A new figure, ragged and wild-eyed, now bursts into the VIP section, leaps up on a concrete balustrade, and commences to rant: “If you are happy about the Rosenbergs, then you are rotten to the core!” It’s that Russian-born Red vagrant from L.A. who caused the day’s delay, I.I. Edelman! People laugh at him and throw empty bottles, but they’re frightened, too!
Julius Rosenberg’s bespectacled old mother, Sophie, is pitching about in a fit of incoherent anguish! Other women are falling to their knees and sobbing and praying and beating their breasts!
The people glance up in anxiety at the clock on the Paramount Building: 19:41! Just 20 minutes to Zero Hour!
The pageant actors try to do something about all this, but fall into arguments as to which of them are Secret Service agents and which not! Some of the iconic Buckskin Militiamen, Sharecroppers, and Prohibitionists are getting hard to handle!
In the confusion, the National Rosenberg Committee has somehow managed to push an entire Clemency Float through the mobs and into the VIP aisles—or maybe they’ve smuggled the pieces in and assembled it here! It rolls toward the stage, carrying blow-ups of suppressed evidence, banners declaring the innocence of the Rosenbergs, pictures of the soon-to-be-orphaned sons, and signs that read FRAME-UP! and CLEMENCY MISTER PRESIDENT! People close their eyes, look the other way, scream for the police, or take a stiff blinding jolt from the bottles of booze still being passed around, trying to ignore the disruptions.
General Douglas MacArthur, all spit-and-polish in his full battle dress, molded hat, sun goggles, and medals, decides that enough is enough and marches forward to take over and bring some order to this society, but he hesitates at the edge of the elephant dung: the Justices are still wallowing about in there, up to their thighs and elbows in the muck, unable to see which way they’re going, bumping into each other like pigs around the feeding trough, it is not an attractive sight. The General stands there, at the water’s edge, so to speak, smoking his corncob pipe and musing on the inelegance of democracies. Harry Truman watches him and laughs, which makes the General’s neck go red.
Behind him, crowned with laurel leaves and gliding like statues on wheels, come the renegade scientists Albert Einstein and Harold Urey, exploding the “secret weapon” issue and casting doubt on the trial verdict. The Red Parson, Dr. Bernard Loonier, leaps through the disintegrating defenses with a clemency petition, shouting: “The death sentence in this instance is an indication of our national weakness rather than our national strength! It is a reflection of our own growing hysteria, fear and insecurity!” He’s clobbered with a dead cat by a Salem Witch and stuffed down an open manhole by a gang of soused-up examiners from the Patent Office, but no sooner is he popped down than Reverend Henry Hitt Crain, the fellow-traveling Methodist preacher from Detroit, pops up: “It implies an altogether unworthy capitulation to the hysterical temper of the times and reveals a recreant willingness to resort to ‘scapegoat’ devices to appease the homicidal urges of crowd compulsion!” For Christ’s sake, the people cry, who let these dingdongs in here? What’s Herbert Philbrick doing? Where is Norman Vincent Peale, now that we need him?
18 minutes to go! General MacArthur sighs wistfully, knocks the ashes out of his corncob pipebowl, turns, and fades away, kicking Truman on the shins as he passes. “Dumb son of a bitch!” yelps Harry.
The defense lawyer Manny Bloch has collared the Assistant White House Press Secretary Murray Snyder: “Has the Court’s last decision or Ethel’s letter been read personally by the President?” he demands.
“It’s…it’s not my function to ascertain this,” stammers Snyder.
“Damn it!” roars Bloch in a red-faced rage, “people are going to die!” 17…! “Make it your function!”
Through the Square, the electric lights dip ominously!
The drum majorettes in the Texas marching band squeal with fright and leap into the arms of the boys in the band, hug them close!
Snyder falls back in alarm!
Whiskey bottles drop and crash!
The packed-up mob flinches, squeezing out of itself an airy moaning wheeze, compounded of gasps, groans, farts, curses, shrieks, belches, and woeful wails.
Judge Kaufman’s knees go soft as warm Jell-O—fortunately he’s wearing his judicial robes, and all that anybody notices is that he seems to dip with the lights. He glances backstage—at last! Here comes Uncle Sam!
The Boy Judge stretches up to his full five foot six and, glimpsing the hands on the Paramount clock just celebrating the quarter hour, flatly denies Dan Marshall’s motion, then withdraws to the wings to get his wind back. He wants to fall into somebody’s arms, but his wife, Helen, is peering down her nose into a compact mirror, and besides, he’s got an audience back here of lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and G-men. They gaze at him, standing apart. They’ll never let me let go of this thing, he thinks, staring back at them, envying their anonymity. The trial’s over, I shouldn’t even be here, it’s against every principle of American jurisprudence—but they’ll keep me here till the day I die.
Uncle Sam roars out onto the Death House set, whooping and snorting like a wild stallion with a bee up its rectum. “I have returned! And by the grace of Almighty God, I’m gonna tar up the arth and wreak a outdacious deevastation around here if I don’t see more deddycated presarvation of the sacred fire of the Liberty Tree and less petterfacted sunshine patriotism! Great Jeminy! Could I not be gone a minute, but some mischief must be doin’? We’ve had to pump lead into a kid in Paris and throw hunderds a damfools in the hoosegow all over the world—and we’ll trim the heels of a few onduly restless whippersnappers here, too, if things don’t settle out a mite less epileptic!”
The people in the Square hoot and whistle and shout out their praises to Uncle Sam. The Singing Saints regroup to sing “0 Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” which in turn inspires the security forces to make a coherent charge on the Phantom’s agents at last. Lumberjacks smash up the Clemency Float with axes, and the Rat Pack reorganizes its perimeter defense lines. The Ku Klux Klan, Invisible Empire of the South, announces they’ve paid a visit to Nashville, and children are chasing Dan Marshall toward the Whale’s mouth, screaming the Lady-bug Taunt at him:
“Shyster, shyster! fly away home!
A cross is on fire in your front lawn!”
The Supreme Court Justices are still in a lot of trouble, but Bill Douglas, who has been watching them slop about helplessly in the muck, finally shakes off his wry amusement and, being the only one who’s had the foresight to wear heavy boots and leggings, goes now to their rescue, leading them back to their seats, where Oveta Culp Hobby, whose business is health and welfare, is waiting for them with a damp rag to wash off their faces. While lawyers’ writs and briefs are grabbed, folded into paper airplanes, and sent flying, the lawyers themselves, along with the Rosenberg Committee operatives, are being rounded up, one by one, straitjacketed or simply conked, and dragged over toward Walt Disney’s giant Whale, whose belly has earlier been closed to the public and used until now to incarcerate zanies, sick drunks, and pickpockets.
“Well,” laughs Uncle Sam, “it’s a frolic scene, where work and mirth and play unite their charms to cheer the hours away!” 7:46…“This was the Phantom’s last shot, boys!” he shouts, stooping to attend to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies. “You got the bloody Barbarite by the short hairs, nothin’ more can happen now—!”
But just then Times Square breaks into an uproar!
A man is backing bareass out onto the stage from the prisoners’ entrance, his pants in a tangled puddle at his feet, a crumpled homburg down around his ears, “I AM A SCAMP” lipsticked on his butt. The man turns, hopping on one foot, blinks in amazement—why, it’s—!
27.
Letting Out the Dark: The Prodigal Son Returns
Is it possible to be rational at all in crisis situations? Do crises seem to have many elements in common? Does the participant seem to learn from one crisis to another? All interesting que
stions which I might well have asked myself, but at the moment, finding myself unexpectedly onstage in the middle of Times Square, staring out on an amazing sea of upturned faces staring back, my shirttails bunched up in my armpits and my pants in a tangle around my ankles, my poor butt on fire from its Dance Hall skid, my shoulder aching, face stinging, stomach rumbling, sweating hands clutching my still-enflamed though fast-shriveling pecker, Uncle Sam rearing up in monstrous astonishment on my left, some woman out cold as a mackerel at my feet, and the electric chair—for some reason splattered with what looked like custard pies since I’d last seen it—standing spotlit and hot with its own latent energies on my right, flashguns popping and cameras with huge glimmering lenses dollying in at me, a band somewhere playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” accompanied by what could only have been the goddamn Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a pervasive odor of excrement in the air which I was afraid might be my own, all I could think of to say was: “Oh my God! LET US PRAY!” Which, when I’d added, dragging my voice down out of its falsetto shriek, “Let me, uh, say, uh, my fellow Americans, uh, bow our heads—let us bow our heads in a minute of silent prayer cast in terms of all our, uh, fighting boys in, uh, wherever they are and for faith, uh, in—and for our President, in a sense—and also for the victims of Communism around the world,” was pretty goddamn brilliant: it shut them all up and gave me sixty precious seconds to get my pants up while they had their heads down. Maybe, I thought, in all the excitement they haven’t even noticed…
While I struggled, sweating furiously in the hot lights, with the birds-nest of trouser legs around my feet—Judas Priest, what a mess, I couldn’t even find the cuffs, and the belt seemed to be looped into some kind of cat’s cradle!—I tried to collect my thoughts for the statement I had to make, the one I’d been working on such long hours this week, but which just now I’d thought I’d somehow got out of. But I was too confused—all those dreams, Ethel’s mouth, the train wheels rolling underneath me—I could smell still the heady fragrance of newfound freedom, new beginnings (what was it? ah! the shampoo in her hair—suddenly I felt double-crossed in every direction at once!)—Christ! I thought in a moment of numbing terror: I can’t even remember my name! I fought to recover that name, that self, even as I grappled with my trousers, hobbling about in a tight miserable circle, fought to drag myself back to myself, my old safe self, which was—who knows?—maybe not even a self at all, my frazzled mind reaching out for the old catchwords, the functional code words of the profession, but drawing a blank. I ought to quit, I knew, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I only knew how to plunge forward: no matter what the consequences—in college football, it was always the off-side penalty; now, I thought, God only knows what I’m in for! Which reminded me that I was supposed to be praying and the minute of grace was fast running out. Uh…fiscal integrity! Paramount question! Yes…ah…make no mistake about it! What this country needs is…eh…no more pussyfooting! a new departure! ragged individualism—rugged, I mean (“Tell the truth, son,” I could just hear Uncle Sam saying, “or trump—but get the trick!”)—yes, it was time to piss or cut bait, time to basically hunker down, hold the line, take off the gloves and bind up the nation’s wounds—but the gloves were off (what wasn’t off?) and if my own wounds got bound up any tighter than they were already, I wouldn’t be able to breathe (I wasn’t able to breathe!)!
I was also feeling suddenly very airy and exposed, almost like a bad wind had got up between my legs, like a French kiss in the wrong place—I glanced up and discovered that everybody in goddamn Times Square was still watching me, not a reverent sonuvabitch in the lot, they’d been watching me all the time, all except Pat, I spotted her now, she was the only one with her head down—even my daughters were gaping at me with stupid smirks on their faces. It looked as though everybody were laughing, but I couldn’t hear anything over the whumping thunder of my heart beating in my ears (my God, I can’t even let my hair down in public, much less my pants! this was worse even than the time I got diarrhea in that jeep in Bougainville!). What crazy things we do, I thought, as I lurched, grunting, wheezing, half-blind from panic and glare, squatting and bobbing about the stage in one last desperate effort to pull my pants up—it was always best, I knew, to do the unexpected if you could get away with it, but this time, damn it, I’d overreached myself. I’d forgotten all the things my Mom had taught me: Don’t make a fool of yourself, Richard, don’t stick your neck out, don’t give yourself away, don’t expose yourself! What was it led me up there, led me up here? I remembered the ticket seller’s caution: “Sure you want on that train, bud?” The cops at the Hunter Street barricades, the dissuasive phalanx of newsguys, the Warden’s curious lecture on history and the convulsive struggle: all warnings I had failed to heed—and yet I was sure I’d been right. “To be great,” Ethel had said (I think it was Ethel—was it Ethel?), “is to be misunderstood.” She was back there, I knew, standing in the wings somewhere, her head shaved for the electrodes, her own heart beating so wildly in her little breast that you could see it through that sad ragged dress she wore, and I had a sudden impulse to dash back there, grab her up, and make a run for it. But I restrained myself, or my pants did, reminding myself (I was much encouraged by the return of this thought) that I had to think of the effect of my decision on the next generation, and on the future of peace and freedom in America, and in the world. Ethel would want it that way. Courage, confidence, and perspective. Which meant that I had to carry through to the finish, whatever the personal agony it would involve—I had to fight back! No crawfishing, no whining, whimpering, or groveling—if you’re always on the defensive, take it from me, you always lose in the end—no, they were asking for it and they were going to get it! I’m a pessimist, but if I figure I’ve got a chance, I’ll fight for it, and I always figure I’ve got a chance—I think that has been a hallmark of my political career. In that respect I’m an Optimo. Optimist, I mean! (Jesus.) But how was I going to do it? Well, I’m a poker player, one of the best, and a good poker player knows it’s important to get good cards, but also that most big pots are won by a bluff. Yes, I had to let fly with everything in the arsenal, throw up a real smoke screen and let out, as Uncle Sam would say, the dark (“Cuttlefish it, boy! If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em!”)—whereupon, having intended something entirely different by such determinations, I stumbled over that old lady’s body (Judas, it was Betty Crocker!), touched my toes to keep from falling over on my head, and cracked a stupendous fart. “AMEN, BROTHER!” some dingbat bellowed, and then I did hear them—Jesus Christ, they were all howling their asses off!
What was to be done? I stared gloomily at the bespattered electric chair, the famous Sing Sing hot seat, and—my own butt on fire from shame and floor burns—listened to the mob in Times Square behind my back. The door to the Dance Hall was now closed and above it was a sign that said SILENCE. I wondered if it was a message to me. I knew that the only defense I had was offense, that I had to somehow talk my way around this humiliation without admitting to any mistakes, but if I couldn’t get my pants up past my ankles, how was I to begin? There was a white hospital cart behind the chair and it looked very comfortable, very restful. I realized I was close to breaking—a man can only take so much!—and that it was now or never. But if now, what? I didn’t know whether to point with pride, view with alarm, or just let my ass go on speaking for me. The stage itself offered no clues, only soberingly lethal realities. I was afraid to look at Uncle Sam. I tried to wargame my situation, to reduce it to some set of constants I could work with, but all I could think of was the time my old man caught me swimming in the Anaheim irrigation ditch. On that occasion, he’d picked me up and thrown me back into the ditch—that’s right: fire with fire, ditches with ditches!
“All right now!” I cried, turning on the mob at last. I was finding my way again. “You may wonder what I am doing up here with my, uh, trousers down! Well, let me just say this! We in America, we in the Free World, all of us here tonigh
t—and let me be quite blunt about this—we have ALL been caught with our trousers down!” An inspired rhetorical ploy which had worked miracles in hundreds of debates, not to mention my famous crisis speech last fall, and which should have worked here, but it didn’t—on the contrary, they got rowdier than ever. They were all out there, I recognized them, jammed around the stage, pressing forward, lit up by the flashing lights of Broadway: Congressmen and judges, governors and celebrities, Republicans and Democrats, all sorts of weird characters dressed up in funny costumes and large papier-mâché heads, little kids, old ladies, all whooping it up and laughing to beat hell. “But this is no laughing matter!” I shouted over the racket (I saw Harold Stassen snorting and pointing, Cabot Lodge looking pleased as punch, Bill Knowland and Lyndon Johnson rolling all over each other in the aisles—even Bob Taft was splitting his crippled sides with laughter), “this is a struggle for the souls of men!” Now what the hell was so funny about that? What was the matter with these people? Were they crazy? I thought they must be nuts! “This is one of those critical moments in history that can change the world, and we need your help, and so I came here like this tonight—and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics—I came here like this to dramatize what the danger is, a mortal danger that we all face!”
“YOU TELL ’EM, STICKY DICK!” they shouted back at me, “YOU GOT THE BALLS!”
“I tell you, we are on the brink!” I screamed—I had to scream: the uproar in the Square was deafening, and on top of it radios were blaring away, bands playing, generators humming, and police helicopters were rattling overhead, taking pictures and dropping booze parcels. “Look at Korea!” I cried. “Look at China! Eastern Europe! Our own State Department! Even the Supreme Court! We’re exposed on all sides by this insidious evil! this sinister conspiracy! this deadly infection! Let me assure you, the Phantom isn’t changing! He isn’t sleeping! He is, as always, plotting, screaming, working, fighting! Scheming, I should say!” I tried to recall that lecture Uncle Sam had given me about the walleyed harbinger who thirsted for Christian blood, but I was too overwrought and afraid I’d fuck it up—I was having trouble enough working my own bromides. “We owe a solemn duty, not only to our own people but to free peoples everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to roll back the Red Tide which to date has swept everything before it! We cannot allow another Munich!” That wasn’t bad, a touch of the old Dick Nixon—I seemed to be getting off the dime at last! They were still laughing, all right, but they seemed more attentive. “It’s…it’s not easy for me to take this position,” I went on, choking up a little to show them that I was vulnerable, too, that I was as human as the next guy, or perhaps because I couldn’t help it, “—it happens that I am a Quaker!” Which for some reason set them all off again, snorting and wheezing, falling off their chairs—Foster Dulles looked like somebody had got ahold of his old Presbyterian face, which just wasn’t made for laughing with, and was wringing it out like an old dishrag: Christ! what if I killed him! “But as Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘Uh, other means may succeed: this could not fail!’” I felt good about that, coming up with that quote all by myself—Lincoln was always helpful in a tight spot, better even than Jesus or Dale Carnegie, and I’d thought he would rescue me from this one, but I might as well have been quoting Gracie Allen. Even Douglas MacArthur was chuffing away, his sun goggles tipped down over his nose, and Oveta Hobby was reared back in her chair and laughing so hard she was showing her khaki drawers. “He…he also said that the world will, uh, little remember nor long, uh, remember what we talk about here,” I pressed on desperately, “but just let me say that I think the world will never forget what, uh, the achievements of this administration here tonight!”
Public Burning Page 60
