Public Burning (9 page)

“Hey,” Ev rumbled, “I guess you heard about the Rosenbergs taking the Fifth Amendment…?”

“Oh yeah?”

We all perked up.

“Yes, they refused to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incinerate them!”

Dirksen grimaced comically and we all responded with groans and laughter. Dirksen had a wonderfully expressive face, it was a delight to watch it, just the opposite of mine, a real clown's face—and he knew how to use his hands, too. He had produced one of the great gestures of all time at our Convention last summer, when he'd turned on Tom Dewey, pointing his finger at him and bellowing out as though in mortal pain:
“We followed you before!”
The finger was pointing all right, and in Dewey's direction, but it was also as limp as a wet noodle, quivering slightly as though straining feebly and ineffectually to overcome its impotence. He'd given the crowd of delegates plenty of time to stare at that drooping digit and then to roar and moan, before continuing:
“And you took us down the road to defeat!”
I hoped he'd never turn that finger on me.

“Say,” he continued now, rolling his eyes, “you know what you get when you cross Little Miss Muffet with Red Riding Hood?”

“Naw,” laughed Gene Millikin, “whaddaya get, Ev?”

“A curd-carrying Communist!”

There were a lot of snorts and guffaws, and then Ev trundled off toward the Senate lavatory. I realized I badly needed to piss myself and I probably should have gone along with him, but not only did I feel out of place in there, never having really become a member of this private club (I often got odd surprised stares from other Senators in there, even the janitors were more welcome than I), but also to get to it you had to go through the President's Room where all the news reporters hung out. According to the legend, the best news sources have always been Senators with “weak bladders and strong minds”—all the more so when the bladders have been weakened by bourbon. There were even women journalists out there, laughing as the Senators hurried through clutching their nuts. To me it was a real indignity, but most Senators didn't seem to mind, even enjoyed the notoriety of it. It was said that during the debate on the Tidelands Oil Bill, Lyndon Johnson had got trapped by a young socialite reporter and had agreed to an interview provided only she'd come in and hold his pecker for him while he peed—which presumably she did. Scoop of the year. Or, as Lyndon was said to have remarked at the urinal, “Lady, you just struck a gusher!”

Homer Capehart came into the Cloakroom and started complaining loudly about the collapse of the workers' riots in East Berlin. “First Czechoslovakia, and now this!” he snapped, glowering narrowly in my direction. Homer seemed edgier than usual today, and for good reason: if Bill Knowland succeeded in getting the controls bill past the Democrats and out on the floor this afternoon, it would be Capehart's duty to defend it. “Why the hell is it we can't seem to
capitalize
on these things?”

I worked up what I hoped was an enigmatic smile, meaning to suggest that there was more to what was going on behind the Curtain than met the eye, but in truth I was pretty disappointed myself. I remembered the day three months earlier when we heard that Stalin had suffered a stroke—if that was all he'd suffered—and was dying. It had been a raw day, one of those gray March mornings that makes the Capital look like a city in Central Europe, and a bunch of the boys had gathered early in the President's office, waiting for the Old Man to come down. He'd come striding in, wearing a tan polo coat and a brown hat with the brim snapped far down over his eyes, like a Marine on shore-patrol duty. “Well,” he'd barked, making us jump, “what do you think we can do about
this?”
So we'd thought up a few things and done them. And this was what it had come to. You couldn't help but feel the frustration of it. And I could see that some of these guys had had their confidence shaken. Though many of them had decried Uncle Sam's vulnerability as a campaign tactic, none had truly believed it, but now they had seen for themselves: even Uncle Sam could get left with his finger up his ass.

“Give us time,” I said, “it's a tough ballgame. But we've got them on the ropes, it's the beginning of the end. The seed has been sown, they've had a taste of freedom and they won't soon forget it. It's like George Humphrey says, ‘You can't set a hen in the morning and have chicken salad for lunch!'” Which reminded me: I was pretty goddamn hungry. Homer nodded solemnly, shrugged ambiguously, gazed off. Herman Welker, who had joined us, seemed less convinced, belching sourly. He said that over in the House Don Wheeler was outraged by the fact that Justice Douglas had “taken unto himself the authority to grant amnesty to two proven spies,” and was drafting an impeachment proposal, and Bourke Hickenlooper looked up from the old sofa where he was sprawled, going through his morning's mail, to say that he hoped they smeared that butternut once and forever. Maybe I should find a page, I thought, and send him down for a sandwich.

Uncle Sam had actually prepared me for this crisis during our last match at Burning Tree Golf Club, but I had not understood. Had not taken it all in. I knew now he'd been telling me a lot of things—about history, about guilt and innocence, death and regeneration, about the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere—but I'd been too abashed by my transparent ignorance, too upset by the coincidence of anniversaries and by my fluffed drives, to think clearly. The only accurate description is that I was probably in a momentary state of shock. I had failed to heed one of Eisenhower's favorite admonitions (which, in fact, he rarely heeded himself): “Always take your job, but never yourself, seriously.” Even the anniversary remark I'd misread—when he'd said that all judges were cabalists at heart, I'd thought he was talking about Kaufman, not Douglas.

Fourteen. Fourteen years ago today Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass were married. That was the same summer, fourteen years ago, that Hitler and Stalin signed their pact: yes, it was a year for weddings. Hitler had seized Czechoslovakia, annexed Danzig, and invaded Poland, divvying it up with Stalin, while Britain and France were celebrating a short-lived marriage of their own. But I was courting Pat at the time, could think of nothing else, hardly noticed the world falling down about my ears (how far away it seemed then!), I thought I'd go to Cuba to get rich or else to the opening of the New York World's Fair, or freeze orange juice and start a company. If only I could win Pat. It wasn't easy. She laughed at me when I proposed, made fun of me in public, it was humiliating as hell. She was so goddamned cool, she seemed to know everything, and all I could do was pretend. She tried to put me off, made me drive her into Los Angeles for dates with other guys, kept me on the leash for over two years before she finally gave in—and even then it was possible she capitulated only because she was getting on in years and I was the only real prospect still around. But I didn't care, as long as I got her. I needed the win and she was it. I felt like a champ—like the Brown Bomber himself, who was ripping up Arturo Godoy, cutting him “crimson,” as the papers said, the night before we wed. This was in 1940, June, just one year after the Rosenbergs had got married. A lot was happening in the world, but we were oblivious to it—Pat and I were anyway, I can't speak for the Rosenbergs. Of course, Pat was always out of it as far as the news was concerned—the only paper she ever read was the one she helped the kids edit at the high school where she taught.

Contrarily, I've always been a newspaper nut. But not that summer. We got married in the beautiful sentimental Mission Inn just as the Germans marched into Paris, honeymooned in Mexico the summer they killed Leon Trotsky down there, and I finally lost my maidenhead the night Harold “‘The Boy Wonder” Stassen keynoted the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell “The Barefoot Boy from Wall Street” Willkie for President (we were all boys then)…but I hardly noticed any of it. It was like I was living on some other plane. It lasted a whole year, longer even. Hitler was attacking Russia by the time we celebrated our first anniversary, and all I remember from that time is the little apartment we had over a garage in Whittier, going to San Juan Capistrano and Santa Monica beach with Jack and Helene Drown, getting out of bed in the morning with Pat, sharing the bathroom, driving into Los Angeles for the opera and a fancy supper from time to time, running civic clubs in town, thinking idly about my law career, mostly just exploring this new condition which I somehow thought of as unique in the world. On my own, I should say. Pat never liked to talk about it, not with me anyway, she just went her own way as before, which for the most part suited me just fine.

We were a perfect pair. At least it was a perfect pairing for me—Pat was a little restless and uncertain for a while, I could tell by the way she nagged. (Something to do with the mating part maybe, which, looking back on it now, wasn't so good at fírst. I had to spend a stretch in the Navy before I really got the hang of it. Something a lot of people don't understand about sex: it's something you've got to study just like you study anything else—musical instruments, foreign languages, poker, politics, whatever. I did my homework in the Navy, and Pat was not a little bit surprised when I got out. Happily surprised, I think: we had two kids—
whap bang!
—before she even knew what hit her, and for a couple of years there it was pretty fantastic.) But for me it was like coming home. Pat had simplified my life, brought it all together for me. Not by doing anything. Just by being Pat and being mine. Without having to say a thing, she became my arbiter, my audience, guide, model, and goal. Sometimes she felt she did have to say something, but it was usually better when she kept quiet. She looked good in photographs. I understood myself better when I looked at those photographs. She was the undiscovered heroine whom I could make rich and famous and who would be my constant companion. When I explained myself to Pat, I knew I was explaining myself to what was good in people everywhere. Everything became easier for me. I wondered if it had been somehow like that for Julius Rosenberg? Had he, too, been waiting for someone to come along and make it possible for him to do what he had to do? Or maybe it was the other way around? Ethel was the one, after all, who'd been doing the waiting. Julius was just a kid when she found him.

The Cloakroom was filling up in anticipation of Knowland's big play. Not everybody was happy about it. A lot of them had planned to be well out of the city by noon today. Hendrickson popped in asking for Bill, but nobody knew where he was.

“Do you think he's drunk?”

“Not with this vote on, he hasn't touched a drop.”

Somebody said they'd seen him in Joe McCarthy's committee room, and Hendrickson sent a staff member down there to ask Knowland if two o'clock was still the target. I glanced at my own watch: just minutes away. Bob hurried back out on the floor, and the talk shifted to Joe McCarthy's latest act. I stayed out of it. Tail Gunner Joe was dangerous to the peace around here, which it was my job as a kind of double agent—doubled and redoubled—to preserve.

“Jesus, it's a real fucking carnival down there, the whole place wired up with klieg lights and microphones, reporters and photographers everywhere, crawling under the tables, on their knees in front of Joe's table, perched up on windowsills—he's really got something going, all right!”

My main problem was how to keep McCarthy safe inside the Party with all the enormous power he now commanded, here on the Hill and throughout the nation, and at the same time prevent him from getting out of hand and setting the whole house on fire. This wasn't easy, old Joe could wax pretty evil at times, especially when he saw a crowd gathering around a speech of his and lacked a climax to what he was saying—he became increasingly reckless and impulsive then, and could get very dangerous. “Joe,” I'd say, “the best tactic in the face of suspicion from a large segment of the press and public is to be certain you can prove every statement you make about Communist activities.” But when I said things like that, his eyes would just spread apart and focus on some point way behind the back of my head, far out on the horizon. Ike could say, “I am not going to engage in personalities,” and so keep his lily-white fanny clean, but I couldn't. And Joe was a tough sonuvabitch, he had energy to spare, a killer instinct, access to secret files, and a lot of allies. He didn't fit the genial Foghorn image when he came here, and he'd had a hard time at first establishing a power base—so, like me, he'd formed his own club, picking up dissidents and outsiders, going out and working the vineyards, getting his own men—guys like Butler, Welker, Goldwater, Dworshak, Dirksen, and the like—elected. We had other things in common, too, Joe and me: we were both born poor and were shy as kids, both worked in grocery stores, went to Bougainville during the war, came back to make careers in politics off the Communist issue, and both of us had helped make Wheeling, West Virginia, famous. Also we were both Irish, but this was in fact what separated us. And Joe—like all those young beavers around him, Scoop Jackson, Cohn, Kennedy, Schine—lacked my patience, my thoroughness, my iron butt.

“I hear he's got some sonuvabitch down there today who was supposed to be the head of a Phantom goon squad assigned to knock Joe off!”

“Ho ho! No shit! Who says?”

“Some guy from the FBI, used to be a double agent.”

“Fantastic! Where the hell does Joe dig up these guys?”

“You gotta admit, it's the best show in town! I mean, he's a legend in his own goddamn lifetime—how many of us can say that?”

Just then, through the Cloakroom doors came the missing Majority Leader, Bill Knowland, puffing in on us like an old World War I armored car, snorting and bellowing: “Okay, goddamn it! muster the troops! the vote's on!” Bill slapped my back as he roared by. “C'mon, Dick! History calls!” And he barreled on out into the Chamber. A few of the Senators trailed out after Knowland, others came pouring in, genial with booze and rumor. I stood at the edge of the activity, moving my lips as though counting heads, just to give them the idea I was acknowledging their presence, and remarking to myself on the essential plainness of this famous “anteroom to history”: just a bunch of old sofas strewn with papers and pillows, some tables for signing correspondence, a couple of old typewriters, and upended jugs of Poland Springs bottled water—I remembered the time when, still green and as always overeager, I had made the mistake of going over to one of them to get a drink, breaking one of the innumerable idiotic traditions of this place. Now, not to get caught in another and to avoid the tensions when Joe McCarthy came storming through, I returned to the Chamber.