Public Burning (14 page)

In short, my conscience was clean—so why had Uncle Sam brought this Rosenberg case up, especially so late in the ballgame? Of course, he'd only mentioned it in passing while washing his balls on the seventh tee, but I had long since learned that with Uncle Sam nothing was mere happenstance, you had to listen to him with every hole in your body. The case itself seemed cut-and-dried: a routine FBI investigation, a sequence of confessions from Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass, leading directly to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They denied all accusations, but then so did Hiss—in fact, their reactions were very similar, high and mighty sometimes, hurt and offended others—you could smell the ham in them. And they had a much more telling witness against them than a fat spooky slob like Whittaker Chambers. David Greenglass was also something of a fat slob, true, and a bit spooky as well, but he was more than that: he was also Ethel's own brother. His story of his recruitment by Julie and Ethel, how he drew up the lens-mold sketches and lists of personnel, passed them on to Harry Gold, how he discussed these things with the Rosenbergs, with little details of family life mixed in, how Julie tried to help him escape—it was all very convincing. The only question remaining really was: who else was in the spy ring besides the Rosenbergs, Greenglasses, Gold, and the Russian Yakovlev? Uncle Sam had wanted maximum pressure to be applied to the Rosenbergs to make them talk, which was the reason Judge Kaufman had given them the death penalty, together with a hint that confessions might soften his heart. No one had to tell Kaufman this, he knew what he had to do, though he'd apparently sent Saypol down to Washington just to make sure. There had been a lot of evidence brought forward over the past two years to support some of the Rosenbergs' minor testimony and try to damage David's credibility as a witness, and having studied the case now, I could perceive a lot of backstage scene-rigging and testimony-shaping by the prosecuting team that deprived the courtroom performances of some of their authenticity and power, but there was no shaking off the basic conviction: the Rosenbergs were guilty as hell. So why—?

The “Yeas and Nays” bell rang. I leapt to my feet, hauled on my jacket, and dashed out the door. I took the subway car over to the Capitol, arriving breathlessly in the middle of the roll call. “Jesus, Dick, where the goddamn hell ya been?” whined Knowland through clenched teeth. I rushed forward to relieve Purtell and count the vote: it was another tie, this time 41 to 41. Once again I cast the tie-breaker, but then into the Chamber came Dennis Chavez, Democrat from New Mexico: “Mr. President, ah, due to unavoidable circumstances…” That did it. All this effort for nothing, I thought. I felt weak from the run over, sweaty—I realized I'd forgotten to have lunch; mustn't let supper go by, I could make myself sick. Willis Robertson, yellow-dog Democrat from Virginia, announced flatly, almost sadly, that he wished to speak for three minutes on the dubious merits of the issue, and then he would call for a vote on the conference report itself and have it simply voted up, eh, or down…that is, unless the distinguished Senator from California wished to postpone a vote on the report until three p.m. Monday, as the Democrats had originally requested.

I watched the collapse set in on Knowland's big florid face. It was like an old fortress turning to putty. There was nothing more that I could do. He rose slowly, heavily, like a tired old walrus, and made one last stand: all right, goddamn it, not till Monday then—but two p.m., not three p.m. Knowland probably thought the Democrats would let him have that point to save his pride on this, his maiden sally as Leader, but if so, he should have known better. Chavez in fact suggested they delay the vote until Tuesday. Knowland, crashing to defeat, agreed to hold the vote no sooner than three p.m. Monday. Johnson, grinning like a possum, nodded, and it was all over. Monday!—it seemed light years away! I was eager now to get back to my office and get some of my thoughts down on index cards before I forgot them—not just about the Rosenbergs and their goddamned fourteenth anniversary either: I remembered that I'd had an important thought about the 1954 campaign tactics that had already slipped my mind, and another about justice and my generation. And then, as I banged the ivory gavel down, terminating the exercise and giving the Democrats their victory, it suddenly occurred to me: ivory was the traditional gift for fourteenth wedding anniversaries! The trouble with me, I thought, is that I'm too attentive, I see things too clearly. One could well envy old boozers like Bill.

I took the elevator down to the subway, jammed in with the others on their way to their offices and homes, but once below decided against riding the subway car—it was crowded and I saw I might have to sit facing the rear of the car, something I always hated to do. It even made me motion-sick sometimes, short a ride as it was. Also, they were squeezing as many as sixteen to eighteen on the damned thing, and I hated to sit that close to anybody, especially perspiring as I was now, so I set out on foot on the walkway beside the monorail, glancing back over my shoulder from time to time, mindful that John Bricker had nearly got assassinated down here five or six years ago. It was windy in the tunnel, it was always windy in here, but it seemed windier than usual today, threatening, almost as bad as it was out at Burning Tree Sunday. The Burning Tree Golf Club was also known on Capitol Hill as the Smouldering Stump, but I now thought of it as the Burning Bush because it was there, during the past few months, where Uncle Sam had most often dropped his mask and talked with me directly about such things as statecraft and incarnation theory, rules for the Community of God, the meaning of the sacred in modern society and the source of the Phantom's magical strength, the uses of rhetoric and ritual, and the hierology of free enterprise, football, revival meetings, five-card stud, motion pictures, war, and the sales pitch. And it was there last Sunday, in the comparative seclusion of the seventh tee, that he slipped out of his duffer's disguise, hit a hole in one, and on the way over to rinse off his balls, asked me what I thought about the Rosenberg case.

In the aftershock of Uncle Sam's transmutation, it is difficult even to hear a question, much less to grasp or answer it. One is struck by a kind of inner thunder, a loss not so much of vision as of the coordinates of vision, and a loosening of all the limbs as though in sympathy with the dissolution of the features of Uncle Sam's current Incarnation. I say he went over to rinse off his balls and asked me about the Rosenbergs—but perhaps he had asked me long before, while watching his drive arc distantly toward the flag on the sixth green, for example, or even during the backswing, somewhere in that timeless era between the first snap and crackle of metamorphosis, Ike's blue eyes flashing me a glance full of fear and trembling as the moment grew in him, and my own slow recovery from the awesome dazzle of this miraculous transubstantiation. My senses only began to pull together and function again, as it happened, while watching his large pale freckled hands plucking the little white balls, gleaming wet, out of the suds and popping them into the gray folds of the towel: at that moment it came to me that Uncle Sam, freshly shazammed out of the fretful old General, had just whipped out a five-iron, smacked the ball four hundred yards to the green, vacated the tee like a priest his altar, and somewhere along the way, asked me my opinion on the atom spies.

I realized he was putting me on the spot, testing me, and I didn't know quite what to answer. Did it have something to do with Korea? Stalin? My Checkers speech? American jurisprudence? Alger Hiss? I raked my mind for some clue to his drift. He was leaning against a bench, tossing the shiny white balls up in the air, juggling them two, three, seven…thirteen at a time. His white cuffs flashed in the sunlight like signal flags. Of course, I expected to be tested like this, expected it and welcomed it, knew it to be part of the sacred life, something Uncle Sam had to do to protect his powers. And I trusted him—he'd never used kid gloves on me, but he'd never been unkind to me either, I was pretty sure he liked me—I trusted him and was eager to please him. Maybe he only wants to be reassured, I thought.

I was glad about the way the case turned out, of course, but he knew this already. After all, having gone out on a limb about it back in '49, I couldn't help but be flattered when J. Edgar Hoover actually found a spy ring and busted it. But past that, I had to admit, I didn't know too much about the case. The trouble was, by the time it came up in '51, I had begun to catch fleeting glimpses of Uncle Sam's blue coattails and was busy chasing them, and so I had pretty much stayed out of Hoover's and Saypol's way. Oh, I knew well enough what the Big Issue was, my whole political career had been built on it. And I knew, of course, that the Rosenbergs were part of it, an important part: Edgar had called it “the Crime of the Century” in the
Reader's Digest
, and I'd gone along with that, even if I did think he should have given equal billing to the perjury of Alger Hiss. And even though I didn't follow the details—about all I knew for sure was that Fuchs had led the FBI to his American courier Harry Gold who had led them to Ethel Rosenberg's brother David Greenglass who subsequently had turned state's evidence against the Rosenbergs (Morton Sobell fitted in there somewhere—maybe he was the one who tore the Jell-0 box)—I did admire Irving Saypol's dynamic, intransigently hostile prosecution of the case, applauded the breadth of Judge Kaufman's vision and courage, and was properly relieved when the Supreme Court, still dangerously New Deal-tainted, refused to review the case. On the other hand, let me say—and I don't mind being controversial on this subject—I was a little sorry that two people, a father and mother of two little boys, had to die. I'm always sorry when people have to die, my mother taught me this. Especially women and children. But how much of the world's sadness can any one man handle, no matter how sensitive he is? I had troubles of my own, and I knew that Uncle Sam would do what was right and necessary; just stay on the reservation, keep the faith, do your own job well, get your rhetoric ready, and don't ask too many irrelevant questions: that seemed the best policy.

But maybe it was not. Maybe I had not done enough. I fussed about, choosing a ball for teeing up, worried about this. Everything was remarkably green, the sky was deep blue, the balls a blinding white: my senses were still on edge from the transmutation. Uncle Sam was now balancing a putter on his sharp thin nose while juggling the golf balls. The empty tee awaited me: the novice called upon to show what he knows. I'd built my reputation on the thoroughness with which I'd pursued the Hiss case, after all, and maybe I'd gone soft on this one, lost some of my fabled diligence and so part of my image as well, perhaps this was the thrust of Uncle Sam's question now. He somehow had his old plug hat up on top of the putter and was twirling it around. His playfulness could be deceptive. Don't take chances, I thought—stick with what you know. I wasn't sure whether or not the actual conspiracy charge had been proven, but let's be frank about it, it was just a technicality anyway—mainly because of the statute of limitation, I supposed, and the fact that in these espionage cases there were rarely two witnesses to anything. They were being tried in fact for treason, never mind what the Constitution might say, which was anyway written a long time ago—and on that charge, J. Edgar Hoover's word was as good as a conviction.

“Well,” I said finally, poking around bravely in my golf bag, “well, I believe they're, uh, probably guilty.”

Uncle Sam blinked in amazement, gathering in the balls with one big hand, catching the putter and hat as they fell with the other.
“Guilty!”
he roared, his chinwhiskers bristling. I realized, glancing away, pretending to study the distant green, that Abraham Lincoln, whom I'd always admired, was probably the most terrifying man of his age. “Well, hell, yes, they're guilty!”

I knew by his reaction I must be miles off the mark, but my answer still made sense to me and I resented what seemed like some kind of entrapment. Instinctively, I counterattacked: “Well, naturally, I haven't had ample opportunity to study the transcripts carefully, but I, uh, from what I've seen of them, the case has not been proven—”

“The case!” he snorted incredulously. “Proven! Gawdamighty, you do take the rag off the bush, boy!”

I stared miserably into my golf bag while he railed at me. Not only was I giving all the wrong goddamn answers, I was also having trouble with my drives. I do not believe that some men are just naturally cool, courageous, and decisive in handling crisis situations, while others are not. I chose a number two wood for a change. I knew this was a mistake and put it back. “There…there was no hard evidence,” I said, pressing on desperately. “And since the Rosenbergs refused to cooperate, all we had left really was the brother's story!” I wasn't sure this was true. I'd read it somewhere. I thought: there is less than a 50 percent chance that what I'm doing will help me. “And to get
that
, we'd had to make this deal with him and his wife which—”

“So all that courtroom splutteration was a frame-up,” he blustered—he was in a ferocious state, “what trial isn't?”

“Wait, that's not what I meant!” I protested. “Irving Saypol's a fine trial lawyer!” I wished I could keep my mouth shut. But I'd always admired Saypol, the greatest of the anti-Communist trial lawyers, though I knew he was mean and ornery with a mind about as broad as a two-by-four, and a Tammany Democrat to boot. I pulled out my driver, swished it around a little. My hands were so sweaty it nearly slipped right out. “I don't think he'd ever—”

“Rig a prosecution?” Uncle Sam laughed sourly. I knew better, of course, I was being a fool. “Hell,
all
courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a baldface lie, ain't that so? Moonshine! Chicanery! The ole gum game! Like history itself—all more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation's seen since the Gold Rush—the fatal slantindicular futility of Fact! Appearances, my boy, appearances! Practical politics consists in ignorin' facts!
Opinion
ultimately governs the world!”