Public Burning (21 page)

The genius of Irving Saypol—himself just forty-five then—was how well he understood all this and used it in the Rosenberg trial. He even stole one of my lines from the play: “I am not going to appeal to your ‘souls,' or to those ‘deep secret chords of your hearts'—but to your reason alone!” He himself had said somewhere: “A well-turned case is just like a stage play really,” meaning by that not merely that convictions depend upon dramatic entertainment, but that justice
is
entertainment. His own performance as Prosecuting Attorney was inspired, his backstage manipulations imaginative and exhaustive. With the help of a cooperative and close-mouthed FBI, he had produced a brilliant working script and then had rehearsed his principal witnesses for weeks—he'd even lodged Harry Gold and David Greenglass together up on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison (the “singing quarters”) for several months so that they could perfect their interlocking testimony—while at the same time, he'd seen to it that the defendants were kept too disturbed even to think properly, disrupting their family life, isolating them from each other and driving them to despair over fears for their two kids, depriving them of their freedom and personal dignity, not to mention an ordinary sex life, terrorizing them with ominous rumors, exposing them to vitriolic press and radio campaigns, dividing their own families against them, keeping them ignorant of his own strategy while maintaining tabs on theirs by intercepting their communications and planting FBI informers in the cells near Julie, holding back from them the vast amount of back-up support and research he was getting from the FBI and other government agencies, forcing them to rely entirely on their own limited resources, knowing that no one would come to their aid since to do so could implicate that person in the “conspiracy.” Saypol had even managed to arrange a complete dress rehearsal—sort of like trying the show out in New Haven—in the thematically similar, though less serious, Brothman-Moskowitz trial four months earlier, in which virtually the entire cast—including the Judge and excepting only the accused—was the same. Thus, the Rosenbergs and their lawyers were the only ones not rehearsed, and were in effect having to attempt amateur improvisation theater in the midst of a carefully rehearsed professional drama. Naturally they looked clumsy and unsure of themselves…and so, a bit like uneasy liars.

Saypol was terrific in the courtroom, too: shrewd, thorough, quick on his feet, cold-blooded, and powerful enough in his hushed no-messing-around way to make what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth—at least long enough to wrest a guilty verdict from an impressed jury. True, he accomplished this more with adjectives and style than with verbs and substance, but, given the difficulties, this was all the more to his credit. Knowing he'd have a group of middle-class jurors (most of them were accountants and professed anti-Communists—and here again, in jury selection, Saypol had done his homework, having complete access to police and FBI dossiers withheld from the Rosenberg team), he saw to it that all his witnesses were properly dressed and carefully schooled in witness-box mannerisms, so as to create the undercurrents of awe, rapport, sympathy, or believability he wanted, and he himself stood tall and stern, like Lou Gehrig or Randolph Scott, speaking softly but wielding a stick as big as Uncle Sam's forearm. Poor old Manny Bloch, contrarily—stocky, stoop-shouldered, and baggy-eyed—looked a little sinister and out at the elbows, and his clients behaved strangely—shrill, pompous, abject, seedy, emotionally unstable—for this jurybox of middle Americans, so like my own constituents. I knew the way Saypol's mind was running: with this jury, dowdiness
was
guilt.

Bloch treated him deferentially and sometimes fawned on him, conceding he might be right on this or that minor point, or accepting his word and thanking him for his “courtesies,” obviously angling for Saypol's pity and sense of fair play, but there was no reciprocal gesture from Saypol. He just accepted the compliments as though deserving them and lashed back, never giving an inch. A natural killer. As he himself once said: “As a prosecutor in a criminal case, one in my position has armament like an iceberg.” Every word was calculated to further the impression that the defendants were tampering with or dodging the truth, and that even their lawyers were embarrassed at having to defend them—a one-track mind, that track leading straight to the electric chair, which Saypol firmly believed in. And those you couldn't eliminate, teach: “I've often wondered,” he has said, “whether the whipping lash wouldn't be a greater deterrent than what we have now.” Mr. District Attorney. According to Roy Cohn, Saypol loved to play cop, interrogating suspects himself, investigating them—he even carried a gun around in his back pocket like Sam Spade.

Nevertheless, tough as he was, I could have whipped his ass from Foley Square to Jenkins Hill and back again, could have beat the rap for the Rosenbergs—though of course this would have been a miscarriage of justice. Bloch, the Rosenbergs' lawyer, was a dunce, a pushover—in fact, he played so naively into Saypol's hands at times that I suspected Uncle Sam must have had something to do with frazzling his mind somehow. Giving him bad dreams so he didn't sleep well or something. He buckled under to the Judge, overpraised the Prosecutor, joined the chorus of admiration for the FBI—who were, though he never seemed to grasp this, his real opponents in this trial: in the final analysis, it was their word against his, and it was his job to destroy their credibility. But this never even occurred to him. He just didn't know what the game was all about. He neglected to bring in friendly witnesses and refused to cross-examine key government witnesses, bungled the Fifth Amendment procedures, seemed not to hear half of what got said. Nor did he challenge any of the physical exhibits, a lot of which were very dubious looking and should have been exposed to public scrutiny—hell, the FBI has a special section which does nothing but produce fake documents, they have to do this, it's a routine part of police work, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed doing if they'd given me that job I asked for when I left Duke—and much of the stuff that Saypol offered up looked like it might well have come from that factory. Of course, what choice did Saypol have? The real evidence was in Russia. You had to credit his ingenuity. Just as you had to fault the defense for chickening out under pressure.

Bloch's crosses were hardly likely to get him into the Hall of Fame either. He failed to ask who if anybody helped Greenglass prepare those new sketches, presumably copies of the originals, for the trial, even leapt up and urged the impounding of the goddamn things in a phony act of patriotic grandstanding that fooled nobody, stamped the drawings as the real McCoy, and drew an awful lot of excitement to the testimony of Greenglass which followed. He neglected to probe into Greenglass's complicated finances, failed to follow up when Greenglass talked spookily of “memories and voices in my mind.” He did not demand to know the details of the prosecution's careful rehearsal of David, Ruth, Harry Gold, and the others during the six months preceding. In short, he lacked a win complex. I believe you have to stay on the offensive, wait for windfalls, get what dope you can on your adversary, and then blast him, whether in a courtroom, an election campaign, or a summit meeting. Saypol had built a house of cards and Bloch just didn't blow. “Every man sitting over here is an honest man,” Bloch said in his summing-up: “The FBI representatives, Mr. Saypol and his staff, every man of them, they are doing their duty.” Saypol must have had a hard time just to keep from laughing.

Bloch's most astounding blunder was to refuse to cross-examine Harry Gold. Gold was the alleged courier-link between Fuchs, Rosenberg, and Greenglass, and if he was lying—or if the jury could be made to think so—then Bloch and the Rosenbergs had it made. Gold, like most spies, even our own boys over in the CIA unfortunately, was an incorrigible fantasist, who in the course of his operations had invented a wife, twin children, an apartment, a house purchase, a polio attack on one of the children, a separation, his brother's death, and even a fictitious list of “contacts” which he gave the Russians, sharing intimate moments from this fantasy life with friends and associates, acting it out for the world in all its bizarre detail, while in fact living at home all the time with his mother, at least until she died. His wife's name in this saga was Sarah O'Ken, a former gun moll of an underworld villain named Nigger Nate; he said he'd met her while courting another girl with one blue eye and one brown eye (his mother had such a pair). John Hamilton, who had once been our National Committee Chairman and who somehow got Gold as a client, told me he sometimes wondered if Gold was even a spy, maybe he was making the whole thing up; he had all the apparatus, all right, but it was all down in his basement, even the stuff he was supposed to have given the Russians, boxes of it, like the raw materials of some novel. He told me Gold was something of a self-destructer, too, a man with no sense of his own being, and as a boy—probably now in prison, still—he played these weird baseball games with decks of cards, inventing a whole league of eight teams with all their players, playing out full seasons, keeping all the box scores and statistics, even taking note of what they looked like! It's a wonder one of his ace pitchers didn't turn up in the trial testimony as a contact or something. Maybe one did. And vice versa.

He was apparently fascinating to watch on the witness stand, a man so used to living in make-believe worlds under one cover or another he couldn't remember rightly the real one any more, yet outwardly very calm and convincing, with an ingenious sense of detail—a man at home within the artifice of a courtroom trial. Maybe Bloch was afraid to probe such talent, no telling what he might come up with. That smug self-confidence reminded me in some ways of Alger Hiss, except that Gold was both creepier and humbler than Hiss and could spin it off with less self-consciousness. He had a round face with a sharp nose and big dark eyes, wore a pinstripe suit with enormous lapels and fat bright ties—he looked like a silent-film comedian doing an imitation of Roy Cohn. Outpost Harry. Must have seemed like a gift from the goddamn gods to the FBI, and maybe that was the best way to think of it. He was the man who supposedly turned up in Albuquerque one day with half a card from the back of a Jell-O box that matched a half that Julius Rosenberg had given David Greenglass, told David “I come from Julius,” and then exchanged some money for some atomic-bomb sketches and other material. Thus, he was the master link that brought it all together, made a “spy ring” out of it. Hamilton told me that in his early conferences with Gold, he'd apparently forgotten all of this, but once he'd had a couple of weeks with the FBI agents, it all “came back” to him. That “I come from Julius,” for example, maybe the key piece of corroborative testimony: at first glance it was very damaging. But in fact, if true, it was strong evidence that Rosenberg was
not
involved, since these intelligence agents always use made-up names, not real ones, especially in recognition signals. Moreover, Greenglass had felt obliged, after the exchange of money and data, to give Gold Julius Rosenberg's name and phone number as a way of getting in touch when David was in New York on furlough, so in any case both of them must have assumed Gold was referring to some other Julius. Fuchs, for example: one of his middle names was Julius. So for that matter was Herb Brownell's. Hamilton didn't even think this was the real signal used. He said that in his first conversations with Gold there'd been no mention of these signals at all—in fact, no mention of Greenglass or A-bomb sketches either—all this had come later after Gold had had several helpful sessions with the FBI. But even after Gold had begun to “remember” Greenglass, there had
still
been no Jell-O box and no Julius, just “something on the order of Bob sent me or Benny sent me or John sent me or something like that.”

Admittedly, Bloch didn't know then what I knew now—and thank God for that, I suppose, God and John Hamilton, who kept his mouth shut—but how the hell are you going to find out if you don't ask? Bloch had surely read the transcript of the earlier Brothman-Moskowitz rehearsal when Gold had spun off that fantasy-family routine—with that alone I could have split that screwed-up schizoid in two, right slap through the void in his middle. He could've walked out of the courtroom afterwards through two separate doors. And one thing about a witness with a penchant for all those cute little supplementary details: keep egging him on and he'll invent one too many, ask any of those famous inspectors from the classic murder cases of literature. Or take that baseball game played with a deck of cards, I can just imagine what I might have done with that one…

DEFENSE
: Say, by the way, this fella “John,” you know, your Russian contact—an older fella. I gather, tall and sort of blond…

GOLD
: No, he was about five feet nine inches in height, had a medium build, which tended toward the slender, and he was about twenty-eight or thirty years old…

DEFENSE
: I see. But blond and—

GOLD
: No, he had dark or dark brown hair and there was a lock of it that kept falling over his forehead, which he would brush back continually…

DEFENSE
: Tried to keep it stuffed under his cap, I suppose…

GOLD
: Yes, and he had a rather long nose and fair complexion, dark eyes. He walked with somewhat of a stoop…

DEFENSE
: Like a catcher, you mean. Or a rightfielder…

GOLD
:
NO
, first base was his position actually…

DEFENSE
: Not too tall, but agile…

GOLD
: Yes, he had a good reach, and…uh…ah…