Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  I sighed, fished the crossword puzzle out of my pocket, as though consulting statistical notes. Down and through, these clues, from Burning Tree activity to “——in Boots,” like some kind of tortuous labyrinthine sentence. Meaningless, silly even—yet why did it make me think of my dreams again? I found AVER, ASSUAGE, TURN, STOP, and ROAR. Arthur Summerfield was there: his “responsibility”—I glanced up at him uneasily, but he seemed to be sleeping. When I got in trouble last fall, Art was the only major Republican official on the Eisenhower train who was arguing openly and strongly that I should be kept on the ticket, defended, and supported. Of course, we’d all turned up in these puzzles (I wondered in fact if VEEP was not an invention of crossword puzzlers), but why had Art been singled out today? 53 Down: Player chased in a game. HERO? HEIR? HEAD? And who was the Duncecap wearer, the Companion of humidity, who the Hardy heroine, the Candidate for worst dressed woman? This last one was a five-letter word, but luckily it began with “F”—but on the other hand, there was 61 Across: Be superior to, and for this one I already had some of the letters: E — — EL!

  Beside me, Herb Brownell was bringing up the possibility of issuing a “white paper” on the Rosenberg case, but he interrupted himself momentarily to ask dryly if that crossword puzzle I was working was going to be the next order of business?

  I’d been deep in thought, trying out “T” and “H” in those blank spaces, and his question startled me. But I was prepared for it. “No, not the puzzle, Herb,” I said, then sat forward to look around at the others, “but this advertisement beside it.” The others turned to me expectantly, leaving a chagrined Brownell momentarily eclipsed and biting his lip. “It’s for a book ostensibly about Soviet Civilization,” I said, “but in fact it’s a blatant plea for ‘co-existence’—and we all know whose kind of talk that is! It’s published by an outfit up in New York which calls itself the Philosophical Library and they’re not only out to peddle this propaganda, they’re also trying to whip up another new letter-writing campaign to the President!”

  “Oh, no!” groaned the President. “I thought when this Rosenberg thing was over, I’d—what do they think I am, a darned mailbox?” Summerfield woke up at this reference to his own Cabinet post and glanced about in panic as I passed the ad around. “Can’t we classify it as obscene mail or something? Nobody reads all this foolishness, nobody could even if they wanted to, the most we can ever do is weigh it and burn it, and the incinerators are all stuffed as full as we can get them as it is!”

  Summerfield snorted and coughed, and snatched up the clipping to see what we’d been talking about. He studied it blearily, somewhat amazed. “You mean OAF?” he asked finally.

  Our laughter was interrupted by a messenger from the Supreme Court: all nine Justices had arrived and the Court was sitting. The Attorney General glanced coolly at his watch, then said: “In just a few moments, Chief Justice Vinson is expected to announce that the Supreme Court is vacating Douglas’s stay. As soon as possible after that, the President must issue a final denial of clemency, which we’ve already drafted, and then the Justice Department will follow with its announcement that the Rosenbergs will be executed tomorrow night at the latest.”

  Someone pointed out that that was the Sabbath.

  “We’re not going to burn them on Sunday!” the President shouted, rearing up from his doodle, his blue eyes flashing.

  “No, General, the Jewish Sabbath,” Herb explained. “These people are Jews.”

  “Oh, all right, then,” said the President.

  All of this was just a joke, everybody was just trying to calm down.

  The Attorney General pondered the problem a moment, then said: “Well, in that case, we’ll finish it tonight. We’ll set it up as soon as the Court stops sitting.”

  “Before sundown,” someone said. “It starts at sundown, their Sabbath.”

  “Right, sundown. Thanks.”

  Friday. Sunset. The two thieves. Jews condemned by Jews. Some patterns had been dissolved by the overnight delay, it was true, but others were taking shape. Uncle Sam could not be entirely displeased, I thought. But the President only belched grumpily and shifted in his seat. He said he still didn’t understand what the issue in the Supreme Court today was, still didn’t see why there had been this delay. If they were guilty, they ought to be punished; if not, let them go. The speech-writer Emmett Hughes, once part of the retinue surrounding the National Poet Laureate, scribbled away, his dark brows bobbing, taking notes on all this for posterity—not what he was being paid to do, but you could spot these parasites a mile away. I supposed, no matter how tight a ship you ran, there’d always be one of these guys slipping in. “I must say, I’m impressed by all the honest doubt about this expressed in the letters I’ve been seeing,” the President said. Was this true, was he really unable to understand so simple a point of law, or was this too part of his disguise? The good soldier, forthright and true, the man of arms too honest to grasp the devious men of letters? Sometimes simple people are more mysterious than those of us who are more complex.

  Herb explained once more about the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 Atomic Energy Act. As soon as he said that the issue was purely technical, I thought: he’s just given it all away, he’s just told them Douglas was right. Just as, in a purely technical sense, Don Wheeler was also right in calling for Douglas’s impeachment. But I also knew Eisenhower would not realize this, or would not seem to. Was he testing us, I wondered? I recalled his offer—his challenge, rather—to reopen this case at any time before the executions if any one of us believed that to do so would serve the best interests of the United States. Thus, each of us was on the spot….

  “Well, the proof of admission there’s no frameup,” I said, “is the complete silence of the Phantom-controlled press in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It’s obvious they’re expecting the Rosenbergs to confess and they don’t want to look like a bunch of clowns. And I’ll tell you something else. Morton Sobell’s wife said something very funny recently out in Far Rockaway. She said: ‘Julius and Ethel could save their own skins by talking, but Julius and Ethel will never betray their friends!’ I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Of course, I’d got this from a guy who’d got roughed up at that meeting and so was pretty biased, and a right-wing Jew at that, nervous about the anti-Semitism the Rosenbergs could arouse, but that hardly mattered, I understood the essential truth of it and so did everybody else around the table.

  Except perhaps the President. He scowled and unwrapped a cigar. “Well, now,” he said, “if the Supreme Court decides by, say, five to four or even six to three, as far as the average man’s concerned, there will be doubt—not just a legal point in his mind.” He was himself that average man he was talking about, of course. This was the secret of his success. He really was average, a cheerful unimaginative boy from Abilene, and yet he was also the man who won World War II, so that just showed what an average man could do. So long as he was an American. Uncle Sam always chose his disguises to fit the times.

  “Well, who’s going to decide these points,” Brownell argued, “pressure groups or the Supreme Court? Surely, our first concern is the strength of our courts. And in terms of national security, the Communists are just out to prove they can bring enough pressure, one way or another, to enable people to get away with espionage. I’ve always wanted you to look at evidence that wasn’t usable in court showing the Rosenbergs were the head and center of an espionage ring here in direct contact with the Russians—the prime espionage ring in the country!”

  The President stared blankly at Brownell, then lit his cigar. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft,” he said. “The effect of the action.” He understood: it was as though he hadn’t even heard Brownell’s offer to look at the secret evidence. If there was any. It was strange that no one questioned Brownell on this, even though nobody had ever seen this material, Eisenhower especially. I watched this short-tempered old man, Uncle Sam’s new real-time disguise, and thought: the importan
t thing is that there be room for the Incarnation to take place. A man can’t be solid and a mask at the same time. Yes, image—I knew all about that. The essence of power is paradox and ambiguity. Learning to live with this was the hardest thing of all—I was still too precise, too self-critical, too anxious to make everything perfectly clear. While I worried and sweated over every phrase, Eisenhower just leaned back and let fly. “The area of statecraft…the effect of the action…”

  I feared I would never be able to deliver these homilies with such ingenuous sincerity. “All I do is belabor the obvious,” he said, but with him it looked easy. Take “enlightened self-interest,” that maxim he stole from George Washington, and which was still one of his favorites. Uncle Sam once explained this to me. He said that it had long been recognized that self-interest was like some kind of sin, something born of the devil, the source, like money, of all evil—the Greeks knew this, indeed so did the Mana-hatta Indians. Self-interest was irrational and man had long dreamed of the rational utopia, free of self-interest. But reason was also known to be the source of all evil. Enlightenment did not illuminate, but spread a greater darkness. The dream of utopia made men miserable, both through disappointment with their flawed existence and through the horrors they inflicted on each other through pursuit of the rational—and therefore unattainable—ideal. Thus, “enlightenment” and “self-interest” were two sides of the same coin, and if there was evil in the world it was due to our failure to see both sides at once. “Enlightened self-interest” was a stoic formula of acceptance, part of the tragedy of history. But for Eisenhower, it meant: Don’t take any wooden nickels.

  He’d traveled the world, this man, and now he was running it, and he still hadn’t progressed past the simplest kind of home-town table talk. In his cowtown world, he could use words like “instinct” and “freedom” and “sincerity” and “decency,” and assume any darn fool would know what he meant by them, and if they pretended not to, they were either cantankerous or nincompoops. Free economy was God’s truth, that was all, plain as the nose on your face, and he figured if you’d just show the Soviets the facts they’d agree with you, they’d have to. After all, as he said when he called on the Almighty to watch over the Communists when Stalin died: “They are the children of the same God who is the Father of all peoples everywhere.” It was easy. “Now let us begin talking to each other,” he’d say. “And let us say what we’ve got to say so that every person on earth can understand it. Let’s talk straight: no doubletalk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let’s spell it out.” Then he could never understand why this didn’t seem to work: “We are trying to present certain salient facts to the world, facts for example as to what our purpose is, our intent, that we are not imperialistic, we are simply trying to help create a world in which free men can live decently, and they have not understood; we have tried to be helpful and have earned nothing but vituperation!” In fact, he even seemed to blame me somehow when things went wrong, as though I were responsible for corrupting the language of the world so that it obscured all these self-evident truths. He thought almost any problem could be solved if America would just keep its heart right into the job, as he put it, and do the right thing. “Heart, Determination, and Productivity.” He cherished old proverbs about the good life and rags to riches, thought the first World War even more glorious than the second, truly believed in Manifest Destiny. He liked to fish and hunt! He still remembered the Alamo! Businessmen to him were simply people who knew how to solve problems and save money, so he filled up his Cabinet with them and admonished them to remember the little fellow—my God, how could you not like him? Laborers were like foot soldiers in the forward march of free enterprise, and he talked about creeping socialism as if it were some kind of mole eating up the golf course. “Before I appoint anybody to any important position, I call him in and ask him about his philosophy,” he’d say with a straight face. It’s amazing how little some people can understand about the world we live in, even on the simplest level!

  By grunts and nods, we’d seemed to come to some agreement that there was no need for a white paper, but that we should enlarge some on the President’s clemency denial previously drafted by the Attorney General, acknowledging the worldwide “concern” over the case, but answering this Phantom-inspired ruckus with a vivid depiction of the horrible nature of the Rosenbergs’ crime (millions of innocent people may die, etc.) and a little self-congratulatory canticle on behalf of the generous and humane system of American justice and due process of law. I pointed out that the case had had 23 applications to the courts and 112 judges had reviewed it, but no judge had ever expressed any doubt that the Rosenbergs had in fact spied for the Russians. Of course, I knew as well they’d never asked themselves the question and so had had no cause to answer it, confining themselves to legal technicalities, not questions of fact, scrupulously avoiding any improper opinionating about “guilt” or “innocence,” as indeed they had to, but I counted on the General’s ignorance of the appellate system, and sure enough he smiled and said: “Put that in, Herb: ‘No judge has ever expressed any doubt…’”

  Conversation shifted now to the ceremonies tonight in Times Square, the seating arrangements, special events, electrocution protocol, and Doug McKay, as Secretary of the Interior, gave a brief report on the problems of security and set reconstruction, apologizing somewhat abashedly for his failure to solve the Statue of Liberty boat strike. The more this dragged on, the more anxious and annoyed I became. My staff would have arrived by now and discovered the Rosenberg mess in my office. I worried about that, worried that they’d see it and gossip around the Senate Office Building about what they saw, or, worse, that they’d try to do me a favor and clean it up. They knew I liked a clean room. My desk is always clean. You can’t let your mind get cluttered, I believe that, you have to live like a Spartan, spare and clean, be at your best at all times, be physically and mentally disciplined to make decisions in a balanced way, and people who have messes around them all the time also have messy minds. I have a note to myself somewhere on the subject. But right now, I knew, my office was a goddamn disaster area, the Rosenberg letters strewn everywhere, the trial transcripts, secret FBI reports, my notes, books on the floor—if anybody who knew me well saw it, they’d think old Dick Nixon was losing his mind. Or else that somebody hostile to me, malicious, vindictive, had got in while I was out. But there was nothing I could do about it until this meeting broke up, and at the present rate, I’d be lucky to get over there before it was time to show up in Times Square. I really blew it with that shave this morning, I thought irritably, watching Ike doodle that blackbearded bum. Is he stretching it out on purpose, I wondered—is Uncle Sam just toying with me?

  Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson now suggested ringing the area around Times Square an hour before the executions with atomic tanks, which he said he thought he could supply. Joe Dodge, the Budget Director, doubted that this would be economical. Wilson said he just thought he’d throw the idea out to let us kick it around. Watching all these theatrical performances, I thought: Only Uncle Sam is real: there’s no one over his shoulder. An awkward situation, though—he had nothing to believe in except himself. An audience of one. Herb Brownell informed us that the old Look Ahead, Neighbor Special was being rigged up for VIP runs to the city, and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks said that the subway system there had been commandeered to assure us all easy and safe access to the center and out again. Oveta Culp Hobby expressed her appreciation of this. Of course, the whole Cabinet out in public and in one place like that—not to mention Congress, the Supreme Court, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and indeed the better part of America—we were very vulnerable, the Phantom might even throw the big one at us. Foster Dulles gloomily discounted this likelihood, and Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, smiled and said there was nothing to worry about.

  After that, the President, apologizing, read through the speech he planned to deliver at the el
ectrocutions tonight for our approval. It was okay, his usual bumbling incoherent but plainly sincere style, and when he was finished I clapped along with all the rest. I was wondering, though, how to get the discussion shifted back to my injuries. “I read it far more for your blue pencils,” he said, as though genuinely embarrassed, “than I did for your applause.” Why is it, I wondered, that people think of me as the cagy and devious one? “Because at first, in our attempt to state a philosophy of government, we were not close enough down to our daily living. One reason I wanted to read it now is so that you can think it over and be ready to tear it to pieces.”

  “I think it is wonderful,” said Charlie Wilson. “I am in favor of flying the flag pretty high.”

  “I am, too,” boomed Eisenhower, clapping his left hand to Wilson’s shoulder. Art Summerfield awoke with such a start he nearly fell over backwards in his chair. “I would get out and shout it out loud but you have also got to bring basic principles down to living because here is this thing going out to probably one of the greatest audiences that has ever heard a speech. It is going in the papers, here are thousands out in front of us. You want every person there to carry home with him a conviction that he can do something.”

  “A free society stimulates the efficiency of millions,” Wilson said. Engine Charlie smelled the end of this meeting, and his eyes had come uncrossed. So did I, and I leaned forward to gather up my papers. “We should urge that we accomplish more with the same effort for the good of all!”

  “It is on a high plane and for the occasion it is very good,” said Ezra Benson, understanding Wilson’s remarks as a criticism. It would be Ezra’s role to deliver the invocation tonight and to ask God to forgive the Rosenbergs for their sins, a touch of charity we all approved of. “I think it is wonderful.”