Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Up jumped Joe with a ten-foot pole,

  He roused it in that groun’-hog’s hole!

  “A list,” says he, “of two hundred and five…card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” He says: “Commiecrats! Prisoners of a bureaucratic Communistic Frankenstein! Parlor pinks and parlor punks! Prancing mimics of the Moscow party line in the State Department!” Oh yes! “Egg-sucking phony liberals,” says he, whose “pitiful squealing…would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers” who had sold China into “atheistic slavery!” He says: “A conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man!” He says:

  Stand back, boys, an’ gimme a little air,

  I’ve got a little o’ the groun’-hog’s hair!

  I heard ’im give a whistle an’ a wail,

  I’ve wound my stick right in his tail!

  “I thank God,” cries the Reverend Billy Graham, “for men who in the face of public denouncement and ridicule go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle, and from that vantage point try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known, Communism!” And then, while Bible-belters, ex-FBI agents, Catholic hardliners and anti-Zionists, ladies’ clubs, Hearst newsmen, the legendary China Lobby, patriotic queer-bashers, and most of the Republican and Democratic parties surge around Joe to get a piece of History, the besieged President, egged on by Bernard Baruch, Edward Teller, Columbia University’s Dwight Eisenhower, and an uptight Dean Acheson, overrules the Atomic Energy Commission and sets in motion a new crash program: TRUMAN ORDERS HELL BOMB BUILT! “I wasn’t going to be one of your arm-rolling cheek-kissing mollycoddles!” says Harry. Du Pont gets the H-bomb contract, cash on the line. But already it may be too late…

  Stand back, boys, an’ lemme git my breath,

  Ketchin’ this groun’-hog’s might nigh death!

  To-my-wham-bam-diddle-all-the-day…!

  Up on the fifth floor of the FBI buildings, surrounded by souvenirs from his epic past and autographed photos from the radio stars of “The FBI in Peace and War,” Crimebuster J. Edgar Hoover, hand-in-hand with his bachelor friend Clyde Toison, oversees the spy-ring hunt. “Clyde,” he says, feeling a bit giddy, unable to suppress a soft little giggle, “this is the Crime of the Century!” “You said it, Eddie,” says Clyde. The entire FBI is mobilized for the hunt. They are digging into records at Los Alamos, poring through AEC personnel files, badgering a few old suspects, interviewing hundreds of people. Others, disguised as tourists, slip catlike through the ghettos of the nation’s cities, in deep where the unassimilated live, speaking alien tongues, eating weird shit, their seed still frothy with unhomogenized Old World discontents; 90 percent of all Commies in this country, as every G-man knows, are foreign-born or were dropped by foreign-born parents. But chasing them down is like falling down a well: there are nearly forty million of these yahooskis in the U.S., plus all their goddamn kids—over three hundred thousand Russians in New York City alone—it’s an impossible job. Knock knock! Who’s dere? Police! Police who? Uh, police tuh meet yuh, lady. Thistle be quick. Chester routine inquiry. Hassan a body here seen a spy ring? We all aspiring, mister, it’s a Mary kin way! Clem the ladder of success, you know? Gopher broke. Hokay? Well, yeah, but… C’mon, Thomas money, copper, and Eisenhower late as it is! Yes’m, Czar Rhee tuh bother yuh. Dewey have your pardon? Sure, son, Hiss all right, to err is Truman. Better luck on the—knock knock!—Nixon…

  But then suddenly Scotland Yard of Great Britain arrests a high-domed bespectacled atomic scientist named Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, and Fuchs confirms the darkest of Patriot visions: while working on the Manhattan Project in New York and Los Alamos, he stole atomic secrets for the Russians! It’s all true! As Newsweek says: “…the fantastic is beginning to be accepted as fact. There are men like Fuchs and Hiss!” Fuchs describes his U.S. contact as a man “from 40 to 45 years of age, possibly five feet ten inches tall, broad build,” and the FBI promptly arrests a soft little five-foot-six Russian immigrant ten vears younger than that named Harry Gold, who quickly acknowledges that he is Dr. Fuchs’s mystery man. His family is amazed by this confession of a romantic double life, since Harry, who likes to amuse himself through the long nights with a little parlor baseball game played with a deck of cards, has never really left home. TIME say:

  why had harry gold done it?

  he could only mutter a line which

  a thousand sinners had muttered

  before “I must have been crazy”

  While Harry embroiders on his saga and crystal-balls the American League pennant race for his captors, other agents interrogate a young ex-GI, a ne’er-do-well ghetto Jew and ex-Commie (pieces all falling into place), suspected of stealing uranium and other valuables during his days as a mechanic at Los Alamos. He doesn’t want to talk about the thefts, but he is willing, when invited, to say he spied for the Russians. In prison, Harry Gold confers with the FBI and then tells his lawyer that he thinks there’s going to be something extra about a GI in Albuquerque: “Ah… This event, as I said, was—I’m not being—I’m being deadly serious when I say it was an extra added attraction. I use the term, as I said, not in any joking manner—because this is no joking matter—but simply because I believe it best describes the affair… Yakovlev told me that…after I had seen Klaus Fuchs I was to see another man. I don’t remember the name of the street. We, uh, I think that their principal talk…concerned the difficulty of getting Jewish food, delicatessen, in a place like Albuquerque and a mention by the man that his family or possibly her family regularly sent them packages including salami… Yakovlev said we could forget all about him…apparently the information received had not been of very much consequence at all…” He doesn’t remember the GI’s name, some kind of mental block, but a couple of days later, after David Greenglass has been formally arrested, it comes to him: David Greenglass. Also, perhaps he was wrong about what Yakovlev said, probably. David is very contrite. He says his sister Ethel and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, made him do it. They had a kind of power over him. Harry Gold had forgotten about this connection, but with the FBI’s help he begins to remember. Maybe that’s who was sending the salami.

  The net goes out and draws in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, described by J. Edgar Hoover in one of his daily press releases as “important links in the Soviet espionage apparatus”—Rosenberg, Hoover declares the day he arrests him, had “aggressively sought ways and means to secretly conspire with the Soviet Government to the detriment of his own country!” Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass to Rosenberg—quadruple play!—and now what next? Praise pours in. “No finer body of men in all of the world,” says a new federal judge. The FBI is getting its biggest headlines since the vintage years of the 1930s, and the Boss is exultant. He’s reminded of a recurrent dream in which he’s pulling on a kind of rope coming out of the ground, something like a navel-string, and the more he pulls out, the more there is. “We’re going to need a new building, Clyde,” he titters, and cracks open a celebrative bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Walter Winchell invites him out to dinner at the Stork Club. People smile wherever he goes. Cabdrivers give him racing tips. Waiters bow. The cigarette girl thanks him from the bottom of her heart: “We’re all praying for you, sir!” “You do that, miss,” he replies gravely. “Suppose every American spent a little time each day, less than the time demanded by the Communists, in studying the Bible and the basic documents of American history, government, and culture? The result would be a new America, vigilant, strong, but ever humble in the service of God! All we need is faith, miss, real faith!” She swoons at his feet. As he steps around her, he thinks: This is a lot better than being a Presbyterian minister, I’m glad I changed my mind about that, after all. Only one momentary snag spoils an otherwise perfect evening: the Rosenbergs don’t seem to know what everybody is talking about. But they give them
selves away: they keep insisting on their “rights.” Well, remind them they can rightfully get the chair for this, see what that does for their memory.

  Meanwhile, former friends and ex-classmates of Rosenberg are tailed and questioned. Not much happens until it’s discovered that one of them, a radar man named Morton Sobell, has apparently whipped off to Mexico in a wild blue funk: aha. Can’t risk extraditing him, he might slip behind the Iron Curtain before those dumb greasers have got the papers processed, a goon squad has to be used. A bit irregular maybe, but when you’re up against the Phantom, the rulebook goes out the window. Sobell is snatched and dragged, kicking and screaming like Jimmy Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces (they have to bludgeon the hijo de puta to keep him in line), across the Rio Grande in the dead of the night to Laredo, where he’s delivered to a waiting G-man—“Knock knock!” Eh? Who dere? “Grassy!” Grassy? Grassy quién? “Grassy-ass, amigos! Mooch-ass grassy-ass!” Ha ha, de nada, jefe!

  They took ’im by the tail an’ wagged ‘im to a log,

  An’ swore by gum! he’s a hell-of-a-’hog!

  Carried ’im to the house an’ skinned ’im out to bile,

  I bet you forty dollars you could smell ’im fifty mile!

  Smell him maybe, but you can’t hear him: he’s as adamantly uncooperative as the Rosenbergs—but no more kid gloves, no more time for pussyfooting, for Sam Slick is suddenly in a pot of trouble himself, more hogs than even he can boil: not only has the Phantom got Eastern Europe, China, veto power in the U.N., and the atomic bomb, but on the 24th day of June, 1950, precisely at two p.m. in the middle of Uncle Sam’s Big Roundup, hot war has broken out in Korea! “Yowee! take thy beak from out my heart!” yelps Uncle Sam. “Blow the strumpet to arms! Strike up the band! We gotta raise the beacon-light o’ triumph, snouse the citadel of the aggressor, and press onward to liberty and the Injun Ocean before that bluebellied bloodsuckin’ scalawag snatches us bald-headed! Whoo-oop! Hang onto yore hats, boys, we’re ridin’ a tiger!”

  Hastily, the Seventh Fleet hightails it out of Pearl Harbor, a trial date is set, troops are rushed to Korea. Greenglass and Gold are lodged together on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison in New York, where they can help stimulate each other’s recall powers. The Rosenbergs are separated for, obversely, the same reason. An ad appears in The New York Times: “From now on, let us make no mistake about it: the war is on, the chips are down. Those among us who defend Russia or Communism are enemies of freedom and traitors to the United Nations and the United States. American soldiers are dying…every man’s house will be in a target area before this ends!” The Yankee Peddler, turning to meet this new challenge in Asia, is knocked reeling—invading North Koreans cross the 38th Parallel and roll south; Americans land at Inchon, cross the 38th Parallel, and roll north; the Chinese People’s Volunteers cross the Manchurian border and roll south—and by the time the clerk in Room 110 of the Foley Square Courthouse in New York City is ready to step forward on Tuesday morning, March 6, 1951, to call out the case of “the United States versus Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell, et al.,” the whole scene is in great disarray, Uncle Sam doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going, the Mongol hordes of Red China have overrun Tibet as well as Korea and are pressing out in all directions like a bursting waterbag, the Russians are arrogantly lighting up the sky with atomic-bomb tests, the President and his General are at loggerheads, and Nightmare Alley—the escape route out of the Korean hills to the south—is littered with frozen American dead. “We have met the enemy,” cries Uncle Sam, gasping for breath, “and bile me fer a seahorse if I wouldn’t ruther crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, than be cotched alone in the nighttime with one o’ them heathen buggers again!” TIME’S Mother Luce, who, perhaps inspired by the early successes, has been urging her son to push the idea of living with perpetual war as part of the American Way of Life, now writes despondently:

  I had a call from John Foster Dulles, a very special assistant to Secretary of State Acheson. Dulles said he was at his home in New York and could I come after dinner. When I got there I found Foster and Brother Allen and a foreign service officer. The atmosphere was solemn. Foster Dulles put the situation to me concisely and precisely. He said the American army had been surrounded and a Marine division too. “It is,” said Dulles, “the only army we have. And the question is: shall we ask for terms?” I could hardly believe my ears and that is what I said….

  As the brightly badged bailiff enters from the Judge’s chambers and faces the packed courtroom in Foley Square, TIME’S visionary kid brother is declaring: “LIFE sees no choice but to acknowledge the existence of war with Red China and to set about its defeat, in full awareness that this course will probably involve war with the Soviet Union as well!” Work on the H-bomb proceeds feverishly, but there are fears the Russians may have stolen that one before it’s even been invented. Joe McCarthy, the Fighting Marine, demands that General MacArthur, who is widely reported to be “the greatest man alive,” be given the discretionary authority in Asia for “speedy action of the roughest and toughest kind of which we are capable!” The bailiff pounds his knuckled fist on the door three times and calls out: “Everybody please rise!” There’s a scraping of chairs, a scuffling of feet, the Strategic Air Command is put on alert, the Communist program for world domination is released by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A New York Times headline announces: DANGER OF ATOM BOMB ATTACK IS GREATEST IN PERIOD UP TO THIS FALL! The Judge enters—a ripple of surprise: Uncle Sam has chosen for his Easter Trial little Irving Kaufman, the Boy Judge, a stubby Park Avenue Jew and Tammany Hall Democrat who looks a little like a groundhog himself with his plastered-down hair, thick bumpy nose, and damp beady eyes. Old-time court buffs, however, glance at each other and wink knowingly. Not only are they great admirers of the Boy Judge’s fine voice and his activist take-no-shit style of conducting a trial, but they know something most other people in the courtroom don’t: that Irving Kaufman’s own wife is a Rosenberg! They also know that Irving’s an orphan, and though a Jew, a whizkid law-school graduate of Fordham University, the Roman Catholic farm for FBI agents (his classmates called him Pope Kaufman after he aced Christian Doctrine with a 99); that he was once a shrewd prosecutor, one of the original “Foley Squareheads,” an admiring student of the tough-fisted tactics of the Fighting D.A. Tom Dewey, and the first prosecuting attorney in the district to use a wiretap as a weapon in a federal prosecution; and that when his appointment, sponsored by Carmine DeSapio, to become the youngest federal judge in the country was held up eighteen months ago, it was J. Edgar Hoover himself who came to the rescue. He mounts the steps to the bench, dragging his robes behind him, and stands there, peering over the top like Kilroy, while the court clerk announces that the court is now in session: IF SOVIETS START WAR, ATOMIC BOMB ATTACK EXPECTED ON NEW YORK FIRST, says the Journal-American. “All ye having business before this Court, come forward and ye shall be heard!” Julius and Ethel glance at each other, GIs lose another hill in Korea, and East Berlin policemen fire openly on U.S. Army sightseeing buses. The Russians are said to be massing troops on the Manchurian border. “God bless the United States of America!” cries the clerk. “Nobody will have to run if H-bombs start detonating. A big black cloud full of radioactive particles will get you even if…you happen to be browsing around the bottom of an abandoned lead mine!” Behind the Courthouse on Duane Street, the bells of St. Andrew’s Church are striking the half hour. “God bless this Honorable Court!” There are fervent whispers of “Amen!” in the crowded courtroom. The Judge climbs up into the big leather chair and sits down. Schoolchildren scramble under their desks in an atom bomb drill, and an entire Yank company is bogged down in a Korean rice paddy. “The District Attorney moves the case for trial,” says the Prosecutor gravely, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses on his long nose, “and is ready to proceed.” He glances severely at the suspects who sit stiffly in their chairs. ATOM BOMB SHELTERS FOR CITY AT COST OF $450,000,000 UR
GED.

  If the choice of Judge is somewhat unexpected, the choice of Prosecutor is not: though a Tammany Hall ethnic like the Judge, Irving Saypol is not only big in the Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, and Knights of Pythias, he is also, as the National Poet Laureate says: “the nation’s number / one legal hunter of top / communists.” Devious, hardboiled, fast on his feet, he’s a tough man to beat. This, however, is the most critical case of Irving Saypol’s career. American casualties in Korea are approaching the one-hundred-thousand mark when he rises, tall, hard, and graying, to make his opening statement. There are fears of imminent war everywhere in Europe. He shuffles his thick sheaf of papers, smooths down the pocket flap on his double-breasted suit jacket. Irving Saypol is a sonuvabitch at gin rummy, but does he hold the cards? The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives warns that a third world war may be just around the corner. Julius Rosenberg drums on the counsel table with long nervous fingers. President Truman calls on all police officers and citizens to be watchful for spies, saboteurs, and subversive activities. Saypol’s gaggle of assistants and FBI investigators huddle close together, watching their man. TENSION IS GRAVER THAN IN NOVEMBER, MARSHALL’S BELIEF. Ethel Rosenberg edges forward on her chair, little worry lines crossing her face, as she struggles to hear Prosecutor Saypol’s muffled low-key delivery: in soft flat tones he is accusing her of “the most serious crime which can be committed against the people of this country.” Morton Sobell strokes his jaw, licks his lips, wrinkles his nose, confers nervously with his lawyers. David Greenglass and Harry Gold come down from the Tombs and, assisted by David’s wife, Ruth, confess to spying, perjury, conspiracy, and the lot, and then the Greenglasses say the Rosenbergs were behind it all. Twenty other witnesses corroborate minor details of their story—including Liz Bentley the Red Spy Queen, who adds a bit of swish and dash to the proceedings. Julius and Ethel take the stand and say it isn’t so. When they’re asked if they’re Communists, though, they duck behind the Fifth Amendment. Morton Sobell, who has been largely ignored in the testimony, figures they must have forgotten about him and keeps his mouth shut. The members of the jury, mostly accountants and auditors, retire and tote up the witness score: 23 to 2 with 1 abstention. They return with a guilty verdict for all three, and the Judge says: “My own opinion is that your verdict is a correct verdict…. The thought that citizens of our country would lend themselves to destruction of their own country by the most destructive weapon known to man is so shocking that I can’t find words to describe this loathsome offense! God bless you all!” He goes off to the Park Avenue Synagogue to pray and sneak a quick American cheese sandwich. TIME say: