Public Burning (11 page)
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'sâ¦okay. Tell him he'sâ¦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 armâthe 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 Lukasâthe man they were trying to kidnapâis 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 yetâno 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 Mandrake 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, andâka-BLAM!âdecimates 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 lipâno 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, “âtis 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 Squareâwhat 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 itâmeekness 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:
AMERICA THE POKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE POPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD
Thus does Uncle Sam struggle against this new tide of darkness and perversity, unleashed in effect by one man, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, acting alone in his chambers and against the will and necessities of the entire nation. Uncle Sam himself appointed him to this High Council of Elders as guardian of the sacred laws and interpreter of the Covenant, setting him “as a banner in the vanguard of Righteousness, as one who interprets with knowledge deep, mysterious things, as a touchstone for them that seek the truth, a standard for them that love correction,” but now he's fucked it up. Was he innocent in his pernicious decision, or has he fallen prey to the Angel of Darkness, stumbling knowingly into wickedness and falsehood, pride and presumption? This is what he said:
I have serious doubts whether this death sentence may be imposed for this offense except and unless a jury recommends it. The Rosenbergs should have an opportunity to litigate that issueâ¦. It is important that before we allow human lives to be snuffed out we be sureâemphatically sureâthat we act within the law. If we are not sure, there will be lingering doubts to plague the conscience after the eventâ¦.
To be sure, if any conscience is to be plagued it will be his, for thus, with one stroke, he has nullified over two years of careful preparations, over two years of exemplary Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and liturgy, granting not merely a stay but ordering the case sent back to the District Court, thence to the Court of Appeals, giving the atom spies not respite but life itself, and making Uncle Sam, Judge Kaufman, Edgar Hoover, and the entire U.S. prosecuting team look like a bunch of clowns. And he has done so knowing that the Court is in recess and scattered, the world is in turmoil, an A-bomb attack is imminent, and the legal point raised by these shady interlopers is so flimsy that even the Rosenberg defense attorneys rejected it.
Haven't the Pentagon Patriots already warned us�
â¦Now some quack lawyer with a flair
Shall try to save them from the “chair,”
But such a shyster (mark him well)
Is paid with gold that comes from hell.
So with God's lash, he, too, should share
Death with this Communistic pair!
â¦Still, should some court support their prayer
And save them from death's “waiting chair”â¦
If such there be, who'd stoop to spare
Their hides from Sing Sing's “burning chair”
             We'll brand his brow
             With marks of guilt,
             And link his name
             With traitors
             In the sewers of shame!
As one voice, the free press of America cries out against the “treason” of Justice Douglas, calling him “arrogantâ¦craftyâ¦disruptive.” FBI agents secreted in the Warden's garage at Sing Sing wire the Boss reassuringly that newsmen “are considerably upset as a result of the stay and it is Denno's opinion they will probably blast Douglas.” And blast him they do. Leslie Gould in the
New York Journal-American
brands him “a headline-grabber with political ambitions, a tramp who has reverted to type,” and in the
Chicago Tribune
Walter Trohan writes:
Douglas, it must be remembered, has been the darling of the Communists. He dissented from the Court decision upholding the conviction of 11 top Communists. He called for recognition of Red China by United Nations at a time when the Red Chinese were killing American boys in Koreaâ¦. He compared the Communist uprisings in the Far East to the American Revolutionâ¦. Douglas aspires to the presidency. Most of his evil might still be before him!
The
Washington Post
laments that “Justice Douglas has plunged this highly controversial and internationally important case into utter chaos!” and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
asks:
COULD JUSTICE DOUGLAS HEAR MOSCOW'S CHEERS�
Justice Douglas has done his country one more monumental disserviceâ¦after the Court had adjourned until fall, [he] took it upon himself to reverse the whole Supreme Bench by a masterpiece of legal red-hair splitting [and then] hurried quietly away from Washington.
For the moment he is supposed to have gone to Oregon. Some say he will soon head for Moscow, is due there July 1. Many others will wish he would go back to Tibet, climb on a yakâand stay thereâ¦.
The blackest treason in American history must not be condoned.
This is the man, incredibly, who might have been Franklin Roosevelt's fourth-term Vice President, and thus ultimately the Incarnation of Uncle Sam himself! Uncle Sam must have had his eye on him even thenâprobably why he dumped the old satyr into all those sex scandals. Maybe he caught something in all that friskiness, a dose of venereal anarchy or something. And if so, what's to prevent the whole damned Bench from coming down with it? “One scabbed sheep infects a whole flock,” warns Uncle Sam on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Congressman W. McD. Wheeler of Georgia leaps up as though he's been goosed to introduce a prophylactic resolution “that William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors in office,” whereupon a special subcommittee of five is created instanter to act on the resolution. “Ah see no pahticulah point in sendin' mey-un to Ko-REE-ya to dai, Mistah Cheymun,” declaims Congressman Wheeler, “whahl ay-tomic spies are allowed to liy-uv heah at HOME! One Justice yieldin' to the vo-CIF'rous my-NOR-utty preshuh groups of this yere CUNT-tree is indee-FEN-suble! Ah canNOT sit ahdly by heah in this yere layjus-LAY-tuv BAHDY without seekin' to DO somethin' abaout it!” Don Wheeler is warmly cheered by his fellow Georgians, all of whom have been aching for years to see this nigger-loving New Deal cowboy stuffed as deep in hell as a pigeon can fly in a week, and they figure now they've finally got a clean shot at him.
The Rosenbergs themselves, of course, are elated. Their spirits had sunk pretty low of late, Julius burning his eyes out with futile late-night searches through the trial record, Ethel suffering from migraine headaches and sobbing herself to sleep at night. Columnist Leonard Lyons's report recently in the
New York Post
that they were actually anti-Semites at heart who didn't even want a rabbi with them on their Last Walk apparently rattled them, and they've been singing themselves hoarse at the prison services ever since, seemingly in the mad hope that somebody outside the walls would hear them. Julie had to have two teeth pulled out (Warden Denno in his economy-minded way making sure he got temporary plates only), and when his mother, Sophie, visited him while he was still dopey from shock and Novocain, what he said was: “Mama, I don't feel good. Oh Mama, where is my wife? Where are my children? I'm sick, Mama. If only I were home you and Ethel could take care of me.” Ethel has evidently stopped writing letters to him altogether. She hasn't wanted to go out in the exercise yard and play boccie-ball any more. Julius has tried to exercise, to keep in shape, but his knees have been like putty. When he's tried to flip cigarette butts at the toilet bowl in his cell, he's not only been missing, he's been burning his fingers as well.
Now all that is changed. Their happy singing, as they call it, is driving the other cons up the wall, and their lawyers are dancing impertinent jigs right out in the streets: it's a real breakthrough! They have until October now at the very least, even if the Appeals Court rejects the new arguments. Time to design hundreds of new questions, dig up more confounding evidence, get more signatures on the clemency appeals. The Korean War could end, the Soviet peace offensive could lead to detente, the whole climate could change. And what is this that Dr. Urey and others are saying about there being no secret to the A-bomb in the first place? Where is that spy ring the FBI has been shouting about? Who the hell is Harry Gold after all, and where did he come from? No, there's
reason
to dance, and what's more, the Appeals Court might even sustain the new argument, hold that they were indeed sentenced under the wrong lawâthen the whole indictment would be quashed and they'd both be set free! The government would have to obtain a new indictment and get up an entirely new trial! This time there'd be no mistakes, those Greenglass diagrams would be held up to public scrutiny, Gold would be cross-examined, Morty Sobell would testify, the complicated Greenglass finances would be probed, questions would be asked about where that list of prospective jurors came from, and they might even be lucky and get a Presbyterian judge.