Public Burning (5 page)

it
was a
sickening and
to americans almost
incredible history of men
so fanatical that they would destroy
their own countries & col
leagues to serve a
treacherous
utopi
a

The Free Nations of the World, bracing for the holocaust, are fragmented and exhausted. Even sturdy little Judge Kaufman seems suddenly drawn and haggard, aged past his years, as he emerges from the synagogue, mounts the three steps to the bench, and in a hoarse faint voice charged with repugnance and something bordering on panic, tells the packed galleries: “These defendants 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! I feel that I must pass such sentence upon the principals in this diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation, which will demonstrate with finality that this nation's security must remain inviolate!” This is true; the nation assents: “Wickedness must be humbled and left without remnant!” The tumult of the cries of the common people resounds in the Courthouse at Foley Square.
“No survivor shall remain of the Sons of Darkness!”
Julius sways slowly back and forth on the balls of his feet; Ethel's right hand is clasped in a white-knuckled grip on the chair before her. It is High Noon, and the bells of St. Andrew's are tolling deep vibrating peals, as Judge Irving Kaufman turns to the atom spies standing mutely before him.
“Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed!”
the Boy Judge rasps grimly, stretching forward so as to be able to see over the top of the high bench, and shouting now over the clanging bells:

The Sons of Light fall to their knees: “O Lord, how long shall we cry, and thou wilt not hear?” Behind the fading echoes of the noontime bells can be heard the distant evil laughter of the Phantom. The whole world seems to be falling down, imploding upon Room 110 of the Foley Square Courthouse! But then Judge Kaufman gathers up his strength and says: “I have deliberated! It is not in
my
power, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to forgive you—only the Lord can find mercy for what you have done! The sentence of the Court upon Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is that, for their crime,
they are sentenced to death!”
And then Uncle Sam says: “Those who have cast their lot with me shall come to dominion! Those who have cast it with the Phantom shall get their ass stacked!” And then the people say: “Bless Uncle Sam and all His unerring works!” And then Julius turns to Ethel and sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It's as though a great weight has been lifted from the courtroom.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory!”
They all join in. All except Morton Sobell, ever the spoilsport, now in a deep sulk over being sentenced to thirty years in Alcatraz.
“Glory, glory, hallelujah!”
At the conclusion of which, Rabbi William Rosenblum of New York's Temple Israel, soon to enter History as the first of the Holy Six, steps forward and delivers a “Worse Than Murder” sermon, declaring that the death sentence would be applauded by all decent Americans…

The Boy Judge accepts the many honors due him, gives his wife and J. Edgar Hoover a hug, then goes fishing off Palm Beach with Thomas Dodd, leans back, lights a cigar, and while the rest of the nation settles back to await the inevitable finale, lands a five-foot wahoo….

PART ONE: WEDNESDAY-THURSDAY

1
.

President Eisenhower's News Conference

I was with the President at his news conference that Wednesday morning when the maverick Supreme Court Justice William Douglas dropped his bombshell in the Rosenberg case. Everything had been proceeding according to plan, the appeals had been exhausted, the Rosenbergs were due to be executed the next night, and Eisenhower had called the news conference the day before to confirm the details and remind the nation: “I think I am as implacable a foe of the Communistic theory as there is in this world!” The General had been submitting himself to these confrontations at the rate of nearly three a month since taking office in January, and this worried me. They exercised a visible drain on his powers, he seemed almost to deflate, to simplify, from beginning to end, and from one news conference to the next. As a precaution, we had begun weighing him—down to 180 already—but I didn't need medical proofs, I could see for myself. He won't last, I thought. Not at this rate. Can the Phantom see this? Am I ready, if it comes to that?

The President was talking now about the so-called book-burning scandal—Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's right-hand man and one of the guys who had helped Irving Saypol send the Rosenbergs to the Death House in the first place, had been flying around Europe with his buddy G. David Schine, purging U.S. libraries there of what they considered dangerous authors—people like Howard Fast, Mrs. Clifton Fadiman, Theodore White, Bert Andrews, Dashiell Hammett—and yukking it up in their peejays with hotel clerks and cub reporters. Foster Dulles had had to admit that as a result somebody over there had actually set fire to eleven of the damned books, and now the press was in an uproar about it. The President was clearly confused on this issue. This was because, except for the odd western, he'd never read books, and so respected them more than he ought. Even the westerns were just part of the exercises associated with the reinforcement of his superpowers—he usually skipped past all the technicalities about such things as horse-breeding, trial procedures, and prospecting, all the interesting parts. As for the book-burners themselves, well, Roy's devices were crude maybe, but after all they were also consistent, just like his courtroom prosecutions and his cloak-and-dagger work for McCarthy's committee. Roy was smart and close to the hot center, but like Joe, he lacked real cunning. This was ironical because this is just what they were always accused of. They looked mean and shrewd—but they always outreached themselves. I warned Joe about this three years ago, but he wouldn't listen, he was too excited. In the end, through excess and discredit, they served the Phantom. Risks of the holy encounter. Well, a Jew, a Catholic—maybe they lacked certain defenses, being spiritual outsiders, not quite true full-blooded Americans—too fearful of being misunderstood, of being victimized. Probably. Also Joe was piling up a lot of dough through privileged information—that was okay, but you couldn't do that and be a crusader, too.

The President was saying: “By no means am I talking, when I talk about books or the right of dissemination of knowledge, am I talking about any document, or any other kind of thing that attempts to persuade, or propagandize America into Communism, so manifestly, I am not talking about that kind of thing when I talk about free access to knowledge.”

His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism—he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense. I knew I still had much to learn. People still took me for a carnival barker, a used-car salesman, a fast-buck lawyer—I was still too fluent, too intense, too logical. I had to study this awkward confusion, this easy stupid grin, this casual good-natured gruffness that blunted all the questions. It angered me that Eisenhower had seemed to come by all this naturally. He'd never had to study for anything, not even war. Who else in all history had ever become the world's greatest living military hero without so much as firing a shot or suffering a wound, without so much as a field command, a single battle, even five minutes of real combat? I was no hero, but at least I'd got sent to the goddamn South Pacific and had had a pretty frantic month on Bougainville, while the nearest Ike had ever got to real battle was the White House Egg Roll this year. He was a lucky man. They all said this, it was true. It all seemed to fall in his lap. How could you imitate something like that? I felt cheated. I'd been studying all my life, and I still wasn't there. I worried that I'd never learn enough, worried that Uncle Sam would never use me, and then worried about the worrying. Eisenhower, damn him, never worried at all.

Maybe inquiry, self-consciousness, impeded the process. Maybe Uncle Sam needed vacuity for an easy passage. Certainly, the President never risked clogging the mechanism with idle curiosities of the intellect. He'd had to lean all his life on his little brother Milton whenever it came to thinking (which was something of a closet problem for the Republican Party, Milton having rubbed shoulders with old Henry Wallace during the New Deal days), and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind. The only TV program he was known to watch was “The Fred Waring Show,” which he took to be a classical-music program. He sometimes liked to take in a movie in the White House basement, but generally snored through them,
High Noon
being one of the few that seemed to keep him awake. More or less awake: he tended to doze off during the kissing scenes (did he resent it that the wife was a Quaker?), then would wake up snorting: “What time is it?”—meaning, Is it noon yet? There was a motto inscribed on a small black piece of wood on his desk,
SUAVITER IN MODO FORTITER IN RE
, which he thought was Spanish and pronounced like a Texan. Of course, it was true, he had taken up painting of late, and the room across the hall from his bedroom, I was told, had even been converted into a studio, but other people generally drew the pictures and he just filled in the colors—he was always lamenting that he knew nothing about the chemistry of paints, next to nothing about anatomy (he would wink slyly over my head at some crony or other), and draftsmanship was the one subject that nearly got him flunked out of West Point. He was happiest with eight or ten buddies, broiling steaks and roasting corn in their husks on the grill up in the solarium on the White House roof, or else having some old cronies over for a stag dinner of pheasant in the State Dining Room, then sitting around in a circle in his oval study after, talking about fishing or women or war.

I was not included in these parties. He didn't really like me. I was a “politician.” American adversary politics, the kind I knew how to fight and fight well, was nothing better than a childish gutter-brawl to Eisenhower: “If it takes that kind of foolishness to get elected, let them find someone else for the job!” Yet it was I, not he, who had whipped Adlai Stevenson last fall—Eisenhower won the election, because he couldn't help it; but it was I who beat the other guy. Slogans of his like “Heart, Determination, and Productivity” did no harm—indeed they put people to sleep, and in this day of the hovering Bomb we could all be grateful for that—but people don't vote
for
things, they vote
against
them, take it from W. C. Fields, and when they went to the polls it was my K
₁
C
₃
formula they remembered, scrawling their X's against “Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls.” (If some people were reminded of the old Klan slogan “Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics,” it was not necessarily an accident; Eisenhower wasn't the only campaigner who knew how to stir up a little useful nostalgia for the primitive and virtuous village life of the past.) Ike had come home from his imperial life abroad, picked up the cross, and launched his “Great Crusade,” but I was the poor sonuvabitch who had had to get down in the ditches and fight the Turks. He seemed to think there was something shameful about this, about being a shameless politician, and always gazed at me as though he saw shit on my face. Yet at the same time he expected me to keep the politicians in Congress in line and got annoyed with me when they deserted him to cater to the home-town vote. His program over on the Hill was faltering. Even his Defense Department reorganization bill was under attack—and if a General didn't know about defense, then what the hell was he good for? That “bunch of clowns” in Congress was concentrating on headline-grabbing investigations instead of constructive legislation, as he liked to call it, something which amazed and confounded this Living Legend—a man rich from birth astonished by thieves. And somehow all this was my fault. He maybe even thought I was betraying him. He was a Superhero, wasn't he? Then why weren't they doing what he asked them to do? Somebody must be messing with the message on its way over there. Thus, he didn't even understand his own role. In a real sense,
I
was the old man,
he
the boy. Even Stevenson saw this.

This is an irony I have learned to live with. Old men, liking me, tended to make the paradoxical assumption that I could win votes among the young and women voters, the province of happy-go-lucky studs like Eisenhower—just as it had been my experience, and not Ike's, that had kept our Party's professionals, the old boys, from bolting the ticket last fall. They had made the obvious surface choices at the Convention last summer: Eisenhower was the candidate of the Eastern Establishment, so a Westerner was needed for balance. Eisenhower was old and easy-going and had lived much of his life abroad, he needed a sidekick who was, as Herb Brownell described me, “a young aggressive fellow who knew the domestic issues—the President could be presented to the country as one who would stand up against the Communists in the international sphere, and Nixon would lead the fight in the discussion of the domestic issues.”