“We want to keep it largely on a high spiritual plane with exhortation, but at the same time,” said Ike, gesturing broadly, “trying to relate it to our everyday living.”
“I did not see anything I would want to change,” Wilson said.
I got ready to stand up, but then Cabot Lodge objected to a reference to Moscow as having been formerly the center of autocracy and as being now the center of revolution. He said he thought that implied that the Russian government was no longer autocratic—and as for revolution, well, that was a word that appealed to a lot of downtrodden people in the world.
“Despotism?” suggested Ike. “You are right.” He seemed pleased at Lodge’s suggestion, and cast a brief curious glance at me. In my resolve to keep quiet, I realized, I’d let Lodge steal a line from me there.
“If you gave us a flip from autocracy to despotism,” Wilson chimed in, “it would be better.” Now that he was awake, Charlie couldn’t seem to stop talking.
It suddenly came to me what my problem was: I’d spent too much time on reviewing the trial, not enough on everything else. Hadn’t Uncle Sam warned me about this? Nothing had been or could be proven. I could have challenged Brownell on that suppressed evidence, for example, but I’d sensed somehow it wasn’t relevant—it might have been a week ago, or even yesterday, but it wasn’t any more. Why had I been so slow to see this? Why had I waited so long to get into this case at all? I wasn’t just a Congressman from Southern California any longer, I was a heartbeat away from the Incarnation! Everything mattered! This was the central problem as one rose higher in the echelons of national power: how could one continue to isolate and define the essential debate, keep it clean from diffuseness and mind-numbing paradox? I’ve only begun, I thought. There’ll never be time enough! I had to reread the letters, the biographies, search out the hidden themes, somehow reach a panoramic view of the event, and write a speech! That was the point: I had to go before the people tonight and unleash a real philippic, communicate the facts, publicize the truth, help them all stand taller and feel proud to be Americans! That was what Uncle Sam was expecting of me! That was what language was for: to transcend the confusions, restore the spirit, recreate the society! Ahead of me, I knew, was a day of almost superhuman effort.
“I personally am a little bit reluctant ever to talk,” said the President, “in terms that look like we are running a school. I do believe in this particular one—Lincoln himself didn’t say, ‘Eighty-seven years ago.’ He said, ‘Fourscore and seven years ago.’ He, instantly on the opening of that speech, established a certain stateliness, he didn’t use the language that he knew better than anybody else—if you will read some of the stories that he told. I am open to argument on this, but in this speech I deliberately tried to stay in the level of talk that would make as good reading as possible at the Quai d’Orsay or Number Ten Downing but I particularly tried to make the words that would sound good to the fellow digging the ditch.”
Wilson, beaming (we were all beaming): “You flew the flag! It was wonderful!”
“Uh, my nose…” I began.
But just then in burst Sherman Adams with the news: The Court has met! The stay has been vacated! The crowds on the Hill and in the Mall are on the move—and they’re headed this way!
14.
High Noon
Here they come, streaming up the Mall toward the White House, and leading them it’s TIME himself, America’s laureate balladeer, carrying a blow-up of Gary Cooper crashing through a door with the legend “BLOOD, SWEAT AND TENSION,” and singing his own words to the famous tune:
high noon united artists creeping
on hadleyville pop four oh oh
one hot sunday morning is the
moment of crisis
of crisis for the
the little western cow-ow town
desperado fra-hank miller
whose jail sentence has been commuted
through a political deal is coming
on - the - noon - train
the marshal is no hero he is
g cooper leaving with his wife
grace kelly to open a general sto-hore
but he turns ba-hack
there is a jo-hob
law and order-her are at stake
the solid citizens of hadleyvi-hille
are laying odds that the marshal is dea-head
five minutes after miller gets off
off - the - noon – train
left high and dry in a town para
lyzed by fear and morally
bankrupt the sweating marshal has to
face miller and three
three of his fellow
fellow desperadoes alone
the picture builds to its high noon climax
in a crescendo of ticking clo-hocks
railroad tracks stretching long and level
hushed - deser - ted - streets
throughout the action dmitri tiomkin’s
plaintive high noon ballad sounds
a recurring note of impending doo-oom
as the heat and drama
mount relentlessly to
to the crisi-hiss of high noon…
The poet shows none of Lloyd Bridges’ shameful funk, but moves jauntily, a proud and eager Deputy, grinning like Jack Palance and shaking his hips to Tiomkin’s thumping music like Smiley Burnette, and the people follow. The law has prevailed. The law and the spirit. Judge Fred Vinson’s court, its subversive heavies Douglas and Black shot down, the Jew Judge Frankfurter locked up in uncertainties, has spoken for the last time. The lives of the A-bomb rustlers are now in the hands of that gangly wire-tough old general, Ike (Swede) Eisenhower, who’s seen a lot of border action himself in his day, in Eisenhower’s hands and the hands of the old clock on the wall. In the House of Representatives, Democrat Frank Chelf of Kentucky rears up like Tom Mix on Tony to interrupt the debate on the foreign aid bill with the excited announcement that “the Supreme Court has just voted to set aside the stay of execution in the Rosenberg case. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow! We thank the Supreme Court!”
Not that it’s all over. No, already the Phantom’s desperate last-ditch mob action is mounting. A steady trickle of unwholesome-looking extras leaks out of Inspiration House on Kalorama Road, moving toward Pennsylvania, like Miller and his gang debouching from the noon train.
Pickets appear: WE ARE INNOCENT! WE WILL NOT TRADE DECENCY & TRUTH FOR LIFE! DON’T LET THE ROSENBERGS DIE ON THE WORD OF A LIAR! The air, as in Hadleyville, is oppressive, weighted with the stagnant threat of time and swarthiness. Something is not yet clean. “Ah nevuh believed ah would li-yuv to see whut ah have seen in WAW-shinton in the past few days!” The people streaming from the Court to the White House pause to listen to the elegant old cadences of Congressman E. L. Forrester, Democrat from Georgia’s Third District, pouring out at this instant from the Capitol, as though through the swinging doors of the town saloon…
Last Sunday I saw six or seven thousand mongrels picketing the White House, parading with banners, charging that our Government had bribed witnesses, and with banners demanding that two particular children not be made orphans. Not one of that crowd was concerned over the widows and orphans of our fine young men who died fighting communism in Korea. Yesterday the Capitol Grounds were alive with hundreds of people who have no interest whatsoever in our country except to destroy it, even to take our country over. Today as I came down to the office, I saw that riff-raff picketing the President of the United States!… Mr. Chairman, I despise communism! And the people I represent despise communism!… I want you to know that the section, which I come from—the section where there is no communism—will gladly make every sacrifice and risk every danger and fight until this scourge is completely removed as a menace!
Fighting words, worthy of Johnny Mack Brown and Tim McCoy before him, even the lazy old Chief Doorkeeper Fishbait Miller is on his feet: time to strap on your shootin’ irons, boys, give the Sheriff a hand! But even
here, here in the town meeting hall, there is cowardice and indecision, maybe even treachery—else the enraged Georgian wouldn’t be laying all this heated-up rhetoric on them. There are those who aren’t even here, ducking out just when it’s time to stand up and be counted. Moreover, the foreign-aid bill under debate this morning includes payoffs to Communist outlaws like Tito of Yugoslavia, and Wisconsin Congressman Alvin O’Konski is jumping up and down, trying to get the floor to raise hell about that: whoa! what kind of a Congress is this anyway? Congressman Forrester eventually yields to him, but not before laying the blame for all the street fights looming up today squarely on Justice Douglas and the “civil rights Congress”: “Too many have gawn CRAY-zy ovuh so-cawled SS-EVIL rahhts, a CUM-yunist propaganda FAY-vrit, and this heah class a PEE-pul is most ri-SPAWN-subble fer this heah FOO-lishnuss!” O’Konski’s target this morning is those “Communist devils” who were sent to instigate and “engineer a civil war in Spain,” and in particular the “unwanted Communist horror and terror” of the priest- and nun-killer Josef Tito, who’s in for a piece of cash from the foreign-aid bill, and as the crowds rush anxiously on toward the White House, uncertain even of the loyalty and backbone of the town’s leading citizens, they can hear Alvin’s angry words ringing in their ears…
I am wondering how it feels to aid and abet Communism and help kill freedom-loving people? I am wondering if this Congress has any heart or conscience?
And so, as they gather on the White House lawn, mingling with the last of the sightseers just emerging from their guided tour, there is a tremendous excitement, a sensation of being overswept by something larger than oneself, something divine and magnificent, beyond history even, roaring this way like the noon train. The people glance at each other, nervously, excitedly, smile at each other in recognition, their hearts beating in pride and anxiety to some half-heard drumroll, the clickety-clack of train wheels, galloping hooves—yes, it’s as though the frontier is doubling back on the center, bringing wildness and danger, the threat and tumult of the wide open spaces, disrupting system with luck, law with the wild card. As they shuffle about under the White House balcony, they feel like they’re back in Arizona with Wesley Ruggles, joining up with Roy Rogers’s posse in Bells of Rosarita, marching down western streets with Barbara Pepper and Patsy Montana to vote for Sheriff Autry, riding The Big Trail with John Wayne. Something great is happening. Yes, they all feel it. It’s like being with Sam Houston at the San Jacinto or with old Rough-and-Ready at Resaca de la Palma. Drinking buffalo blood with the free trappers along the Snake, fighting with Sam Brannon’s vigilantes, massacring Comanches at Plum Creek, Kiowas in Palo Duro Canyon, Pueblos in the mission church at Taos. A great day for America, something out of the past to revive the future, fired with risk and destiny. But then again, perhaps a terrible day…
It’s all up to Ike.
And what about the President? Is he still the man they say he is, or has he too been Phantomized like the rest of them, Truman and Acheson and Alger Hiss, all those people the Vice President himself has described as supporters and defenders of the Communist conspiracy? Senator Joe McCarthy has said: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” Then why isn’t the President applauding it? Why does he want to give money to that spic Tito? On the other hand, can one finally trust two characters as dark and grizzly as Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon? Do they give you the feeling of being around Buck. Jones or Sunset Carson? Hardly. The President is no mere Marine rowdy, after all, no Navy shyster—this is a foot soldier, a gunslinger, a tall, handsome, blue-eyed Westerner who looks a lot like Bill Boyd. Harry Carey. Randolph Scott in The Frontier Marshall. This is the man who said in Indianapolis: “No American can stand to one side while his country becomes the prey of fear-mongers, quack doctors, and barefaced looters! He doesn’t twiddle his thumbs while his garden is wrecked by a crowd of vandals and his house is invaded by a gang of robbers! He goes into action!” You can hear those swinging doors slap and flutter. “Neither a wise man nor a brave man,” he told them in Cincinnati, “lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him!”
He is the Man Who Won the War, but he is also a man of the people, born and reared on the lonesome prairie, a man who knows what it’s like to sleep out under the stars, listening to the howling of coyotes and the lowing of little dogies, a man who can ride and shoot and use his fists, a man who’s walked through acres of dead men and kept his chin up to fight another day. “We live,” he was saying just last week in Minneapolis, “not in an instant of peril but in an age of peril—a time of tension and of watchfulness,” and his answer to the Phantom is strength: “The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength—and strength alone!” As a boy, he learned how to lick the bullies of Abilene, saw a shootout in the dusty streets of that cowtown, got a pistol in his own ribs in St. Louis. An old trapper-guide named Bob Davis, whiskery as Chill Wills, taught him how to shoot two ducks at once with a double-barreled shotgun, feather a flatboat paddle, win at poker, trap a musk-rat…
“Eh bub, how do ye catch a muskrat?”
“I don’t know, Bob…”
“Well, I’ll tell ye, ye go and look fer his slides, and then ye put yer trap on a short chain, see, so’s he’ll drown…”
“Gee, Bob…”
He packed up his one good suit and went off to West Point, where he got assigned to the Awkward Squad and Beast Barracks, clumsy as old Coop himself. He clowned around, got in trouble, gawky fun-loving Western boy amid fancypants Southern dudes. His injured knee was ruined in monkey drill, his grades fell off, he took to rolling Bull Durham and sowing wild oats for miles around, he got busted from sergeant to private and would have been dismissed had it not been for Major Poopy Bell’s timely intervention, not unlike the good works of Wallace Beery on his better days. He was getting as reckless as Doc Holliday and might have gone that handsome scoundrel’s route had they booted him out of there. He was already laying plans to go ride herd on the Argentine pampas, when his commission in the Infantry came through after all and he got sent out to join General Pershing and the Carranzistas on the Mexican border in Superchief Wilson’s “Punitive Expedition,” a little moral exercise to keep everybody busy until a real war came along.
Well, he was a full-grown man by then, but you wouldn’t know it, he was still the same old irrepressible Ike, a cocky shavetail with the proverbial wild hair up his ass, hungry for any kind of excitement and screw the consequences—but then, in ole San Antone, he met Mamie Doud, in those days still as saucy and sober a Belle as the West had seen since Blanche Sweet. No more crap games, no more restless whoring, no more barroom brawls, it was like the conversions of badguy Bill Hart as he first gazed on Eva Novak or Clara Williams or Bessie Love: “One who is evil,” the captions would read as the lovesick villain melted saintward, “looking for the first time on that which is good.” Not that either Bill Hart or Ike Eisenhower were ever really evil, of course—no, you might as well say that America itself was evil. What they both experienced was rather that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which, in effect, is what the West is all about. On Valentine Day in 1916 Ike gave Mamie his class ring and a year later he got struck by lightning.
Now, over loudspeakers, as the clock ticks inexorably toward twelve noon, comes the friendly rumbling but worried quaver of Tex Ritter, the Texas Cowboy:
I do not know what fate awaits me,
I only know I must be brave,
And I must face a man who hates me
Or lie a coward,
A craven coward,
Or lie a coward in my grave…!
There’s a strange unsettling drumbeat in the song, maybe that’s what they’ve been hearing all along. The crowd shifts about uneasily, like a movie audience deep in the third reel. Men feel their cheeks for signs of bristle, pat their hips as though reaching for six-shooters. Women hug their children to their skirts. It’s
not the same, of course. They’re not like those yellow-livered cabbageheads in the Hadleyville town saloon, not at all. The President, unlike Gary Cooper, is not alone—no, the nation is ready for this, the whole damn town will be marching down Main Street tonight behind Uncle Sam and Ike and Dick and Edgar and Joe and Irving and all the rest, no one’s forsaking anybody, oh my darling, we’re all in on this one, everybody from the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Cabinet, down to your average housewife, ditchdigger, man in the street, give or take a skunk or two. Who will be dealt with. HUAC has already launched an investigation of all those protesting the executions, noting that “nowhere has the craven hypocrisy of Communism been exposed so tellingly as in the monstrous campaign organized in behalf of atomic espionage agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!” Why, it’s as bad as Billy the Kid protesting against “mob law” when he got sentenced to be hung for twenty-one murders. The essence of the Phantom’s campaign, says HUAC, alerting the Internal Revenue Service, is deception and fraud, “fraud with sinister purpose and spectacular profit, [seeking] to blacken the name of America throughout the world, and [milking] the American people of some half million dollars while it did so!” Not that they’ve loosened the bonds on these two copperheads. On the contrary! As The Commonweal has noted:
They have maneuvered the President into a position where if he did grant a stay it would be widely interpreted as succumbing to Communist pressure in this country and the pressure of Communist propaganda abroad—which is precisely what the United States cannot afford at this time….
No, it cannot. The American press is unanimous: “The switch must be pulled!” The people, a poll shows, agree. “The will to execute them,” in the words of the Catholic weekly America, is “an affirmation by America, as the voice of humanity, of its will to survive…. Such conspirators against humanity must either die or relent if humanity is to live!” Eisenhower knows this. He’s in complete agreement, he has said so. Then, why this strange titillation, this odd anxiety, this recurring note of impending doo-oom that makes one want to giggle and clutch his balls? Of course, there are precedents for last-minute clemency. During the Civil War, for example, General William Tecumseh Sherman, never one to fuck around about such things, arrested one of Horace Greeley’s newspaper correspondents, charged him with spying, and was about to shoot the man, when Abraham Lincoln stepped in and saved the reporter’s life. Of course, Abe himself got shot after that, the lessons should be clear. No, it’s something…ah! the woman perhaps! And the children, the two boys…
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