Public Burning (12 page)

But, like Justice Douglas on his way to the woods, they have not reckoned with Uncle Sam's resourcefulness and his old-trouper determination that this show
will
go on—he sends for The Man to Send For, the Clean-Up Man, as T
IME
calls him,
A LEGAL MIND & A POLITICAL BRAIN,
Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell. “Get that Court back here, Herb,” he says. “I want this thing now!”

“Won't be easy. There's never been a special term of the Supreme Court just to review a stay granted by one of its own members.”

“Yeah? Well, new occasions teach new duties, boy!” His beard seems to darken and a wart flowers momentarily on his cheek: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion! Find Vinson!
Lean on him!”

“O-okay, I'll do what I can—but he's not one of ours, I don't know if he'll—”

“What, not a Republican, you mean? Hell, neither are Kaufman and Saypol. So what? These guys are professionals, they know the score. Come on, boy, hop to it! This ain't a political campaign, it is a call to arms!” His teeth flash and a silver cigarette holder seems to sprout from between them—he snatches it away and whips it out the window. “I said, shag ass, mister! Put his feet to the fire!
I want what I want when I want it!”

“Y-yes-
SIR!
” The Attorney General wheels around in his red-leather swivel chair and grabs up the phone. Chief Justice Vinson is on vacation like the rest of the Court, but he tracks him down. “Hey, Fred, get everybody back here! You gotta vacate Douglas's goddamn stay! Right now! Today, tomorrow—but quick!”

“Vacate a stay? It's never been done!”

“Yeah, well, the occasion is piled high with you-know-what, and it's about to hit the fan! Uncle Sam's breathing hot down my neck, Fred! It's important in the interests of the administration of criminal justice and in the national interests that this case be brought to a final determination as expeditiously as possible!”

Vinson caves in so fast, Brownell figures Uncle Sam must have got to him first. Justice Hugo Black is dragged, protesting, from his hospital bed, others from crap tables and hunting lodges. Justice Douglas is apprehended in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, heading west. He's snapped back to Washington so fast his feet don't even touch the ground. The mothproof dust covers, laid down a day ago for the summer holidays, are hauled off the furniture by emergency cleaning crews, 350 excited members of the public and press are admitted to the big red-draped air-conditioned chamber, and at twelve noon on Thursday, June 18, the Nine Old Men—reportedly “tense and snappish”—file in under a frieze of Truth holding a mirror up to life and take their seats behind the long dark bench. Lawyers crowd in, FBI agents, some of Herb Brownell's lieutenants, members of the original Saypol prosecuting team, tourists, reporters, and sightseeing foreign dignitaries.

It's a dramatic moment, unique in United States history, but Uncle Sam does not have time to see out the formalities. Around the world, the Phantom has Sam Slick's lean back to the wall. The situation in Korea, for example, is still very bleak, riots are breaking out, there's a new threat of invasions, rumors of nuclear warheads moving into the area, Rhee is as obstreperous as ever, even the Pusan whores are out in the streets bellyaching against the Yanks—biting, as it were, the probang that feeds them—and the Phantom has conjured up a dense fog to hide the North Koreans in their mischief. Undaunted, Uncle Sam sends his forces right into the worst of it. They get cut up, but they hold the line. The hardnosed 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, commanded by an up-and-coming tough-as-nails brigadier general named Westmoreland, is flown in from Japan to round up Rhee's rampaging prisoners, put them back in the barbed-wire stockades, and quell the riots. This is the same bunch of cowboys used to break up the Red riots in the Koje Island P.O.W. camp last year, they take no shit from anybody. Uncle Sam wants the truce negotiations to proceed, he's had it with all this yo-yoing, but the Reds say: no roundup, no peace talks. Sam snorts at the cultural ironies and tells them they'd better get their yaller hunkers back to the goddamn table or he's
really
gonna cream 'em, but he's infuriated with Syngman Rhee just the same,
WHY'D HE DO IT
? the newspapers ask.
IT'S A MISTER RHEE
! Uncle Sam lines up his boys around the world and they let Rhee have it—the barrage of abuse and repudiation is deafening. Rhee, unabashed, responds with a cablegram to the Ashland, Ohio,
Times:
The United States, he says, is being influenced by European countries that “are too far gone toward Communist ideology.” Who the hell does he think is running the world anyway?

In East Berlin the situation is even worse, hopeless in fact, it's a real free-for-all for the Phantom and his T-34 tanks. A few guys throw rocks, West Berlin's Mayor Ernst Reuter declares that it's “the beginning of the end of the East Berlin regime,” President Eisenhower announces “with particular satisfaction” an additional fifty million dollars in economic aid to West Berlin, and some trolley wires are pulled down, but there's not much else that Uncle Sam can do, his own tanks are just too damned far away, and his best stuff is tied down in Korea. Willi Goettling, an unemployed West Berlin housepainter with a wife and two small daughters, is caught by the Russians on the wrong side of the city, accused of being a hired gun of Uncle Sam and “one of the active organizers of provocations and riots in the Soviet sector of Berlin, taking part in the banditlike tumults directed against the organs of power,” and he is taken out and unceremoniously shot. Uncle Sam charges the Phantom with “irresponsible recourse to military action” and lack of imagination. Who's going to remember Willi Goettling twenty years from now? he asks petulantly, but all he gets in reply is what sounds like a distant fiendish chortle.

Stung, Uncle Sam cranks up the Voice of America wattage to stimulate new riots, organizes a demonstration of two hundred thousand hungry workers in front of the National Palace of the “Red Colonel” in Guatemala, has Herb Brownell arrest fifty-five Chinese for deportation to Red China in retaliation against Chairman Mao's hassling of the Roman Catholic Missions there, keeps things boiling in Lithuania, where the Kremlin bosses have already had to order drastic party and government shake-ups, and helps Generalissimo Francisco Franco inaugurate four new hydroelectric power plants in Spain, which amazingly all seem to work. “Intimates,” Sam murmurs, kissing Franco on both plump cheeks and stuffing a hundred million in his field-jacket pockets, “are predestined…!” The Radical Party of Argentina cables President Eisenhower, demanding clemency for the Rosenbergs—President Perón, whose own plump cheeks no doubt tingle in anticipation, promptly arrests seven Radical leaders. From one end of the world to the other, all these kissable men: General Sir George Erskine, for example, arriving in Nairobi and announcing his intention to discredit “this Mau Mau business” everywhere and make it “unfashionable” in the eyes of all likely to come into contact with it. It's a kind of disease, and people must be made to understand that it can easily be fatal. To exemplify this, the British Royal Air Force is given the task of making certain prohibited areas “unwholesome.” In a trial run, a force of 1200 African Kenya Home Guards, supported by British planes and white mercenaries, attacks Mau Mau hideouts in the Aberdare Mountains, and at least thirty of the savages are exterminated by saturation bombing and strafing alone. Smiles Sir George: “By good discipline and common sense, we shall do our duty, distasteful as it may be!”

In New York, however, the iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty continues to vex the American Superhero. He moves the wage dispute directly to Washington, and there are hints of an operation along the lines of the Berlin Airlift if the boats don't get moving again in time for the gathering of the tribe during the atom-spy burnings. And when is that to be? Crowds have been drifting all day through Times Square, but there seems to have been no sense of conviction—it is still scheduled for eleven o'clock tonight, but there is no jostling for front-row seats. Uncle Sam joins Cecil De Mille and Busby Berkeley briefly on the Astor Roof for a cinematic overview of the rebuilt Times Square arena, and gets the image of isolated thunderheads scudding through the Square but without the final massing up of unbroken storm clouds. And some of those thunderheads, he sees, are hostile, threatening tempests of another sort—he assigns Allen Dulles and Edgar Hoover the task of collecting and collating I.D. data from these gathering pro-Rosenberg clemency demonstrations, and sends the Holy Six out on the streets to propagandize against them, try to break them up. The Six—Rabbi William Rosenblum, Father Joseph Moody,
Christian Herald
editor Daniel Poling, former Presidential adviser Sam Rosenman, Notre Dame law dean and mystic Clarence Manion, and “Electric Charlie” Wilson, ex-president of General Electric—have formed a kind of transcendentalist brotherhood with the aims of discrediting the Rosenberg clemency drive, preserving America's Judeo-Christian heritage intact, and laying their own claim to a piece of the exorcisory action. In newspaper ads across the nation recently, they declared:

This campaign has in fact effectively scared a lot of people, but many others of weak faith are still putting their signatures to clemency appeals and turning up in the streets bearing inflammatory placards. The streets of New York and most other great cities are clogging up with them, and a special Clemency Train has this very day brought hundreds of these people to the very precincts of the Supreme Court—most of them are ganged up around the steps of the Court, but some have actually slipped by into the gallery up on the main floor—where now Chief Justice Fred Vinson is rapping the special term to order.

The government's task is a formidable one, in spite of the known sympathies of most of the Justices—the point is, they don't want to set any precedents for slapping each other down. Uncle Sam's proxy is Acting Solicitor Robert L. Stern, dressed impeccably in striped pants and black cutaway coat. The Rosenbergs are represented (if that is the word) by four noisy belligerent outsiders—John Finerty, Dan Marshall, Fyke Farmer, and Emanuel Bloch—whose clothes look like they're been slept in and who don't seem even to know each other. Bob Stern argues that the Rosenbergs have already been allowed too many appeals, the new point is frivolous, further delays would make a mockery of our judicial system, and the stay should be vacated. “The defendants have been convicted of a most terrible crime,” he reminds the Court (two of whom are already starting to doze off), “nothing less than the stealing of the most important weapon in history, and giving it to the Soviet Union. Haven't the Rosenbergs had their full day in court and more? The public's rights and safety are no less precious than the Rosenbergs'. We do not think those rights should be violated any longer!”

The Rosenbergs' lawyers scramble about these points, attempting to blur the sharp edges, cast doubt on the applicability of the various laws, and question the need for such haste and impatience in deciding the issue—at one point, tall loose-jointed Dan Marshall even grabs the counsel stand with both hands and does a fair imitation of a country preacher, though he lacks the radiance of a true Man of God, rocking back and forth and crying out: “I doubt whether even a justice of the peace would call the meanest pimp before the bar on such short notice!'

“Now, now,” scolds the Chief Justice, “don't let your temperature rise!”

But it is cranky old jut-jawed John Finerty—whose connections with the Phantom go back to Tom Mooney, and to Sacco and Vanzetti—who really wakes up the nodding Bench and reveals his team's true colors, or color: he denounces the special term as an insult to the Court and the integrity of Justice Douglas, scathingly accuses Brownell and Vinson of a kind of legalistic conspiracy, attacks the Justice Department for perpetrating along with Judge Kaufman a knowing fraud based on rigged testimony and phony evidence, and caps the whole outrage with a blustering assault on Irving Saypol, the original U.S. prosecutor in the case and one of the most admired men in America: “There never was a more crooked district attorney in New York!” he cries. Justice Tom Clark, himself a former Attorney General and a personal friend of Kaufman, Saypol, and Brownell, is offended by this frontal attack and leans forward to put a stop to it. Even Hugo Black grimaces at Finerty's tirade, but this may only be a gas cramp. “If you lift the stay,” snaps Finerty, his Irish cheeks aflush, “then God save the United States and this honorable Court!” There are gasps in the courtroom at this old reprobate's vain use of the Lord's name, and many are sure they heard him say “dis-honorable Court.”

Argument has been edging toward violence, so Fred Vinson cuts it off and the Nine Old Men retire to their private conference room, where a very hostile atmosphere prevails. Black and Douglas are fit to be tied, and Vinson is not confident he has any of the other three New Dealers with him on this one either. It helps, of course, that they're all browned off at Douglas for playing the devil with their holiday like this, this special term being a disconcerting precedent. On the other hand, the new impeachment threat against Douglas may provoke a show of solidarity—they don't want any precedents set in that direction either. Listening to them wrangle like schoolgirls, Vinson figures he's about had it with this goddamn job. If he doesn't quit soon, it'll kill him. He tells them all to go home and sleep on it, they'll announce their decision whether to vacate the stay or not tomorrow at high noon. That's right, high noon, why the hell not. He makes Burton go out front to pass the word, since he's been drowsing through most of the arguments and so is less riled than most.