Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  There weren’t that many more people out here than there had been when I’d come through earlier, but the atmosphere had completely changed. It was wonderful how you could feel this, the sense of an impending drama, the agitation, the swelling excitement: “King Cong” aroused. Movements were quicker, expressions less jaded, conversations more intense. Joe McCarthy’s Maryland protege John Marshall Butler and the Democrats’ Pat McCarran were on the floor arguing about our new hanging bill—Judge Irving Kaufman’s idea—which would restore the wartime death penalty for espionage (McCarran wasn’t arguing against the bill, he was just trying to steal it), and the court reporters were hustling about the Chamber with an augmented sense of purpose, tuning in on each Senator as he spoke, working their fifteen-minute shifts before running back to the Reporters’ Office to feed their shorthand notes into a dictaphone. The pages were suddenly awake and dashing back and forth with chairs instead of idly goosing each other, the chairs mostly for staff members who now came bursting through the swinging doors at the back—and it was filling up now, the tide was rolling in.

  I waited for Purtell to order the reading of the conference report by the Chief Clerk, then, while it was being recited, bumped him from his seat as presiding officer. Nobody applauded my arrival. Not that I expected it, but I remembered how warmly old Alben Barkley was always received whenever he came over here while I was in the Senate. Why didn’t they greet me that way? I was an ex-colleague, too. Of course, I didn’t have Barkley’s length of service, nor did I share his fawning admiration for this bunch of rummies. I was always too independent for this place. I’d liked the House, I could operate there, but I could never get used to the Senate, and stayed away as much as possible. Coming here two years ago I had that same lost feeling I had in the war when I first went into the Navy and got shipped out to Ottumwa, Iowa. Since my school days, I’ve always been allergic to smart-ass private cliques and fraternities, avoiding the tuxedo snobs of the other outfits by forming my own. This place with its almost medieval exclusivity was even worse than most, because, in spite of the surface camaraderie, there was no real interaction here, just obedience to some primitive unchallenged customs and a blind loyalty based on the blood of Party. Each of these clowns lived in a world of his own, like a feudal baron, each one isolated from the other by his retinue of clerks and lawyers, trading favors, garnering wealth and power, loyal only to his own fiefdom. No wonder the Presidents always had trouble with the Senate: Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages.

  “Mistah President…”

  “The Senator from Texas is recognized for five, uh, minutes.”

  Johnson, I could see, for all his surface composure, was hopping mad. Knowland had really pulled a fast one on him today, and Lyndon didn’t like to get outdrawn by anybody. It tickled me to see the old operator so discomfited. He had been feeling pretty smug that TIME had been running about the world this week wearing his face, calling him everything from “Rope Dealer” and “Combination Man” to “The General Manager” and “Landslide Lyndon.” What TIME didn’t talk about was all the tills the General Manager had his hand in; the Depression had been a real goldmine for Lyndon, and he didn’t do bad during the war either. Well, hell, why not? he had the smell of magnolias about him, as they say, magnolias and cowshit, no chance ever to be President, he might as well get rich instead. Anyway, I’d had my day with the Poet Laureate as the “Fighting Quaker,” and deep in my heart I knew, unlike Johnson, that if I stayed clean and on my toes, I’d have more. I wondered what kind of mail Lyndon was getting. I thought of some other alliterations besides “Landslide” and a good play or two on “Rope Dealer.” You could do plenty with “Combination Man,” too. Maybe I ought to send him one, I thought. He’d never guess. Take him down a peg.

  “Ah submit that if’n the muhjority of the Senate is gunna legislate in thet way,” he blustered, lifting one big hammy fist, “it is legislation bah suhprise! it is a patronage grab in the dark, without notice! it is legislation bah steamroller!”

  While he raged, spicing his argument with raunchy Texan broadsides, which his staff would later patiently excise from the record, the Chamber filled up behind him, the party Whips keeping tabs and waiting for the right moment to call for a quorum. There was an increasing racket and both sides were trading a number of more or less friendly insults without first asking for the right to speak. Like a bunch of bored and drunken cowboys, aching for a little action to liven up the town saloon. I tried to maintain a semblance of order for the sake of the visitors up in the galleries, and watched the doorways (seven, like the holes in a man’s head) to see who was coming and going. Over each of the three principal doors there was a statue: “Patriotism,” “Wisdom,” and “Courage.” Perhaps, in time, there would be a statue of me in here, I thought. Not just a bust like the other Vice Presidents, but a real statue. “The Fighting Quaker.” It fit. The motto over the east entrance translated, “God Has Favored Our Undertakings,” and over the south door: “In God We Trust.” Tailor-made for me, just like the “E Pluribus Unum” over my head. But the slogan that excited the imagination was the one attached to “Courage” over the doorway to the West, my part of the country: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Yes, this was what America was all about, I thought, this was the true revolution of our era—Change Trains for the Future!—and I was lucky enough to be alive just at the moment we were, for the first time, really getting up steam. It was our job now—it would be my job—to bring this new order of the ages to the whole world. My boyhood engineering dreams were coming true! Naturally, it wasn’t in the bag, there was already a lot of talk about jettisoning the Vice President, I knew I’d have to fight to stay on the ticket in 1956. And friends were few: my legislative power base was gone and I was a lonely outsider in Eisenhower’s administration of hoary-headed millionaire amateurs—but then I’ve always been a lonely outsider, that was my power. Besides, Ike, disliking me, was in fact helping me, constantly labeling me the “politician,” the pro, the Party man, and so identifying me with the real power structure of the actual nominating conventions. Yes, in reality, the old General was only setting the scene for me, preparing the way for the New Order that it was my destiny, and through me the destiny of my generation, to bring to the world! Of course, you had to be careful—revolution, new order, it was the kind of language people like the Rosenbergs used, too—but in ignorance, in darkness: yes, the truth about the Phantom was that he was a reactionary, trying to derail the Train of Progress! I was enormously pleased with this insight. Maybe this was why Uncle Sam got me mixed up in the Rosenberg case, I thought. Another object lesson in American dynamics for the heir to the throttle. I took out an index card and made a note. On the bottom, I wrote: START THE 1954 CAMPAIGN NOW!

  “What? What?” I asked. Johnson had just addressed me. He’d been shouting something about “any gahdamn Senator” and “gunna ram it down yore throat!” The Parliamentarian whispered that he’d asked for a quorum call. “Oh…”

  “Mr. President,” Knowland interrupted, “will the Senator withhold his suggestion of the absence of a quorum so as to permit the acting Majority Leader to make a statement?”

  “Suttinly, Bill…”

  Knowland launched a counterattack then, giving his reasons for pulling this surprise vote today, and making it clear he’d given Johnson fair warning, so I was able to settle back again. Knowland and I had known each other since my very first campaign in 1946. You could almost say we were friends, were there such a thing in politics. We’d fought a lot of political battles together, had both had our problems with Honeybear Warren back home, and we’d fought shoulder-to-shoulder out here against the Eastern Establishment. Bill had shown me the ropes when I reached the Senate, had sworn me in as Vice President, and it was his shoulder I wept on in that famous photo after the Fund Crisis. “Everything’s gonna be all right, Dick,” he’d said, mothering me, and I’d bawled: “Good old Bill!” On the other hand, we’d had our differences, too. I’d mor
e or less stolen Murray Chotiner away from him and with Murray as my strategist had jumped over Bill’s head to the Vice Presidency in what looked to him like a sellout to the Eastern internationalists, and now I was fighting him still. During the Fund Crisis, he’d been the man called in to replace me after all, and neither of us could get over that overnight. Well, it’s an old truism, just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests. Uncle Sam taught me that—or maybe I learned it somewhere in grade school. Knowland and I would be real friends again only when we wanted something from each other. Like when I’m President and he and his newspapers are looking for a job in government.

  As Knowland carried on, I glanced about the Chamber: it was going to be close. The Whips were scurrying in and out of their respective Cloakrooms, counting adversaries across the aisle, sending staff out in search of missing partisans. I looked down on all this old-man bustle from my marble rostrum, toying with the fragile old gavel—ivory capped with silver and said to have been in use since the first Senate meeting in 1789—and trying to imagine what it felt like to be the Incarnation of Uncle Sam, the physical feeling of it as the transformation came over you. Terrible, some said. I had the conviction Uncle Sam preferred Republicans for this process: somehow he never seemed to fit just right in Democrats, and he had left a number of them in pretty bad shape after. We Republicans were closer to America’s sacred center than the Democrats, which was what made it easier in a way to be a “good” Republican: the catechism belonged to us. But the people, living their day-to-day profane lives, were closer to the crude worldly pragmatism—the bosses, boodle, buncombe, and blarney—of the Democrats, and so, except on ritual or crisis occasions, tended to vote for them. Who listens to his conscience unless he must?

  Bill asked for a quorum call and I said: “The Secretary will call the roll.” I realized, as the roll was called, that I was getting keyed up. It was like an election. “A quorum is present,” I said, and Knowland moved that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the conference report. The Democrats tried to stall and there was a lot of individual playing to the galleries, but when the vote was called, there were 39 “Yeas” and 39 “Nays.” “Under the Constitution,” I announced, feeling very good about it, “the President of the Senate, who has the right to vote in the case of a tie, casts his vote in the affirmative; and the motion to proceed to the consideration of the conference report is agreed to!”

  Knowland flashed me a thumbs-up victory signal and the Chamber began to empty out again, as Homer Capehart commenced his arguments on behalf of the report. That reference to the Constitution had just given me an idea. I was just about to hand the gavel back to Bill Purtell and write a note to myself when Lyndon Johnson came rushing back in from the Democratic Cloakroom with Russell Long, who cried: “Mr. President! Will the Senator from Indiana yield?”

  Oh oh. I sat back down. Knowland stayed his troops and sent Hendrickson hustling into the Republican Cloakroom. “For what purpose does the Senator from Louisiana request that I yield?” Capehart wanted to know.

  “I was not able to be in the Chamber at the time of the takin’ of the last vote, suh!” said Long. “I understand it was a tie vote, and I should like to move to have the vote reconsiduhed!”

  “Well,” I said, “does the Senator from Indiana yield for, uh, that purpose?”

  “No, damn it, I—Mr. President, I refuse to yield!”

  “The Senator from Indiana declines to yield for that purpose,” I said, and rapped the gavel smartly. I didn’t know if it was a proper occasion for rapping the gavel, but it seemed like a good thing to do: BANG! It was like a gunshot, and Long jumped.

  “Yeah, well then, uh, Mr. President,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously, “as soon as I kin obtain reckanition, I shall move to have the last vote reconsiduhed.”

  Capehart conferred briefly with Knowland, then started up his report again, and once more the Chamber began to empty out. I gave the gavel back to Purtell and headed out for the elevators. The day was fast wearing on and I hadn’t yet clarified my thinking on the Rosenberg case. It was still possible they’d be burnt tonight, I’d have to be out there front and center, and I had to be ready. Why had Uncle Sam asked me out at Burning Tree about the Clark House Players, for example? Why had he brought up that Ayn Rand play I’d been in? Julius’s reading of Horatio Alger, or my duel with Alger Hiss? Kaufman’s link with Justice Clark in—? Knowland intercepted me, his big boozy face flushed from all the exertion. “I’m afraid it’s not over yet,” he said.

  “Doesn’t look like it, Bill. Where was Joe McCarthy?”

  “I dunno, that sonuvabitch—hammin’ it up for the newspapers probably. And Dirksen, too! Where’d he disappear to?”

  “Last I saw Ev, he was on his way to use the head.”

  “He was, hunh? Okay, I’ll try to round ’em up. Capehart’ll be good for an hour or two, but don’t go far away.”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Good boy. And…listen, Dick…” Knowland wrapped one weighty arm around me like an ape, softening some, glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being overheard. “Uh, if you see, you know… Uncle Sam…tell him I hope I didn’t screw things up with this little diversion, I just wanted to get off on the right foot, you understand? Just wanted to set the scene right. Tell him…tell him we’re pullin’ for him and, uh…give him my best, will ya, Dick?”

  He’s going to kick your ass so hard, Knowland, you’ll have to take off your bowtie to shit, I said to myself, giving Bill a sincere look. “I’ll do that, Bill. You can count on me.” I took out an index card and wrote a note. I let him think the note was about him, but what in fact I wrote was: LOOK UP HIGH-SCHOOL SPEECH ON CONSTITUTION FOR POSSIBLE USE ON FIGHTING QUAKER MONUMENT.

  “Thanks, Dick, I… I hope he’s…okay. Tell him he’s…tell him, Dick, he’s in our prayers!”

  4.

  Uncle Sam Strikes Back

  Metal and glass are flying everywhere, the scream of tires and crash of cars send the Viennese locals diving into cellars, but the American soldier on the FEAR Military Patrol leaps for the runaway patrol car, whips the door open, grabs the fleeing Russian soldier by the arm—the car careens, tips, smashes into a second patrol car. The four Russians reach for their weapons, but the Yank’s pistol is already out: the Rooskies, outdrawn, are disarmed, forced to leave the car at pistol point. Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas—the man they were trying to kidnap—is still alive. And free. A lean tattered figure crawls slowly out from under the wreckage of the smashed-up patrol cars, stands, brushes himself off: it’s Uncle Sam! “Yippee!” he mutters, somewhat breathless, “heav’n-rescued again!” He straightens out his crushed plug hat and clamps it firmly on his brow, and on the other side of the world a hundred escaped North Korean prisoners find themselves back inside South Korean stockades. “Our crool and onrelentin’ inimy,” says the Superhero, bugging his eyes, “has damn near discombobulated us!” GI units shore up, as he tucks his shirttails in and buttons up, the breached ROK defense lines north of the Hwachon Reservoir. A figure gaunt and grand is Uncle Sam, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world. He winks and Albert Einstein, no longer with the angels, comes down with the flu. He tugs at his balls and cargo transports airlift the heaviest tonnage of the year. “That pestifferous varmint may have got us in a drefful sityeation,” he declares in the old style of Holy Writ, while pinning a Merit Badge on the American soldier of the FEAR Patrol, “but by Godfrey Daniel, we ain’t been knocked outa this ballgame yet—no sir! if them sarpents mean to have ’em a ginewine knife-plyin’ skalp-t’arin’ punch-up, then, brothers, let the deevastation commence!” Flags are fluttering and somewhere a band is playing “Possum Up a Gum Stump.” Here, as the Evangelist Ed Markham so fairly put it, was a man to hold against the world, a man to match the mountains and the sea!

  His eyes burning fiercely like M
andrake the Magician’s, a transfiguring glory in his bosom and a wad of chaw in his jowls, he reaches up and out, seeming to stretch and grow, and with a smile of Christian charity lets fly with the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a Union: “Whoopee-ti-yi-yo! it’s yore misfortune, little dogies, and none o’ my own!” he booms from above, and—ka-BLAM!—decimates a whole paddyful of contentious gooks. “Come on, boys! The only way to resumption is to resume!” One is reminded of Zack Taylor astraddle Old Whitey running down greasy spies or Andy Jackson routing the heathen Creeks, as the Yankee Peddler, gusty and overcast, like a tempestuous blast, leads the Legion of Superheroes forward on the Korean frontier to recapture Finger Ridge and Christmas Hill. His fighter-bombers strike the Phantom’s main highways, destroying bridges and bicycles, making road cuts. Defiance gleams in Sam Slick’s eye, a sneer curls Sam Slick’s lip—no more Mr. Nice Guy now, he’s shooting from the hip! “Fer pleasure or pain, fer weal, fer woe,” he roars, walking softly but swinging a big bat, “‘tis the law of our bein’, we rips what we sew!” And off he goes to quench fires, still earthquakes, keep planes aloft, confound mischief.

  His tattered coattails gallantly streaming, he roars through the Third World, up the Iron Curtain, making it flap in the gale of his wake, and into Times Square—what a mess! He sweeps away the Phantom’s debris, reconstructs the Sing Sing stage, wipes the obscene slogans off the walls, chastises the reckless traffic. “Force rules the world still,” he thunders, his chinwhiskers aquiver in the fitful upper breeze, “has ruled it, shall rule it—meekness is weakness, strength is triumphint, over the whole dingbusted earth, still is it Thor’s Day!” Thus, with the timely aid of the Prophets, Uncle Sam manages to transform even this outrageous disruption by the Phantom into a seeming piece of his own Weltord-nung: Thor’s Day! He lifts his steel-blue eyes and spies a message scrawled across the billboard high over the Death House mock-up: COMMUNISM IS THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY SOLVED AND IT KNOWS ITSELF TO BE THIS SOLUTION! He contemplates this a moment, with doubt and strange surmise depicted in his troubled look, then spits in disgust. “The dadblame Phantom’s gone too far on that one,” he snorts dryly, restraining his mounting rage. “I’ll be swacked if that nasty mortiferous booger-man don’t seem to hanker after these burnings even more’n I do!” Then, his anger bursting its bonds, he rips the billboard down and erects new hoardings in its place: FELLOW CITIZENS! GOD REIGNS AND THE GOVERNMENT AT WASHINGTON STILL LIVES! And with that, the air seems to clear, a furtive presence seems to dissipate and let the sun through, and the electrical sign reading AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD begins once more to metamorphose, Uncle Sam accomplishing in three clean moves what it took the Phantom to do in sixteen dirty ones: