Public Burning (51 page)

I turned away from the window. I was running like a dry creek. Very sleepy. My personal desire was to sack out, but it was not a question of what I personally wanted to do, but what was best for the Party and the nation as well. I stood and gazed down on all the documents and records scattered about the room, trying to get an overview. What a mess. I didn't even know where to begin. Even so, I had to keep moving. Confidence in crisis depended in great part, I knew, on adequacy of preparation—where preparation was possible. The Boy Scouts were right about this. And it had been my experience that once the final period of intense preparation for battle began, it was not wise to break it. It always took me a certain period of time to “warm up” to the point where my mind was working, and it was important to keep the juices flowing. The natural tendency was to procrastinate, because the body and the mind rebel at being driven at a faster pace than usual over any long period of time, like now, for example. But there was never a period when it was safe to let up in the battle with our Communist opponents. They were out to win, and one of the tactics they used was to keep the pressure on. They tried to wear us out. To keep them from winning and to win ourselves, we had to have more stamina and more determination than they had. I squeezed my mouth shut around a yawn and leaned my head back. I realized I was sunk down in my chair again.

I dragged myself to my feet, jangled around a little, shaking myself awake. I had less than seven hours, the day was racing past, I had to keep my mind on this thing, what was the matter with me anyhow? I thought about the Hiss case, how I broke it. What had I done then that I was forgetting about now? Well, for one thing, the lines had seemed less blurred: Chambers was an honest Quaker, Hiss an Ivy League smart-ass, I knew what I was doing. Greenglass was as fat as Chambers and even less stable, and Rosenberg was skinny like Hiss, but Greenglass lacked Whittaker's wit and vocabulary—Checkers was probably brighter—and Rosenberg was poor, like me, thick-tongued, and dressed ten years behind the times. Hiss had been the millionaire gone sour in the Horatio Alger novels, the evil nephew trying to con his rich uncle out of his cousin's inheritance, the wily traitor in a plain respectable man's troubled business. Rosenberg, on the other hand, had been born into a true Horatio Alger family, poor but honest, he should have made a fortune. He'd even sold penny candy on the streets during the Depression, earning as much as eighty cents a day. But somehow something went wrong. The boat did not come in. The rich patron with the sweet tooth did not materialize. There was no happy ending.

So where was I to find my bearings? And Ethel Rosenberg, how did she fit in, what was I to do with her? It was Eisenhower's contention that she was the prime mover, but according to the testimony, she was mainly guilty of typing up notes. Irving Saypol had made as much of this as he could: “This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at 10 Monroe Street. Just so had she on countless other occasions sat at the typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.” Blow by blow. The whole argument reminded me a little too much of my high-school debate: “Resolved: Girls are no good.” But maybe Saypol and the President knew something I didn't.

She
was
pretty goddamn tough, all right. Once, when she was only nineteen years old, she led 150 fellow women workers in a strike that closed down National Shipping. This was during the Depression and the company was fighting for its life, so naturally they hired a new staff and tried to keep operating. But Ethel led the girls in an illegal riot that terrorized the non-union girls and shut the plant down again, in spite of the protective efforts of the whole New York City police force. When a delivery truck tried to crash the picket line, Ethel and the girls hauled the driver from his cab, stripped him bare, and lipsticked his butt with I AM A SCAB. My own butt tingled with the thought of it. When more trucks came, they blocked up the streets, threw themselves down in front of the wheels, slashed up the trucks' cargo, and pitched it all out in the gutters. Later, in the war, she got a job at the Census Bureau in Washington, the same time I was there in the OPA. We might have met. Julius was back in New York. “It's all right, miss—after all, I
am
Dick Nixon of the OPA.…” I grinned to myself. Yet I supposed she was a lot like the people I hated so much in that place—all those ruthless, self-serving, supercilious, cynical wheeler-dealers. That old violent big-city New Deal crowd—we were still trying to get rid of the sonsabitches. Everybody maneuvering for advancement, managing to make a little work look like a lot so as to build their little pyramids—I discovered I could have done the work of the entire OPA all by myself and still take long weekends, but when I tried to introduce a little efficiency, they ostracized me. If anything turned me into a conservative, it was that six months in the OPA. Maybe Ethel was the one most like Hiss…. On the other hand, she didn't last long there either, maybe she was as unhappy as I was. Now she sobbed herself to sleep at nights, hugged her pillow so tightly she got cramps, was frightened by mice, needed cold compresses to soothe her migraines. Poor Ethel…

I stared gloomily at the paper strewn across my office floor. Which was real, I wondered, the paper or the people? In a few hours, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be dead, their poor remains worth less than that horseshit I'd stepped in, and the paper too could be burnt, but what was on it would survive. Or could survive, it was a matter of luck. Luck and human need: the zeal for pattern. For story. And they'd been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with History, they'd be home free. The poor damned fools. Maybe this was yet another consequence of growing up in the city. One of the first shocks a country boy gets when he leaves home is the discovery that no one has been logging all that terrific history he's been living through. Until he thrusts himself into the urban fracas, he might as well never have lived at all, as far as History was concerned. In fact, part of the fun of becoming famous was to bend the light back on the old home town and stun them with their own previously unnoticed actuality, make guys like Gail Jobe and Tom Bewley jump and stutter. Yet, I knew what the Rosenbergs felt, because I had felt it, too.

The Rosenbergs' self-destructive suspicion that they were being watched by some superhuman presence came early, perhaps years ago, back in college, or when Julius got fired maybe, but certainly—and with force—almost immediately after their arrests. In many ways their first letters were the best of the lot: quiet, unassuming, written in haste, often dropping their pronoun subjects and abbreviating, full of ordinary sentences that touched the heart: “Just got through hanging the clothes as Mike didn't get to sleep until 11:30…”

But then came the death sentence, and what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement—it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction. Oh, there was some impressive political rhetoric in them, and though I was no judge, Ethel's poem was probably a classic of a sort. And now and then they did make a half-hearted effort to describe something of their lives in prison, the boredom of it, the killing of cockroaches, Jewish services, playing chess or boccie-ball, but frankly it was as though they were responding reluctantly to editorial suggestions from their lawyer or the Party: “Dearest Ethel, Shall I describe my prison cell? It is three paces wide, four paces long, and seven feet high…” And Julius occasionally worked hard at inventing a sympathetic past for himself: “I was a good student, but more, I absorbed quite naturally the culture of my people, their struggle for freedom from slavery in Egypt. As an American Jew with this background, it was natural that I should follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage and seek to better the lot of the common man…” That was admirable, I might have come up with the same phrases myself (“follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage”: I made a note), but all these half starts quickly collapsed, and more often than not into maudlin self-pity: “Ethel, My Darling, You are truly a great, dignified and sweet woman. Tears fill my eyes as I try to put sentiments to paper…. Our upbringing, the full meaning of our lives, based on a true amalgamation of our American and Jewish heritage, which to us means freedom, culture and human decency, has made us the people we are. All the filth, lies and slander of this grotesque frame-up will not in any way deter us, but rather spur us on until we are completely…” et cetera et cetera. Culpable of deceit, he accuses others of the same thing! With such grandstanding, who would not find them guilty? Who or what did he think History was—some kind of nincompoop? A little unimaginative maybe, and yes, eccentric, straitlaced, captious, and rude—but feebleminded? Hardly.

Maybe Julius had had intimations that something or someone was watching him as long ago as his famous encounter with the street-corner Tom Mooney pamphleteer, in the same way that I'd been touched by Aunt Edith's history book—but intimations are one thing, real awareness is another. Intimations reach you like a subtle change of temperature; real awareness hits you like a bolt of lightning. I'd seen this awareness crash on others before it fell on me, most dramatically during my HUAC investigation of Alger Hiss, and it was a pretty awesome experience. It was as though the whole world had slowly shifted gears and pivoted to stare down upon the incredible duel of Hiss and Chambers, and when they looked up and saw that Eye there, it nearly drove both of them mad. Poor old Whittaker even tried to kill himself. Though I had basked in the peripheral glow of this gaze and was granted my first close-up glimpse of Uncle Sam, I wasn't touched directly, I wasn't burned. It wasn't until the fund scandal broke last fall that I really for the first time in my life felt the full force of it. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg receiving the death penalty was minor-league stuff compared to it.

I was on my campaign train, the Nixon Special, whistle-stopping north from Pomona, California, toward Oregon and Washington—
Change Trains for the Future!
—when the gears started to shift for me.
SECRET
NIXON
FUND
. I tried to ignore it, concentrated instead on technical problems like microphones and schedules, boning up on local color, dealing with the small-time politicos who got on at one stop and off at the next. I had this weird illusion that if we'd just get up a little more steam we could outrun it—instead, we seemed to draw closer and closer to the hot center,
RICH
MEN'S
TRUST
FUND
KEEPS
NIXON
IN
STYLE
FAR
BEYOND
HIS
SALARY
. I tried to skirt it. I joked about it. I shouted at it and ran. But it did no good. The fund issue was becoming a national sensation. Willy-nilly, I was entering the arena.

I decided to counterattack, the only possible defense against a smear, especially when it's largely true. “I was warned,” I cried out from the back of my campaign train, “that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this government, they would try to smear me! Ever since I have done that work of investigating Communists in the United States, the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear that they have been able to!” But they only laughed and everywhere we went there were more and more hecklers,
SSH!
ANYONE
WHO
MENTIONS
$16,000
IS
A
COMMUNIST
! The fat was in the fire. Not only Democrats, but Republicans, too, were demanding my scalp. Eisenhower turned his back on me. It was because of him I was in trouble. I'd had to double-cross Earl Warren and his gang at the Convention to break up the California delegation and swing the nomination to Eisenhower, and it was some of those soreheads, I knew, who had spilled the beans on the fund—and now he turned his back on me! He said he didn't know me well and if I was honest, I'd have to prove it. “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business as of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren't clean as a hound's tooth?” He made me feel like the little boy caught with jam on his face. Stassen and Dewey told me to get off the ticket. Friends were not at home when I called them on the phone. Knowland was summoned by Sherman Adams all the way from Hawaii to take my place. Out on the trail, the people wanted blood. I felt like I'd been hit by a real blockbuster, much of the fight had gone out of me, and I was beginning to wonder how much more of this beating I was going to be able to take. Was the whole nation in the Phantom's power? I got hit by pennies in Portland.
NO
MINK
COATS
FOR
NIXON,
JUST
COLD
CASH!

I knew the time had come. Either I had to turn and face it, or else I had to quit. In meeting any crisis, one must fight or run away, but one must do something. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out. I began to notice the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was mean to live with, quick-tempered with the members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. I was preparing, I knew, for battle. It wasn't just a question of who was on the right side, it was a question of determination, of will, of stamina, of willingness to risk all for victory. I tossed through sleepless nights, elbowing and kneeing Pat until she cried, struggling with myself. Of course, I had no intention of quitting. But I didn't want to get pulped, either. Back in July, I'd had to lock Pat up in a Chicago hotel room one whole night with Murray Chotiner, who had a helluva job pressuring her out of threatening to leave me if I ran for the Vice Presidency—he said afterwards she was a real tiger—so now I got no pity at all from her. She became thin and haggard and even my breakfasts were lousy. But Jack Drown told me not to worry, Bert Andrews talked to me like a Dutch uncle, and some of my old schoolteachers wished me well. I felt better. “You are the lightning rod,” Chotiner told me, “and if you get off this ticket, Eisenhower won't have the chance of a snowball in hell in November.” The lightning rod. I knew then that what I did would affect not just me alone, but the future of my country and the cause of peace and freedom for the entire world. It was a crisis of unbelievably massive proportions. I wanted to disbelieve in the Eye. I wanted to ridicule it. But I also wanted to lick the Phantom. And I wanted like hell to be Vice President. If Eisenhower wasn't going to help me, I'd have to help myself. The soul-searching was over. “General,” I said to him when he called me on the phone from his
Look Ahead, Neighbor Special:
“there comes a time when you either have to shit or get off the pot!”