Public Burning (4 page)

But then suddenly Scotland Yard of Great Britain arrests a high-domed bespectacled atomic scientist named Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, and Fuchs confirms the darkest of Patriot visions: while working on the Manhattan Project in New York and Los Alamos,
he stole atomic secrets for the Russians!
It's all true! As
Newsweek
says: “…the fantastic is beginning to be accepted as fact. There are men like Fuchs and Hiss!” Fuchs describes his U.S. contact as a man “from 40 to 45 years of age, possibly five feet ten inches tall, broad build,” and the FBI promptly arrests a soft little five-foot-six Russian immigrant ten vears younger than that named Harry Gold, who quickly acknowledges that he is Dr. Fuchs's mystery man. His family is amazed by this confession of a romantic double life, since Harry, who likes to amuse himself through the long nights with a little parlor baseball game played with a deck of cards, has never really left home. T
IME
say:

While Harry embroiders on his saga and crystal-balls the American League pennant race for his captors, other agents interrogate a young ex-GI, a ne'er-do-well ghetto Jew and ex-Commie (pieces all falling into place), suspected of stealing uranium and other valuables during his days as a mechanic at Los Alamos. He doesn't want to talk about the thefts, but he
is
willing, when invited, to say he spied for the Russians. In prison, Harry Gold confers with the FBI and then tells his lawyer that he thinks there's going to be something extra about a GI in Albuquerque: “Ah… This event, as I said, was—I'm not being—I'm being deadly serious when I say it was an extra added attraction. I use the term, as I said, not in any joking manner—because this is no joking matter—but simply because I believe it best describes the affair… Yakovlev told me that…after I had seen Klaus Fuchs I was to see another man. I don't remember the name of the street. We, uh, I think that their principal talk…concerned the difficulty of getting Jewish food, delicatessen, in a place like Albuquerque and a mention by the man that his family or possibly her family regularly sent them packages including salami… Yakovlev said we could forget all about him…apparently the information received had not been of very much consequence at all…” He doesn't remember the GI's name, some kind of mental block, but a couple of days later, after David Greenglass has been formally arrested, it comes to him: David Greenglass. Also, perhaps he was wrong about what Yakovlev said, probably. David is very contrite. He says his sister Ethel and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, made him do it. They had a kind of power over him. Harry Gold had forgotten about this connection, but with the FBI's help he begins to remember. Maybe that's who was sending the salami.

The net goes out and draws in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, described by J. Edgar Hoover in one of his daily press releases as “important links in the Soviet espionage apparatus”—Rosenberg, Hoover declares the day he arrests him, had “aggressively sought ways and means to secretly conspire with the Soviet Government to the detriment of his own country!” Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass to Rosenberg—quadruple play!—and now what next? Praise pours in. “No finer body of men in all of the world,” says a new federal judge. The FBI is getting its biggest headlines since the vintage years of the 1930s, and the Boss is exultant. He's reminded of a recurrent dream in which he's pulling on a kind of rope coming out of the ground, something like a navel-string, and the more he pulls out, the more there is. “We're going to need a new building, Clyde,” he titters, and cracks open a celebrative bottle of Jack Daniel's. Walter Winchell invites him out to dinner at the Stork Club. People smile wherever he goes. Cabdrivers give him racing tips. Waiters bow. The cigarette girl thanks him from the bottom of her heart: “We're all praying for you, sir!” “You do that, miss,” he replies gravely. “Suppose
every
American spent a little time each day, less than the time demanded by the Communists, in studying the Bible and the basic documents of American history, government, and culture? The result would be a new America, vigilant, strong, but ever humble in the service of God! All we need is faith, miss,
real faith!”
She swoons at his feet. As he steps around her, he thinks: This is a lot better than being a Presbyterian minister, I'm glad I changed my mind about that, after all. Only one momentary snag spoils an otherwise perfect evening: the Rosenbergs don't seem to know what everybody is talking about. But they give themselves away: they keep insisting on their “rights.” Well, remind them they can rightfully get the chair for this, see what that does for their memory.

Meanwhile, former friends and ex-classmates of Rosenberg are tailed and questioned. Not much happens until it's discovered that one of them, a radar man named Morton Sobell, has apparently whipped off to Mexico in a wild blue funk: aha. Can't risk extraditing him, he might slip behind the Iron Curtain before those dumb greasers have got the papers processed, a goon squad has to be used. A bit irregular maybe, but when you're up against the Phantom, the rulebook goes out the window. Sobell is snatched and dragged, kicking and screaming like Jimmy Cagney in
Angels with Dirty Faces
(they have to bludgeon the
hijo de puta
to keep him in line), across the Rio Grande in the dead of the night to Laredo, where he's delivered to a waiting G-man—“Knock knock!”
Eh? Who dere?
“Grassy!”
Grassy? Grassy quién?
“Grassy-ass, amigos! Mooch-ass grassy-ass!”
Ha ha, de nada, jefe!

Smell him maybe, but you can't hear him: he's as adamantly uncooperative as the Rosenbergs—but no more kid gloves, no more time for pussyfooting, for Sam Slick is suddenly in a pot of trouble himself, more hogs than even he can boil: not only has the Phantom got Eastern Europe, China, veto power in the U.N., and the atomic bomb, but on the 24th day of June, 1950, precisely at two p.m. in the middle of Uncle Sam's Big Roundup, hot war has broken out in Korea! “Yowee! take thy beak from out my heart!” yelps Uncle Sam. “Blow the strumpet to arms! Strike up the band! We gotta raise the beacon-light o' triumph, snouse the citadel of the aggressor, and press onward to liberty and the Injun Ocean before that bluebellied bloodsuckin' scalawag snatches us bald-headed! Whoo-oop! Hang onto yore hats, boys, we're ridin' a tiger!”

Hastily, the Seventh Fleet hightails it out of Pearl Harbor, a trial date is set, troops are rushed to Korea. Greenglass and Gold are lodged together on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison in New York, where they can help stimulate each other's recall powers. The Rosenbergs are separated for, obversely, the same reason. An ad appears in
The New York Times:
“From now on, let us make no mistake about it: the war is on, the chips are down. Those among us who defend Russia or Communism are enemies of freedom and traitors to the United Nations and the United States. American soldiers are dying…every man's house will be in a target area before this ends!” The Yankee Peddler, turning to meet this new challenge in Asia, is knocked reeling—invading North Koreans cross the 38th Parallel and roll south; Americans land at Inchon, cross the 38th Parallel, and roll north; the Chinese People's Volunteers cross the Manchurian border and roll south—and by the time the clerk in Room 110 of the Foley Square Courthouse in New York City is ready to step forward on Tuesday morning, March 6, 1951, to call out the case of “the United States
versus
Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell, et al.,” the whole scene is in great disarray, Uncle Sam doesn't know whether he's coming or going, the Mongol hordes of Red China have overrun Tibet as well as Korea and are pressing out in all directions like a bursting waterbag, the Russians are arrogantly lighting up the sky with atomic-bomb tests, the President and his General are at loggerheads, and Nightmare Alley—the escape route out of the Korean hills to the south—is littered with frozen American dead. “We have met the enemy,” cries Uncle Sam, gasping for breath, “and bile me fer a seahorse if I wouldn't ruther crawl into a nest o' wildcats, heels foremost, than be cotched alone in the nighttime with one o' them heathen buggers again!” T
IME'S
Mother Luce, who, perhaps inspired by the early successes, has been urging her son to push the idea of living with perpetual war as part of the American Way of Life, now writes despondently:

As the brightly badged bailiff enters from the Judge's chambers and faces the packed courtroom in Foley Square, T
IME'S
visionary kid brother is declaring: “L
IFE
sees no choice but to acknowledge the existence of war with Red China and to set about its defeat, in full awareness that this course will probably involve war with the Soviet Union as well!” Work on the H-bomb proceeds feverishly, but there are fears the Russians may have stolen that one before it's even been invented. Joe McCarthy, the Fighting Marine, demands that General MacArthur, who is widely reported to be “the greatest man alive,” be given the discretionary authority in Asia for “speedy action of the roughest and toughest kind of which we are capable!” The bailiff pounds his knuckled fist on the door three times and calls out:
“Everybody please rise!”
There's a scraping of chairs, a scuffling of feet, the Strategic Air Command is put on alert, the Communist program for world domination is released by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A
New York Times
headline announces:
DANGER OF ATOM BOMB ATTACK IS GREATEST IN PERIOD UP TO THIS FALL
! The Judge enters—a ripple of surprise: Uncle Sam has chosen for his Easter Trial little Irving Kaufman, the Boy Judge, a stubby Park Avenue Jew and Tammany Hall Democrat who looks a little like a groundhog himself with his plastered-down hair, thick bumpy nose, and damp beady eyes. Old-time court buffs, however, glance at each other and wink knowingly. Not only are they great admirers of the Boy Judge's fine voice and his activist take-no-shit style of conducting a trial, but they know something most other people in the courtroom don't: that Irving Kaufman's own wife is a Rosenberg! They also know that Irving's an orphan, and though a Jew, a whizkid law-school graduate of Fordham University, the Roman Catholic farm for FBI agents (his classmates called him Pope Kaufman after he aced Christian Doctrine with a 99); that he was once a shrewd prosecutor, one of the original “Foley Squareheads,” an admiring student of the tough-fisted tactics of the Fighting D.A. Tom Dewey, and the first prosecuting attorney in the district to use a wiretap as a weapon in a federal prosecution; and that when his appointment, sponsored by Carmine DeSapio, to become the youngest federal judge in the country was held up eighteen months ago, it was J. Edgar Hoover himself who came to the rescue. He mounts the steps to the bench, dragging his robes behind him, and stands there, peering over the top like Kilroy, while the court clerk announces that the court is now in session:
IF SOVIETS START WAR, ATOMIC BOMB ATTACK EXPECTED ON NEW YORK FIRST
, says the
Journal-American
. “All ye having business before this Court, come forward and ye shall be heard!” Julius and Ethel glance at each other, GIs lose another hill in Korea, and East Berlin policemen fire openly on U.S. Army sightseeing buses. The Russians are said to be massing troops on the Manchurian border. “God bless the United States of America!” cries the clerk. “Nobody will have to run if H-bombs start detonating. A big black cloud full of radioactive particles will get you even if…you happen to be browsing around the bottom of an abandoned lead mine!” Behind the Courthouse on Duane Street, the bells of St. Andrew's Church are striking the half hour.
“God bless this Honorable Court!”
There are fervent whispers of “Amen!” in the crowded courtroom. The Judge climbs up into the big leather chair and sits down. Schoolchildren scramble under their desks in an atom bomb drill, and an entire Yank company is bogged down in a Korean rice paddy. “The District Attorney moves the case for trial,” says the Prosecutor gravely, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses on his long nose, “and is ready to proceed.” He glances severely at the suspects who sit stiffly in their chairs.
ATOM BOMB SHELTERS FOR CITY AT COST OF
$450,000,000
URGED
.

If the choice of Judge is somewhat unexpected, the choice of Prosecutor is not: though a Tammany Hall ethnic like the Judge, Irving Saypol is not only big in the Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, and Knights of Pythias, he is also, as the National Poet Laureate says: “the nation's number / one legal hunter of top / communists.” Devious, hardboiled, fast on his feet, he's a tough man to beat. This, however, is the most critical case of Irving Saypol's career. American casualties in Korea are approaching the one-hundred-thousand mark when he rises, tall, hard, and graying, to make his opening statement. There are fears of imminent war everywhere in Europe. He shuffles his thick sheaf of papers, smooths down the pocket flap on his double-breasted suit jacket. Irving Saypol is a sonuvabitch at gin rummy, but does he hold the cards? The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives warns that a third world war may be just around the corner. Julius Rosenberg drums on the counsel table with long nervous fingers. President Truman calls on all police officers and citizens to be watchful for spies, saboteurs, and subversive activities. Saypol's gaggle of assistants and FBI investigators huddle close together, watching their man.
TENSION IS GRAVER THAN IN NOVEMBER, MARSHALL'S BELIEF
. Ethel Rosenberg edges forward on her chair, little worry lines crossing her face, as she struggles to hear Prosecutor Saypol's muffled low-key delivery: in soft flat tones he is accusing her of “the most serious crime which can be committed against the people of this country.” Morton Sobell strokes his jaw, licks his lips, wrinkles his nose, confers nervously with his lawyers. David Greenglass and Harry Gold come down from the Tombs and, assisted by David's wife, Ruth, confess to spying, perjury, conspiracy, and the lot, and then the Greenglasses say the Rosenbergs were behind it all. Twenty other witnesses corroborate minor details of their story—including Liz Bentley the Red Spy Queen, who adds a bit of swish and dash to the proceedings. Julius and Ethel take the stand and say it isn't so. When they're asked if they're Communists, though, they duck behind the Fifth Amendment. Morton Sobell, who has been largely ignored in the testimony, figures they must have forgotten about him and keeps his mouth shut. The members of the jury, mostly accountants and auditors, retire and tote up the witness score: 23 to 2 with 1 abstention. They return with a guilty verdict for all three, and the Judge says: “My own opinion is that your verdict is a correct verdict…. The thought that citizens of our country would lend themselves to destruction of their own country by the most destructive weapon known to man is so shocking that I can't find words to describe this loathsome offense!
God bless you all!”
He goes off to the Park Avenue Synagogue to pray and sneak a quick American cheese sandwich. T
IME
say: