Public Burning (38 page)

Now, in the Cabinet meeting, in fact, they had started talking about Times Square. I didn't know how they'd got there, it was just the way these meetings went. Sinclair Weeks was complaining about the shambles up there. I tried to tune into this because I knew that a man was at his best in a crisis when he was thinking not of himself but of the problem at hand. Weeks's problem at hand was that his son was getting married tonight as part of Uncle Sam's in-depth campaign to reaffirm the social order in the face of the Phantom's disruptions, and he was therefore quite naturally distressed about what was going on: could we hold the stage or couldn't we? We'd all complimented Weeks on this marriage tactic right after the prayer this morning, and I'd wished for a moment that I'd had a daughter old enough to give myself. Weeks was bald-headed like a lot of guys around this table.
LIFE
had said it: “Ike likes them balding.” Benson. Brownell. Humphrey—the first time the General saw George, he threw his arm around his shoulder and said: “I see you part your hair the same way I do!” He'd never greeted me that way. I sat between Brownell and Humphrey at the Cabinet table, feeling like the Hairy Ape. I ran my hand through my thick hair, tracing the scar there and wondering: What is it suddenly about baldness? That image of Bob Taft's glowing pate as he turned to walk away from me yesterday in the Capitol flashed to mind. This was something all recent Presidential candidates had in common, I realized, even Adlai. Some personal vanity on Uncle Sam's part? Or did it make the transformation easier somehow? It didn't matter, Uncle Sam surely knew that I'd pluck it all out if it came to that. Weeks's son, of course, was not alone in this endeavor tonight—literally thousands of America's sons and daughters had been pledged to this nationwide ritual of sanctification, including the son of a deceased Republican Congressman, who was marrying the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller himself.

“Thank God for our young people!” I said, and Eisenhower said: “Amen to
that!”

“Say, Dick, what the hell did you do to your nose?” asked Charlie Wilson, uncrossing his eyes long enough to get me in focus.

“I, uh, some demonstrators outside, they had picket staves, and, it, uh, it's nothing…”

Eisenhower took notice then for the first time and I thought I was about to pick up a few points, but then Cabot Lodge leaned forward and said he deplored “the flood of propaganda instead of factual information about this Rosenberg case,” complaining that left-wing groups all over the world were distorting the facts and arousing a lot of hostility toward the United States, even building it up into a case of official anti-Semitism. Why weren't we making better use of the Voice of America? Of course, Lodge was under a lot of pressure about this in the U.N. He was very effective, a little too boyish and simple maybe, but an appealing politician. He'd just been named “Father of the Year,” part of a gathering campaign probably. I knew he was one of the favorites around here, and of all the guys around this table, he was the man most likely to challenge me—maybe even three years from now. I knew that was my real task: staying on the ticket in 1956. The chances were good that the General would pass away before 1960, and even if he didn't, it would be an uphill battle for anybody in the Party to unseat me by then. Everybody else in this potbellied timocracy was too antiquated. Lodge used to sit beside me on the Senate floor—I knew just how he breathed, snorted, moved, smelled, fretted. He'd worked hard last fall for Eisenhower, so hard he'd done what no politician should ever do: he'd neglected his own campaign and lost his Senate seat to Jack Kennedy. On the other hand, maybe that was inevitable, and meanwhile he'd scored a lot of points across the country, Ike had provided him a good national forum in the United Nations, and he even had the aura these days of a “what-if” President: had Taft beat Eisenhower out at the Republican Convention, Lodge would have been a logical Party-unifying Vice Presidential candidate, and with Taft dying now, Cabot would be getting ready to take over the country. I worried about the almost complete ambiguity of his past record and the dapper three-piece suits he wore. Those cool narrow ties: you couldn't even buy ties like those out in California!

“We must mount a mighty ideological offensive,” I said, “which will prove to peoples everywhere that the hope of the world does not lie in turning toward dictatorship of any type, but that it lies in developing a strong, a free, and an intelligent democracy.”

Not everybody was pleased at this. I rarely said anything at these meetings, and then only about tactics. Why was I sounding off like this? If I was trying to speed things up, I wasn't succeeding. I sat back, letting my gaze float out through the tall glass doors and on down the long soft green slope of the White House lawn, determined to say nothing that would prolong this goddamned meeting any further. They were terrible, these Cabinet sessions, the consequence of Ike's “team concept”: get all the “best brains in the country” around a table and reach an inspired consensus. They lasted forever and resulted in lowest-common-denominator policy-making and an appalling dilution of power. Or so it always seemed while sitting in one. Just a screen, probably. Our very drowsiness must have given the American people added confidence: faiths fall when the priests get nervous. Thus, when I took over a couple of months ago and spent the whole time harping about the urgent need to get the next campaign started now, I was only rocking the boat.

I sighed, fished the crossword puzzle out of my pocket, as though consulting statistical notes. Down and through, these clues, from
Burning Tree activity
to “——
in Boots,”
like some kind of tortuous labyrinthine sentence. Meaningless, silly even—yet why did it make me think of my dreams again? I found
AVER,
ASSUAGE,
TURN,
STOP
, and
ROAR
. Arthur Summerfield was there: his “responsibility”—I glanced up at him uneasily, but he seemed to be sleeping. When I got in trouble last fall, Art was the only major Republican official on the Eisenhower train who was arguing openly and strongly that I should be kept on the ticket, defended, and supported. Of course, we'd all turned up in these puzzles (I wondered in fact if
VEEP
was not an invention of crossword puzzlers), but why had Art been singled out today? 53 Down:
Player chased in a game
.
HERO?
HEIR?
HEAD
? And who was the
Duncecap wearer
, the
Companion of humidity
, who the
Hardy heroine
, the
Candidate for worst dressed woman?
This last one was a five-letter word, but luckily it began with “F”—but on the other hand, there was 61 Across:
Be superior to
, and for this one I already had some of the letters:
E
—
—
EL!

Beside me, Herb Brownell was bringing up the possibility of issuing a “white paper” on the Rosenberg case, but he interrupted himself momentarily to ask dryly if that crossword puzzle I was working was going to be the next order of business?

I'd been deep in thought, trying out “T” and “H” in those blank spaces, and his question startled me. But I was prepared for it. “No, not the puzzle, Herb,” I said, then sat forward to look around at the others, “but this advertisement beside it.” The others turned to me expectantly, leaving a chagrined Brownell momentarily eclipsed and biting his lip. “It's for a book ostensibly about
Soviet Civilization,”
I said, “but in fact it's a blatant plea for ‘co-existence'—and we all know whose kind of talk
that
is! It's published by an outfit up in New York which calls itself the Philosophical Library and they're not only out to peddle this propaganda, they're also trying to whip up another new letter-writing campaign to the President!”

“Oh, no!” groaned the President. “I thought when this Rosenberg thing was over, I'd—what do they think I am, a darned mailbox?” Summerfield woke up at this reference to his own Cabinet post and glanced about in panic as I passed the ad around. “Can't we classify it as obscene mail or something? Nobody reads all this foolishness, nobody could even if they wanted to, the most we can ever do is weigh it and burn it, and the incinerators are all stuffed as full as we can get them as it is!”

Summerfield snorted and coughed, and snatched up the clipping to see what we'd been talking about. He studied it blearily, somewhat amazed. “You mean OAF?” he asked finally.

Our laughter was interrupted by a messenger from the Supreme Court: all nine Justices had arrived and the Court was sitting. The Attorney General glanced coolly at his watch, then said: “In just a few moments, Chief Justice Vinson is expected to announce that the Supreme Court is vacating Douglas's stay. As soon as possible after that, the President must issue a final denial of clemency, which we've already drafted, and then the Justice Department will follow with its announcement that the Rosenbergs will be executed tomorrow night at the latest.”

Someone pointed out that that was the Sabbath.

“We're not going to burn them on Sunday!” the President shouted, rearing up from his doodle, his blue eyes flashing.

“No, General, the
Jewish
Sabbath,” Herb explained. “These people are Jews.”

“Oh, all right, then,” said the President.

All of this was just a joke, everybody was just trying to calm down.

The Attorney General pondered the problem a moment, then said: “Well, in that case, we'll finish it tonight. We'll set it up as soon as the Court stops sitting.”

“Before sundown,” someone said. “It starts at sundown, their Sabbath.”

“Right, sundown. Thanks.”

Friday. Sunset. The two thieves. Jews condemned by Jews. Some patterns had been dissolved by the overnight delay, it was true, but others were taking shape. Uncle Sam could not be entirely displeased, I thought. But the President only belched grumpily and shifted in his seat. He said he still didn't understand what the issue in the Supreme Court today was, still didn't see why there had been this delay. If they were guilty, they ought to be punished; if not, let them go. The speech-writer Emmett Hughes, once part of the retinue surrounding the National Poet Laureate, scribbled away, his dark brows bobbing, taking notes on all this for posterity—not what he was being paid to do, but you could spot these parasites a mile away. I supposed, no matter how tight a ship you ran, there'd always be one of these guys slipping in. “I must say, I'm impressed by all the honest doubt about this expressed in the letters I've been seeing,” the President said. Was this true, was he really unable to understand so simple a point of law, or was this too part of his disguise? The good soldier, forthright and true, the man of arms too honest to grasp the devious men of letters? Sometimes simple people are more mysterious than those of us who are more complex.

Herb explained once more about the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 Atomic Energy Act. As soon as he said that the issue was purely technical, I thought: he's just given it all away, he's just told them Douglas was right. Just as, in a purely technical sense, Don Wheeler was also right in calling for Douglas's impeachment. But I also knew Eisenhower would not realize this, or would not seem to. Was he testing us, I wondered? I recalled his offer—his challenge, rather—to reopen this case at any time before the executions if any one of us believed that to do so would serve the best interests of the United States. Thus, each of us was on the spot….

“Well, the proof of admission there's no frameup,” I said, “is the complete silence of the Phantom-controlled press in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It's obvious they're expecting the Rosenbergs to confess and they don't want to look like a bunch of clowns. And I'll tell you something else. Morton Sobell's wife said something very funny recently out in Far Rockaway. She said: ‘Julius and Ethel could save their own skins by talking, but Julius and Ethel will never betray their friends!' I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?” Of course, I'd got this from a guy who'd got roughed up at that meeting and so was pretty biased, and a right-wing Jew at that, nervous about the anti-Semitism the Rosenbergs could arouse, but that hardly mattered, I understood the essential truth of it and so did everybody else around the table.

Except perhaps the President. He scowled and unwrapped a cigar. “Well, now,” he said, “if the Supreme Court decides by, say, five to four or even six to three, as far as the average man's concerned, there
will
be doubt—not just a legal point in his mind.” He was himself that average man he was talking about, of course. This was the secret of his success. He really was average, a cheerful unimaginative boy from Abilene, and yet he was also the man who won World War II, so that just showed what an average man could do. So long as he was an American. Uncle Sam always chose his disguises to fit the times.

“Well, who's going to decide these points,” Brownell argued, “pressure groups or the Supreme Court? Surely, our first concern is the strength of our courts. And in terms of national security, the Communists are just out to prove they can bring enough pressure, one way or another, to enable people to get away with espionage. I've always wanted you to look at evidence that wasn't usable in court showing the Rosenbergs were the head and center of an espionage ring here in
direct
contact with the Russians—the
prime
espionage ring in the country!”

The President stared blankly at Brownell, then lit his cigar. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft,” he said. “The
effect
of the action.” He understood: it was as though he hadn't even heard Brownell's offer to look at the secret evidence. If there was any. It was strange that no one questioned Brownell on this, even though nobody had ever seen this material, Eisenhower especially. I watched this short-tempered old man, Uncle Sam's new real-time disguise, and thought: the important thing is that there be room for the Incarnation to take place. A man can't be solid and a mask at the same time. Yes, image—I knew all about that. The essence of power is paradox and ambiguity. Learning to live with this was the hardest thing of all—I was still too precise, too self-critical, too anxious to make everything perfectly clear. While I worried and sweated over every phrase, Eisenhower just leaned back and let fly. “The area of statecraft…the effect of the action…”