Public Burning (6 page)

But in fact, though all too few understood this, it went much deeper than that. Likable Ike's open-faced friendliness and easy smile won a lot of votes, but some people began to suspect he might be a little simple. Any man on the street past thirty knows there's a lot more to politics—at home and abroad—than plain talk and friendly handshakes. Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy. We all know this: politics is a dirty, combative, dangerous game, it's not something to grin at like a doped monkey. A beloved leader is no leader at all. Gregariousness is a liability if you live close to the center. Crusaders all make one mistake: they leave home. Optimists buy the wrong used cars, take it from a guy who's sold them. And never trust any man who's “clean as a hound's tooth”: it's clear he's never been out in the real world when the shit's hit the fan.

So everybody liked Ike, that casual straightforward bumbler—me they called Tricky Dick. I hated this at first, it was a brutal thing to fight, but eventually I discovered it won votes. Uncle Sam probably didn't like being called Yankee Doodle at first either, but eventually he stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. And as these plays on my name got filthier, I even started picking up some votes among women and young people. I'm not very interested in the philosophy of any gimmick or policy, only its efficacy. It's not the content that counts, but the impact—and that attitude itself is efficacious at the polls. Ike was so accustomed to being loved, even apathy offended him. When some guy up in Racine, Wisconsin, borrowing from the 1948 campaign, invented the phrase “Phewey on Eisenhewey!”, the General was genuinely upset and wouldn't associate with Tom Dewey for days. If the Democrats had hit him hard enough, portrayed him as a pompous disloyal fraud and something of a helpless moron to boot, if they'd ridiculed his cronies and dragged old Mamie through the mud as they should have, he'd have probably quit. In fact, I knew he could still quit, any day, he was already losing interest.

“I believe the United States is strong enough to expose to the world,” he was saying now, “its differing viewpoints, from those of what we call almost the man who has Socialist leanings to the man who is so far to the extreme right that it takes a telescope to find him, but that is America and let's don't be afraid to show it, to the world, because we believe that form of government, those facts, that kind of thinking, that kind of combination of things has produced the greatest system of government that the world has produced, that is what we believe, that is what I am talking about.”

Raymond Brandt of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, one of the weak links in the American press system, was trying in his tenacious hangdog way to stir up trouble with further questions about this, when Herb Brownell, the Attorney General, came in, looking dark and secretive. Of course, this was easy for Brownell with that high dome and fixed gaze, he always gave you the impression there was nothing he didn't know, even when he was half dozing, but today he looked less cool and collected than usual. He motioned me aside. We huddled, scowling importantly, and the newsguys watched us; I was beginning to catch on to some of these angles. “Pete Brandt's trying to get up a fight between Ike and Joe,” I whispered.

Herb didn't seem to hear me. Up close, I realized he was very agitated. “It's all off, Dick!” he whined. “Douglas called it off!”

“Off?” I said. “What's off, Herb?”

“The executions! The Rosenbergs! The anniversary! Tomorrow night!”

My heart jumped, seemed to lodge in my throat. I worried that the reporters would notice this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I'd been very tense about this thing since that golf game with Uncle Sam over the weekend, and I wasn't sure whether this new situation was good or bad. I was pretty sure Uncle Sam wouldn't like it—we'd been building up toward this thing for two years, everything was ready up in Times Square, we'd thought the last hurdle had been cleared: and now this! The fat was really in the fire! Or rather, it wasn't…. There'd been delays before, of course—Uncle Sam had originally scheduled the executions just before the balloon drop at our Inaugural Ball last January—but none so shocking as this. On the other hand, I realized, it at least gave me more time. I'd been pressing very hard, going over everything, and I still hadn't figured out what it was Uncle Sam wanted me to do. I'd thought I was safe, I who'd single-handedly vanquished Alger Hiss and put Voorhis and the Pink Lady to rout, but now I was feeling vulnerable again.

“But I… I thought the Supreme Court had recessed!” I whispered.

“They
have!”
wheezed Herb. “Douglas waited until all the other Justices had left town on their vacations, and then issued a stay of execution! It's a helluva mess!”

“We've got to get word to the General, before one of these organ grinders asks the wrong question,” I said.

“Generally speaking,” the President was saying, “that is exactly what I believe. But I do say I don't have to be a party to my own self-destruction, that is the limit and the other limit I draw is decency, we have certain books we bar from the mails, and all that sort of thing, I think that is perfectly proper and I would do it now, I don't believe that standards of essential human dignity ought to be violated in these things. And human decency.”

I scratched out a note:
ROSENBERG EXECUTIONS CALLED OFF
! and passed it to the press secretary, Jim Hagerty. Hagerty blanched, seemed uncertain what to do with it. I motioned toward the President, but Jim seemed reluctant to pass it on. Probably afraid the Old Man would read it out loud like an announcement. Or get confused and become completely unintelligible. Maybe even blow his stack.

“How many of you have read Stalin's
Problems of Leninism?”
the President was asking the reporters. We didn't even know he knew the title. “How many of you have really studied Karl Marx and looked at the evolution of the Marxian theory down to the present application?” Everybody thought he had said “Martian theory” and he was getting a lot of laughs. This was very successful, the reporters had completely forgotten what they'd asked him, but I thought: My God, I could never do this! I wrote a new note:
URGENT BUSINESS! BRING THIS CONFERENCE TO A CLOSE!,
and handed it to Jim. Jim added in
PLEASE
and
AS SOON AS POSSIBLE,
passed it on to the General, who was just saying: “Of course we shouldn't give that text to a Communist teacher and say, Now. Take your students off, and try to lead them astray any more than you would give them, let us say Al Capone's book on how to be a crook!” Nobody knew any longer what text he was talking about.

When the news conference was over and we'd cleared everybody out of there, Herb sprang the news.

The President drew himself up—a tall man, after all, and strong—in fact, his countenance was already changing—and with jaw set and fists clenched, yet with perfect composure, perfect equanimity, said simply:

“Friends, this is a job for Uncle Sam!”

2
.

A Rash of Evil Doings

A United States Supreme Court Justice—himself a controversial appointee from the Era of Compromise—thwarts the long-planned execution of the atom spies, disappears.

Two ore tankers go aground in the mud of St. Clair, Canada.

A coffee plot is uncovered in Brazil.

Russian tanks tool up, roll toward East Berlin.

From North Korea come horrific images of brainwashed GIs staring vapidly and twitching like zombies, while in the South, the port of the capital is bombed and underground rumors abound of trouble afoot, strange stirrings in the prisoner compounds.

In Times Square, the “c” has vanished from the
SILENCE
sign tacked up over the stage door of the execution chamber mock-up, and the letters are scrambled to spell
SENILE
, a cross-eyed Uncle Sam chalked crudely on the wall above it. The electrical sign reading
AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD
has been altered to
AMERICA THE DOPE OF THE WORLD
, and now, metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passersby, becomes:

AMERICA THE ROPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE RAPE OF THE WORLD

What's happening?!?

The men of Local 333 of the United Marine Division of the International Longshoreman's Association strike the two boats that take sight-seers out to Bedloe's Island, throwing up what
The New York Times
calls “an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty!”

Judge Irving Kaufman, now guarded day and night by FBI in mufti and twelve boys in blue at his Park Avenue home, receives two bomb threats against his life, and total strangers send him telegrams: “May your children become orphans!”

British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the heir-designate to Prime Minister Churchill, is struck down in London, taken to the hospital for a gall bladder operation, and fire breaks out in the key U.S. military port of Whittier, Alaska.

AMERICA THE RAKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE FAKE OF THE WORLD

King Sihanouk of Cambodia, having fled to Thailand, takes encouragement from the sudden dissolution and demands from the French full independence for Cambodia. The French will to stand firm falters.

The Phantomized Guatemalan regime seizes lands belonging to Uncle Sam's United Fruit Company, redistributes them to greedy and incompetent peasants.

Francis Cardinal Spellman's tireless epistolary efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, Italy, without a government, slips to the left, just as the body of a twenty-year-old student in the Passionists' seminary at Caravete is found in the woods, skull smashed by a stone. There have been fires in the convent library, two watchdogs have been poisoned, and all the Passionist brothers and pupils found potassium cyanide in their morning espresso one morning of late. The village's small community of newly-converted Protestants is suspected; anti-American feeling grows apace.

AMERICA THE FATE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HATE OF THE WORLD

Something passes like a cold unseasonal wind through Times Square, tipping over police barricades, blowing holes in the set, and stripping away all the white and blue bunting in the streets, leaving—from a Busby Berkeley overview—a tattered crimson star fluttering in its wake. This same wind blows through Whittier, Alaska, fanning the flames, spreading the fire through docks and warehouses, forcing back the hundreds of stevedore troops battling the blaze, and then through Africa, stirring the blacks in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa to rebellion. It whistles through the Federal Council of Italian Evangelical Churches, which cables President Eisenhower “to be great in your mercy and spare the lives of the Rosenbergs,” and it even touches the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Nepal: they erupt into a sudden feud over the exploits of Heroes Edmund Hillary and his guide Tensing Norkay, now down off the roof of the world, the British claiming that Hillary had to drag the reluctant Sherpa (they persist, out of habit, in calling him “the native”) up Everest's summit behind him, while the Nepalese, who have declared May 29 a new national holiday—Tensing Day—retort that in fact it was their man who had to carry the fagged white man up on his back. An international crisis develops, and America seems unable to do anything about it.

Elsewhere, the Phantom strikes out even more boldly, using every weapon from hysteria to hyperbole, tanks to terrorism. In Korea, firing thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, the Phantom's troops attack along a broad front, capturing Finger Ridge and Capitol Hill, breaking through Allied lines near Outpost Texas, scattering chickenshit ROKs and exhausted GIs in all directions. “If this is getting ready for peace,” bitches a shot-up U.S. rifleman as they cart him away on his stretcher, “I'd just as soon go back to the old war!” T
IME
, the National Poet Laureate, records this sentiment for immortality, then adds:

Uncle Sam wants the hell out of this war, but Syngman Rhee is threatening it go it alone. He sends mobs of schoolgirls out in the streets to attack the GIs from the rear in protest against the truce negotiations under way. Key to these negotiations are the North Korean prisoners of war in South Korean compounds, most of whom are said to be anti-Communist. “Just so Rhee don't go berserk,” mutters a U.S. negotiator, “and let them prisoners go!”

Almost as a kind of reflex, the guard is doubled on the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs are said to be gloating over their new stay of execution. The Phantom whips up anti-American demonstrations in their behalf in Milan, Toronto, Jakarta, Genoa, Paris, London, and swamps the White House with protest letters—nearly ten thousand letters asking Eisenhower to spare the couple are passing like stuffed ballots across his desk every day now. The Rosenberg lawyers, augmented by a gang of last-minute interlopers, are scrambling frantically through ancient lawbooks in search of any new shyster tactic that might confound Uncle Sam.

To gain time, the Phantom sends his terrorists into action in Malaya and French Indochina, and his tanks into East Berlin. The Russian T-34s come clattering in over the cobblestones, “rocking and snarling,” as T
IME
say, wagging their big 85-mm guns about like magic wands…

Some run, some stand, some die, many are glad they stayed at home, most are frightened, and everyone soon vanishes, as the Rebellion in the Rain gutters out, all of it watched morosely by Uncle Sam, sitting helplessly on his blistered duff on the wrong side of Potsdamer Platz. Soon, nothing can be heard in the divided city but the soft dripping of rainwater, the clink of knives through the evening rituals of black bread, butter, cheese, and sausage, the odd Soviet firing squad off in the fields….