henry Wallace. Who were those people? Where were they now? Why hadn’t we done something about them? Old Wallace…might have been President. But he didn’t have it. Got too near the sacred fire and went berserk. Risks of the game…

I turned away from the window. I was running like a dry creek. Very sleepy. My personal desire was to sack out, but it was not a question of what I personally wanted to do, but what was best for the Party and the nation as well. I stood and gazed down on all the documents and records scattered about the room, trying to get an overview. What a mess. I didn’t even know where to begin. Even so, I had to keep moving. Confidence in crisis depended in great part, I knew, on adequacy of preparation — where preparation was possible. The Boy Scouts were right about this. And it had been my experience that once the final period of intense preparation for battle began, it was not wise to break it. It always took me a certain period of time to “warm up” to the point where my mind was working, and it was important to keep the juices flowing. The natural tendency was to procrastinate, because the body and the mind rebel at being driven at a faster pace than usual over any long period of time, like now, for example. But there was never a period when it was safe to let up in the battle with our Communist opponents. They were out to win, and one of the tactics they used was to keep the pressure on. They tried to wear us out. To keep them from winning and to win ourselves, we had to have more stamina and more determination than they had. I squeezed my mouth shut around a yawn and leaned my head back. I realized I was sunk down in my chair again.

I dragged myself to my feet, jangled around a little, shaking myself awake. I had less than seven hours, the day was racing past, I had to keep my mind on this thing, what was the matter with me anyhow? I thought about the Hiss case, how I broke it. What had I done then that I was forgetting about now? Well, for one thing, the lines had seemed less blurred: Chambers was an honest Quaker, Hiss an Ivy League smart-ass, I knew what I was doing. Greenglass was as fat as Chambers and even less stable, and Rosenberg was skinny like Hiss, but Greenglass lacked Whittaker’s wit and vocabulary — Checkers was probably brighter — and Rosenberg was poor, like me, thick-tongued, and dressed ten years behind the times. Hiss had been the millionaire gone sour in the Horatio Alger novels, the evil nephew trying to con his rich uncle out of his cousin’s inheritance, the wily traitor in a plain respectable man’s troubled business. Rosenberg, on the other hand, had been born into a true Horatio Alger family, poor but honest, he should have made a fortune. He’d even sold penny candy on the streets during the Depression, earning as much as eighty cents a day. But somehow something went wrong. The boat did not come in. The rich patron with the sweet tooth did not materialize. There was no happy ending.

So where was I to find my bearings? And Ethel Rosenberg, how did she fit in, what was I to do with her? It was Eisenhower’s contention that she was the prime mover, but according to the testimony, she was mainly guilty of typing up notes. Irving Saypol had made as much of this as he could: “This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at 10 Monroe Street. Just so had she on countless other occasions sat at the typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.” Blow by blow. The whole argument reminded me a little too much of my high-school debate: “Resolved: Girls are no good.” But maybe Saypol and the President knew something I didn’t.

She was pretty goddamn tough, all right. Once, when she was only nineteen years old, she led 150 fellow women workers in a strike that closed down National Shipping. This was during the Depression and the company was fighting for its life, so naturally they hired a new staff and tried to keep operating. But Ethel led the girls in an illegal riot that terrorized the non-union girls and shut the plant down again, in spite of the protective efforts of the whole New York City police force. When a delivery truck tried to crash the picket line, Ethel and the girls hauled the driver from his cab, stripped him bare, and lipsticked his butt with I AM A SCAB. My own butt tingled with the thought of it. When more trucks came, they blocked up the streets, threw themselves down in front of the wheels, slashed up the trucks’ cargo, and pitched it all out in the gutters. Later, in the war, she got a job at the Census Bureau in Washington, the same time I was there in the OPA. We might have met. Julius was back in New York. “It’s all right, miss — after all, I am Dick Nixon of the OPA.…” I grinned to myself. Yet I supposed she was a lot like the people I hated so much in that place — all those ruthless, self-serving, supercilious, cynical wheeler-dealers. That old violent big-city New Deal crowd — we were still trying to get rid of the sonsabitches. Everybody maneuvering for advancement, managing to make a little work look like a lot so as to build their little pyramids — I discovered I could have done the work of the entire OPA all by myself and still take long weekends, but when I tried to introduce a little efficiency, they ostracized me. If anything turned me into a conservative, it was that six months in the OPA. Maybe Ethel was the one most like Hiss…. On the other hand, she didn’t last long there either, maybe she was as unhappy as I was. Now she sobbed herself to sleep at nights, hugged her pillow so tightly she got cramps, was frightened by mice, needed cold compresses to soothe her migraines. Poor Ethel…

I stared gloomily at the paper strewn across my office floor. Which was real, I wondered, the paper or the people? In a few hours, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be dead, their poor remains worth less than that horseshit I’d stepped in, and the paper too could be burnt, but what was on it would survive. Or could survive, it was a matter of luck. Luck and human need: the zeal for pattern. For story. And they’d been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with History, they’d be home free. The poor damned fools. Maybe this was yet another consequence of growing up in the city. One of the first shocks a country boy gets when he leaves home is the discovery that no one has been logging all that terrific history he’s been living through. Until he thrusts himself into the urban fracas, he might as well never have lived at all, as far as History was concerned. In fact, part of the fun of becoming famous was to bend the light back on the old home town and stun them with their own previously unnoticed actuality, make guys like Gail Jobe and Tom Bewley jump and stutter. Yet, I knew what the Rosenbergs felt, because I had felt it, too.

The Rosenbergs’ self-destructive suspicion that they were being watched by some superhuman presence came early, perhaps years ago, back in college, or when Julius got fired maybe, but certainly — and with force — almost immediately after their arrests. In many ways their first letters were the best of the lot: quiet, unassuming, written in haste, often dropping their pronoun subjects and abbreviating, full of ordinary sentences that touched the heart: “Just got through hanging the clothes as Mike didn’t get to sleep until 11:30…”

But then came the death sentence, and what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement — it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction. Oh, there was some impressive political rhetoric in them, and though I was no judge, Ethel’s poem was probably a classic of a sort. And now and then they did make a half-hearted effort to describe something of their lives in prison, the boredom of it, the killing of cockroaches, Jewish services, playing chess or boccie-ball, but frankly it was as though they were responding reluctantly to editorial suggestions from their lawyer or the Party: “Dearest Ethel, Shall I describe my prison cell? It is three paces wide, four paces long, and seven feet high…” And Julius occasionally worked hard at inventing a sympathetic past for himself: “I was a good student, but more, I absorbed quite naturally the culture of my people, their struggle for freedom from slavery in Egypt. As an American Jew with this background, it was natural that I should follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage and seek to better the lot of the common man…” That was admirable, I might have come up with the same phrases myself (“follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage”: I made a note), but all these half starts quickly collapsed, and more often than not into maudlin self-pity: “Ethel, My Darling, You are truly a great, dignified and sweet woman. Tears fill my eyes as I try to put sentiments to paper…. Our upbringing, the full meaning of our lives, based on a true amalgamation of our American and Jewish heritage, which to us means freedom, culture and human decency, has made us the people we are. All the filth, lies and slander of this grotesque frame-up will not in any way deter us, but rather spur us on until we are completely…” et cetera et cetera. Culpable of deceit, he accuses others of the same thing! With such grandstanding, who would not find them guilty? Who or what did he think History was — some kind of nincompoop? A little unimaginative maybe, and yes, eccentric, straitlaced, captious, and rude — but feebleminded? Hardly.

Maybe Julius had had intimations that something or someone was watching him as long ago as his famous encounter with the street-corner Tom Mooney pamphleteer, in the same way that I’d been touched by Aunt Edith’s history book — but intimations are one thing, real awareness is another. Intimations reach you like a subtle change of temperature; real awareness hits you like a bolt of lightning. I’d seen this awareness crash on others before it fell on me, most dramatically during my HUAC investigation of Alger Hiss, and it was a pretty awesome experience. It was as though the whole world had slowly shifted gears and pivoted to stare down upon the incredible duel of Hiss and Chambers, and when they looked up and saw that Eye there, it nearly drove both of them mad. Poor old Whittaker even tried to kill himself. Though I had basked in the peripheral glow of this gaze and was granted my first close-up glimpse of Uncle Sam, I wasn’t touched directly, I wasn’t burned. It wasn’t until the fund scandal broke last fall that I really for the first time in my life felt the full force of it. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg receiving the death penalty was minor-league stuff compared to it.

I was on my campaign train, the Nixon Special, whistle-stopping north from Pomona, California, toward Oregon and Washington—Change Trains for the Future! — when the gears started to shift for me. SECRET NIXON FUND. I tried to ignore it, concentrated instead on technical problems like microphones and schedules, boning up on local color, dealing with the small-time politicos who got on at one stop and off at the next. I had this weird illusion that if we’d just get up a little more steam we could outrun it — instead, we seemed to draw closer and closer to the hot center, RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY. I tried to skirt it. I joked about it. I shouted at it and ran. But it did no good. The fund issue was becoming a national sensation. Willy-nilly, I was entering the arena.

I decided to counterattack, the only possible defense against a smear, especially when it’s largely true. “I was warned,” I cried out from the back of my campaign train, “that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this government, they would try to smear me! Ever since I have done that work of investigating Communists in the United States, the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear that they have been able to!” But they only laughed and everywhere we went there were more and more hecklers, SSH! ANYONE WHO MENTIONS $16,000 IS A COMMUNIST! The fat was in the fire. Not only Democrats, but Republicans, too, were demanding my scalp. Eisenhower turned his back on me. It was because of him I was in trouble. I’d had to double-cross Earl Warren and his gang at the Convention to break up the California delegation and swing the nomination to Eisenhower, and it was some of those soreheads, I knew, who had spilled the beans on the fund — and now he turned his back on me! He said he didn’t know me well and if I was honest, I’d have to prove it. “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business as of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?” He made me feel like the little boy caught with jam on his face. Stassen and Dewey told me to get off the ticket. Friends were not at home when I called them on the phone. Knowland was summoned by Sherman Adams all the way from Hawaii to take my place. Out on the trail, the people wanted blood. I felt like I’d been hit by a real blockbuster, much of the fight had gone out of me, and I was beginning to wonder how much more of this beating I was going to be able to take. Was the whole nation in the Phantom’s power? I got hit by pennies in Portland. NO MINK COATS FOR NIXON, JUST COLD CASH!

I knew the time had come. Either I had to turn and face it, or else I had to quit. In meeting any crisis, one must fight or run away, but one must do something. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out. I began to notice the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was mean to live with, quick-tempered with the members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. I was preparing, I knew, for battle. It wasn’t just a question of who was on the right side, it was a question of determination, of will, of stamina, of willingness to risk all for victory. I tossed through sleepless nights, elbowing and kneeing Pat until she cried, struggling with myself. Of course, I had no intention of quitting. But I didn’t want to get pulped, either. Back in July, I’d had to lock Pat up in a Chicago hotel room one whole night with Murray Chotiner, who had a helluva job pressuring her out of threatening to leave me if I ran for the Vice Presidency — he said afterwards she was a real tiger — so now I got no pity at all from her. She became thin and haggard and even my breakfasts were lousy. But Jack Drown told me not to worry, Bert Andrews talked to me like a Dutch uncle, and some of my old schoolteachers wished me well. I felt better. “You are the lightning rod,” Chotiner told me, “and if you get off this ticket, Eisenhower won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell in November.” The lightning rod. I knew then that what I did would affect not just me alone, but the future of my country and the cause of peace and freedom for the entire world. It was a crisis of unbelievably massive proportions. I wanted to disbelieve in the Eye. I wanted to ridicule it. But I also wanted to lick the Phantom. And I wanted like hell to be Vice President. If Eisenhower wasn’t going to help me, I’d have to help myself. The soul-searching was over. “General,” I said to him when he called me on the phone from his Look Ahead, Neighbor Special: “there comes a time when you either have to shit or get off the pot!”

Just saying that released me. I knew now what I had to do. I determined to face the Eye in its nakedest form: the television camera. This was no eye-in-the-sky pipe dream: you could see it there, hard and shiny, black, heartless, unblinking. I would go before it. I would bare my soul and my bankbook before the nation. Actually I only wanted to bare my soul, but Ike insisted on baring the bankbook as well, so since he was paying for it, I agreed. I had learned from my experience in the Hiss case that what determines success or failure in handling a crisis is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high. That experience stood me in good stead now. I found myself almost automatically thinking and making decisions quickly, rationally, and unemotionally. When my advisers excitedly urged me to go on the air after the “I Love Lucy” show on Monday night, I coolly vetoed the idea. “No,” I said. “Tuesday night.” Tuesday—? “That’s right. After Milton Berle.”

On my way to Hollywood to make the speech, I jotted down notes on picture postcards I found on the plane in the seatback in front of me. I was thinking of course of the legend of Abe Lincoln scribbling on a train on his way to Gettysburg. Actually, the notes were useless, I had to throw them away, but the legend — my own now — lives on. This ploy reminded me that Lincoln had said something about the common man, and I got one of my old Whittier profs to look it up for me. Roosevelt had made good use of Fala, I decided to work Checkers in somehow. Use Pat’s cloth coat against the Truman mink-coat scandal. Lay out all the monies I’d ever earned: this gave me the opportunity of using a lot of attractive boyhood images. How poor we were, and all of that. I was glad I hadn’t let Smathers and his old high-school buddy Bebe Rebozo talk me into their real-estate schemes. I decided to demand that everybody in the campaign publish his finances just like me, Eisenhower included. I knew it would piss him off, I did it to needle him, let the disloyal cock-sucker find out what it felt like — Jesus, I was mad at him! Him and all those naïve amateurs around him, I was eager to watch them squirm — and by God I was not going to go to him like a little boy to be hauled off to the woodshed, properly punished, and then taken back into the family, I’d had enough of that shit with my old man! I was going to win this one! I wondered if I could bring George Washington, Nathan Hale, Lou Gehrig, Little Orphan Annie, and Sergeant York into it somehow. This broadcast had to be a smash hit — one that really moved people, inspired them to enthusiastic, positive support, left even the Uncle Miltie fans gasping.

I should have sent the Rosenbergs a copy of that speech. It was just four days before Ethel’s birthday — maybe she heard it on the prison radio. Not likely though; she would have mentioned it in her letters. Too bad. It might at least have helped them prepare their last words. Our purposes, after all, were much the same; to convince a stubbornly suspicious American public — our judges — of our innocence. And we were innocent. The Rosenbergs, in their internationalist confusions, did not see themselves as traitors any more than Hiss, Acheson, or Stevenson did. And the press was wrong about the fund — what I wanted was not the money, but the guys who gave it, a nickel was enough, I wanted their names, their commitments. What did money mean to me? Oh, of course, like all American boys, like Julius Rosenberg out selling penny candy no doubt, I used to dream of rescuing a generous millionaire from being robbed and murdered by a thug and receiving a thousand-dollar reward that propelled me into fame and fortune, being named in the rich man’s will and perhaps even marrying his daughter, who was disguised as a poor girl selling apples on the street corner, but all this was behind me now. Not that I hadn’t made good use of the money, it was what had made it possible for us to buy our Spring Valley home, but to tell the truth, I rarely thought of money any more except when there were bills to be paid. People have accused me of a lack of taste, but it isn’t that, it’s a simple lack of desires. If I were rich, the only thing I could possibly want to buy would be the Presidency.

And so we had presented to the public the facts of our case, the Rosenbergs and I, using the medium we found to hand — but where the Rosenbergs had fallen back on exaggerated postures of self-righteousness and abused innocence, I had remained humble and sincere. And objective. Where they had lathered their Death House letters with sententious generalities and vague romantic intimations of lives together that had been all sweetness and light (“Twelve glorious years we’ve spent together, always sharing, seeking together life’s joy…”), I had named names and places and times, reported specific conversations and moments of doubt and difficulty, laid bare everything I owned and owed — not just a car, but a 1950 Oldsmobile, not a bank debt, but a $4500 debt to the Riggs National Bank of Washington—it moved people to hear me pronounce that name: The Riggs National Bank of Washington. I mentioned Tricia’s age, the Hiss case, Abraham Lincoln and the common people, Pat’s maiden name and her respectable Republican cloth coat — she sat over there and modeled it for me, she looked great, even her terrible skinniness, the circles under her eyes, were a plus for me — and when I got to Checkers, I even told exactly how the dog had arrived in a crate at Union Station in Baltimore — I said that: Union Station in Baltimore. “And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it!” Now, that was very goddamn moving, it could still make me choke up a little, and it made me one of the most famous Vice Presidential candidates in American political history — it was virtually a kangaroo ticket after that, old war hero at the top or no.

Darryl Zanuck the movie mogul called me up afterwards to tell me it was “the most tremendous performance I’ve ever seen!” I’d asked for letters in my support, and over 300,000 of them came to the Washington Republican Party headquarters — they were stored for posterity in Whittier now in a box labeled “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ike caved in and called me “a brave man.” We created the Order of the Hound’s Tooth, my own cufflinks gang, and threw a party. Later, in Wheeling, the General embraced me and called me “my boy” and let me walk on his right side. I felt like love and death were all around me, and I remembered that moment so long ago, coming home and being kissed by little Arthur, soon to die — I couldn’t help but cry. “Good old Bill!” I’d wept, falling on Knowland’s shoulder, but what I’d really meant was: “Mom! It’s your good dog Richard! I’m home!” Clean as a hound’s tooth. Thanks to Checkers. Thirty years since I wrote that letter to Mom, pretending to be an abused dog — not that things come full circle in this world, but that in a random universe, ironical patterns are thrown up, and sometimes, as pattern, they turn and operate on the world…

My Dear Master:

The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.

One Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt a pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore. I wish you would come home right now.

Your good dog


Richard

Even today that letter broke my heart — why hadn’t the Rosenbergs been able to get that kind of feeling in their correspondence? That “swarm of black thing” was more terrifying than anything they’d said in over two years of self-pitying anticipation of the electric chair. “It is incredible,” Ethel wrote to Julius on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary and their first spent in prison, “that after 12 years of the kind of principled, constructive, wholesome living together that we did, that I should sit in a cell in Sing Sing awaiting my own legal murder.” What was more incredible to me was that she apparently could not recall a single day, a single event, from those twelve principled et cetera years worth mentioning. In all her letters, there was only one image that came to her mind from the past: that her younger boy used to call a certain kind of ice cream “Cherry-Oonilla.” The very loneliness of that image made it all the more touching. As for Julius, his recollections of the past read like the obituaries in small-town newspapers. There was not even any mention of their idyllic 1943 holiday in a rented cabin in Peekskill, where they presumably swam and hiked, chopped wood, made love in a hammock in front of their friends. Of course, it was right after this that they dropped out of overt radical activities, maybe in fact this was where they took their spy-training program, the love-play just a cover….

Nevertheless, pedantic and other-directed as they were, these letters seemed to be the most meaningful contact Julius and Ethel had with each other. Perhaps the prison setting estranged them. Maybe they feared what each knew about the other. People had claimed early on to have seen them kissing each other through the wire mesh, but this must have lost its charm pretty quick, and maybe it had been a lie. After they had meetings together or with the boys, their letters were full of apologies for their tears, bad tempers, or sullen silence. They found it easier to write to each other than to speak to each other. And behind all the rhetoric, something real did trickle through: in Julie’s case, an eagerness to please, to be admired, not only by the world, but by Ethel, too; in Ethel’s, her loneliness and her love. “Dearest Julie, I hold your dear face between my hands as I used to do so long ago and kiss you with all my heart.… I talk with you every night before I fall asleep and cry because you can’t hear me.… I see your pale drawn face, your pleading eyes, your slender boyish body and your evident suffering…. Oh, what shall I do? Hold me close to you tonight, I’m so lonely….”

Well, I knew from my own experience how love, awkward in the flesh, could blossom through the mails. Even now, I often wrote Pat letters at night for her to read in the morning. It was a way of working things out for yourself, exploring your own — then suddenly it occurred to me, what should have been obvious all along: she didn’t love him. She never had. She needed him, but she never loved him. “Daddy, I never saw you and Mommy kiss.” She had loved, yes, she was a lover, but she had no proper object for her love. I understood this. She was using his slender boyish body as I had used Pat’s cloth coat: to cop a plea. She had married Julius to fulfill something in herself, the old story, something maybe that got into her that day long ago when she got knocked down by the police fire hoses on Bleecker Street, but it was a portion of her will she had wed, not a lover: “Julie dear, I have such utter respect and regard for you; how well you know the score! Hold me close and impart to me some of your noble spirit!” Yes, a perfect marriage, and he had not disappointed her, this young activist, not up till now anyway; but she could recall nothing — or would not — of their past together, was given to confusion and tantrums when they met, even forgot their anniversary last year, though in prison she had almost nothing else to think about, and for the last few months had apparently stopped writing to Julius altogether, as though he no longer had ears to hear, or never did. And thus the deep longing in these letters mailed to the world: “Sweetheart, I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She could as well have been speaking to me.

I sighed, leaned back in my chair. The letters, transcripts, notes, records littered the room, but I was no longer disturbed by this, I even perceived a certain order in it — like an image of time, I thought, not knowing quite what I meant, except that by tomorrow the office would be clean again, and so, no doubt, would I. There was a special fragrance in this soft summer day blowing in through the open window that reminded me of California, the old California which was in the middle of the world, not today’s remote, statistical, old-man California over on the other side of the voting continent, and I could hear a song wafting up from the streets below, one I recognized: “Among My Souvenirs”—it was one of the few that the Rosenbergs had mentioned in their letters. Something like the memories of last night rolled over me again, but now not so much as separate strung-out recollections, but rather as a kind of concentrated mass of feeling and abstract imagery that kept swelling and receding like a sort of slow heartbeat. I wanted to hold it constant, examine it, lose myself in it — it seemed to me that the resolution to this whole problem lay concealed in it, my speech, everything, as though on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my vision — but it kept slipping away. Then I’d sit back and it would sweep over me again. It was very strange, very sweet, I could almost taste it, smell it, feel it filling my lungs, spreading through my limbs, it was warm and dusty and dense, like the heart of a garden, the heart of a city, concrete and leafy all at once. A kind of dusty summer ballpark of the spirit. It seemed almost too beautiful, too heroic, to be a real memory, it was more like…like the memory of a daydream, and not even of the dream, but of the sensation of dreaming.

On my desk lay Picasso’s doodles of the Rosenbergs. Julie resembled Ronald Colman, only more scholarly, while Ethel had a kind of Little Annie Rooney look — the lost waif. She looked like someone you could talk to. In spite of all our obvious differences, I realized, we had a lot in common. We were both second children in our families, we both had an older brother, younger brothers, both had old-fashioned kitchen-bound mothers and hard-working failure fathers, were both shy and often poor in health, I admit it, both preferred to be by ourselves except when we were showing off publicly on a stage, both found escape in books and schoolwork and music, both were honor students, activists and organizers, loved rhetoric and drama, worked hard for our parents, had few friends, never dated much and mated late, had dreams. Ethel dreamed of some glorious future as an artist or musician, a singer maybe, or actress. She entered an amateur-night competition at Loew’s Delancey Street theater one night and won second prize singing “Ciribiribin.” She was spotted by a Major Bowes talent scout, who put her on the professional amateur-night-competition circuit, and by the time she was seventeen she was all but making a living at it. She took voice and piano lessons from some lady at Carnegie Hall, paying for them out of her lunch money, and she bought a used piano and dragged it home — her finances were even better than mine, she supported herself and her family and still knew how to invest. She always kept a rigid schedule, writing it out every day, charting her consistency, always woke up at six, practiced an hour, went off to work, studied scores at lunch break, took lessons in the evening — like me plotting out my college activities program or preparing for a political campaign.

She auditioned for the Schola Cantorum at the Metropolitan Opera House and was accepted, the youngest voice the choir had ever had, it looked like her dreams were coming true. But she couldn’t go on tour with them because she couldn’t leave her job, so they dropped her. Her mother said: “If God wanted you to have lessons, God would have made them possible.” She was like the heroines in all those musicals who starve and suffer unnoticed, until one night the star gets a sore throat and can’t go on, and against the better judgment of the fat cigar-chewing manager, the heroine takes over, wins the hearts of millions. Only Ethel never took over. She wasn’t there when the star got a sore throat. She married Julius Rosenberg, typed up spy notes, and got sentenced to the electric chair instead. What happens to us in life seems, in retrospect, inevitable. And much of it is, the main patterns anyway. And yet we are full of potential, there are many patterns in us, and there are significant moments in life when we can choose among those parts of ourselves we might fulfill. What if I had met her years ago? I could have recommended her for a scholarship at Whittier, she might have studied music like Ola, they might’ve even been friends, we could have acted in plays together. She was just a year behind me, having skipped a year, she was very bright, and I was virtually running Whittier College from my freshman year on, it would have been easy — Dr. Dexter would have admired the suggestion, bringing a poor girl from the Eastern ghettos out to the clean air and warm sunshine of Southern California, I’d have probably got special mention in the yearbook for arranging it. We could have taken walks and talked about all my student activities: the fraternity, football, debate and theater, politics — she might have helped me with my studies. I didn’t really need help, but I was always getting depressed about them, and she could have kept me going.

I breathed the June air deeply, feeling the campus palm trees swaying gently overhead, and wondered if Ethel, too, a dreamer like myself breathing this same air, was being similarly moved, similarly drawn back into this trance of timelessness, on this, her last day on earth, falling in love all over again with life itself, or at least a dream of life? “Now I kneel down to a crevice in the concrete, filled with earth painstakingly accumulated from the underpart of moss, small velvety crumbs of which cling to the damp cool parts of the yard where the sun’s rays rarely penetrate. In this crevice an apple seed which I planted, and have watered patiently, is sprouting bravely. All my love, darling.” Just the thing to take root and crack up the concrete, I thought, the prison people must love it.

In the Horatio Alger novels, in spite of everything, the heroines were always saved at last by rich uncles. Ethel didn’t have a rich uncle. Neither did I, growing up — except for Grandpa Milhous’s money which put me through school, we were as poor as any other middle-class family — but later I got adopted. By teachers, businessmen, Herbert Hoover, eventually Uncle Sam himself. I was successful with old men, she wasn’t. Was this it, then? Was this the reason that that serious little curly-headed girl watering an apple seed in a prison exercise yard was going to get 2000 volts bolted through her brain tonight? A missing character, a lost “closing scene”? Or had the story taken a wrong turn somewhere, putting her beyond the reach of rich uncles? That night she got attacked by that old guy from The Valiant cast, for example, or the day they knocked her down with fire hoses on Bleecker Street.

What would I have done, I wondered — what would have become of me if they’d knocked me down with those hoses? Ethel was just sixteen years old, a sensitive little girl with a pretty voice and big dark eyes, trusting, innocent, bright and lively. She didn’t want to change the world, she wanted to love it, to sing to it, to give herself to it. Just like me. But it was 1931, the unemployed were marching on Washington, her family was wretchedly poor, and there was a job to be had: as clerk in a paper-box factory on Bleecker Street. “You’ll never get ahead!” her mother had screamed at her, pushing her out the door. “There’s no place in life for arty people!” But all right, she would get a job, share her money with the family, and still somehow save aside enough to take music lessons, maybe even go to the university, enter theater — it happened in the movies every day. But when she got to the factory, there were already a thousand people there ahead of her, trying to get the same job. I knew how she felt, I’d been through this, too, that Christmas in New York, trying to land a job with a law firm. But in her case, there was no private interview, there was a riot. The police were called and the crowds were broken up with fire hoses. Ethel was knocked down twice.

I tried to imagine this scene, but it was confusing. I thought of the street as narrow with little restaurants and movie houses, but I knew that further east, near Lafayette Street and the Bowery, it didn’t look like this. Rows of plain dirty brick buildings, I thought, five or six stories high, a lot of fire escapes, balconies, drainpipes, green paint. The street would be clotted with trucks, not to mention the rampaging mob, yet I felt the trees around, blue sky, room to run. I could see the police springing down out of their patrol wagons, faces alert, turned up, catching the sun, hands on their sticks or at their belts, tense yet exultant, like footballers taking the field, could see the hoses uncoiling from fire trucks, connected to fire hydrants that looked like stubby circumcised peckers, could feel the hoses suddenly fattening with surging water, could sense the excitement of the crowd, men mostly, tough and angry, and big women — where was Ethel? I saw her, small, all but lost in the huge crowd, an uncertain child, wanting to run, yet drawn obediently toward the job she’d been sent to ask for, thus moving neither with the crowd nor against it, and so isolated, a tempting target, framed in the solid arched doorway of a dingy yellow brick building, a kind of warehouse or something — and the guy with the hose, blasting away at the big broads, the clumsy old men, spies her standing there, legs spread, eyes wide open, clutching a handbag to her small breasts, and slowly he bends that big gray snake of his — I run toward her: “Ethel! Look out!” She looks up — but too late, the spray hits her full in the face and down she goes, kicking against the current, the jet blasts up her skirt, driving her, skidding on her backside, to the wall — I throw myself in front of her, absorbing the brunt of the spray. It slams hard against my butt, my head, I’m thrown against her, we tumble together in the driving shower, she clutches me to hang on, I fall between her legs, but I keep my back to the spray and she manages, protected, to scramble to her feet. “Run!” I say. “Get away while you can!” She grabs my hand. “Come!” she cries. Her voice is small, almost strident. Somehow, we’re out of the spray and running free, past the milling angry crowds, wheeling vehicles — then suddenly it hits us again, from a different direction maybe, knocks our feet out from under us, she’s down and hurt, skirt up around her waist, I pick her up, plunge forward through the driving spray, duck behind a car, then around a corner: safe!

I set her down, lower her wet skirt. We stare at each other a moment, our faces blank with shock and exertion: and then we laugh. She pushes her curly hair out of her eyes, notices that my hair is curly too. We look down at our wet clothes, pasted to our bodies. She takes my hand: “My brother Sam’s got some clothes that will fit you,” she says. Her voice is gentle now, and musical. We walk south on the Bowery, past locked-up doorways, windows with junk piled high in them or cardboarded up, there in the sunshine, talking about our lives. It does not seem far. I feel at home here with her: she seems so at ease in the city. It excites me to watch her move, so self-assured. I tell her about my play, The Little Accident, and she laughs gaily, squeezes my hand. My fraternity, the Square Shooters, had just put it on in April, a “real shocker” they called it at Whittier — it was about a football star who gets benched for bringing his girl back to the dorm after eight o’clock. It had a lot of daring scenes like Coach Newman kissing his star goodnight when he tucks him in. The unique thing was that all the characters were real people, and the plot, though outlandish, was nearly true. Ethel says that’s very experimental. I tell her how I played the part of Joe Sweeney, my debating partner in real life. The Whittier News said it was “one of the cleverest skits of the year.” She is greatly amused when I tell her that the climax of the play is when the star of the team is allowed to enter the game at last, but in a final wild effort to win the game, falls on his face on the three-yard line. “Really! Well, don’t worry,” she says laughing, and pulls me along. She tells me about the settlement-house theater groups and says I should write something for them. Why not? I think. This may be my big break! She leans against me. Water is running down through the drains in the streets from the melee now far behind us. When we get near the place she lives, she makes me wait. “It’s okay,” she says when she comes back. “My mother’s out shopping, my father’s busy in the shop, and the boys are gone.”

There’s a big plate-glass window with her father’s name on it in peeling gold leaf: BARNET GREENGLASS. Two doors: one goes into the sewing-machine repair shop; we take the other and climb a steep flight of stairs. Her wet body is silhouetted against the dim daylight at the top as though it were naked. Her room is separate from the rest and opens off the hallway. It is plain but clean, a bed and a chest of drawers, some pamphlets and books, musical scores, ashtrays, a wooden chair. Right away, I want to buy her something for it, flowers maybe, or a soft doll. “Get your clothes off,” she says, “and I’ll go get you a towel.” I remember a movie in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert spent a rainy night together in a hotel room with a blanket up between them like the walls of Jericho. I try to strip the cool way Clark Gable did, but I feel more like Claudette Colbert. My shirt and pants are heavy, and I see there’s a puddle where I’ve been standing. I lay them across the windowsill.

She comes back with a towel and some clothes. A warm bath would feel good, but the only tub, I recall, is a large primitive enamel affair with a heavy wooden lid down in the kitchen by the stove. Water for it is heated on the stove, like for the big metal bath Millard Fillmore installed in the White House a century ago. She has unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it out, and now she kicks off her shoes. I’m standing near the window in my underwear, my hands crossed in front of me, but unable to hold back the bulge of my excitement. She lays her brother’s clothes out on the bed, turns toward me questioningly with the towel. I pull my undershirt over my head, feeling vulnerable. She watches as though admiring me. She rubs my back and chest hard with the towel. I know that Jewish girls have no religious restrictions against having…doing…going all the way. She peels my underpants down, kneeling as it were to the crevice — my penis, released, falls stiffly forward, brushing her cheek. “Let me get you out of those wet clothes,” I say hoarsely, pitching my voice down like Clark Gable’s. Her fingers are trembling as she unlocks the stay on her skirt. Her brassiere slips forward off her narrow shoulders. “Richard,” she whispers, “I’ve never…never…” “Neither have I,” I say softly. We stare at each other in the bare room. A warm summery breeze is blowing in through the window, a song from some radio. We kiss. I slide her wet panties down over her cool damp bottom, getting a glimpse of her black round thing, my heart beating wildly. She strokes me gently. “I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She pulls—

“Well, I see that the old flagpole still stands,” somebody said. It wasn’t Douglas MacArthur, it was Uncle Sam, who had just flown in through my open window. “You know, son, you’ll go blind playing with yourself like that,” he said. “It can make your hair fall out and your brain rot, too!”

18. The National Poet Laureate Meditates on the Art of Revelation

The boatmen’s strike is over. The Iron Curtain around the Statue of Liberty is down, the sightseer ferries are running again. The jam at the south end of Times Square collapses momentarily as crowds stream away to the Battery to make the traditional birth voyage in the sunshine-yellow ferries across to Bedloe’s Island, there to enter into the Mighty Lady and reach the fount of Liberty: “Oh Mother of Exiles, merciful and mild, refuge of the tempest-tost and comfort of the wretched refuse, conceived without the stain of sin, full of grace and reinforced copper, noble couch of the three branches of government and perfect holocaust of Divine Love whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, watch over us!” But the Square soon fills up again as thousands of newcomers arrive and press toward the center, where now the Entertainment Committee is making a special announcement: to beat the Sabbath and any further postponements, the executions have been moved up from eleven p.m. to eight o’clock — the Federal Express is not only on time, she’s three hours early! The Rosenberg defense lawyers, already wild with frustration, explode in a fit of incoherent anguish and suicidally charge the Square — they’re allowed to pass through, one time, end to end, like fraternity pledges running the gauntlet, pelted with laughter and good-natured abuse as they go shrieking by, into the center and out, zooming along like their tails are on fire, into well-deserved oblivion. Or so everyone hopes.

Smiling wryly at all the hidden ironies, the National Poet Laureate watches them go, then wanders unobtrusively through the area, collecting images, experimenting with various forms and meters, searching for the metaphoric frame by which to contain and re-create tonight’s main ceremony (“…the last scene…the seventh decision…dance to his violent tune…shouts of anathema…as the clock ticked on…”) and cause it, by his own manifesto, “to happen in people’s heads.” This is what his art is all about, this is what it means, as his mother says, to be “called to be the servant of truth.” It is not enough to present facts — something has to happen in time and space, observed through the imagination and the heart, something accessible and yet illuminating to that reader he writes for, the Gentleman from Indiana. Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, there’s too much of it and man’s mind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination, of giving them shape and visibility, keeping them personal. It is, as Mother Luce has said, “fakery in allegiance to the truth,” a kind of interpretive reenactment of the overabundant flow of events, “an effective mosaic” assembled from “the fragmentary documents” of life, quickened with audacious imagery and a distinct and original prosody: “Noses for news lie betwixt ears for music.” Some would say that such deep personal involvement, such metaphoric compressions and reliance on inner vision and imaginary “sources,” must make objectivity impossible, and TIME would agree with them, but he would find simply illiterate anyone who concluded from this that he was not serving Truth. More: he would argue that objectivity is an impossible illusion, a “fantastic claim” (“gnostic” is the word on his tongue these days), and as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts — not to mention Ultimate Truth — even remotely possible.

Thus, debating uneasily with himself, less self-assured than his readers might suspect or hope, he threads his way through the masses in Times Square, alert to his task, but reflective in mood, worried that he’s got off the track somehow, fearful of his powers even as he fears their diminishment, and conscious, a young man at the pinnacle of success and in the full bloom of life, of his own mortality — didn’t Mother Luce predict his death as long ago as 1936? He and his brothers must surely die, she said then: “I don’t suppose we can establish the date for the euthanasia… But one way to look at them, at this date, might be to say that they have twenty more years of life….” He was only thirteen years old when she said that, and it had frightened him to think that, like Jesus Christ, he might have only thirty-three years to walk this earth. And it was possible, it was all too possible. Not only were the actuarial tables dismal enough for poets like himself, but hadn’t his own father died prematurely at the age of thirty-one? A sudden and sordid death on the night of young TIME’S sixth birthday, he’s never quite got over it. Almost like his Dad was trying to tell him something. The hard way. Though TIME loves his mother and is often inspired by her, it’s the ghost of his unhappy father, he knows, that he carries in his poet’s heart. And now thirty of his allotted thirty-three years have washed away, he has just three of them left, three short years to sort things out, find some way of rejuvenating himself, of overmastering the world’s entropie attack on him before it’s too late. And in this, he knows, his fate and America’s are linked: he and America both seem to have lost, as his mother says, “that feeling for the future, the confidence in the bigger and the better, the spirit of you-ain’t-seen-nothin’-yet”—but perhaps tonight…?

Twice before, he thought he’d found the secret: once, just before World War II, with his dream of “The American Century” (“We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world…the dynamic leader of world trade…the powerhouse from which the ideals [of Western Civilization] spread throughout the world…”), and again three years ago, at the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, with his vision of perpetual War: “One of the great perennial themes along with Love and Death.” His mother’s vision, actually, but as always he had been inspired by her: “In the next few years Americans will have to live with War as they have not since the days of the settler and the Minute Man…. War always has been, is and always will be part of man’s fate until Kingdom come.… In any case, we are not going to end War without practicing it some more — and living with it…. If ‘coexistence’ with the present Soviet Communist system is impossible, is total War ‘inevitable’? Maybe so, maybe not, but what no man has a right to say is that we can live peaceably and happily with this prodigious evil…. The Soviet Empire will continue to expand unless it is opposed with all our strength and that includes the steady, calm and constant acceptance of the risk of all-out War…. The truth will be made plain by wrath if not by reason!”

But both dreams have soured. The other Free Nations, misunderstanding his charitable intentions, took unnecessary offense at his laying claim to all of the Twentieth Century, and even his fellow Americans seemed to lack the imagination to “accept the thrust of destiny,” to go out and take over the world and “create the first great American Century.” Didn’t they care? What has gone wrong? “I think this country, far from having a George-Washingtonian belief in the Tightness of its cause at home and abroad, is actually very uncertain of itself, very divided and confused in its ‘soul,’ and almost totally lacking in basic realistic notions as to its ‘objectives’ in the world situation!” The War in Korea looked more promising, as War always does, especially when, largely through TIME’S inspired advocacy, General Eisenhower was elected Commander-in-Chief — it brought back the halcyon days of World War II (the naming of wars like kings was TIME’S own conceit), which saw, almost overnight, the transformation of this young enfant terrible and adolescent American hustler into a powerful and serious poet and — even before the War had ended — the Poet Laureate of the Nation. How could he not love War? Indeed, he even loved the Japanese for making it possible. As Mother Luce wrote to his brother LIFE following the attack on Pearl Harbor: “This is the day of wrath. It is also the day of hope…. For this hour America was made!” He felt suddenly ashamed of his “pusillanimous” youth, which he identified with that of his country: “It is not even possible to call these years tragic, for tragedy implies at least the dignity of fate. And there was no dignity in these years, and nothing of fate that we did not bring upon ourselves. The epoch that is closing was much less tragic than it was shameful….” He felt like Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, like Dwight Eisenhower hit by a bolt of lightning in Texas: he was a new man, a new poet, purged of his supercilious past. Of course, his readers might not notice the difference, but inside, he knew it was true. An era ended for TIME in 1941 and a new one began. Then, three years ago, he felt like the same thing was happening all over again, a resurgence of the old hope and joy, the glorious struggle — he might even become Poet Laureate of the World! Calling for “an unambiguous defeat” of the Reds, forecasting the imminent advent of World War III, and whooping it up like a drunken cowboy, he rushed off to the Korean front, pen in hand.

But now, what? it’s all come to nothing. A meaningless stalemate. And every sign of a disastrous truce about to be consummated. He had loved and defended General Mac Arthur, remains even tonight absolutely convinced of the need to carry the War to the Chinese mainland, and has these past months been struggling to keep General Van Fleet’s “total victory” appeals before the people, but he knows it’s a lost cause. He can feel it. He can’t even get a decent poem out of it any more. His “Night on Old Harry” last week with its “ugly sausage / shaped ridge,” its “littered slopes” and “crumbling trenches,” is about the best he’s done since the earliest lyrics of the War, and that’s probably because all it’s about is holding on desperately to something useless, his present unhappy condition. Might better have called it “Night in Old Harry”…

…one by one the bunkers

collapsed covering

american and chinese

bodies with sand and dust

king was reinforced

the reds attacked again

during the night

twenty thousand shells

exploded in an area

smaller than times square

but the hill remained

in u.s. hands

the hill remained

And though it’s all right, even that one’s a far cry from, say, his account of the assault on No Name Ridge, or the taking of Pyongyang (“…the end of the war loomed as plain / as the moustache on Stalin’s face…”), or his classic cables of World War II. Ah, where’s it all gone? he wonders, pushing through the Square, pressed in upon all sides by people from whom he feels increasingly alienated. The Gentleman from Indiana, he laments, is dead. For thirty years he has shared his dreams with him, and now the old boy has taken them with him to the grave. And yet, at some deep unexamined level, though they’ve failed him, he still has faith in both dreams. He still believes that “America alone can provide the pattern for the future…[and] must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of men.” And he still believes in War.

This great poetic affinity for War is perhaps inborn, a consequence of his having been conceived in a World War I Army camp back in 1918 by two underaged but passionately eager shavetails named Brit and Luce, a pair of Yale romantics who longed, as Luce said, “to be officers of the Army of the United States, go to the front and fire at the enemy.” Though she never had that pleasure, she did manage a kind of vicarious experience of the War, and if not exactly heroic, it was at least a contribution. As it happened, she came on a group of enlisted men one night who were having some doubts about just what the devil they were fighting for, and, in what she called “one of the greatest successes of my life,” she roused them to high patriotic fervor with her account of the sinking of the Lusitania, marched them off to the railroad station singing “Over There,” and saw them off with a “Good-bye and good luck!”; the train took them, cheering wildly, to the docks, where they boarded the transport, the Ticonderoga, and halfway across the Atlantic got sunk by a German torpedo. Brit shared Luce’s zeal. As he wrote his Mom: “I long to be sent overseas as a Battery Commander or Major General or something, and there to take part in the great 1919 drive, the one that will end the war and smash Kaiser Will!” Instead they both got sent back to Yale. But not before one “sickeningly hot” night out behind the barracks, which TIME’S mother recalled many years later at her son’s twentieth-birthday party: “One night Brit and I were walking back to our barracks through the vast, sprawling camp. At each step, our feet sank ankle-deep in mud. I think it was in that walk that TIME began. At the center of our lives, at that point, everything we had belonged to each other. We ploughed on for hours…”

Inception was prolonged — nearly five years. But this is not uncommon among geniuses. After a stormy but loving on-again off-again romance, Brit playing the restless Odysseus, Luce the patient but busy-fingered Penelope, both parents were at last reunited, and pregnancy, if doubted before, was now assured. TIME was born in an old remodeled house of vaguely Italianate style not far from here at 141 East Seventeenth Street. As midwife Culbreth Sudler once described it: “You thumped one step down from the street into the windowless dining room on the ground floor and then mounted to the living room which ran across the front of the house. The paint on the woodwork was so thick it was like cheese. Here we set up loft-type tables.” And it was on those tables, one wintry February night just after midnight in 1923, that Mother Luce, drenched in a cold sweat, stretched out and spread her thighs and — with the father assisting in his green eyeshade — gave birth to baby TIME (SO named because his mother had been frightened by an advertising headline: “Time to Retire”—or was it “Time for a Change”? she never could remember after, the riddle perplexes her still). He was thin, pale, unhealthy, attractive like all babies, but less appealing than his parents had hoped. Folks said he looked a lot like Uncle Joe Cannon. Few thought he’d last long.

But, though poor and sickly, TIME was born with a great will to survive, and by the time he was four, after a couple of convalescent years out in Cleveland (which nearly killed his fun-loving father and threatened to break up the marriage), he began to get a little color in his cheeks. Though his early verse was often cocky, strained, flippant and superficial, derivative, and of course childish, he was already showing signs of that prodigious talent that would one day set him above all his rivals, even the powerful Franklinesque Saturday Evening Post, Poet Laureate of the day….

Hearing a slight scratching


In the ceiling above her,


She raised her eyes in time to see


A pointed grey face


Peer at her from


A hole in the plaster. The hole

Widened, the thin mortar


Crumbled and an enormous


Black rat fell into the water with her,


Splashed about,


Caressed her with its


Clammy paws and insolently ogled her…

The seeming discrepancy of a black rat with a grey face created considerable literary controversy, needless to say, and raised the hackles on the backs of academic purists, but the controversy itself attested to the spreading recognition that here was a young poet to be reckoned with. His verse was fresh, penetrating, epigrammatic, candid even to the point of insult, sometimes startling, always provocative. No poet ever became great by being, in his young days, overly polite: his father taught him that. And he rarely was. Anything too physical or too spiritual alike aroused his wrath. Zealots as well as shirkers suffered from his “one-finger type, two-finger brain, / six sneers and one suggestion.” He hated pomposity and timidity, yesterday’s ideas and tomorrow’s fashions, partyboys and doomcriers, Babbitry and Bolshevism. And he struck them down with style. When Leon Trotsky fell ill, he wrote gleefully:

criticism to the left of him


enmity to the right of him


jealousy in front of him


the Red Army behind him


a high fever within him


all tried to blight him

he resolved to take a trip to the Caucasus…

Yes, a frankly acknowledged above-the-board package of prejudices, essential to his genius. As his mother recently warned the hired help with regard to the “Aloha Shirt Set,” who just this afternoon have at last been found guilty of Communist plotting to overthrow the Government under the Smith Act:

This is to state as a matter of policy that… TIME is 100 % in favor of the property owners, capitalists, and corporations of Hawaii and 100 % against Harry Bridges and anyone who is in any way allied with him. (If there are any worse names for property owners and capitalists such as “reactionaries” we are for them, too.)

“Business,” his mother always liked to say, “is, essentially, our civilization.” She called it “the smartest, most universal of all American occupations…the largest of the planets which make up our system.” In the past, TIME’S business bias has been bruisingly attacked, but few would dare challenge it today. They still call him an opportunistic thief, a pastepot-poet who steals from everybody, but that only means he’s squarely in the mainstream of American poets, most of whom have been great eclectics, gatherers and enhancers of the detritus from the passing flux, collage-shapers — and as for being opportunistic, so what? As he himself wrote when T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land was being “revealed” as a hoax: it’s immaterial, “literature being concerned not with intentions but results.” And who can doubt his own results? TIME’S number one, “not only at the box office but…in the opinions of a large part of mankind.”

His mother’s words. She loved the adulation, the wealth, the power. His father loved the poet’s life more than its rewards, loved controversy, loved style. True genius, he once told his young son, is to be faithful to one style, while exploring intransigently all that it contains — like making love all your life to one woman. Maybe he learned that from Ernest Hemingway. Or vice versa. TIME in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, compound words, cryptic captions, middle names and parenthetical nicknames, ruthless emphasis on physical details, especially when somewhat obnoxious, extended metaphors (“slowly the ribbon of his voice unrolled/ with here and there a knot…”), alliteration, rugged verbs and mocking modifiers, and TIME’S own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. He called footballer Red Grange an “eel-hipped runagade” and G. K. Chesterton a “paradoxhund” before most children his age could even spell “cat.” A Charlie Chaplin movie was “a gorgeously funny example of custard-piety,” and when the Queen Mother of Spain died, he looked up the true meaning of “the Escorial,” where she was buried, and blithely penned: “They took her to the Dump.” Well, he was a youngster, he could do such things and get away with them, even the Queen Mother might have smiled. And if sometimes he strove too hard to be clever and overshot the mark (“A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon…”), if sometimes the coinages proliferated into self-parody and “backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” it was understood that such excess was a necessary flaw in any great poet: you have to take your pratfalls while you’re still young — the old man who suddenly lurches into audacity late in life is a fool.

TIME was close to his father and deeply mourned his sudden passing — more perhaps than Mother Luce did, though she was pregnant again and so had worries of her own — and though he kept his feelings largely to himself, one could sense in him ever after a restless unconscious search for his missing father. Perhaps — he forced himself to admit this — perhaps he needed his father’s death, needed the search, the inexpressible longing, in order to achieve the emotional depth and maturity essential to a Master (and let’s face it, there was always something sophomoric and nihilistic about his father’s influence, loving and protective as he was, something of the restless jock and compulsive boozer), perhaps in all great poets’ lives there had to be these early tragedies, and this was his. His mother, though increasingly occupied with other children, took over his development for a while, and though his most important formative years were behind him, she did instill in him a stricter discipline, a wider-ranging urbanity, and a greater appreciation of intimate detail. The growing cynicism and detachment, however, were his own.

His sister FORTUNE was born the week of his seventh birthday, a beautiful child, well-endowed, ultimately more brilliant and sophisticated than he, tutored by songsmiths and loved by the rich, but though she sometimes teased him and once even called him a “fascist” (admittedly he was flirting at the time with the far right, supporting Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy, picturing Haile Selassie as “squealing for protection” for his “squalling Abyssinia,” and smearing Jews and Socialists — but all that only went to show he was a lot smarter than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who’d been growing up with him), FORTUNE always looked up to him as her big brother, and depended upon him, a father surrogate of sorts, for guidance and protection. As did his baby brother LIFE, even though he’d enjoyed a success in the art world the equal of TIME’S in literature, radio, and film. There were other children along the way, some adopted, some stillborn, others neglected and allowed to die, even a bastard called HIGH TIME, apparently engendered in a nightmare by the Phantom and quickly done away with when the truth was known; but the pride of Mother Luce, and indeed of the nation, were her three remarkable and close-knit sibling prodigies, TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE.… Or at least up till now. The old lady’s been getting skittish again of late, seems to be losing interest in the arts, flushes like a schoolgirl at ballgames and boxing matches. There was a big party just a few days ago, everybody high as a kite and letting themselves go, he’s pretty sure she’s been knocked up again.

He’s not jealous — why should he be? Oh, some people say she’s trying to breed his successor since she fears for his life, but he doubts this: one Poet Laureate is all any mother can hope for. What does upset him, though, is that she’s being drawn away from him, just like when his father died. He feels his self-confidence draining away. Tonight’s events, for example: how will he cope with them? What can he hope to achieve? MOTHERLESS CHILDREN HAS A HARD TIME WHEN THE MOTHER’S DEAD — he saw somebody a while ago carrying a picket with that written on it, and when he should have laughed, he shuddered. Has he lost the way? This spectacle, even as it fascinates him, frightens him with its challenges to the imagination, its dangers, its hints of hidden appositions, confrontations with the Shape-Shifting Absolute, webworks of treacherous abstractions that make his verse somehow irrelevant, unequal to the occasion, silly even. Everybody else seems to be rejuvenated by coming here, he feels years older. His instinct is to flee, forget it — it’s not his mission “to exorcise the Doubt which is conquering the Western World,” his mother’s already told him that, his job is to stay alive — but he is a poet (he reminds himself) and he can do no other than to stay. Art is not an idle affectation, it is a solemn calling, a penance, a manly devotion to something behind the profane world of baseball games and movie reviews. The poet is not merely an entertainer, though this would be the easy way out, not merely a celebrator of his age — he is also a prophet of religious truth, the recreator of deep tribal realities, committed “desperately, whimsically, absurdly, cockeyedly, whole-souledly” to Revelation. “TIME will reveal everything,” Euripides prophesied. “He is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.”

And so, though circuses and theater generally fail to move him, though he distrusts mobs and is dubious about the selection of Times Square for the executions (as Mother Luce has said: “New York is in the bloodstream of America and America flows hot through New York. But New York is not America, son… New York is the fascination of America — where vices easily become virtues and virtues vices…”), here is where he must be tonight. It is, as his mother would say, his “manifest duty.” And he is not without defenses. If worse comes to worst, he will do what he has always done. If he bursts through the scrim of phenomena and grasps the whole of tonight’s events, he will celebrate them; if they overwhelm him, he will belittle them. He’s a professional, after all.

19. All Aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special

“I been busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the nettle-rash,” stormed Uncle Sam, “copin’ with riots and wars, payroll robberies, murders, and onscrofulous sabotage! Them parleyvoos, who can’t even get a damn guvvamint together, are tearin’ up our Embassy, the Bolsheviks are massin’ for a riot in Munich, I’m exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions from within stirrin’ a ‘ruption in me equal to a small arthquake, time is fast runnin’ out, I need ever’ able hand at my command at full strength and manly firmness — and Holy Foley! what do I find you doin’?!”

I stood with my back to him at the marble fireplace, flushed with shame, afraid even to look up at my own face in the mirror, trying to unjam the zipper on my fly — he’d startled me so, I’d leapt out of my swivel chair like an Eisenhopper, nearly castrating myself on the edge of the desk as I’d slammed past, and, trying desperately to yank shut my fly, had trapped my shirttail deep into the zipper.

“Remember, you shall have joy, or you shall have power,” admonished Uncle Sam, “but you cain’t have both with the same hand! These repeated abuses and usurpations ain’t such as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for flyin’ the flag! You cain’t Tippecanoe and till her, too!”

I struggled desperately with the snagged zipper, not even trying to puzzle out whose voices were leaking through him now, in fact I could hardly hear him, all my senses seemed blocked off somehow — yet I knew he was there, omnipresently there, jamming up all the corners. I longed for the privacy of the old bell tower over our store in Whittier, where things like this never happened. My trouble, I thought, is that I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession.

“So what’s the matter, son? Pat pregnant again?”

“No! No, I… I don’t know,” I whispered hoarsely. “It’s like…like I’ve been going backward… I’m sorry…it’s silly — backward in time! It’s hard to explain…”

“Aha,” mused Uncle Sam, “backward in time, is it?” I caught a furtive glimpse of him in the mirror over my shoulder. His face was in shadows, his back to the window. He might have been giving me a look of utter disgust. Or he might have been laughing. Either way, I knew, the fat was in the fire. I’d recognized from the time I became a member of HUAC, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard of personal conduct that was above criticism, and now — ah, I had faced some problems in my life perhaps more difficult than this one, but none could approach it in terms of personal embarrassment and chagrin. “Sounds like the fortieth-birthday blues to me,” he said.

“Uh…” Was this an excuse? It didn’t sound like one. “That was five, uh, five months ago, I don’t think—”

“You were busy then, Inauguration and all, it usually doesn’t hit you until a few months go by…. Say, boy, you want me to give a jerk on that thing for you?”

“No!” I cried. “No, I… I have it now… I almost have it…!” But I didn’t. I couldn’t even see the damned thing, everything was blurred, and my hands were shaking. Heart whamming away like ninety. This crisis is worse even than the fund, I thought. “It’s not my…it’s just my shirttail…”

“No doubt,” snorted Uncle Sam. Hands in pockets, he kicked heedlessly across the room through the clutter of notes and documents. “Well, lemme tell you, hoss, backward in time is one place Americans don’t never go, grand climacteric or no! Herbert Hoover was born a penniless orphant, but he didn’t look back, and at the age of forty he was worth four million smackeroos — and he wasn’t even President yet! In fact, later on, bein’ a mite skittyish, he finally did look back — and got royally creamed for it, too! You know what Henry Ford done when he turned forty? He gave up small-time mechanics and went out and founded him the goddamn Ford Motor Company, that’s what! Forty, yes, he was forty! Now his boy, who ain’t even as old as you, is pullin’ in upwards of a hundred million bucks a year, not bad for a kid, and even payin’ taxes on some of it, just to show his heart’s in the right place!” He picked up one of the Greenglass sketches, turned it one way, then the other, finally shrugged and tossed it back on the floor. “‘At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment’—old Ben Franklin wrote that, and passin’ forty hisself, sold off his press and bought up Dr. Spence’s do-it-yourself electrical kit — if he hadn’t a flown that kite, we wouldn’t be here today! When Paul Revere was forty, he spread the alarm through every Middlesexed village and farm, and Ulysses Grant used his fortieth year to put the squeeze on Vicks-burg and that ain’t just another name for your old John Thomas! Now, what woulda happened if them snorters had opened their pants, got bird in hand, and looked backward in time? Eh? No, my friend, remember the Prophets: Look not mournfully into the Past, it comes not back agin!”

“It wasn’t…exactly my own past exactly…more like…” Never mind. Just make matters worse. I struggled to recall that line from Shakespeare about hearts and hell that I copied down years ago when I was in the Navy, I knew it would be useful. When I was away from Pat for a while…. But it wouldn’t come to me. Instead, what I did remember suddenly was the name of that old Clark Gable movie: It Happened One Night. This scene, however, was not in it.

“I will say to your credit, though, you’re more natural at that than you are at golf or politics — if you loosened up like that out in public, might make all the difference! You’d probably be floggin’ a lot fewer problems at home, too….”

“I’m not having problems!” I protested. Did he know about Pat and me? Politicians lived in glass houses, I knew, but surely there were decent limits…maybe not, though — I’d only really come under the gaze about nine months ago, I was still mapping this out. “It’s…it’s got nothing to do with that…”

“No?” Uncle Sam, his white locks curling down around his shoulders, was peering at me as though over the top of Ben Franklin’s reading glasses. “Maybe not. But remember just the same, lad, a little wife well tilled, willed, I mean — in a word, don’t keep it to yourself, boy, stand beside her and guide her, a used key is always bright along the Wabash!” His voice had softened to a throaty rumble — like that of Raymond Massey playing Abraham Lincoln. His playful fade had calmed me somewhat, and I’d managed to work a tooth or two of the zipper free from the cloth, but the rest wouldn’t budge. “Listen, you’re fightin’ the problem, son,” he said, leaning toward me as though he might come to help.

“I’ve got it!” I cried, and in a panic gave a great yank on the zipper: it parted and my shirttail was free at last! My fly, however, would never close again. My shoulders relaxed — I began to feel the tension going out. I felt defeated and liberated at the same time. “The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell’s own fire in them.” That was the line. Probably not Shakespeare, though. Or useful either.

“What’s that got to do with it?” demanded Uncle Sam.

I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. I was very tired. And depressed. Shit, I thought. What a mess. Maybe I ought to get sick. “Just…just something I—”

“Cock’s body,” swore Uncle Sam, kicking through the papers on the floor, “I ain’t seen so much shit piled around in one place since we cleaned out Harry Gold’s basement! You know, I think your problem is, you been spendin’ too much time indoors. I know how much your famous Iron Butt means to you, and I reckanize it gets you more votes than your face does, but you don’t wanta get musclebound in one joint while the rest just withers away! You probably ain’t eatin’, drinkin’, eliminatin’, bathin’, whoopeein’, and sleepin’ like you ought neither — you get aholda Dr. Calver’s Ten Commandments, fella! You look worse’n John Brown’s molderin’ body!”

Maybe Napoleon said it, I thought. Or else Mark Twain. I wondered how I was going to get home in time to change into a new pair of pants before tonight — have to buy a whole new suit maybe…

Uncle Sam picked up one of my large lined yellow legal pads, and, peering down his long white nose at it, commenced to read: “‘I can’t speak for the lives of other men, but my own has always seemed to me to have purpose, and so events which might have seemed like accidents or casual decisions to others’—what the hell is this?”

“It’s a…a position paper…”

“Yeah, some position all right — it’s all flat and sprawled and bends ever’ which way! I ain’t seen such wretched penmanship in high places since the days of the early railroad barons! Gotta give you credit, them ‘t’s’ are real killers, but the rest is all stingy and crabbed and outa balance! And why is it, boy, when I set you to cogitatin’ a problem like this case, you think only about yourself?”

“Not…not only—”

“What are you jerkin’ around like that for? You got the Saint Vitus Dance? And look at me when I’m talkin’ to you!”

“I… I can’t—!”

“No, you’re in bad shape, mister! The solid earth, that’s what you need!” What I needed right now was to lie down, but he was blocking my access to the sofa. A man ought to be judged by the decisions he made or didn’t make, I thought light-headedly, not by how he dots an “i” or crosses a “t.” “The actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! There are times when in the course of human events, you gotta let the dead Past bury its dead, and act — act in the livin’ presence! No more time-outs, son, it’s out-under-the-open-sky-root-hog-or-die time!”

I turned and stared dismally out the window on the balmy June day. Perhaps he’s right, I thought. I could go on a speaking tour, see America. Anything would be better than this. On a patch of grass, far away, I could see a group of people. They seemed to be playing croquet. Or else taking snapshots of the Capitol. Or carrying pickets. Ah, why did nothing in America keep its shape, I wondered? Everything was so fluid, nothing stayed the same, not even Uncle Sam. Of course, this was what stayed the same…. “Aren’t we making too much of all this?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from breaking. Foolhardy maybe, but I knew the rules: stay on the attack, find your opponent’s weakness and lean on him, and if he attacks you, don’t answer, don’t go on the defensive. I was scared, though. I didn’t know where I was with him any more. I tried to recall the arguments the Phantom had used on me, but all I could remember was Ethel Rosenberg doing the Dirty Crab, slapping the stage with the cheeks of her ass, and the bit about Native Dancer and Sonja Henie. I gritted my teeth. “All these old, uh, acts…we’ve made our point…”

“Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned,” said Uncle Sam ominously, “victories are never final so long as he is still able to fight!” This was familiar. I’d heard it somewhere before. I turned to face him: he was staring at me darkly. I knew what was coming next, it was as though we were in some play, I felt like I’d fallen into a river and was getting swept helplessly along: There is never a time…. “There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down!”

“No,” I said, groping for my lines, my place. “No…but what can the Phantom do? Like you said, this one’s in our home, uh, ballpark…”

“Yeah, well, so was Grant’s second Ordination and look what that onry galoot done to that!” replied Uncle Sam.

“Grant?” I gasped in disbelief. I didn’t know whether I was on dry land again, or going down for the third time. “You mean the…the Phantom? Way back—?”

“You durn tootin’! Cast such a outdacious petterfactin’ shadow that all the thermometers went bust in the freeze, coldest goddamn Investiture in national history, Grant never got over it! Oh, that sarpint had us all on the skids in that one, I never felt such a awesome chill — except for the time I tried to incarnate myself back into Warren Harding, not noticin’ he was dead! And whoopee! what a wind! It come rippin’ hell’s bells outa the north big as all outadoors and gettin’ blacker by the minute — seemed like it was tryin’ to push all the District real estate clean over into Prince Georges County! It whistled bucklety-whet through the parade like shit through a tin horn, whippin’ away decorations, clothing, wives, horses, and even Old Glory — blasted Grant’s daughter Nellie all the way to England and broke his goddamn heart! It sure tore up jack! And cold? The champagne at the Ball froze solid as the rock a Prudential, not to mention the poor little singin’ canaries and emancipated jigaboo servants! I swear to Jesse, if we hadn’ta got one helluva dance revved up, he mighta turned the whole Tabernacle to ice crystals, shattered it with his twister, and blowed it clean off the face of the earth! No, son, you don’t fuck about none with the Phantom!”

“But…you mean—? but it’s the middle of June—!”

“Of course it’s the middle of June!” roared Uncle Sam. “My God, it ain’t hard to see why you bombed out as a used-car salesman and orange-juice czar, you haven’t got the brains for anything faster than politics! I’m warnin’ you, mister, you had better set yourself for a mighty carnage, a evil hour of darkness and adversity and bodacious peril, a most horrible contwisted embranglement that’ll tar up the earth all round like that Worcester tornado and look dreadful kankarifferous!” He strode violently through the room, lean and long-legged, kicking through my paperwork as through a snowdrift, a pile of dead leaves, hands clutching his blue lapels, whirling on me from time to time and riveting me with a fiery glance — terrible those eyes: you could see the lightning coiled behind them, ready to flash out, that incredible power…that could be mine…if only…“On accounta we are up against the archenemy of the whole human race, sir, the meanest son of a misbegotten wildcat on the skin of the goldurn globe, all hot sulphur but the head and that’s aquafortis!”

“Aquafortis—?”

“Heavy water, boy! Pure sorcery and dangerous as a Massassip allagator with a tapeworm! They call him Sudden Death and General Desolation, half cousin to the cholera and godfather of the Apocalypse! He’s all what most maddens and torments, all what stirs up the lees a things, all what cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle vinimus demonism of life and thought, that mysterious fearsome force which from time immemorious has menaced the peace and security of mankind and buggered the hopes of the holy, the Creator of—”

“But, but I thought, uh, heavy water was—”

“Hold your tongue, mister, whilst I’m recitin!” Uncle Sam bellowed, spinning on me fiercely, “or you shall smell brimstone through a nail hole!” I thought he was going to draw a six-shooter like Andy Jackson and gun me down. It occurred to me I ought to leap out the window to save myself, but I couldn’t even move. “I say, he’s the Creator of Ambiguities, out to conquer the world, refashion it in his own craven image, enslave it to his own Utopian ends! A warlock, a wizard is he, and lord a the wind and the sea, half wild horse and half cockeyed catamount, and the rest of him is crooked snags and red-hot snappin’ turkle! You hear me? The massacree of isolated communities is the pastime of his idyll moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of his life! Why aren’t the Rosenbergs talkin’? Who’s sewn ’em up? Why’s the whole world goin’ crazy? Who made you get a grip on your old whang-doodle insteada the problem at hand? It’s the Phantom, boy, our natural and habitual enemy, a rantankerous mean shape—”

“But—”

“Shut up, boy, and lissen! If you don’t say nuthin’, you won’t be called on to repeat it! I’m tellin’ you, true as preachin’, he’s a rantankerous mean shape a the brumal rain, and the darkness fearful and formless, lean, hongry, savage, anti-everything, the maker a deserts and the wall-eyed harbinger a deevastation whose known rule a warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions! the Hog-Eye Man! the arch-degenerate! alien to us in ever’ way — habits, hopes, blood even — and he infects everything, our litterchur, art, religion, games, deemocratic system and free enterprise, with the pizen — you remember all this, son, you can use it yourself some day — with the pizen of his evil sinister influence! Why, even our decision to burn them two lefties in Times Square mought not be ours at all, but his! A trap! That sassy rascal, he’s capable of anything!”

“You…you think there’s a chance,” I gasped, “that the Phantom can actually break, uh, this thing up?”

“Yea, I tell you, mister, we are at the precipice, it is a bloody desput condition what confronts us, and if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s, we shall all be fissionated quicker’n a allagator can chew a puppy!”

“You mean—!?”

“I mean what I say!” Uncle Sam glared ominously at me through the storm of notes and documents now fluttering slowly to the floor, then turned on his heel and went in to use my John.

I was struck dumb. Was this it, then? Of course, I knew it could happen, we all knew it could happen any day, we talked about it all the time, Rockefeller had his bomb-shelter business in high gear, we were already counting out the holy remnant — but now, so close, so sudden? Was this the bloody condition, the perilous fight, the evil hour? Had Uncle Sam not announced, long ago, an uproarious tumult, a time of tribulation but a redemption which shall last forever? Was this more than a mere symbolic expiation? Were the Rosenbergs in fact the very trigger — living high-explosive lenses, as it were — for the ultimate holocaust? And was this what Uncle Sam wanted me to share in? The crashing roar of his urine drowned out my thoughts — he’d smashed up more than one solid-marble toilet bowl in this building with that mighty Niagara of his, and I always worried when he used mine. Like those fire hoses on Bleecker Street, I thought, oh fuck my luck. “Whew,” he groaned from in there, “this is the most magnificent movement of all!” It was said that he could generate enough power with his flow to light up all Latin America, so long as they didn’t mind the odor, and that once, to prove he could stop time, had pissed Old Faithful back down its hole, and thereby had created the Hot Springs of Arkansas. Something to look forward to during the Incarnation…if I survived….

Uncle Sam emerged, looking pleased with himself, buttoning up his pantaloons. “I promised you a veritable day of havoc, my friend, and it ain’t over yet! Nosirree, hob, I know what I’m explanigatin’ about, there’ll be a hot tamale in the old town tonight, so you better get a grip on your braces, boy — when Jesus comes to claim us all, it’s gonna be no place for skonks and cookie pushers! We’re in for a turrible grumble and rumble and roar, a most strenuous and fearful concatenation of orful circumstances, so stay with the procession or you’ll never catch up!” Maybe the pissing had done him good, he seemed more relaxed and playful again. I felt hopeful. But then he poked his nose into my refrigerator and his face fell. Nothing in there, I knew, but an empty cottage-cheese carton and a bottle of moldy ketchup. “Damn it, you spread a wuss table even than that Yankee pinch-fart Coolidge — only thing I ever got outa him was his wife’s apple pie, which was like eatin’ raw shrapnel, but even that was more wholesome than — hullo! what’s this! Say, I ain’t smoked an Optimo since before the last Depression!” He sniffed it, peeled the cellophane, bit off the end. “Do you mind?”

“Well, no, but—”

“But me no buts, son, you gotta learn to give a little!” he scolded, tucking the cigar in his cheek. “No, like I’m noratin’, this is no local matter up in Times Square tonight, are you listenin’? The whole pesky world’s in on this one, always has been. It is, and I shit you not, it is a irrepressible conflict betwixt opposin’ and endurin’ forces! Why, it’s said that when the very angels fell — now, this was a long time ago, son, before your time, even before Grant’s time — it’s said their fall was on accounta unnatural lust and the betrayal of ‘etarnal secrets which were presarved in Heaven.’ You see? Even then! And you know what them secrets were?” He fumbled behind his ear, took off his plug hat and searched the inside band, slapped at his pockets. He swept the stacks of paper off my desk, finally found buried there a lighter Pat had once given me on some anniversary. “Well, come on, boy, I asked you a question, don’t stand there dumb as a dead nigger in a mudhole! You know what the secrets them angels betrayed were?”

“N-no, sir!” I replied with a start.

“They taught men how to make weapons!” said Uncle Sam solemnly.

“Ah…!”

“Whereupon, God stretched forth his little finger…” He flicked the lighter importantly, but nothing happened. “What the hell…?” He thumbed it several times, but it wouldn’t light. I knew this would happen, it had never worked since she gave it to me. “Goddamn world’s goin’ to the dogs!” he muttered irritably, “it’s them poxtaked Japs, the shiftless cusses,” and he struck it like a match on the seat of his pants. “Right…stretched forth his little pinky, then, and them traitor angels was consumed…”—he drew the flame slowly toward the cigar—“by (puff! puff!)…”—glancing up as smoke began to curl out between his lips, tossing the lighter out the window: “… FIRE!” The cigar exploded in his face.

I couldn’t breathe. I stared at him in disbelief. His eyes were bugged out and crossed over his nose with astonishment, his face tarred with soot, his white eyebrows bobbing like a minstrel comic’s, the peeled-back cigar butt still quivering in his puckered lips like a blackened daisy. I’ve lost it, I wept. I’ll never be President!

“BY GOD!” he roared. The few papers left on my desk lifted and settled again, and Ike’s framed prayer crashed from the wall. “WHAT IN TARNATION IS GOIN’ ON HERE!?!”

“I’m — I’m sorry!” I cried. “I didn’t—!”

“OHH! DUMB BE PASSION’S STORMY RAGE, WHEN HE WHO MIGHT A LIGHTED UP AND LED HIS AGE, FALLS BACK IN NIGHT!” he bellowed — the chandelier splintered and crashed, and the refrigerator door blew open and fell off its hinges. He was in a truly awesome rage, his face puffy and almost ugly, like a choleric John Adams or Teddy Roosevelt, and now black as Rochester’s to boot. I was clutching my breast in absolute terror. It is not a pleasant picture to see a whole brilliant career destroyed before your eyes, I thought, tears streaming down my cheeks, especially when it is your own! My knees had turned to Jell-O — jelly, I mean — and my—

Suddenly his index finger sprang forward and waggled in front of my nose — it was just like those new 3-D movies, he didn’t seem to move an inch, just flashed that pointing finger out at me — I jumped right out of my shoes, even the one with the lace in it, and fell back against the wall. “LISTEN TO ME, MISTER!” he thundered, cracking the mirror over the fireplace and pinning me back against the wall with a look that not even the worst of the Democrats or the most vicious of the Phantom’s blackhearted agents ever gave me. I felt the wall behind me tremble — or perhaps it was only my own terror. “YOU’VE GOT JUST SIX HOURS TO GET YOURSELF STRAIGHTENED OUT OR ELSE!”

“Oh, please!” I gasped. He towered high above me — oh, he was a mighty and terrible sight to see! I knew just how those poor criminals must have felt when Grover Cleveland came to hang them! He hurled the shattered cigar past my left ear and out the window — it whined by like a falling mortar shell and something deep inside my head seemed to blast open. “I can explain—!”

“FUCK EXPLAIN! THE NECESSITY OF BEIN’ READY INCREASES! LOOK TO IT!”

“I–I was only trying to do what you—!”

But he was gone. I was alone in my office. Terribly alone: Uncle Sam had always before left something behind when he departed, something like static, a kind of energy that I could take into myself and use until it ceased to hum, but not this time. The emptiness was so profound it was nearly a vacuum. He seemed even to have sucked the room’s gravity away with him: papers, the disturbed red drapes, fragments of the exploded cigar and splintered chandelier, all hovered without settling. I moved, afloat, in stocking feet, swimming through all my guilt and shame, to my chair and fell dully toward it. Debris hung about everywhere, mirroring the awful muddle in my head. Then, slowly, the gravity came back. The drapes sank, the papers fell, I crashed into the chair. I could hardly move. I felt depleted, threatened with insignificance, abandoned. My chin sank to my chest, and I stared, sick at heart, at my gaping fly. I hadn’t felt so miserable since Mom went away to Arizona. How could it have come to this? I’ve thrown it all away! All I’ve worked for since I was ten years old! The odor of gunpowder clung to my nostrils, faintly acrid, faintly sweet…like semen. A last rebuff.

I blew my nose.

I had to move on, I knew. I couldn’t stay here.

Go forth, he’d said. Under the open sky. Times Square, he meant. With all the rest of the nation. I dreaded it, all those goddamn people…

I swiveled about and dragged my shoes over with one foot. He probably won’t even let me sit up front. I was just another throttlebottom, after all, like all the rest. Here today, gone tomorrow. Miserably, I stuffed my foot back into the laced-up shoe, breaking down the back of the heel but not caring, pulled the other one on and strung it up with some yellow packing string from my wastebasket. I stared wetly out on the mad clutter, wondering: Why did Uncle Sam do this to me? Why was I always the whipping boy? Who turned him against me?

I heaved myself up out of the chair, hauled on my jacket, and slumped out of my wrecked office, crunching splintered glass underfoot. Should change suits for tonight, but what did it matter? I found a safety pin in one of Rose’s drawers for my fly. Ah, poor Rose, what would she do now? I felt sorry for all my secretaries and assistants. I felt sorry for all the people who had voted for me. And for my poor little girls. I felt sorry for the whole country. It didn’t seem fair. I pricked my thumb on the safety pin and was almost pleased. I sucked my thumb and demanded to know: How much must I give? What more can he possibly want from me? I’ve done everything a man can be expected to do without groveling on his knees, I just can’t take any more! I have found that leaders are subject to all the human frailties: they lose their tempers, become depressed, experience the other symptoms of tension. Sometimes even strong men will cry. Like me: I was bawling my goddamn eyes out. Jettisoned! Sandbagged! It was all over! I’d suffered it all: the unwanted child, the unwanted boyfriend, the unwanted husband, the unwanted lawyer, the unwanted Vice Presidential candidate, the unwanted Republican leader — and now the unwanted Incarnation!

After a while, after I’d stopped crying, I thought: maybe it was just as well. After all, look how many of the poor misused bastards had been physically destroyed by the travail of transmutation: one Roosevelt had been brought to his knees, the other blinded, Grant and Cleveland had got their insides eaten out, they’d nearly all got shot at and some hadn’t made it through at all, while others — Jackson, for example, Coolidge — had been left a little batty when it was all over. I’d seen Hoover up close, and there was something in his eyes that worried me, too. So what the hell, I told myself, take it as it comes, don’t go off half-cocked. I was no quitter after all, I had to ride it out to the end, maybe when these executions were over, things would look different. I wiped my face on my sleeve, put on sunglasses to hide the red eyes — things were bad enough, I didn’t want those news shits to start calling me “the Weep” again. And what was the dress tonight? Homburgs probably, since they’d gone down so well before. I found mine finally on a wooden chair back of the hat stand near the secretaries’ coffee mess. It was covered with eraser dust and spilt coffee, and somebody had apparently sat on it. By now I expected as much. Brusquely, I popped it out with my fist, swatted it against my pantleg to beat the dust off, and left the office.

It was a warm June day out, bright even with my sunglasses on — too comfortable really, seemed like there ought to be rain, thunder and lightning, high winds, on such a day as this. Was there a clue in the sunshine? No, there were no clues, no clues. On the short walk through the park to Union Station, I thought: there’s something peculiar about Uncle Sam. He’s our Superchief in the Age of Flux, and yet here he is, worrying about something beyond it all — call it consistency, the game plan, the script, what you will…he’s still hungering after some kind of shape to things, I thought. Or else he’s putting me on, not telling me everything….

Up to my left, scattered groups of sullen demonstrators wandered around with placards that read THEY MUST NOT DIE! and FIRST VICTIMS OF AMERICAN FASCISM! while past me on the right moved knots of cheerful young men whose signs said DEATH TO LEFT WINGERS! and HELP CLEAN THE SCUM-MUNISTS OUT OF OUR CITY! and HANG ‘EM AND SHIP THE BODIES TO RUSSIA C.O.D.! These latter were crudely lettered compared to the handsomely printed pro-Rosenberg signs, but at least they bespoke a genuine sentiment. The professionally manufactured pro-Rosenberg propaganda just reinforced the suspicion of conspiracy. I walked up the middle between them, where the children played, thinking: in a way, the Rosenbergs are lucky — at least they know what they have to do. It’s not knowing what to do that tears your insides out.

As I neared the station, I saw I was not alone, there were a lot of people arriving with me. Cabs and buses were swinging up, pouring out passengers, and the streets were jammed with illegally parked cars. The whole city seemed to be emptying out, moving toward Times Square. I avoided people I knew, which was easier than usual for some reason. The sunglasses maybe. Or else the homburg — no one else had one. But then a limousine full of Washington Post reporters pulled up and unloaded — I ducked around the Columbus fountain, pretended to study the legend up on the west side of the station. It was about fire. And electricity…

CARRIER OF LIGHT & POWER. DEVOURER OF TIME & SPACE. BEARER OF HUMAN SPEECH OVER LAND & SEA. GREATEST SERVANT OF MAN.

ITSELF UNKNOWN.

…….

THOU HAST PUT ALL THINGS UNDER HIS FEET

What was one to do with such gratuitous messages? Nothing. The world was full of them. Union Station itself was a veritable Bartlett’s in stone. THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE, it said elsewhere. THE DESERT SHALL REJOICE AND BLOSSOM AS THE ROSE. Forget it. Like RID THE U.S. OF RATS! and SAVE THE ROSENBERGS FROM MCCARTHYISM! If you took such things seriously you were lost.

I waited until the Post reporters had disappeared through the arches, then ducked my head and bulled my way through the crowd into Union Station. It was packed in there with people trying to make connections, get seats, bribe reporters. Lots of extra trains running to New York, so most would eventually make it, but there was a nervous, almost desperate feeling in the air — as though this were something one dared not miss, not merely because one had to be up there to say he’d lived through his own age, but more than that: because Times Square might be the only safe place in the world tonight! Well, I shared their anxiety, but I wasn’t afraid. Right now, the Bomb seemed like a happy entertainment, compared to what I was going through. I followed the signs for the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, flashed my identification at the military barrier, received a salute, and was let through — though not without a suspicious double take at my disheveled state. I worried I might run into somebody like General Persons or Sherm Adams, but I was lucky: there was another run of this train later on, and apparently all the real bigwigs were going on that one. Nothing but second-stringers on this one, shit, I was demeaning myself again. I did pass Jack Kennedy, standing there on the platform with a leggy brunette — where did he get these broads? It wasn’t just his so-called Irish charm, I was as Irish as he was. His money probably. God knows that sonuvabitch would never get accused of a secret fund — his old man was all the funds he’d ever need, and it was no secret. His girlfriend was apparently going to take pictures of the executions. She looked familiar. A little like one of those female reporters who used to hang around outside the Senate toilet in the President’s Room. Maybe she’d bagged Kennedy out there. They were surrounded by a group of people, all smiling and radiant, and as I ducked by and slipped into the nearest open car, I heard Kennedy laugh lightly and remark: “Well, just let me say this about socialism, as Uncle Sam said once — ahh — said to me: At least it’s better than the goddamn Phantom!”

This was disturbing. Not the part about the Phantom, but the part about Uncle Sam. Kennedy, I knew, was a skeptic, a freethinker, didn’t even believe in Uncle Sam, much less have congress with him — he’d told me so on a long trainride together six years ago. He’d laughed cynically then at my simpleminded fundamentalism and called me a gullible Hollywood primitive. And now—! Well, it was clearly worse than I’d supposed — and Kennedy might not be the only one. It occurred to me that a lot of guys had been showing newfound flash of late — my fair-haired-boy days with Sam Slick were over. But Kennedy? What was happening to Uncle Sam? Maybe we needed to revive the Know-Nothings and the American Protective Association, put a stop to the contamination, I thought sourly. Close the door, fuck the oppressed of every nation, get the Old Man back in the pink again. Distantly, I heard something about “the OPA.” Kennedy laughed. The girl tittered. The sonuvabitch. I hoped at least he sat in a different car this time.

That other time was in the spring of 1947, we were both fresh out of our Naval Officer uniforms (I outranked him) and newly elected to the House of Representatives, both on the same Education and Labor committee, and Frank Buchanan had invited the two of us up to McKees-port, outside Pittsburgh, to debate the merits of what was then the hot issue in Congress, the Taft-Hartley Act. I was for the bill. Kennedy was against it. I won. Kennedy was a pushover in fact. Of course, the entire audience was made up of employers, I couldn’t help but win, but I could have beat him anywhere. Maybe this had pissed Kennedy off and made him unusually sarcastic. After the meeting, we’d ridden a sleeper from Pittsburgh back to the capital. During the long rocky ride, we’d talked about foreign affairs, the handling of the Communist threat at home and abroad, and religion: where America was going, what it all meant. I didn’t recall the details — except that he kept wanting to talk about getting ass and at one point, when I tried quoting Alf Landon on the “new frontier,” complained that I had the imagination of a fucking peasant — but of one thing I was absolutely certain: Only I had the true faith. Not that I’d had any concrete proof yet myself, I’d had as much contact with Uncle Sam as I’d had with Jesus, but as usual, my instincts were right about this and Kennedy’s were wrong.

At the time, I’d thought: it’s probably his Catholicism standing in the way. But he didn’t seem to be much of a Catholic either — not like Charlie Kersten, for example, who was on the committee with us, or Monsignor Sheen or my friend Father Cronin — hell, in a way, I was more of a Catholic than he was! I eventually realized it was mainly his money and good looks that had agnosticized him: he didn’t have to fight for anything, didn’t have to ask hard questions. Probably got a soft push downhill at Harvard, too. The only reason he’d beat Lodge out of his Senate seat was because his old man had bought off the pro-Lodge Boston Post with half a million dollars. At the time I’d seen this as yet another stroke of historical luck for me, getting rid of Lodge like that, but now I couldn’t be sure. Uncle Sam had a lot of respect for money, I knew that — hadn’t he just lectured me on it? But Kennedy was too frivolous, too cocky, a pampered arrogant snot who wasn’t interested in anything unless he could get into its pants — he wasn’t called “Shafty” in the Navy for nothing — and if my butt was made of iron, his was made of peanut brittle. Like my brother Harold, he had a certain reckless charm, but no discipline, no staying power. I’d never taken him seriously, and assumed Uncle Sam hadn’t either — Uncle Sam was born an Episcopalian, ate a whole side of cornfed Nebraska beef every Friday night and would rather whip a papist paddywhack than a nigger any day. Negro, I mean. Not a single one of his Presidential Incarnations had even mentioned Jesus by name in an Inaugural Address, much less his R.C.-idolatrized Mother. The only occasion I’d ever heard Uncle Sam mention the Virgin was the night he’d interrupted my Caribbean cruise back in 1948—just the second time I’d ever seen Uncle Sam that close — to fly me back to Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. He still didn’t know me well then, and, while working the rowing machine in the S.S. Panama’s gym, which we’d snuck away to, he’d asked me a little about my life. I’d begun at the beginning, as I always do, with the day of my birth, but he’d interrupted to ask me when I’d lost my cherry. I’d stammered something clumsy about honeymooning with Pat in Mexico, and he’d laughed that rattling disconcerting peddler’s laugh of his and, keeping rhythm with his strokes, had chanted:

The Virgin Mary stumped her toe


On the way to Mexico!


On the way back she broke her back


Sliding on the railroad track!


Queevy, quavy, Irish Mary,


Stingalum, stangalum, buck!

He said the Indians had taught it to him.

Not that Uncle Sam was a secularist — how could he be? He was Uncle Sam, after all. Faith was essential to the Incarnation, it wouldn’t come off without it—“any deeply felt religious faith,” as Eisenhower liked to put it, “and I don’t care which it is.” True, by the letter of the Covenant, any would serve, but on the other hand, Uncle Sam clearly was not partial to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Voodooists, or Romanists. If he had any favorites at all, they were among people like Ezra Benson’s Mormons, the eccentric, evangelical, and fundamentalist sects nurtured here on this soil and here primarily, Adventists, Shakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Hardshell Baptists, Church of Christers, Four Square Gospelers…yes, and Quakers. And so I hadn’t been surprised at Jack Kennedy’s blindness, his blasphemies, and as always I’d held my peace when confronted by them: some men are born to greatness and some are not, no point in helping those who are slow to catch on. Especially a rich fucking Ivy League Brahmin like Kennedy — I hated all those guys, not personally, but because they didn’t play fair, they corrupted the American Dream with their bankrolled head starts: goddamn it, if they couldn’t sell penny candy and rescue millionaires like the rest of us, they could go to hell. I always thought that was how Uncle Sam saw it, too, that enthusiasm he had for the log-cabin starting line, but now suddenly there was this conversion: it could only mean one thing. I shrank miserably into my seat as the train pulled out, huddled in my rumpled clothes, smelling the acids of my fathers rise in an ancient indignation: the only good papist is a dead papist. Poo. I needed a fresh shirt and a deodorant, I stank worse than Sheba, but fuck it, I was past caring.

The car had filled up with festive exuberant people singing songs, uncorking hip flasks, drawing out mouth-harps and decks of cards, lighting up cigars…but no one had come to sit by me. Not that I gave a shit, that passion for anonymity was no joke with me, in school buses, at choir practice, on the bench at football games, at family picnics, I’d always had a place apart, I was the original Lone Ranger and wanted it that way, but still I didn’t like the implications — it was as though I’d been set up as a humpty dumpty and everybody smelled this on me, knew better than to get contaminated themselves. It was that same total isolation I’d been feeling since the fund crisis, like maybe Checkers had given me rabies or something, it was as though the last dozen years had not happened and I was back in Washington in the OPA, getting crapped on by the big-city Jews and Yalie New Dealers. Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else. The only question was whether you risked getting killed yourself — and even that might be just another reason to go ahead and have a try. Not that I’m suicidal, I’d been scared all my life of dying and I was scared still. Yet I needed to confront it constantly. “That swarm of black thing.” I drew energy from it, only provided I didn’t name it. Though the threat of it paralyzed me, I was never so alive as when it threatened me. It made mere survival the central principle of my life. It molded my face. It made me reckless. I wanted to plunge into it and out the other side over and over again. It taught me that Self, though nothing, was everything. And it was what dragged me down the aisle that night in Los Angeles, when Dad took us boys in to Dr. Rader’s revival meeting. What a night! This was not the Friends Meeting House in tranquil reasonable Whittier. This was the goddamn truth. Awesome and fundamental. No play-acting piety here, no “Joy to the World,” there was a terrible choice to be made, and there were no third alternatives. Dr. Rader made one thing perfectly clear: the truth did not make you comfortable. I was wide open and ready for this — I had just started high school the day before and I wanted to bleed! We joined hundreds of others that night in making our personal commitments to Christ and Christian service. Or perhaps this was a formula for some transformation deeper than commitment. I remember the crying. How vulnerable my father looked. Jesus was like some kind of radiant loving cloud one walked through out of Death toward Progress. Toward true freedom. I believed. I thought: only in America could this happen!

We pulled out of the suburbs of Baltimore, picking up speed, and as I felt the train propelling me toward New York, I reminded myself, thinking back on that night in Los Angeles: whatever happens, there’s not much I can do about it now — start down the aisle, there’s no turning back. This is always true, the stream of events has a terrific force and momentum of its own. Once a man gets into an important position of leadership — mine, for example — he can set off a lot of big waves, but he can’t turn the river around completely. All about me, people were singing “Go Get the Axe” and “Tea for Two” and, changing the words somewhat to suggest the electric chair, “On Top of Old Smokey.” I didn’t join in, I felt less and less a part of them. I sat by myself, huddled up against the window in my homburg and sunglasses, reminded of the Inauguration: looking out over the stone banister at all those strange people. After the General’s pontifications, they had all erupted in whistling: wolf-whistles, they’d sounded like, as though it had been Eisenhower’s legs they’d liked, not his speech. Some applause, too, but the shrill brutish whistling was what you’d been able to hear best out there in that cold wind. Most people, I’ve found, are complete fools — that’s why it was so easy to get ahead, there just wasn’t any serious competition out there….

We were now ripping along through open country, and the excitement seemed to build as we drew toward New York. The air was heavy with smoke, singing, intense talk, and the smell of booze, which was beginning to make me nauseous. Nobody offered me any of the liquor getting passed around, but just as well. I loosened my collar, leaned my head back. Jesus, that was all I needed now, to get sick. Nothing to throw up, I knew. “Hollow, hollow — like the case against the Rosenbergs.” I’d missed lunch again, hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and though I couldn’t remember what I’d had then, I was sure it wasn’t much. No goddamn corned-beef hash, nothing that would have helped. All I could recall about breakfast was scolding the girls and barking at Pat, which I regretted, even if she did deserve it. She didn’t understand me any more, damn it. I had this big thing to do and she wasn’t paying any attention. She’d lost interest. She said she didn’t like politics — but it was me she didn’t like! I could never count on her when I was really down. Take election day two years ago against Helen Douglas: I was sure I’d lost, I knew my whole political career was ended, but I didn’t want to show this, I had to make it look like it didn’t matter. So I decided we’d all go to the beach. The children, too, I made everybody go. It was a terrible day, I admit, cold and gray, with a bitter offshore wind beating in — it seemed to confirm my worst suspicions and I reveled in its punishment. The girls cried and wanted to go home. I wanted to hit them. Instead, I smiled and told them to go dig in the goddamn sand and shut up. But the worst thing was that Pat didn’t understand either. She sat there on the sand wrapped up in a blanket, sulking and nagging, until I finally gave up and took them all home. I was so disgusted I just pulled up to the curb and dumped them out, then went off to a movie by myself. And now, Christ, she was even complaining publicly about my thrashing around in bed, about my jumping up in the middle of the night to take notes, waking her up with my sudden fears or enthusiasms — I’d made her the Number Two lady in the nation, did she think you got something like that for nothing? Some woman had wandered into the car and by request had sat down on the armrest of the empty seat beside me to sing “I’d Rather Die Young” for everybody, which was apparently a big new hit. I stared at the way her bottom plumped out over the armrest, thinking: I was the only goddamn faithful husband in national politics, and where had it got me? Stranded here on the Whip with a carload of boozy loonies, the cockeyed Community of God. Cast Intact.

“Hey, how about ‘Down the Trail of Achin’ Hearts!’”

“‘Doggie in the Window!’”

“‘Changin’Partners!’”

I sat there in all that smoke and ruckus, feeling sour and overburdened, slumped over my broken fly as over the law books in Durham, wishing the whole thing would get called off somehow. The real crisis of America today, I thought sullenly, is the crisis of the spirit. I’d failed to button my shirt cuffs and the sleeves were bunched up inside my jacket. I knew I should stand and take the jacket off, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Besides, I was too nauseous. The thick smoke, the noise, the dust from the old seats were getting to me. I was afraid I might have a hay-fever attack. I leaned my head back again and from under the brim of my homburg read the blow-ups of letters written to the Rosenberg Clemency Committees, mounted over the windows and at each end of the car like advertisements…

To whom it may concern. All I say is why have they been wasting so much time when the government Knows how guilty they are!.. Its traitors like these human snakes that cause wars. I say Kill them before our silly government turns them loose to cause further hell and treachery and torture to our Sons. Just because they are Jews like yourselves you selfishly want them released. You have taken over nearly all the U.S.A. you ungrateful Dogs. If your friends are released I’m no longer an American.

The distraction helped, but not much. I kept seeing Uncle Sam’s finger shooting out and trembling in front of my nose. Somewhere a glass smashed and a woman squealed.

Build a strong wailing wall with four sides, and put dear little Mammala and Papala Rosenberg in the big middle of this wailing wall in Sing Sing, and let them wail and wail and wail. What do the Jew$ do in return [for being] permitted to live in the U.S.? He is without exception the spy, the Saboteur, “Commies,” Left Wingers, Infiltrators, hate mongers and all around trouble-makers, to say nothing of their intense Zionism which makes Hitler look like an amateur.

These 2 Rats should of been hung long ago & so should you.

A good American

There were more, they were plastered all over the goddamn car, but I was getting too train-sick to keep on reading them. Jesus, we seemed to be picking up speed — racing through piled-up industry now, must be in New Jersey already, the slums and factories were racing past so fast you could hardly see them, flashing by like the flipping of pages in a picture book! Somewhere a whistle screamed, the wheels clacked and banged, I whacked my head on the window and my homburg fell off! I grabbed it up and pulled it down over my ears. The drunks in the car were now singing train-wreck songs at the top of their lungs, but they were completely drowned out by the thunderous ruckety-pucketa of the wildly careening Look Ahead, Neighbor Special. I like campaign trains, I’m no front porcher, but this was too goddamn much! I once read in a dictionary of quotations that politicians were said by someone to be “monsters of self-possession.” Well, we may show this veneer on the outside, but inside the turmoil could become almost unbearable, and that was how it was with me now, I wasn’t even doing so good on the outside! I was perspiring heavily, feeling very clammy, clinging to the seat with both hands. It had always been my lifelong conviction that a man should give battle to his physical ailments, fight to stay out of the sickbed, and learn to live with and be stimulated by tension — in fact, I once said these very words to Bob Taft to cheer him up when he first fell ill with cancer — but now, eyes squeezed shut against the impending disaster, mouth dry, stomach knotted up, and smelling very funky, all I could think of was: I quit! Just let me out of here!

20. Yippee, the Divine Concursus

The sun is settling on the tips of the skyscrapers, the temperature crests at 85 degrees and out on the periphery begins to drop, the humidity begins to rise: out at the edges, one can feel the chill spread of shadows — the people, now arriving by the tens of thousands, press forward, into Times Square, into the center where it’s still warming up. Loudspeakers are turned on and tested out, and a bop-talking disk jockey from California is invited to emcee an hour or so of pop records: Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Ray, Harry Belafonte…“Hey, zorch, man!” his hepcat fans holler — which is fuzzbeard lingo for the “colossal!” of their folks’ generation — and their bodies start to swing and bounce, sending massive ripples through the tightening crowd like the wind blowing across Kansas wheat fields. Some weirdos turn up, Frisco fans of the deejay, with green hair and purple lipstick; they get absorbed (this place can absorb anything) but not imitated.

In between numbers, the disk jockey goes down into the mob with his “raving microphone” to interview dignitaries, zanies, and ordinary mortals against a background of teen-age screams, and to conduct a straw poll on which of the two spies should be burned first. Of the first thousand votes cast, 438 are for Julius, 417 for Ethel, but there are also a number of votes for Mayor Impellitteri, the Dragon Lady, Jackie Robinson, Alger Hiss, Kilroy, Syngman Rhee, Justice Douglas, and Clifton Fadiman, among others, and including one vote each for Mr. and Mrs. Richard Nixon and two for Harold Stassen. Bobo Olson and Paddy Young, who follow the Rosenbergs on the program tonight with a fifteen-round middleweight-championship fight, are intercepted ducking into Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant for some pre-bout sirloins: they vote sportingly for each other.

Out back, poking around in Dempsey’s garbage, is an old panhandler who has been working this area since it was Indian territory, long enough certainly to know that though the meat’s better over at Al and Dick’s Steak House, it’s also picked closer to the bone — lot easier to get a full meal back of Dempsey’s. This old man is, in his way, as good as a Ford or a Rockefeller at picking up the country’s loose change, though he’s been slipping a bit since the turn of the century. Now, as he makes his addled way down Broadway, gumming a T-bone, he encounters a gathering of millions. He blinks, casts a bleary eye at the clock over the Square, mops his brow in disbelief, then shrugs, pockets the bone, and hobbles hastily back to his cellar digs for his cap and overcoat.

Below the streets meanwhile in the Times Square subway station, now closed off to ordinary traffic and guarded by G-men, T-men, and city vice-squad detectives, the first trainloads of VIPs are beginning to pull in. The earliest to arrive are first-term Congressmen and their wives, minor administration officials, federal judges from outlying districts, pro-statehood delegations from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Formosa, and Alaska, and (in the line of duty) the Advisory Board on Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, but others of higher rank are not far behind. Handshaking and elbow-tugging, they circulate through the vast undergound complex, doing their best to impress each other and learn a few more names. Special bars have been set up for them, and they dip in cautiously, trying not to let the heat beneath the street and the gathering excitement make them soak it up too fast.

Some slip topside to peek out from backstage at the crowds rapidly filling the Square — still hours to go, and already the crush and jostle is terrific! They’d like to sneak out a minute and visit some of Walt’s sideshows, but they’re afraid they might not be able to make it back through the jam to their special reserved seats in the VIP section in time for the main proceedings. It’s going to be a big show all right — there are bands, choirs, preachers milling about backstage, the Pentagon Patriots have arrived and are unpacking their instruments, Gene Autry is tuning up and Nelson Eddy is gargling with lemon water — but what they all see when they look out is that bare twilit stage and the antique Rube Goldberg contraption bolted to the middle of it. The chair. Two people will sit there tonight and die. Without them, none of this would be possible. Those two are to the program what the soul is to the body: the inner mechanism that sums it up and gives it meaning. In the middle of the middle of the Western World stands this empty chair: and only the Rosenbergs can fill this emptiness. Not the Nazi war criminals, not the disloyal union agitators or the Reader’s Digest Murderers, not even the grisly necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie can sit that seat tonight. For the Rosenbergs have done what none, not even these, may dream to do. They have denied Uncle Sam, defied the entire Legion of Superheroes, embraced the Phantom, cast his nefarious spell upon the innocent, and for him have wrested from the Sons of Light their most sacred secret: the transmutation of the elements. This is no mere theft, no common betrayal, and “plain, deliberate, contemplated murder,” as young Judge Kaufman has said, “is dwarfed in magnitude” beside their crime — for they have sought nothing less than the ultimate impotency of Uncle Sam!

Yet if one is filled with dread and loathing, he is also filled with awe. They have done something that has changed the world. Which of these petty politicians peeking out from backstage, listening to Georgia Gibbs sing “Kiss of Fire” over the p.a. system, has not dreamed of doing as much? But feared the price? The Rosenbergs have done it. They have propelled themselves toward the center with such ferocity that now not even Uncle Sam could prevent their immolation, and by doing so they seem for a moment to have brought History itself alive — perhaps by the very threat of ending it! Even their beggarly childhood on the Lower East Side, their clumsy romance, their abandoned children, their depressing withdrawn lives in the enemy’s service, acquire suddenly monstrous proportions, as if, by their treachery, new and appalling archetypes have been called into existence to replace the comforting commonplaces of “Stella Dallas” and “Young Widder Brown” being broadcast this afternoon across the nation on NBC radio. Everything they have touched seems suffused now with a strange dark power: this book or habit, that console table, this wristwatch. For years they kept on a shelf a coin-collection can labeled SAVE A SPANISH REPUBLICAN CHILD. Which child is that, and saved for whom? Replicas of this can are being sold by the dozens out there in the Square this afternoon, but there’s no magic in them — where is the original, they all wonder, what its force? Even Julius’s Talmudic name “Jonah,” Ethel’s mysterious “Madame” at the Carnegie Hall Studios, the inverted links with America’s historic heritage in the location — Monroe Street, Knickerbocker Village — of their one-bedroom flat on the Lower East Side seem to hint at uncracked codes, unpenetrated conspiracies.

The disk jockey breaks for the five-o’clock news: Still no confessions. The Rosenbergs are playing it right down to the wire. The Phantom is said to be active in Milan and Genoa, Paris, London, and Teheran, but all this is coming to seem very remote. No breakthroughs in Korea or Berlin — if anything, the situations are worsening — and in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a housewife has been injured by a stray shell from an atomic cannon while lying at home in her own bed. Zap. Disquieting, but these frenzied last-gasp activities of the Phantom are to be expected as the hour of the executions draws near. Up in Queens, a forty-year-old window cleaner drops out of his safety belt to his death, there are floods in Bombay, somebody gets shot in Chicago. Weather forecast: a heat wave is predicted. No doubt.

As far as the old panhandler can tell, it has already arrived. He has made it back into the Square, dressed now in his winter overcoat and stocking cap, newspapers stuffed round his feet in his old brogans. He works his way sweatily down a long line of tourists, who are evidently waiting to get into some picture show or something. They all want to take his picture, but that’s all right, he’s used to that — many’s the time he has poked in a wastebasket or curled up on a park bench under newspapers out of sheer narcissism — and anyway it tends to loosen the bigger coins. Dumb tourists are all underdressed, he notes, mopping his face with the frayed ends of his tattered muffler. Not all of them are friendly either: some are parading around gloomily, shouting for justice and shouldering provocative placards. Not only do these types never give him a nickel, they have a way of souring the trade. But luckily they are being shunted out of the area by police and pushed to the south. The old panhandler nearly gets swept up in this net when somebody on the run thrusts a sign in his hand, but fortunately the sign reads CHRIST SAVE US FROM A DEATH LIKE THIS, and the police assume the old man’s a walking advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous. “Hottest goddamn New Year’s Eve in living memory!” he’s heard to mutter as he bulks along in his thick wraps. One thing about it, though: people are generous this afternoon. Part of the ancient year-end superstition about wasting your goods to ensure a fat year. His pockets are heavy with jangling coins; he hopes he lives long enough to spend them.

The disk jockey, cooling his bop patter and moving toward the center, has slipped sentimentally into his hayseed act, giving a recipe for crawfish pie, telling a joke about a girl who got run over on the tracks of history (“The track was juicy, the juice was Lucy!”), and loading up his turntable with hillbilly hits by the late and great Hank Williams, tunes appropriate to the occasion like “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” and “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” and “Sundown and Sorrow” and

Hey, good lookin’!

Whatcha got cookin’?

How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?

Williams, just twenty-nine, died mysteriously on New Year’s Day, about the time the Rosenbergs were granted their stay of execution for the Clemency Appeals, and many wondered at the time whether or not his death in the back seat of one of Uncle Sam’s convertible Cadillac super-mobiles might not have been a long-planned Phantom counterattack which had somehow gone off prematurely. “Ever since the coming to this world of the Prince of Peace, there has been peace in the valley!” the Montgomery Baptist Church preacher said at the funeral, standing beside the huge white floral piece that carried the legend I SAW THE LIGHT, and most folks assumed he was talking about Hank Williams. After all, he’d died even younger than Jesus. His small ghostly voice now flows thinly, sweetly, from a hundred amplifiers, filling the warm streets, singing the sun down, drawing the Square and indeed all of midtown America into a kind of hypnotic trance with its doleful messages from the other side…“There’ll be no teardrops tonight,” he sings. “Rootie tootie…!”

The trance is broken by the sudden arrival of the city mayor Vincent Impellitteri with a burst of glad tidings: he has just signed into law a bill permitting the sale of liquor in public theaters, and, the whole Times Square area being proclaimed one, booze is on the way! Amid the wild cheering, makeshift bars are thrown up by the boys from City Hall, bottles are broken out, orders taken. Tension has been mounting all day, and most everyone can do with a few snorts right now. It is impossible to get within two miles of Times Square by car or van, so ice and paper cups are dropped in by helicopter. The whiskey is replenished by a kind of bucket brigade from the periphery, and in the jubilant and prodigal mood of the moment, there’s no need to watchdog the supplies: what some people take for nothing, others gladly pay twice for. The old panhandler can’t believe his luck. Not only is he beginning to feel like the Bank of America, but people are setting him up faster than he can toss them down. “Thank ye, son! Need a little somethin’ to (burp!) warm the ole innards, tain’t easy sleepin’ out nights in a blizzard, not at my age! God bless!” But this is just the old litany, blizzards be damned, he’s in fact sweating like a stoat, his coat weighs a ton and scratches his poor hide, and he’s beginning to wonder if somebody is finally out to get him for good, cutting the years in half. He starts to lift a tourist’s watch, then decides to ask what time it is first, lift it after. “Howzat? Just past five? Well, well, thank ye, sir! Long life!” That’s it, then, another six hours and then some before the ball drops — if he doesn’t get soused and blow it all, he could leave here a rich man. The watch is gold, but very lightweight — don’t make them like they used to. The tourist buys him a whiskey. “Here’s spit in your eye, son!” he chortles with a sideways wink at the bartender (one born every day, ain’t it the truth!), and tips back his cup. There’s a crush around the bar, and a kid behind him buys him a refill. The bartender scratches about for another fifth. “Hey, ye still got almost seven hours to go, johnny!” the old man says cheerily. “Y’ain’t gonna have enougha that (wurp!) sneaky pete to last!”

The bartender glances at his fob watch. “Naw, just three hours now, old-timer, and it’ll be all over.”

“Wha—?!” Now he’s sure they’re finishing him off. Sonuvabitch, just when he was striking a real seam at last! He throws down the drink, stuffs the paper cup in his pocket, and decides to work his way out in the general direction of his digs, so he can at least die in his own bed like a proper gent. If he can get through — whew! his pockets are so heavy he can barely move, and he wonders confusedly if he’s being treated to some unpleasant moral on the accumulation of capital. This is the worst he’s ever seen it!

It’s true, they’re really piling in now, everybody jamming up together, old and young, great and small, of all creeds, colors, and sexes, shoulder to shoulder and butt to butt, missionaries squeezed up with mafiosos, hepcats with hottentots, pollyannas with press agents and plumbers and panty raiders — it’s an ingathering of monumental proportions, which only the miracle of Times Square could contain! And more arriving every minute: workers in dungarees, millionaires in tuxedos, pilots, ballplayers, sailors, and bellboys in uniform, brokers in bowlers, bakers in white aprons tied over bare bellies. Certainly this is the place to be, and anyone who’s anyone is here: all the top box-office draws and Oscar winners, all the Most Valuable Players, national champions and record holders, Heisman Trophy and Pulitzer Prize winners, blue ribbon and gold medal takers, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, Imperial High Wizards, Hit Paraders, Hall of Famers, Homecoming Queens, and Honor Listees. The winners of small-town centennial beard-growing contests have all come, the year’s commencement speakers, class valedictorians, and quiz-show winners, the entire Social Register, the secretariat of Rotary International. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Yehudi Menuhin, Punjab, Dick Button, who isn’t here? Gary Cooper hoves into view up in the Claridge, wagging his shiny new Oscar from High Noon and doing his much-loved toe-stubbing aw-shucks Montana grin for all his admirers, both on the House Un-American Activities Committee and off — he’s been one of the top ten box-office draws for thirteen years running now — only Bing Crosby has been loved so long so well. Uncle Sam has provided Coop a special position tonight in a third-floor window of the Claridge where he can both see and be seen, along with other Hollywood stars friendly these past years to HUAC’s efforts to shrive and scour Movieland — good Americanists like Jack Warner, Elia Kazan, Bob Taylor, Ronnie Reagan and Larry Parks, Budd Schulberg, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou. Others, more suspect, like Bogie and Bacall, Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel, and Edward G. Robinson (his true identity, after all, is Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest!), are shunted off to the periphery, where they’ll be lucky, standing on tiptoes, to see a few distant sparks fly.

Harry James arrives, snaking his band through the thickening mob toward the Hotel Astor, where they’ve got a gig up on the Roof — their rendition of “Ciribiribin” will be featured tonight during the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. Paulette Goddard’s in the crowd, José Iturbi and Consuelo Vanderbilt, John L. Lewis and George Mikan. Esther Williams turns up in her tanksuit, hand-in-hand with the Oscar-winning cat-and-mouse team, Tom and Jerry — and old Mickey Mouse himself is there, too, celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday and elbowing his way through the crowd with Minnie, Goofy, Horace, and the rest of the aging Rat Pack. It’s also Eastern Airlines’ twenty-fifth birthday tonight, and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker has brought four thousand of his employees to the Square to celebrate it. The deejay, from his prominence, catches a glimpse of the famous bald pate of John Reginald Halliday Christie, the polite bespectacled necrophile, brought over here from London to model for wax museums before his hanging (the Mother Country is still catching on to electricity) next month, and in his honor plays Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues” and “I Can’t Help It.” It is said that Christie — who murdered at least seven women, including his wife Ethel, and copulated with their corpses, sent an innocent man to the gallows and earned two commendations as a member of the Police War Reserve for “efficient detection in crime”—was wounded in World War I, just like tonight’s Official Executioner Joseph Francel, by mustard gas. Patterns everywhere. Little Reggie, led through the Square by a brace of English bobbies, gazes gently at all the women, leaving a wake of frothy excitement. Some women are frightened, some smile, some faint, some come to orgasm. It’s supposed that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, invited here tonight to pursue his celebrated studies into the effects of electrocution upon the erogenous zones, cannot be far behind.

In such a pack-up there’s a natural rush on anything cold and wet. Some of the bars near the center are running out of liquor — the bottle brigades are drying up before they get all the way in, so heavy is the demand further out — and there’s talk of getting Eddie Rickenbacker to fly supplies in. Ice cream vendors are being mobbed, and nobody cares any more whether it’s Cherry-Oonilla or not. Fights break out, ice cream is shoved in faces, bottles shatter, people jab each other with their I LIKE KIKES buttons. Marquees read WE ARE SWINGING ROUND THE CIRCLE and THE FIERY TRIAL THROUGH WHICH WE PASS WILL LIGHT US DOWN IN HONOR OR DISHONOR TO THE LAST GENERATION, while around the Times Tower in electric lights circle the oracles of the American Prophet Gil Imlay…

EVERYTHING HERE GIVES DELIGHT * * * SOFT ZEPHYRS GENTLY BREATHE ON SWEETS AND THE INHALED AIR GIVES A VOLUPTUOUS GLOW OF HEALTH AND VIGOR THAT SEEM TO RAVISH THE INTOXICATED SENSES * * * FAR FROM BEING DISGUSTED WITH MAN FOR HIS TURPITUDE OR DEPRAVITY, WE FEEL THAT DIGNITY WHICH NATURE BESTOWED UPON US AT THE TIME OF CREATION * * *

Backstage, Uncle Sam, fresh arrived from his containment exercises out in the receding world, is watching all this ravishment and dignity through a peephole cut in the set for the purpose, the profane muscles of his face in tune for laughter and a merry twinkle in his steel-blue eyes. “Great balls of fire!” he whoops. “This may be the biggest thing since we struck oil at Titusville!” With him are some of the night’s key performers, due to go onstage any moment for the early part of the show, as well as a few of the heavyweights up from the VIP subway shelter for a sneak peek at the congregation. Which in its glow and vigor is getting a bit unruly. They seem to have been invaded by a certain anxiety out there, a certain exultation now that the sun has slipped behind the skyscrapers, a giddy sense of being at the edge of something terrific — like a striptease or the end of gravity or an invasion from Mars. There are whoops and screams and loud laughter. People are pressing into the sideshows not so much to see as to join them. Teetotalers elbow frantically toward the bars, shy clerks pinch bottoms and make naughty remarks, tourists forget their cameras, businessmen toss off their jackets, empty their pockets. The police are still managing to keep a semblance of order, but they can’t help being a little excited themselves — no matter which way they turn, or how quickly they whirl about, there’s always somebody behind them they can’t see, goosing them with electric shockers.

The Secretary of Agriculture, up for a glimpse of the festivities, objects piously to all this sensuality. “Pshaw! We need it, Ez — sex’ll cause the flame to grow,” retorts Uncle Sam. “You gotta plow up a field before you can grow something in it — what in tarnation did you think agriculture was all about, my friend?”

Messengers arrive from the subway station below with roll-call lists: most of the Supreme Court has arrived, as well as hundreds of Congressional leaders and State governors, the members of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the Rosenberg prosecution team and jury, J. Edgar Hoover and his boys, the Executioner and Guest Speakers. “Sir, before God and his chilluns, I believe the hour is come,” grins Uncle Sam, glancing over the rolls, “to hot up the brandin’ arns, open up the gates, and get this ro-day-oh under way! Yessirree bob! my judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is flat in it! I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-lookinvarmints to my side!”

There’s an excited backstage hustle and bustle, rippling all the way down into the station below. Ties are straightened, pants hitched, drinks drained, hair primped, crotches fiddled, lips licked, brows wiped nervously. This is it.

“Hey, wait a minute!” someone calls out. “Where’s Dick Nixon?”

21. Something Truly Dangerous

The sun was slipping off toward the western horizon, dipping down over the Catskills, as I stepped off the empty train and into the streets of Ossining. I felt a little like one of those beardy desperadoes arriving at a dusty Hollywood cowtown for the final showdown. On the other hand, it was like coming home. Not to Sing Sing, of course, hunkering up on the bluff to my right like some impenetrable medieval fortress, ringed round with its high turreted ramparts (or else like a cluster of friendly red-brick schoolhouses sitting in a sunlit playground — everything seemed double-edged like that since my sudden decision to come here, full of promise and danger at the same time), but to this familiar suburban Main Street with its squat three-story buildings, its scattered fleet of dented Fords and Chevies, its shops and billboards promoting all the recognizable brand names. I didn’t know whether I was going to be met by the Sheriff or by Mom and Dad. Or which was the more threatening prospect. The very familiarity of this place could be a kind of bait, I recognized. An elaborate trap. Maybe Mom was the Sheriff. Not literally, of course, but she was the one I’d turned away from back there in Penn Station, and if I was walking with either of them now, it was the rebellious and hot-blooded old man, not her. The people streaming past me into the station, rushing for tickets on the southbound trains, might well have been found on the streets of Whittier, all right: middle-aged men in shirtsleeves and suspenders, ladies in unfashionable summer dresses, low-hemmed and sleeves to the elbows, a lone Negro — a trusty maybe — idly sweeping out the station. We had a Negro in Whittier, too. What we didn’t have out there, though, were all these cops — they were all over the place, it was like a goddamn military occupation. All this protection was a relief in a way. But also unnerving, given the reason for my being here. They might not all agree I was on their side. Some boys were playing marbles down by the tracks. That was what Tyler was doing, I recalled, when the Incarnation hit him: playing marbles. Yes, anything could happen. Or nothing. Very scary, but there was no turning back. Courage and confidence, I told myself. The valiant never etc. The choice has been made: now live with it.

I hadn’t reached this decision in the calmest of circumstances. In fact it was just when the horseplay aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special had really started to peak that it had come to me what it was I had to do. But this was to be expected: in a critical situation it wasn’t supposed to be easy, and I often got my best ideas just when the going was toughest. We hadn’t crashed, as I’d feared, but we hadn’t slowed either — if anything, we’d started screaming along faster than ever, and the closer we’d drawn to New York, the sicker I’d become and the wilder the scene around me. The songs had got dirtier, the laughter louder, people were wandering around a lot, exchanging flasks and getting very playful with each other. A couple of young legal assistants up at the other end of the car had got into a scuffle that no one had seemed to want to break up. Girls were squealing giddily. A plump prissy clerk from the General Accounting Office, strutting fruitily up and down the aisle in crushed field hat, sunglasses, and corncob pipe, and singing “Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fly Away!”, had slipped on some spilt booze and crashed into the arms of TIME’S showman kid brother LIFE, launching what had showed every sign of becoming an outrageous romance. Anything to keep LIFE busy. The sonuvabitch had been snapping a lot of pictures, probably for one of those anthropological features, “LIFE Goes to a Party,” and the popping flashgun had been making me very goddamned edgy. The few drunks with any voice left were singing “Roll Your Leg Over”…

“If all little girls were atomical spies,


And I were the hot seat, I’d juice up their thighs!


Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over,


Oh roll your leg over, the man in the moon!”

What was I to do? I had to think! I knew, if I was to avoid a no-win policy, I had to launch a counterattack — but how? and against whom? What I needed was an issue, just one good issue — when you’re in trouble like that, you’ve got to find an issue and concentrate on it, not yourself — I was back on my own one-yard line, it was time to throw a long one! time to punt and pray! Maybe that was it, maybe I ought to pray! My Quaker upbringing and religious experience in the Society of Friends had got me out of tough jams in the past, maybe they’d work for me now! But it had been too goddamn noisy. I couldn’t even think.

Young women had gone bouncing around the car as though being tossed by the violent rocking of the train, waggling their boobs and falling into guys’ laps, grabbing on to whatever they’d found there. Somehow they’d missed me. They hadn’t missed me with the food they were throwing around, though — nor with the bottles of pop they were shaking up and firing off at each other like…fire hoses…. Oh shit, I’m sorry about what I’ve done, I’d thought, feeling the tears spring on cue to my eyes. That was the play I’d learned to cry in, Bird-in-Hand. I’d played the old innkeeper — those lines had come rolling back to me now like an ancient judgment: I shall be sorry for it till the end of my life! Ah, that poor old fellow! I knew that coolness — or perhaps the better word for it was serenity — in battle was a product of faith, but this was more than I could take! And all because I believed in the American ideal of trying to do my best, trying harder, wanting to do good in the world, to build a structure of peace! Oh, I’ve behaved so as I ought to be ashamed, I know, I’d wept unprompted as an egg salad sandwich hit the window beside me and splattered into my lap—but this business ‘as pretty near broke meeart…!

“This Communist spy had showbizz aspirations,


Tonight she will be Broadway’s hottest sensation!


Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over…!”

But wait a minute, wait a minute — what about all these plays, I’d wondered? We’d all been in them, even Eisenhower in high school at the turn of the century — he’d played the sheeny buffoon in a parody of The Merchant of Venice and stolen the show: “Dwight Eisenhower as Launcelot Gobbo, servant to Shylock,” the town newspaper had reported, “was the best amateur humorous character seen on the Abilene stage in this generation!” It was as though we’d all been given parts to play decades ago and were still acting them out on ever-widening stages. Tragic lover, young author, athlete, host, father, and businessman — I’d played them all and was playing them still…

“I wish little girls were all Jews from the slums,


And I were the Judge, I’d blister their bums!


Oh roll your leg over…!”

Yes, and a bum, too, one of my best roles, in George M. Cohan’s Tavern, our senior play — and a prosecuting attorney: when I laid my case before the American people and asked them to judge me, yea or nay, during the fund crisis last fall, I was in effect presenting them with the climax of Night of January 16th. But the important one — right now, anyway — was my lead in Bird-in-Hand! That play was about the conflict between political parties, and how love bridged the gap between ideologies. I hadn’t played the lover, of course, that role was long behind me, I’d been old Thomas Greenleaf, the girl’s father who stood in the way: “But look here, my girl, class is class, we’ve always known who was who and which hat fitted which head!” But as the villain, I was also the hero, the bridging took place in me, and I had ever since been the healer of rifts, the party unifier, the fundamentalist who could perceive the Flux, the hardliner who knew how to cry…

“I wish little girls were all free-loving Commies,


And I were Joe Stalin, I’d make them all mommies!


Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over,


Oh roll your leg over, the man in the moon!”

And then I’d realized what it was that had been bothering me: that sense that everything happening was somehow inevitable, as though it had all been scripted out in advance. But bullshit! There were no scripts, no necessary patterns, no final scenes, there was just action, and then more action! Maybe in Russia History had a plot because one was being laid on, but not here—that was what freedom was all about! It was what Uncle Sam had been trying to tell me: Act — act in the living present! I’d been sitting around waiting for the sudden inspiration, the stroke of luck, the chance encounter, forgetting everything that life had taught me! Like that night I gave myself to Jesus in Los Angeles, I had to get up off my ass and move, I had to walk down that aisle — not this aisle, of course (I cautioned myself and sat back down), it was too full of crazy people — but the point was I had to make a commitment and act on it! Deeds, not words: that was Ike’s hewgag, but now, unless I wanted to break my back on the railroad track, I had to make it mine!

This, then, was my crisis: to accept what I already knew. That there was no author, no director, and the audience had no memories — they got reinvented every day! I’d thought: perhaps there is not even a War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness! Perhaps we are all pretending! I’d been rather amazed at myself, having thoughts like these. Years of debate and adversary politics had schooled me toward a faith in denouement, and so in cause and consequence. The case history, the unfolding pattern, the rewards and punishments, the directed life. Yet what was History to me? I was never one to keep diaries or save old letters, school notes, or even old legal briefs, and I had won both sides of a debating question too often not to know what emptiness lay behind the so-called issues. It all served to confirm an old belief of mine: that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only an artificial — call it political — commitment to consistency makes them hold steadfast to singular positions. Yet why be consistent if the universe wasn’t? In a lawless universe, there was a certain power in consistency, of course—but there was also power in disruption! I’d let go of the armrests and, farting liberally, had begun to feel a lot better — though troubled at the same time with the uneasy feeling of having learned something truly dangerous, like the secret of the atom bomb — which was not a physical diagram or a chemical formula, but something like a hole in the spirit. The motive vacuum. And I’d understood at last the real meaning of the struggle against the Phantom: it was a war against the lie of purpose!

A secretary had staggered through the aisle on her way to the toilet, and three guys and a woman, shouting, “PANTY RAID!”, had tackled her and commenced to rip her skirt off. She’d tumbled hard into the empty seat next to me, giving me a jarring thump, but I’d hardly noticed — I could have been hurt, but I’d given little thought to the possibility of personal injury to myself, not because I was “being brave” but because such considerations just were not important in view of the larger issues involved. The whole nation is falling on its ass, I’d thought, my own career is atrophying, only a wild and utterly unprecedented action will save it, will save them, get things going again! But what?

And then, as they’d dragged the dazed woman out of the seat and spread-eagled her down at one end of the car, it had suddenly come to me what I had to do! I had to step in and change the script! It was dangerous, I knew, politically it could be the kiss of death, but it was an opportunity as well as a risk, and my philosophy had always been: don’t lean with the wind, don’t do what is politically expedient, do what your instinct tells you is right! As Uncle Sam had once lectured me, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him — and my instincts now told me, as down at the far end the secretary screamed, the crowd roared, and the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special shot underground and began to decelerate: You must go on up to Sing Sing! You’ve got to reach them! Promise them anything — first-class passage to Moscow, free time on TV, box seats at Ebbetts Field, a Cabinet post, anything! But get those confessions! Stop these executions! Don’t let that show go on tonight! Hurry!

In Penn Station, the others — hastily combing their hair, wiping away the blood and vomit — had jumped down off the train and rushed to follow the signs to the Times Square subway trains, but I’d ducked away, found a phone booth, called the Warden up at Sing Sing Prison: “Hello, Warden? This is Vice President, uh, Richard Nixon calling. Are the, the atom spies still up there?”

“Yes, sir. We’re keeping them here under guard until the last possible moment.”

“Good. I will, ah, be coming up to talk to them.”

“You will—?”

“I’m catching the next train.”

“I see…uh…is it clemency, Mr. Nixon?” he’d asked hopefully.

“A new offer,” I’d said.

“Boy, you fellows are really keeping the pressure on them, aren’t you?”

“Pressure?”

“Well, I mean, since you sent Bennett here a couple of weeks ago, you’ve hardly let up.”

“Bennett—?”

“The Bureau of Prisons Director—”

“Ah.” I didn’t know about this. “Well, we’ve, uh, got some new information. Listen, will it be difficult for me to get in?”

“It’s all cordoned off, but you should have no trouble passing through.”

“No, that’s true, but, uh, it’s important that I draw as little attention to myself as possible. You know, in case it, ah, all falls through…”

“Oh yes…”

“Could you arrange to pass me through under some other name?”

“Yes, I could do that. What…?”

“Eh… Greenleaf. Thomas Greenleaf.”

“Greenleaf. Like the poet…”

“That’s it.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll arrange it.”

On my way across the glass-domed concourse, I’d spotted a novelty shop, and it had occurred to me that maybe I ought to have a disguise, a beard maybe, like Greenleaf had in Bird-in-Hand. No beards in the shop, though — the best I’d been able to find was a cheap handlebar moustache. At the New York Central ticket window, the guy had asked me: “Sure you want on that train, bud? Just runnin’ it north to pick up the Albany crowd, wasn’t plannin’ to stop.” That’d be Tom Dewey and his lot — Jesus, what if I failed and had to suffer another one of these goddamn trainrides, and this time with Dewey’s bullyboys? Probably have that man-eating Great Dane with him, too. “Yes, hurry it up, I don’t want to miss it!” I sure as hell hoped I could pull this thing off.

Hustling toward the train, running all alone against the tide, I’d sniffed hastily at my armpits and wished this place was actually one of those Roman baths it’d been modeled after. It was hot and I’d felt sticky and ugly with sweat. Why do I always perspire so much? “Oh, you work hard at stirring up a good stew,” Uncle Sam once told me, “but people see you work, they see the sweat drop in the soup.” Well, couldn’t be helped, a man had to live with his liabilities. I needed a shave, too, a clean suit — I’d be playing out this hand looking more like Beetle Bailey than Steve Canyon, but it would have to do. Hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I’d realized. My stomach was churning, my mouth was dry, but I’d recognized these symptoms as the natural and healthy signs that my system was keyed up for battle. When a man has been through even a minor crisis, he learns not to worry when his muscles tense up, his breathing comes faster, his nerves tingle, his temper becomes short — in fact, far from worrying when this happens, he should worry when it does not. And I was also feeling an exhilaration, a sense of release and excitement. The worst, I’d reassured myself, was over. Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. And I had made mine: I was changing trains for the future! I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I’d felt I’d found my form again. I understood the Rosenbergs as no one else in the world could understand them — not their families, their children, their co-conspirators, the FBI, not even each other. And out of that understanding I could provoke a truth for the world at large to gape at: namely, that nothing is predictable, anything can happen.

I’d reached the train and had stepped aboard, but I’d suddenly been shaken by a cold chill and had stepped back down: was I making a mistake? The train was completely empty, I’d be all alone. I could see others jumping down off the incoming trains and racing eagerly for the subways uptown, and I’d nearly lost heart. The American people are very volatile. They can be caught up emotionally with a big move, but if it fails, they can turn away just as fast. I always felt guilty whenever I deviated from the majority, and now I was bolting the executive party to boot. But what was the alternative? It was Hobson’s choice: certain failure, if perhaps less spectacular and final, up at Times Square — or a possible long-shot breakthrough up at Sing Sing, however hazardous. Maybe I should call Pat, I’d thought, maybe she could help me decide. But what would I say? Anyway, she’d probably left home already — for all I knew, she and the girls might be somewhere here in Penn Station right this minute! Couldn’t let her catch me like this, she’d never understand. Saint or no, she could be a real bitch at chewing people out, and right now I couldn’t take it, not in public anyway. She was like the good fairy who was all right in her place but wouldn’t leave you alone. Besides, the choice, the decision, I’d reminded myself, had already been taken. Had it not? Had it not? The whistle had screamed and I’d leapt aboard the empty train, thinking: Oh my God! they’ve left me alone to do it all!

Once we’d pulled out and started to roll north out of the city, I’d begun to feel better. It always helped to move. Connected me with time somehow, made me feel like things were in mesh. Like that time I came flying back from the Caribbean to find all those microfilms in Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. Or my wedding day when Pat and I struck off for Mexico City, the whole fantastic world out in front of us, timeless, borderless, ripe and golden as the unspecified fortune sought by all of the poor but honest boys of the fairy tales. Motion — even random movements — made me feel closer to reality, closer to God. Not that I ever thought much about God — but I knew what I was talking about. Ask the man in the street and he’ll tell you that God is a ‘“Supreme Being.” But “being” is only the common side of God — his transcendent side is motion. Monks on hilltops know nothing about contemplation, all that’s just idle daydreaming. I knew a lot about that, too, I’d spent a lot of time flat out in the back yard staring off into infinity, but I knew you had to keep moving if you wanted to find out who you really were and what the world was all about. It was the real reason I’d always loved trains — not to escape west or east or any other direction like that, but to pull back from the illusions of fixed places so as to make the vital contact. If I’d had time for theology, I might have revolutionized the goddamn field.

It had felt spooky being all alone on the train — the echoey emptiness had seemed to emphasize the essential loneliness of all critical decision-making, to set me apart in some awful way — but I’d been grateful for the chance to relax, take off my hat and sunglasses, my shoes, unbutton and stretch out a little, without having to worry about what other people might think. I’d tried the moustache on. It had felt funny. Stiff. Ticklish. I’d stuffed it in my pocket. It’s not enough to break the play open with one face, I’d thought, saving the other one to use later in case it didn’t work. If I was going to do this thing at all, I had to do it as Richard Nixon — and not even as Richard Nixon, which was already, even in my own mind, something other than myself, but as just…me. I’d realized that in some obscure way, through my contact with the Rosenbergs, even as remote and unintentional as it was, I had somehow become tainted myself — as though I’d had some ancient curse laid on me (though I didn’t believe in curses, I was getting carried away by those stories from my childhood, the ones our hired girl used to tell, and by this train, its lonesome whistle, the daydreaming — contemplation, I mean): in short, I was in a lot of trouble and I’d stay in trouble unless I could somehow absorb this contact, intensify it, and turn it finally to my own advantage. In a sense I was no more free than the Rosenbergs were, we’d both been drawn into dramas above and beyond those of ordinary mortals, the only real difference between us being the Rosenbergs’ rashness and general poor judgment — but then wait: if that was so, was my breaking out a part of the script, too? Oh shit! but then — I hadn’t wanted to think about this, I’d pushed it out of my mind, forcing myself to concentrate on the Rosenbergs instead, how I was going to approach them, what kind of strategy I might best use, what in the end I wanted out of them.

Julius was the weak one, I knew. I’d start with him, and if he cracked, Ethel would have no choice. This was the great thing about conspiracies: you punch a little hole and a whole flood of accusations and counter-accusations comes pouring out. It would probably break up their marriage, but that’d be their problem. They might be looking for a good excuse anyway. And at least they’d still be alive. When things had died down, they’d probably thank me for it. Not that it would be easy. Weak or no, Rosenberg had had two years to shore up his defenses — all those public declamations: he’d thrown up a real stone wall. Mere reason was useless in the face of it, as were threats or cajolery. He’d repel all frontal attacks, I had to sneak over that wall somehow, catch him by surprise from behind.

So what was the angle? To agree with them maybe about the entrapment, the frame-up? I could tell them I’d been the victim of smear jobs, too, I knew what they were up against. But if we were going to make it work, they had to trust me, they had to tell me everything. Of course, if they really were who the FBI said they were, then we were back to square one again. Or if they were really as innocent as they claimed to be: same problem — I had to have something to take down to Times Square tonight. But I was convinced the truth lay somewhere in the middle: the Rosenbergs were guilty of something, all right, but not as charged. And if the Rosenbergs could deliver their half, I could probably deliver mine. The FBI had let the word out in a thousand ways that they had the goods on the Rosenbergs locked away in their files, but their repeated declarations on this subject were themselves cause for suspicion — like the Rosenbergs dropping their Daily Worker subscription, it could be read two ways. Those guys over there still hadn’t grown out of their gangbusting days and the Junior G-Men Clubs, they’d built up a fantastic image for themselves in that Golden Age, and now it scared them that somebody might catch them in a fuck-up. I’d met a lot of them, depended on them in fact for my inside dope over the years, but I had to say that most of them are pretty far removed from reality. Putting on disguises and snooping about after other people makes them think everybody else is doing the same thing only better, even their fellow agents, they get very paranoid, and that filing system of theirs with all those tedious and intertangled dossiers has got them more cloistered than a bunch of goddamn medieval monks. And in spite of all their files and snoopers and crime labs and privileged access, they still crack most of their cases because some guy rats on another, in effect using the FBI as his own trigger, or because some agent plays a lucky hunch. Maybe just because a guy looks like a crook. Or a Commie. This is true. They still believe they can identify criminal tendencies by the bones in the face — they run a regular goddamn seminar down there over John Dillinger’s death mask! And Julius Rosenberg had a very unlucky face. He looked like the stoolies, the finks, the unsympathetic first-reel victims of all those old gangster movies — once they saw him, they probably didn’t think twice. After which, the dossier grew and grew. Like Pinocchio’s nose.

Certainly, through all this, one thing became clear. At the heart of this worldwide conflict and crisis lay a simple choice: Who was telling the truth, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or two admitted Reds? At the trial, in the press, in the appeal courts, there was no contest: for what chance did the Rosenbergs have? Kaufman knew this in advance: every juror at the Easter Trial had had to swear under oath that he’d give the same weight to testimony of either an FBI agent or a member of the Communist Party. Of course this was just bullshit, you couldn’t find twelve decent Americans who’d believe a Commie as easily as a G-man, it was simply Kaufman’s way of protecting himself from a mistrial and assuring the prosecutor of a jury willing to fudge a little, but it showed Kaufman knew what the case would ultimately rest on.

Saypol, free from such scruples, could throw the whole weight of the FBI legend against these ghetto outcasts: “There came a day, however, that a vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation broke through the darkness of this insidious business…” He heaped praises on the FBI. So did Kaufman. So did the President, the press and radio, the Attorney General, the nation’s civic clubs and leading politicians…and me, too, for that matter. So did the FBI itself in its own frequent and popular press releases. Not even the Rosenbergs’ own lawyer could stop himself! What did Kaufman and Saypol really believe? Probably that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. Why? Because the FBI said so. Hoover himself had flatly announced the Rosenbergs’ guilt in the nation’s press, who was going to say it wasn’t so? Maybe Edgar believed it all himself, locked away in his inner sanctum, reading all those eager-beaver reports from ambitious agents, fluttering through all those inventories and interviews, surveillance reports and signed confessions. Sometimes the entire FBI file on the case read like a strange remote dialogue between Gold and Hoover — a speaker, reaching for the truth, a hearer, avidly sanctifying the revelations: a sinner and his distant God. At the time of the trial, the newspapers were full of front-page stories announcing that “meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is following other leads on wartime espionage.” Saypol hinted that there was a lot of FBI material he wasn’t free to use because of these continuing investigations (presumably protecting, for example, some new Herbert Philbrick down in the ranks I, but if he could, the stuff would nail the Rosenbergs to the wall, and who in the courtroom or all America doubted this? There probably wasn’t one American in a thousand who had even paused to think about it. No, if Irving Saypol held up a handful of FBI reports and told them to imagine Julius Rosenberg “reaching out like the tentacles of an octopus,” then an octopus is what everyone willingly saw, surprised only that it had a moustache and wore double-breasted suits.

But maybe they were all wrong. Maybe the case constructed against the Rosenbergs had been a complete fabrication, beginning to end, maybe Greenglass was the Herbert Philbrick of this investigation and he’d simply fucked it up, had had to agree to the invented meeting with Gold in order to validate many years of otherwise fruitless effort, save the Old Man’s job. Or worse: maybe even the FBI didn’t know what had happened. Maybe the whole trial had been just an elaborate smoke screen thrown up by the Phantom to conceal the real ring. Perhaps Gold, wilier than anyone had thought, had surrendered to throw the FBI off the track, and the Rosenbergs, innocent of the spying but in on the cover-up, had constructed their tenacious defense to waste Uncle Sam’s energies and draw the FBI into a blind alley. Maybe they were even supposed to have pleaded guilty but chickened out at the last moment — certainly this would explain why until a few months ago they’d been completely disowned by the Communist press and abandoned by their old left-wing friends. So was that it, a calculated deflection? A bit crackpot maybe — or as TIME would say, psychoceramic — but even those clowns over at the FBI had noticed Rosenberg’s “quixotic behavior,” once they’d shown themselves and let him know they were on his tail: they’d reported that he’d continued to traffic with the very characters who later got arrested with him, had made ludicrously elaborate preparations for other people to escape while lingering on himself, had made all manner of furtive and suspicious moves while at the same time bragging openly to complete strangers about his undercover exploits. The FBI planted informers in jail with him after he was arrested and following his conviction, and even there he kept right on blabbing away. In effect, in order to satisfy themselves he was indeed the man they wanted, they’d had to conclude he was a nut. Maybe he was. That story he allegedly told the passport photographer about Ethel inheriting an estate in France was pretty far out after all, nearly as good as Harry Gold’s invented family. Providing Rosenberg had ever actually said such a thing: there were a lot of lively imaginations in the FBI, too. But to me all that “quixotic behavior” looked more like a snow job by a couple of con artists, two experienced actors diverting the overeager G-men’s (and later the whole nation’s) attention away from the real thing.

In short, they seemed to be taking the rap for somebody else. Yes, I was convinced of this now. Maybe they knew who this somebody else was, maybe they didn’t, but this was what I had to find out. I could only guess. Maybe Sobell and Greenglass had talked them into it. Maybe even their supposed antipathy toward David had been feigned, David getting the tragic part, as it were. Maybe they’d been conned into thinking such a ring existed and were taking the rap for nobody. Pawns in a Cold War maneuver that only Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom knew about. Maybe their own lawyer was setting them up — Bloch, I knew, was close to a lot of hardline Commie causes and had helped to orchestrate the publicity on the case in the Red press, maybe he’d masterminded the whole thing. Whatever the case, they’d convinced me of two things: they weren’t who or what the FBI said they were, but they did know something, even if they’d only got it, like me, from a backstage glimpse.

And so that was my handle. Exposure of the FBI in exchange for confessions, a partnership in iconoclasm. I had a lot of contacts over at the Bureau, and I knew what kind of crazy and dangerous place it was — Hoover was in many ways a complete loony, arbitrary in his power and pampered like a Caesar, and if he dreamed up a spy network one day, then by God it existed. Doubt was out. It was an agent’s job to increase the Bureau’s “statistical accomplishments” and “personally ramrod field investigations of ‘major cases’ to successful conclusions,” and never to question the remote wisdom of the Director, and I assumed if we moved fast enough, before they had time to tidy up after all the desperate excitement, we could probably find enough deception and confusion over there to blow this case wide open. The Rosenbergs would have to consider it, I was their last best hope. Might get a lot of their friends in trouble, but it’d be, from their viewpoint, for a higher cause, and so justified. And if it worked, if they talked, and if we went after the FBI and the Justice Department, what then? Could the American people take it? The incorruptibility of U.S. agencies and institutions — above all, the FBI — was an article of faith in this country: could the people brook an attack on that faith? Would they even listen? Well, it’d be risky like all great power plays, might even drive the whole nation into dangerous paranoia, but if it worked I’d have them in the palm of my hand. They’d have to believe in something, and I’d be all they had left, not even Joe McCarthy with his assaults on the Army and the State Department could match it. Even Uncle Sam would have to toe the goddamned line! And it wasn’t for myself I’d be doing this, and not even just for the nation. Let’s face it, the survival of the whole fucking world depended on us, and I was the only guy in the country who could make it work. And I would, too, I’d give everything I had to it. The government would function, truly function, for the first time since the eighteenth century. Then who could stop us? We could do good wherever good needed to be done!

This was not idle dreaming: I knew I could do it. I felt my strength reach out to embrace the globe. I saw statues of myself in Berlin, in Seoul, in Prague, Peking, and Peoria. A universal veneration for the hardnosed but warmhearted Man of Peace, the Fighting Quaker. On horseback maybe (I seemed to feel a horse under me) — or better yet, standing, arms outstretched in a great V, in the back seat of a limousine. All done in black marble. Prizes, medals, titles, special investitures, all that shit — meaningless of course, but the people needed ceremony like they needed proteins, and I’d do my duty in this regard as in all others, even as I understood, better than any other man of my generation could, what children they were. Honorary degrees, too, from Oxford and the Sorbonne, Harvard and Heidelberg — and screw those constipated candy-asses from Duke. I would make war and rebellion physically impossible, and world commerce would flourish with an energy and elegance not seen since the first trade routes were opened up to China. Naturally I’d be loved. Priceless treasures would be heaped on me but politely refused: what did I care for the world’s wealth in my selfless dedication to its welfare? Well, a special palace perhaps, not for me of course, but for Mom and Dad, a gift from the peoples of many nations. I could see it far ahead, standing high on a bluff over a sleepy river, turreted and bejeweled in the sunlight. It was something like the Mission Inn in Riverside (we’d get the best architects), only more beautiful. I seemed indeed to be riding a horse, decked out in silver armor, some kind of special ceremony no doubt, yes, I was coming home, there was a festival in my honor, bands playing, the people were pouring out into the streets, singing my praises — but, oddly, the trophy I was bringing them was a gigantic rubber cigar (or was it the pommel on the saddle?) and high above me I saw as I rode under it, a mysterious dark tower, long soft tresses streaming from it wet with blood—

I’d come to with a start: it was Sing Sing Prison I’d been staring up at! My God, where had the time gone? Must have been dozing! I’d caught just a glimpse of the place as we’d rolled under it, standing up there in the afternoon sunshine, much closer and more ordinary than I’d expected, its heavily manned guntowers looking like little yellow and green toy castles armed with thick stubby cannons (not cannons of course, but spotlights) — and then we’d shot below through a tunnel and a kind of trench and reeled with a wheeze and a screech of steel wheels on rails into Ossining Station. No time to wash up or piss as I’d planned — in fact I’d barely had time to shove my feet into my shoes, grab up my other things, hang on to my pants, and leap down before the empty train had gone lurching on out of there toward the north. I’d caught my breath, buckled my belt (this was when that Western desperado feeling had swept over me), tugged my homburg down around my ears, settled the sunglasses on my nose, and, pressing through the inrushing crowds, had stepped out into what — flattening it all out a bit and tossing in a few pepper, camphor, and loquat trees — might have passed for Whittier, California.

I stood outside the station a moment, getting my bearings, gazing up what I guessed to be the Main Street. Slightly run-down, quiet, sleepily cheerful — were it not for all the cops, it would have been a very pleasant place, just the kind of village, updated by a century or so, that old Rip might have come home to. It was no longer a village, though, not even a town, but already something new: you could almost feel the place getting pulled toward the south, sucked into the Manhattan orbit. I understood such places. The same thing had happened to Whittier: I went into the Navy from “Ye Friendly Town” and came home three years later to a piece of Los Angeles. People all over America who had lived whole lives in such towns and villages, each with its own character and integrity, were suddenly finding themselves being annexed to once-distant urban centers, tied to the fortunes of the expanding city with all its vice and corruption and foreign faces. And its riches: it was hard to resist. We’d lived through a revolution, my generation had, and here at the middle of our lives we found ourselves uneasily adrift between the poles of some ancient dispute belonging to a generation not our own. Ike’s gang. Ike and I had both grown up in small communities, known the smell of pastures and cowdung, the feeling of leaving home to go “out into the world,” the hostility and perversity of the cities, but his Abilene was a simple old-fashioned village of prairie peasants, the “Cow Capital of the World,” with its legendary cowboy shootouts and its Sunday booze-ups and crapshooting joints at the edge of town, just emptiness beyond. For Eisenhower, everything rural was natural, everything urban unnatural, but my generation, however much temporary nostalgia we might feel for such simplicities, recognized that there was something wrong with this black-and-white view, just as with the contrary idea held by the big-city Brahmins and ghetto provincials that only the cities were civilized, the rest of the country untamed and barbarous. What was missing was the middle ingredient, the place in between where all the real motion took place now that the old frontier was gone: the suburbs, waystop for transients, and thus the true America. My America. Dwight Eisenhower and Julius Rosenberg would never understand each other, but I could understand — and contain — both. Was this to be my role? To urbanize the countryside and bring the wilderness back to the cities? To lead the New Revolution? To bring the suburb to all America?

I pondered this as I walked up into the town, looking for the best approach to the prison. There were wooden barricades up everywhere, even along the New York Central right-of-way, all entrances manned by Ossining City Police and New York State Troopers. All looking tough, especially the locals, Chief Purdy’s boys. I hoped that Warden Denno had spread the word. Spencer Purdy was a guy you didn’t fool with. When eight hundred New Yorkers came up here last Christmas to sing carols to the Rosenbergs, Purdy had barricaded all streets leading to the prison, had refused to allow the carolers to leave the area of the railroad station, had secreted five hundred cops, deputy sheriffs, and state troopers in an abandoned wire factory nearby with a fleet of buses assembled to convoy them to any trouble, and as much as possible had kept the demonstrators out in the open, under a bitter icy rain. He’d finally let six of them deposit in the prison parking lot a basket of flowers with a legend reading GREETINGS TO JULIE AND ETHEL FROM THE PEOPLE, but as soon as they’d gone he’d had it carted off by a garbage truck to the city dump. All of which was just a quiet little practice run compared to today’s operation. The place was like an armed camp. There were patrol cars everywhere, hundreds of sweating unhappy cops, Coast Guard helicopters rattling overhead. I couldn’t see them, but I supposed there were National Guard troops up in the hills as well, PT boats in the river. All of which made me feel very goddamn nervous. I decided to wear the moustache, after all, even if it was in pretty shoddy shape after the ride in my pocket — one side of it kept bending out away from my face.

For a while, I just walked the streets, considering alternatives, angles, practicing my Thomas Greenleaf lines for passing through the barriers (if they asked, I’d tell them I was a salesman, a traveling salesman — which was true after all: our greatest salesman against socialism, isn’t that what the party regulars called me?), nervously trying to recall the strategy I’d planned to use on Rosenberg. Something about the FBI, a confrontation…. The local residents watched me wander by. I hoped they’d take me for a cop or a reporter. Those not running for the trains were all standing outside their houses in the June heat, listening to car radios. Something about the Rosenbergs. I tried to pick it up: “…the Rosenbergs confessed. In Congress, heavily engaged upon major legislative work, the day has been one of anxiety and suspense…”

What—? Had they talked? Was it all over? This ruins everything, I thought. Forget it. Turn back now, and you’ll still have time to make it to Times Square for the ceremonies. I jerked around and started to run back down the hill. But then I reasoned: if they had confessed, what were all these cops doing here? The Phantom would have no use for the two of them now. I tried to reconstruct the sentence. Lot of possibilities: if the Rosenbergs confessed, had the Rosenbergs confessed, whenever the Rosenbergs confessed — I spun around on my heel again and started back up the street. The moustache blew off and I had to press it on again. People were staring at me now. I tried to cool it. I knew this was the most difficult period in a crisis situation, the period of indecision: whether to fight or run away. It was important not to commit yourself irrevocably to a course of action until you absolutely have to do so. Otherwise you’re just shooting from the hip, you can miss the target and lose the battle out of sheer recklessness. On the other hand, I’d already passed through this period, hadn’t I? Back at the office? On the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special? In Penn Station? Which period was I in, then? I was very edgy and short-tempered, and I was afraid I might blow my stack and throw a tantrum or something. I thought of my old man, doing everything wrong, raging futilely against the world: I’m no better than him! I tried to tell myself that if I didn’t feel keyed up like this, it would mean I wasn’t ready, mentally and emotionally, for the conflict ahead, but I was too upset to listen to such bullshit. My stomach was boiling, my nose was running with hay fever, and my need for a toilet was getting desperate.

Back on Main Street, I spied a drugstore and crossed over to it. Get some antacids. Find a John maybe. But when I peeked inside, I saw that the place was full of troopers lounging about in their snappy but grim black and gray uniforms. I ducked my nose into a revolving rack of postcards outside the door: tinted pictures of the Calvary Baptist Church, Jug Tavern, the Half Moon, and a tombstone pierced by a cannonball in Sparta Cemetery. I was trying to think, but my mind was a blank. “Ossining is a Sint Sinck Indian word meaning ‘stone upon stone,’” said a card depicting the first prisoners setting up the original old marble cell block, said to be still standing. Maybe that was where they were. No, here was the new Death House. There were postcard portraits of famous local Revolutionary War heroes and Death House victims, complete with their last words. Cartoons, too — crude jokes about the electric chair, last meals, and manacled prisoners fantasizing, pissing on their jailers, being tortured with near-naked girls: “Okay, Miss Ladoo, that’ll be enough for today!” A prisoner pulling his pants off on one side of a screen, a visitor lifting her skirts on the other, and a cop dashing up, shouting: “Hold it, Diddlemore!”

Inside, the troopers were sucking milk shakes and horsing around with a young high-school girl behind the soda fountain, elbowing each other slyly, looking bored and horny at the same time. I recognized them. The first team. All suited up. A little kidding around, a little grab-assing, ball-tugging, just loosening up for the big game, no harm meant, no rapes intended. One of them was playing a pinball machine that said HOT STUFF along the top, and on the jukebox somebody was singing “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night.” Maybe I should risk it, I thought. They won’t even notice me come and go. A caramel milk shake might be just the thing I needed, better even than antacids. Or maybe pineapple. I adjusted my moustache and started forward, feeling uneasy, on the wrong side of things somehow — like that day long ago when I entered a strange drugstore to purchase my first packet of prophylactics and found myself face to face with a man who looked like my grandmother. That time, in panic, I’d bought a lotion for athlete’s foot instead. Today it was an old woman who looked like Herb Brownell. She met me in the doorway and said: “What’ll it be, mister?”

“Uh…this one!” I croaked, reaching blindly behind me and grabbing a card. I fished for a nickel. “And…uh…could you tell me, please, the best way up to the, uh, prison?”

“Sure, bud,” she said eyeing me suspiciously. She pointed: “Right over, uh, there: uh, Hunter Street.” Was she mocking me? Behind her, the cops had stopped joshing the little soda jerk and were staring dully out at me. I pocketed the postcard, thrust a coin at the old lady, and fled, nearly crashing into the side of a passing taxi. Behind me, I heard hard belly laughter, and it made my stomach knot up and my knees quake. But I was on the way at last.

At the entrance to Hunter Street, however, I was stopped cold: “Sorry, mac, visiting hours are over.” He was a big potbellied gray-haired cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt, wet in the armpits.

“The Warden’s expecting me,” I said as gruffly and matter-of-factly as I could. “Greenleaf…uh, Thomas—”

“Sure he is, sure he is,” said the cop sourly, staring vaguely over the top of my head, as though I were too insignificant to be seen. He had a thick hairy nose and small pale eyes: a German, I supposed.

“Listen,” I said, “believe me—”

But the cop was busy with two guys who had come up behind me, wearing straw hats down over their noses, unknotted ties, and carrying big Speed Graphics. They flashed some kind of pass, press cards probably, and the cop let them through. I didn’t have one. The next guy did have one, though, and he still didn’t get through. “I’m sorry, bud, but we’re just too crowded.” The man shrugged, we exchanged commiserating smiles.

“Hey, you know that guy?” snapped the fat cop, squinting darkly at me, one hand on his pistol butt.

“Wha—? N-no!” I gasped. I felt like I used to feel around Ola’s old man: shabby, obsequious, guilty.

“Who was it?” asked another cop, wandering by with a walkie-talkie.

“Fuckin’ Daily Worker reporter. He had a lotta fuckin’ nerve.”

“Judas, I’ll be glad when this thing is over,” sighed the cop with the walkie-talkie.

The fat cop shrugged heavily and mopped his brow. “A job’s a job.”

“Yeah, so long as the damned you-know-who don’t show up,” said the other one.

“The Phantom? Shit, I wish he fuckin’ would,” snarled the fat cop, hiking his gunbelt. “I’d love to tangle asses with that greasy cocksucker. I bet he ain’t half what he’s fuckin’ cracked up to be!”

“Half’s enough,” the other one said, giving me a long inquisitive stare. “Who’s the dude in the handlebars and funny bags?”

“A crasher. Says his name is Nature Boy.”

“Greenleaf,” I corrected, but I knew it was hopeless. I could see the prison up the hill at the top of the street, so close and yet so far.

“Thomas Greenleaf?” asked the cop with the walkie-talkie. “It’s all right, Frank. The Chief said to let him through. The Warden’s waiting for him.”

Frank shrugged and waved me by, moving to stop some other guy coming up behind me. Made it after all! I braced my shoulders and strode by them — but then the cop with the walkie-talkie grabbed me as I passed: “Hold on there a minute, pal!”

“Eh? What—?! You said I—”

“It’s your moustache,” he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear: “You got it on upside down!”

“Oh! Uh, right…!” Just as well. It was beginning to itch, and changing it around gave me a chance to scratch. The cops’ laughter, though, I could have done without.

It got more congested the further up the hill I went. There were other checkpoints, but they were easier to get through than the first: the weakness of all security systems. Once you cracked the periphery, the rest got easier. But not all that easy. At the prison parking lot, I found at least a hundred and fifty reporters and cameramen, some of whom I recognized, and nearly that many more police, among them the Sheriff of Westchester County, apparently a guest of honor in the cavalcade that would soon transport the Rosenbergs to Times Square. “Anything stirring below, Sheriff?” a state trooper asked him.

“Nope, all quiet,” he said. “Nothing but Republicans down there.” Everybody laughed. Even I was laughing, it was like someone was pulling my face and shaking it.

“They say there’s trouble brewing up in the city,” a reporter said.

Somehow I had to find a way past all these guys without being recognized. Access was through a gate in a wire fence behind all these people. There were more guards there, then another heavier gate in a thick wall, the prison beyond that. I’d expected gray blocks of marble — stone upon stone — like an old castle, but most of the walls and buildings in fact were made of brick. Brick and concrete. It was large, but it had seemed larger from below. Impregnable, just the same. And archetypal: probably those familiar hexagonal watchtowers with the peaked roofs gave you this feeling. Just like in the Raft and Cagney movies. You could get nostalgic about this place if you hung around long enough. The guards in the towers were armed and wore dark sunglasses. They seemed very relaxed. They reminded me of the captains of some ships I’d been on. There was some kind of walk up through the chopped granite hillside by the north wall: maybe there was a way in through the back. But one of those towers hovered over the place where the walk began, with a lot of smiling cops gazing down. Not a chance.

I stood for a few uncertain moments in the sun at the edge of the parking lot, near a bank of telephones hanging exposed on a fence there. I reasoned: if somebody comes up to me suddenly, I could duck my head over a phone and give someone a call. I realized I’d probably call Pat. I was sweating heavily and my moustache kept slipping. The sun was dropping over the river: time running out. It was now or never. A couple of reporters turned my way, apparently coming to use the phones. I stepped brusquely out into the parking lot as though heading for my car, then turned on my heel and walked straight toward the gate. My moustache fell off: I grabbed it, clutched it in my fist. My heart was pounding away a mile a minute, but I remained outwardly cool. Courage — or, putting it more accurately, lack of fear — is a result of discipline. Any man who claims never to have known fear is either lying or else he is stupid. I was afraid, all right, I knew a lot was at stake, but I’d made up my mind to do this, and now I had to carry through. I was famous for this, this stubborn carry-through, everyone from my mother to Uncle Sam had noticed it, I probably couldn’t do otherwise. But I felt like I’d felt getting into that cage with Sheba. There was a sign at the gate:

DEAD

STOP

END

I felt a rush of activity around me as I bulled forward. People turning to stare. Reporters lifting their cameras. Guards rushing toward the gate. Christ, I thought, afraid to look up at the towers, they might even try to shoot me! I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be. All I could think of was Greenglass, but that wasn’t it. I glanced up and saw that on the other side of the fence some guy was barreling straight at me with a magazine held up in front of his face like a mask. In my panic I thought it might be me! That I was charging straight at a mirror! That I’d been inside all the time and was rushing out! But that there was no “out”! If life is all free flow, I wondered, bracing myself for this astounding collision, then how do such things happen? And if it is not, then what the hell am I doing here?

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