Public Burning (7 page)

They're gone: some twenty-five thousand of them. Dashing out into open fields, remote villages, the alleyways of Pusan: Rhee, the obstreperous old bastard, has pulled the straw mat out from under Uncle Sam's feet and let his prisoners go.

By Thursday, peace hopes have been dashed in Korea, the East German freedom fighters have been crushed, and all preparations for the great atom-spy pageant have been thrown into utter confusion. The wires have been pulled on the electric chair and a manikin has been strapped into the seat, dressed up to look like Uncle Sam with a Hitler moustache. Bombastic handbills, instruction sheets for clemency vigils, tattered bunting, and dirty pictures showing President Eisenhower and all his Cabinet in compromising positions litter the streets.

The fire in Alaska is quenched at last, after millions of dollars of damage to military installations and supplies, but simultaneously the new $3,000,000 U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro bursts into flames. Smaller fires break out in a random pattern across New York City—on Fourth Avenue, West Thirteenth, Eldridge, and East Forty-ninth in Manhattan, Fulton and West Eighth in Brooklyn—and during a demonstration at Fort Dix, a mortar shell explodes, injuring sixteen American GIs and killing Private Frank X. Zirnheld, 20, of Buffalo. Adlai Stevenson travels all the way to Turkey to praise the Turkish troops fighting in Korea, but his words are drowned out by earthquakes that rock Adrianople; he sighs, remarks on his usual luck, and goes for a hopeful swim in the Bosporus.

Three Israelis are slain by a Jordanian patrol, three Home Guards by terrorists in Malaya. The Red Chinese crack down on the last of the Roman Catholic missions, arresting eleven priests in Shanghai, ten in Tientsin, more in Canton, as “well-known spies.” Indonesian terrorists kill 60 villagers and burn 800 homes in a raid on 4 villages south of Jakarta, leaving 3500 homeless. U.S. casualties in Korea shoot up to 136,029, while at home 305 new polio cases are reported for the week, bringing the year's total to 3124. These numbers rattle through the streets like apocalyptic codes, signals of some numerological conundrum, resolving itself toward catastrophe. Broadway bookies now give the Rosenbergs a fifty-fifty chance of survival, which is better than they're giving the best horse running that day. The local boatmen, holding out for another thirty-five cents, still refuse to take pilgrims over to Miss Liberty on Bedloe's Island. Clemency floats containing photographic blow-ups of new documents brazenly stolen from the office of the Green-glasses' lawyer, purporting to prove that major prosecution witnesses lied against the Rosenbergs, roll into Times Square. Enraged loyalists try to smash up the floats and fights ensue.
AMERICA THE BITE OF THE WORLD
, the sign reads.
BILE. PILE. PULE. PUKE. JUKE
. What kind of game IS this?

AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD!

There seems no stopping the Phantom in his blasphemy. It's almost as if he has been playing dead all this time, like those inscrutable Japs used to do in all the World War II movies, lying in ambush, flat out, with a pile of hand grenades tucked under their yellow bellies. It's not even clear who Uncle Sam's friends are. The French, facing the most serious crisis in the dismal history of the Fourth Republic, are losing their nerve in Indochina, and everybody from President Auriol on down is protesting the Rosenberg executions. So are the Scandinavians, and the Pope is not exactly standing up and cheering for the Sons of Light. Churchill has talked about withdrawing British troops from Korea, where only 40,000 outside forces now support the 460,000 ROKs and 250,000 American GIs in this so-called United Nations action as it is. “United Nations, my ass!” Uncle Sam is heard to mutter, trying to find a toehold along Finger Ridge. “Hal-lucy-nations, more like it! In-subordy-nations!” India and Switzerland actually threaten to quit the commission to supervise repatriation of war prisoners in Korea, confirming Uncle Sam's mistrust of “neutralism,” and there are suggestions—even at home in the Americas!—that Red China be admitted to the United Nations. T
IME
say: “
SHADOW OF THE RED DRAGON!”

Not only are the North Korean hostages out of the prison camps and living like the golden boys of Pusan, heroes of the local dongs, but women and children are out in the streets, screaming insults at the Americans for failing to unify the nation, and mutilated veterans are staging a very unappealing lie-down strike on Pusan's main drag. Syngman Rhee smiles at Uncle Sam's discomfiture. Says a soldier-friend of T
IME
: “We came over here to help him, and now he's kicked us in the face.”

It's a scandal, just like the strikes, the rising prices, the legal shenanigans, the erratic weather, the clemency appeals. The Red Puppets of Poland insolently offer political asylum for the Rosenbergs. France's
Le Monde
says Uncle Sam is “disturbed” and accuses him of planning a “ritual murder.” “More and more,” says
Le Monde
, “the Rosenbergs seem to us like the expiatory victims of the cold war…”

Many of America's own atomic scientists, led by Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey, seem to be siding openly with the spies, claiming that there
is
no secret to the atom bomb in the first place (but this is a lie—Harry Truman said there was a secret, and so did J. Edgar Hoover), and now the granddaddy of them all, Albert Einstein, writes to a teacher just fired by the City Board of Education for refusing to answer questions about his connections with the Phantom: “The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without…. They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive. What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-cooperation….” New apostates are being won and the letters keep coming in. From Netherlands Women, British Railwaymen, French Lawyers, and the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies. Clerics, novelists, schoolteachers, and 2200 Melbourne ladies. The British
Electrical
Union! All writing to the President, all urging clemency for the atom spies. Even their sons—which prompts President Eisenhower to complain in a sputtering rage that “they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purpose!”

If he is offended by the boys' appeals, he is even more outraged when Ethel Rosenberg's latest letter to her two sons is flashed on the moving electric sign on the Times Tower: Christ on the mountain! he can just feel the damned Phantom's power radiate through the spellbound crowds in the Square…

What's that about chickens? The people duck their heads and peer nervously up at the sky. Is this it, then?

What's to be done? The National Maritime Union's strike spreads like a virus, tying up hundreds of ships, and the U.S. Post Office announces a 36 percent rise in parcel post rates. Pickets appear:
NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS PERJURY!

The Reds walk out of the Korean peace talks, accuse Uncle Sam of bad faith. The Chinese breach the ROK defenses north of the Hwachon Reservoir. Soviet occupation troops raid workers' homes in East Berlin and mark some thirty thousand ex-Wehrmacht officers for automatic arrest.

Mrs. Sarah Brock Dodge, U.S. Army nurse in the Spanish-American War, and later personal nurse for General Douglas MacArthur and the Taft family, drops dead as a doornail…

…and then in Japan, an Air Force Globemaster transport with 129 American servicemen aboard falls right out of the sky, the worst disaster in the history of flight! Those damn chickens! “East and West,” T
IME
say, “from within & without / news crashed / upon the U.S….”

Demonstrators march in broad daylight through the streets with signs that read:
THE ELECTRIC CHAIR CAN'T KILL THE DOUBTS IN THE ROSENBERG CASE! ROK
troops fall back in Korea in the biggest retreat in two years. An anonymous caller tells the police that a bomb is set to go off in Public School 187 in the north part of the city. There are rumors of an all-out strategic exchange. Scrawled across the whitewashed walls of the Sing Sing Death House set atop the information kiosk:
WHAT THE BOURGEOISIE, THEREFORE, PRODUCES, ABOVE ALL, IS ITS OWN GRAVEDIGGERS.
Then somebody sabotages the stage and the whole business collapses into the street. And in Vienna, three beetle-browed Russians force their way past the landlady and drag Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas out of his flat. Strange perspectives, weird watching faces, peculiar zither music—an Austrian policeman intervenes and a four-man (French, English, American, Russian) Allied Military Patrol speeds to the scene. They block the kidnappers' escape route, leap out of the car with weapons at the ready. But the Soviet member of the FEAR Patrol commandeers the patrol car, shoves Lukas and his kidnappers in, leaps into the driver's seat himself, slams into reverse, rams two civilian cars, shifts back into first—for God's sake!

STAND BY TO CRASH!

—Where Is Uncle Sam?

3
.

Idle Banter: The Fighting Quaker Among Saints and Sinners

My old California colleague Bill Knowland was in trouble in his first test as the new Republican floor leader in the Senate, so on the way back to my office Thursday from the emergency meeting of the National Security Council at the White House, I stopped by the Capitol to see if I could be of help. The Hill and Mall were swarming with demonstrators, counterdemonstrators, tourists, cops, dogs, kids, and there were expressions of worry, gloom, apprehension, uncertainty everywhere. There'd been too many setbacks. In the middle of all this, Knowland had decided to pull a fast one: after having told the Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson earlier that there'd be nothing more controversial today than the call of the calendar—which few Senators even bother to show up for—he'd suddenly decided to interrupt the call with an aggressive attempt to ram our new controls bill through and catch the Democrats flatfooted. I wasn't sure Bill was doing the smart thing, but I understood his motives and had to admire them: he'd just taken over from the ailing Bob Taft, and he was trying hard to put his personal stamp on the leadership job, make it his through partisan conflict. It wasn't easy to follow a living legend like Taft, Bill had to do something audacious to signal the change and establish his authority. Of course, he could blow it, too, and the chances were just about fifty-fifty—with Wayne Morse now voting with the Democrats, there were forty-eight votes on each side of the aisle, and my vote was the tie-breaker. I was eager to get back to the Rosenberg case, things were in a mess now, thanks to Douglas, and I didn't know what the hell was going on or what I was supposed to do, but Eisenhower's relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn't afford to antagonize them in any way—I had no choice but to be on hand and save the day for Knowland if need be. Besides, it was just the kind of political battle I loved: nobody gave a shit about the bill itself, it was a straight-out power struggle, raw and pure, like a move in chess.