Public Burning (20 page)

I felt that I was close, hovering as it were (even though in fact I was flat out on my back) over the answer, not quite able to pick it out. Something about judgment. Time. My generation. My lousy drives. The city. The riddle of history, the letter O. Growing up. Balance. Motion.… I wondered if I should trace the travels of Harry Gold on a map to see if some kind of picture would emerge. Roughly, in my mind's eye, they seemed to trace out half a cheese sandwich. I remembered that he said somewhere that the Greenglasses asked him where they could find good Jewish delicatessen in New Mexico. Or maybe Gold asked them. I realized the bomb diagrams somewhat resembled cheese blintzes. Deviled eggs. Stuffed cabbages. My stomach rumbled. I realized I should stop thinking about food.

I tried to think instead about the money, the amounts exchanged, what got done with it. Murray Chotiner taught me this rule: When you're attacking an opponent, looking for scandal, ask first about the money. But the sums here were small and the evidence even for these was dubious. In fact, the only people with real money in this story were the Judge and Prosecutor, Attorney General, and FBI Director. The jury members were modestly but comfortably salaried, most of the witnesses were getting by, while the Rosenbergs were the poorest of the lot. Which was maybe the point: O for zero. They ran a small business that lost money, apparently donated their services to the Phantom for nothing—real fanatics. Well, I could understand Julius's business failure: I'd gone that route myself once with frozen orange juice, and my father had entertained us all with a whole lifetime of successive failures. I could even understand their working free for the Phantom—I'd do the same for Uncle Sam, though I was glad he had never asked this of me. How could he? Money is dignity, he's told me that himself. What I couldn't understand, though, was the Rosenbergs
staying
poor. Not that poor. Not in America. They didn't even have a car or a TV. Hell, I was earning money by the time I was eleven years old, picking beans on farms and working in my Dad's store, pumping gas, grinding hamburger, culling rotten apples and tomatoes—Dad didn't give me any abstract lessons in the American Way of Life, he simply turned over the vegetable shelves to me, let me fill them, keep them in order, and take the profits. I learned everything I needed to know about hard work. And its rewards. Now, even the simplest lump could pump gas or grind hamburger, so I figured Julius Rosenberg had to be faking it. Their poverty was just a cover. They no doubt had a secret bank account somewhere—Poland probably, since that country had had the brass to offer them political asylum. There were people who said Julie was throwing money around like water toward the end—I think it was the FBI who said this—he was buying clothes, photographs, eating out at expensive restaurants. I wondered if I should take Pat out to an expensive restaurant on our anniversary. There was a good Mexican place on Connecticut I'd heard about. At one time, I'd been eager to take up Mexican food, because I had so many California constituents who ate the goddamn stuff, and I knew it was something you had to get in practice for. Pat would probably want to eat fish down by the river. Where all the mosquitoes were, very romantic. I'd settle, as always, for a good well-done hamburger. And a pineapple malted. Or even a dish of cottage cheese. I eat a lot of cottage cheese, I can eat it until it runs out my ears. And one thing I do that makes it not too bad is put ketchup on it. I learned it from my grandmother.

My stomach growled. I loosened my belt a notch, belched emptily, ate an antacid. I've been at this too long, I thought. If I wasn't careful, I'd make myself sick again. How did other people get where they were without having to work like this? Since the moment I'd got in off the course Sunday, I'd been going at it. I hadn't even paused to take a shower in the clubhouse (of course, I rarely shower in public places any more—I agree with Ulysses Grant about that, I don't think it's wise to let people see what any Incarnation of Uncle Sam looks like without his clothes on—or even in his shorts or pajamas; I just couldn't understand Eisenhower making his valets help him on with his underpants every morning, it seemed like some kind of unnecessary strategic risk), I'd rushed straight back here and headlong into a full-scale exhaustive study of the Rosenberg case, the trial, the background, personal histories and peripheral issues, appeals, the impact on world affairs, everything. This is my way with every project, scholastic, political, athletic, or romantic: I talk for hours with every person I can find, spend every spare moment studying reports and recommendations, gather up and try to absorb every known bit of information, make hundreds of calls, read whatever philosophy or political science or history I need to accomplish the task. “Iron Butt,” they called me in law school. There was always a tradition of hard work in my family, especially on my mother's side, the Quaker side. And it always paid off.

I assumed it would pay off now, though I still wasn't sure just what that payoff was going to be. Of course, I could only think of one thing these days, and that seemed a long ways off, but I knew how important it was to keep your eyes open at all times, miss nothing—one moment of carelessness or distraction, and you could stumble and fall from sight forever. Like that fund they set up for me in California, I hardly thought about it at the time, and I nearly got erased by it. The least detail could make or break you. Or maybe I was making too much of this thing. Maybe it was nothing more than just an exemplary entertainment of sorts. Who could tell what was on Uncle Sam's mind? Certainly it was very theatrical. There was the drama of a brother sending his big sister to the electric chair; the implied tragedy of the Rosenberg children who would be left orphans; the curious spectacle of Jews prosecuting and judging Jews, then accusing each other of tribal disloyalties; an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution's presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil…and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody in this case from the Judge on down—indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government, myself included—behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama, speaking in their letters of sinister “plots” and worldwide “themes” and “setting the stage” and playing the parts they had been—rightly or wrongly—cast for “with honor and with dignity.”

And that was another thing: not just the Rosenbergs, but almost everybody involved in this case was about the same age—
my
age! Judge Kaufman, for example, who in many ways had emerged as the real star and hero of this thing—he must have been going through his own fortieth-birthday crisis at the time of the trial two years ago. The Boy Judge: I had to admire him. I'd always thought of myself as a fast starter—I've been “the youngest ever” to do a lot of things in my life—but even I was no match for Irving Kaufman. He'd entered Fordham when he was only sixteen, had graduated so young from law school he wasn't even eligible to take the bar exam, and while I was still dusting Tom Bewley's office library back in Whittier and working on drunk cases, divorces, and traffic shit, he'd already been fighting the big ones, right in the heart of New York City, for over five years! He'd become an assistant D.A., helping gangbuster Tom Dewey and winning fame as the “Boy Prosecutor”—the Roy Cohn of his day. No wonder they got on so well. I hardly thought of national politics until I got asked to run for office in 1946, but Kaufman had already been called in personally by F.D.R. to help choose a federal judge way back in 1939 (
fourteen
years ago!), and by the time I'd got to Washington as “the Greenest Congressman in Town,” he was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Tom Clark, on a first-name basis with Edgar Hoover, and getting big write-ups in all the newspapers. When Harry Truman made him a federal judge in 1949, he was only thirty-nine years old, the youngest in America. And now he was being touted for the U.S. Supreme Court. His friend Tom Clark, Truman's old hatchet man, was already sitting there, no doubt promoting his cause. Well, if I was ever in a position to nominate and he hadn't made it yet, provided the Jewish seat was open, he'd be a likely candidate. I'd have to get over the resentment I sometimes felt at the fact that while I was fighting seasickness and mosquitoes in the South Pacific, Kaufman was sitting out the war in a private law practice, pulling down $100,000 a year with well-heeled clients like Milton Berle, but I figured if I ever became the true Incarnation, all such feelings would drop away like Clark Kent's spectacles. Certainly he was my kind of judge—and a popular choice with the opposition at the same time: Pope Kaufman, the All-American Christian Orthodox Jew, a Tammany Hall Democrat whose law partner was a prominent Republican leader, hard as nails and heart of gold, “radical one day,” as the
New York Post
said of him in a headline story, “reactionary the next,” a natural. This judicious balance: it was his special genius. He could appear both strict and generous, scholarly and worldly, intense and serene, innovative and traditional. He'd even produced a set of twin sons. And smoked exactly two cigars a day.

In the Rosenberg trial, this talent helped him make all the right motions with regard to due process and fair play, while in fact keeping tight control over the development of the case. Whenever Irv Saypol seemed in danger of floundering, Kaufman would pop a telling question at the witness and get the Prosecutor back on the track, but he coolly kept his peace when Bloch was making all the obvious blunders on the other side. Whenever Bloch did get onto something at last and begin to peak, the Judge would deflate him with a blunt, sometimes even derisive, interruption, and Bloch would have to start all over. He knew how to heighten a prosecution moment with a brief recess, how even as a Jew to bring the Spirit of Easter into the courtroom, and how to reduce a rebellious defense attorney to abject silence: “Don't give me any course of instruction as to what is usually done in a courtroom! This is the way I am running this courtroom, and I think I understand the way a courtroom should be run! I don't care to hear anything further from you!” Then there was that day when the Rosenbergs were taking the Fifth on the Communist issue. They were looking bad enough without any help, but upstairs in the same building gangsters like Joe Adonis and Frank Costello were also taking the Fifth before the Kefauver crime-investigation committee, and Kaufman evidently couldn't resist. He interrupted the interrogation, cleared the court, asked the jury to stay, and invited down that old New Hampshire windbag, Senator Tobey. “I'm very glad to be here and meet you,” Tobey said to all of them as Kaufman scrambled down off the bench to greet him. “We could use people like you upstairs.” Who could miss the connection? Another time, when Saypol ran into trouble on a query from Bloch about possible wiretapping, it was Kaufman who got him out of it—“It
is
ridiculous!”—even managing at the same time to remind the jury that whatever the United States Attorney said must,
de fide
, be true, and obscuring the fact that the question was never really answered (of course Bloch was probably right about the wiretap, but nobody wanted this fundamental case to be obscured by a technicality, maybe not even Bloch—besides, Kaufman
liked
wiretaps: thirteen years before, he'd been the first prosecuting attorney in the district ever to use one in a federal case; he'd played it on a small portable phonograph, creating a big stir in the courtroom, even the defendants had crowded around to see how it worked). He was like the director of a play who knows how to boost his actors' egos and give them a sense of participation in the staging and interpretation, while in fact pulling all the strings—a fantastically smooth performance, Bloch himself had to applaud it at the end.

Applause, director, actors, script: yes, it was like—and this thought hit me now like a revelation—
it was like a little morality play for our generation!
During the Hiss case, I had felt like a brash kid among seasoned professionals; now my own generation was coming into its own—and this was (that lecture at Burning Tree was making sense to me at last) our initiation drama, our gateway into History! Or part of it anyway, for the plot was still unfolding. In the larger drama, of which the Rosenberg episode was a single act, I was a principal actor—if not, before the play is ended,
the
principal actor—but within this scene alone, I was more like a kind of stage manager, an assistant director or producer, a presence more felt than seen. This was true even of the trial itself: I felt somehow the author of it—not of the words so much, for these were, in a sense, improvisations, but rather of the
style
of the performances, as though I had through my own public appearances created the audience expectations, set the standards, keyed the rhetoric, crystallized the roles, in order that my generation might witness in dramatic form the fundamental controversy of our time!

Of course, I knew it was foolish to place too much weight on a court record, even as didactic theater, Uncle Sam had already warned me about that. What's missing in the record is the atmosphere of the courtroom: the expressions on faces, gestures, inflections, betrayed emotions—in short, what are elsewhere called acting values. But it could equally well be argued that the court record, like a baseball box score, was even more reliable than the actual trial: some people were better actors than others, and the emotions of a courtroom could often get jurors into such a state they couldn't even hear what was being said. Practiced liars could overwhelm the hardest evidence against them, turn it to their own credit, and reduce a whole courtroom to tears, while simpler folk, accustomed to telling what they thought of as the truth, could get caught in a small exaggeration or personal embarrassment and become so flustered that everything they said afterwards sounded false. Some attorneys blew their best material right at the outset like a premature ejaculation, saving nothing back with which to bring the jury to climax just before they retired for a decision, and so finding themselves getting beaten by an opponent with nothing but nonsense, innuendos, and a superior sense of dramaturgy. Class identifications or hostilities could evoke juror responses completely unrelated to the testimony, well-timed comedy could provoke gratitude or ill-timed comedy shock, and evidence suddenly produced by surprise could obscure the fact, later obvious, that it was worthless. The point of
Night of January 16th
, for example, that Ayn Rand play I was in back in Whittier, was that there was no final conclusion to be drawn, no “right” or “wrong” judgment, the evidence was ambiguous, the testimony contradictory, and each night a jury selected from the audience was invited to render its own verdict. Depending on our various performances, the verdict changed from show to show. I played the part of the District Attorney and prided myself on winning more nights than I lost—one of my most successful roles actually: I was a natural as a prosecutor, could have made a Tom Dewey career out of it. But I would have taken just as much pride in winning for the defense.