The Kingdom and the Power (61 page)

The afternoon passed; it grew dark and began to rain. Gossett had no chance of getting a photograph of Burros into the next day’s
Times
at this late hour, and so after telephoning the picture desk he was told to leave. He loaned Phillips the raincoat that he always carried in his car trunk, then drove home. Phillips waited alone for the return of the elder Burros, or perhaps of Daniel Burros himself.

Phillips felt a bit queasy as he stood in the entrance of the building under a globe light that was broken. It was an old, rundown
two-story yellow brick building that was divided into four apartments. The Burros family occupied one of the apartments on the second floor. The neighborhood was like dozens of other neighborhoods in Queens that spread low and unglamorously beyond the skyline of Manhattan. Its inhabitants were predominantly lower-middle-class whites who had escaped their old neighborhoods of ethnic distinctiveness in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or lower Manhattan, and had created, in such places as this, settlements of sameness. Travelers could pass through most sections of Queens hundreds of times—en route to the airports, or to Shea Stadium, or to the beaches beyond—and discover no reason for stopping except the traffic lights. Some of the houses were extremely well kept and had tidy lawns, and trees; but there was no more sense of the country or the suburbs here than there was of the city. Across the street from the Burros apartment there was a bar with a neon sign; a supermarket was half a block away; a U.S. Army recruiting poster, swinging in the wind, stood close to the curb near a bus stop.

But it was the anticipation of meeting Daniel Burros, and not the neighborhood, that accounted for Phillips’ slight feeling of uneasiness. Neighborhoods, be they elegant or shabby, had little effect on Phillips. Material objects did not interest him. He had never spent money on luxury items or on entertainment. What was left after paying for the necessities of New York, he gave away—to his church, to his mother—who had been separated from his father, a traveling salesman, years before his father’s death—or to his younger sister. McCandlish Phillips had never married, and solitude did not often bother him because he felt the omnipresence of the Lord, and because he also had spent most of his adolescence moving from town to town, school to school, making friends and then being forced to leave them.

After he had graduated from high school, and after taking the advice of one elderly editor who assured him that college was a waste of time, Phillips accepted a $20-a-week job on a weekly sports publication in Boston. Later he became a general-assignment reporter for a small newspaper chain in Brookline, and it was there that he met a man who would alter the course of his life.

The man, a devout Christian, worked in the advertising department. One day he asked Phillips if he might like to accompany him and his wife to church on some Sunday morning. Phillips accepted and he was soon pleased that he had. It seemed obvious to Phillips that the words of the minister from the pulpit
were carrying right into the lives of the people. There was a clearness of countenance about them, a directness of manner, a certain warmth that seemed much more than mere sociability; it seemed genuine.

Phillips accepted the man’s offer to return, and did so for the next nine Sundays. On Phillips’ tenth visit, after the sermon had ended, the minister asked that all heads be bowed, all eyes closed. “You have heard the words that have been spoken this morning,” the minister said, “you have heard that Jesus Christ died for your sins, and that he is ready to come into your life and to govern your life.…” Then the minister asked if there was anyone in the congregation who acknowledged himself as a sinner, and who recognized the need of Christ as his Savior—would those persons please raise their hands? It was not a thought process with Phillips. All he knew was that he wanted to raise his hand, and he did.

He was drafted into the Army shortly after his conversion as a “born-again” Christian, being stationed for the next two years at Fort Holabird, Maryland. He rose to the rank of sergeant, and although he sometimes thought about his future he mainly felt that it was in the hands of Christ. Before his release from the Army, hours before he was to leave Fort Holabird, Phillips felt a great sense of adventure—he did not know exactly where he would go when he walked through the military gate for the last time. He thought that he might end up in Alaska, or Hawaii, or wherever the Lord would lead him to do what was to be done. When Phillips received no sign, he bought a train ticket to Boston, but he never got there. He got off at New York, checked into a hotel in Times Square, and prayed. The next morning he bought
The Times
and the
Herald Tribune
. In the middle of one of
The Times
’ classified advertising pages there was a half-inch notice: “Editorial trainee wanted. Apply NYTimes Personnel.”

Phillips got on his knees and prayed, then walked toward the
Times
building.…

McCandlish Phillips had been standing outside the Burros apartment building for more than an hour when he noticed an elderly man, starting to walk slowly up the path. It was almost too dark
and misty to see the man’s face, but he was stocky and slow-footed, and, as he got closer, Phillips could observe a bulbous nose, pale pouted cheeks, sad eyes. He wore a thick coat slightly frayed.

“Mr. Burros?” Phillips asked.

The man looked up, but his vacant expression hardly changed as he answered, “Yes.”

“I need to reach Dan,” Phillips said.

“Who are you?”

Phillips gave only his name. Mr. Burros remained silent and waited for a fuller explanation.

“I’m with
The New York Times
,” Phillips added, finally. “We have a story about Dan, and I need to talk to him.”

Quickly, Mr. Burros turned away.

“I got nothing to say,” he said, pushing the door open, then closing it. Phillips remained in the doorway, watching the thicknecked elderly man, about seventy years old, slowly climbing the steps to the second floor. Phillips had no story for the next day’s edition, and because of the damp chill of the evening, and because he also did not wish to encounter Daniel Burros at this time, a reaction that he did not pause to analyze, he decided to walk to the bar across the street and to call
The Times
. Rosenthal had left, but an assistant editor told Phillips to come back to the office. Before doing so, Phillips wrote a note to Daniel Burros and returned to the apartment to leave it for him. He then left the building for the subway station, and the long ride back to Manhattan.

Daniel Burros did not respond to Phillips’ note, nor to a followup telegram, although Phillips later learned that Burros had received and read both. Phillips meanwhile continued to dig into Burros’ past, assisted by the two younger
Times
men. They interviewed dozens of people who had known Burros, had gone to school with him, had employed him, or had arrested him; and slowly the bizarre sketch of young Burros began to materialize.

Burros had been born in the Bronx in March of 1937 to parents who had married late in life—his mother had been thirty-four, his father forty-two, both descendants of Russian Jewish immigrants. Daniel Burros’ father, the tired man that Phillips had briefly met,
had joined the Navy before World War I when he was about sixteen, and after one enlistment he had transferred to the Army, serving with a division that had pursued Pancho Villa. During World War I, in France, Burros had received a throat wound that would forever impair his speech. In civilian life he became a machinist, but his health was bad, and when Phillips had met him he was not working, living mainly on his government pension and on whatever income his wife earned as a saleswoman in a department store in Jamaica, Queens.

Esther Burros was devoutly religious, and when she produced, at thirty-five, her only child, she became extremely loving and protective. Even when Daniel Burros was in the sixth grade, Mrs. Burros would often walk him to school and would return to take him home afterward, although the school was only a half-block from the Burros apartment. Daniel Burros had gone through the bar mitzvah ceremony, he later confided to a friend, because he had been “pressured” into it at home, but Burros had seemed to enjoy a warm relationship with the rabbi until the rabbi, offered a larger congregation on Long Island, had accepted it because he had needed more money for his family. Daniel Burros had appeared to be disappointed by the rabbi’s decision, but the boy continued to do well in school, and had registered an I.Q. of 154, which labeled him a “gifted child.” His grades in high school continued to be outstanding, but warped signs of confusion and rebellion began to appear. He took pride in his blue eyes and blond hair, and began to represent himself as a German-American, not as a Jew. With his friends, those who did not know that he had attended Hebrew school, he argued often that the German leaders had been misunderstood during World War II. He seemed awed by the top German generals, and was resentful of those fellow students who disagreed with his opinions. One day, after an argument with a Jewish student had led to swinging fists, Burros blurted out bitterly: “Jew bastard!”

Burros was somewhat influenced in high school by his history teacher, an Irish-Catholic McCarthyite, who helped to crystallize some of the right-wing philosophy that Burros was espousing. Burros’ poorest school grades were in Hebrew, which he had flunked, while his grades in German had been excellent. He finished high school with a four-year average of 87, which would have qualified him for a scholarship to college, but he had not been interested, explaining to one friend that college was for “Jew boys”
trying to dodge the draft. Burros wanted to become a soldier, and in 1955 he had enlisted in the United States Army paratroopers, serving with the 101st Airborne Division and the 187th Airborne Combat team. He made seventeen parachute jumps, and was among the troops sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, under Major General Edwin A. Walker, to control the disturbances caused by the school integration program. Burros’ letters to friends revealed that he had been appalled by the sight of white soldiers “protecting niggers,” and that he believed that the nation was becoming a left-wing police state.

Though he had wanted to achieve status as a brave soldier, Burros’ companions in the service were more amused than impressed by him. He looked almost comic in uniform. He had lost his flabbiness and was broad-chested and thick-armed, but he nonetheless was very short and seemed to be weighed down by the parachute pack, the large round helmet, and boots. His snappy salute was
too
snappy. He was a mockery of militarism. They laughed at him, and on more than one occasion he tried to commit suicide. Sent to an Army psychiatrist, Burros was diagnosed as an emotionally immature individual overwhelmed by childish fantasy. In 1958 he was discharged.

He had worked for a year and a half in the Queens Public Library as an office-machine operator, but by 1960 he had quit and become active in the American Nazi party, commanded by George Lincoln Rockwell. He found a $300-a-month job in Washington as a multilith operator with the United States Chamber of Commerce, but his main activities were centered in Rockwell’s barracks in Arlington, Virginia, where he lived and established himself as perhaps the most militant of anti-Semites. There he had drawn pictures of gas chambers, hoping to amuse the other troopers. He also displayed a little green-wrapped bar of soap that was labeled: “Made from the finest Jewish fat.” Burros had been an active public demonstrator with the Nazis, once picketing the Chamber of Commerce building where he worked. He was fired, and he was later arrested and fined $100 for pasting swastikas in an elevator at the B’nai B’rith building in Washington. He was convicted on three other occasions during the summer of 1960 for using profane language and for fighting with spectators at street rallies.

Not long after this Burros quit Rockwell’s followers and went to New York hoping to strengthen a local Nazi contingent. But he failed. The New York Nazis were so poor that they could not
even afford uniforms, a fact that had greatly disappointed him. When a racist friend obtained an invitation for Burros to join the Klan, Burros accepted with pleasure, becoming the recipient of a white gown and hood. His enthusiasm was obvious, his energy boundless, and soon he was appointed the Grand Dragon of New York, presiding over dozens of members, and coming to the attention of the police and government authorities that specialize in the infiltration of political fringe groups. One day Burros’ parents were visited by a government agent who later discovered that the family was Jewish. The agent did not intend to expose Daniel Burros’ secret at that time, partly out of sympathy for the parents, who had been suffering in silent shame ever since their son had been arrested with Rockwell’s men. The agent also knew that to expose Burros would be to eliminate from the racist movement a possible informer.

So that is where matters stood until, on October 22, 1965, Rosenthal received the letter from his friend about Burros’ background. And on October 29, exactly one week after McCandlish Phillips’ first visit to the Burros apartment, Phillips decided to go back and try again. He set his alarm for 5:15 a.m., and took the subway from upper Broadway to Queens via Brooklyn, thinking that he would arrive outside the Burros apartment before anyone had gotten up. He planned to post himself outside the door, all day if necessary, in the hope of meeting Burros.

The subway ride was frustratingly slow. It was almost 8 a.m. when Phillips finally arrived, walking down the long flight of steps from the elevated platform. As Phillips turned onto Lefferts Boulevard, the very instant he made the turn, he caught a quick glimpse of Daniel Burros walking into a barber shop. The timing was unbelievable. If Phillips had arrived at that spot two seconds later, he would have missed Burros—would have walked past the barber shop to the Burros apartment with no assurance that Burros would have returned until nighttime, if then. Phillips had never seen Daniel Burros before, but he knew him from photographs. There was no doubt about the identity.