Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “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 bunt
ing 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!” TIME, the National Poet Laureate, records this sentiment for immortality, then adds:

  americans could not forget

  korea and it spoiled

  some of their pleasure in

  tv sets and Cadillacs

  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 TIME say, wagging their big 85-mm guns about like magic wands…

  the machine guns and submachine guns

  began chattering the crowds broke threw

  themselves into gutters and down subway

  stair wells to dodge the bullets but

  not all made it…

  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….

  AMERICA THE NATE OF THE WORLD

  AMERICA THE NITE OF THE WORLD

  it was a quiet rainy night in

  prisoner of war camp number nine

  under the brow of a green hill in

  pusan

  at 2:30 a.m.

  pfc willie buhan was reading

  a book in the “maximum security”

  compound (for prisoners who had broken

  minor rules)

  he wasn’t

  worried much though vaguely aware

  that his two rok buddies on guard

  duty had been acting sort of

  “funny”

  the next thing

  he knew he was looking down

  the barrels of two carbines

  one garand rifle and one pistol

  all in the hands of

  rok guards…

  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 on
ly 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. TIME 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 TIME: “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!”