Public Burning (52 page)

Just saying that released me. I knew now what I had to do. I determined to face the Eye in its nakedest form: the television camera. This was no eye-in-the-sky pipe dream: you could see it there, hard and shiny, black, heartless, unblinking. I would go before it. I would bare my soul and my bankbook before the nation. Actually I only wanted to bare my soul, but Ike insisted on baring the bankbook as well, so since he was paying for it, I agreed. I had learned from my experience in the Hiss case that what determines success or failure in handling a crisis is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high. That experience stood me in good stead now. I found myself almost automatically thinking and making decisions quickly, rationally, and unemotionally. When my advisers excitedly urged me to go on the air after the “I Love Lucy” show on Monday night, I coolly vetoed the idea. “No,” I said. “Tuesday night.” Tuesday—? “That's right. After Milton Berle.”

On my way to Hollywood to make the speech, I jotted down notes on picture postcards I found on the plane in the seatback in front of me. I was thinking of course of the legend of Abe Lincoln scribbling on a train on his way to Gettysburg. Actually, the notes were useless, I had to throw them away, but the legend—my own now—lives on. This ploy reminded me that Lincoln had said something about the common man, and I got one of my old Whittier profs to look it up for me. Roosevelt had made good use of Fala, I decided to work Checkers in somehow. Use Pat's cloth coat against the Truman mink-coat scandal. Lay out all the monies I'd ever earned: this gave me the opportunity of using a lot of attractive boyhood images. How poor we were, and all of that. I was glad I hadn't let Smathers and his old high-school buddy Bebe Rebozo talk me into their real-estate schemes. I decided to demand that everybody in the campaign publish his finances just like me, Eisenhower included. I knew it would piss him off, I did it to needle him, let the disloyal cock-sucker find out what it felt like—Jesus, I was mad at him! Him and all those naïve amateurs around him, I was eager to watch them squirm—and by God I was
not
going to go to him like a little boy to be hauled off to the woodshed, properly punished, and then taken back into the family, I'd had enough of that shit with my old man! I was going to win this one! I wondered if I could bring George Washington, Nathan Hale, Lou Gehrig, Little Orphan Annie, and Sergeant York into it somehow. This broadcast had to be a smash hit—one that really moved people, inspired them to enthusiastic, positive support, left even the Uncle Miltie fans gasping.

I should have sent the Rosenbergs a copy of that speech. It was just four days before Ethel's birthday—maybe she heard it on the prison radio. Not likely though; she would have mentioned it in her letters. Too bad. It might at least have helped them prepare their last words. Our purposes, after all, were much the same; to convince a stubbornly suspicious American public—our judges—of our innocence. And we
were
innocent. The Rosenbergs, in their internationalist confusions, did not see themselves as traitors any more than Hiss, Acheson, or Stevenson did. And the press was wrong about the fund—what I wanted was not the money, but the guys who gave it, a nickel was enough, I wanted their names, their commitments. What did money mean to me? Oh, of course, like all American boys, like Julius Rosenberg out selling penny candy no doubt, I used to dream of rescuing a generous millionaire from being robbed and murdered by a thug and receiving a thousand-dollar reward that propelled me into fame and fortune, being named in the rich man's will and perhaps even marrying his daughter, who was disguised as a poor girl selling apples on the street corner, but all this was behind me now. Not that I hadn't made good use of the money, it was what had made it possible for us to buy our Spring Valley home, but to tell the truth, I rarely thought of money any more except when there were bills to be paid. People have accused me of a lack of taste, but it isn't that, it's a simple lack of desires. If I were rich, the only thing I could possibly want to buy would be the Presidency.

And so we had presented to the public the facts of our case, the Rosenbergs and I, using the medium we found to hand—but where the Rosenbergs had fallen back on exaggerated postures of self-righteousness and abused innocence, I had remained humble and sincere. And objective. Where they had lathered their Death House letters with sententious generalities and vague romantic intimations of lives together that had been all sweetness and light (“Twelve glorious years we've spent together, always sharing, seeking together life's joy…”), I had named names and places and times, reported specific conversations and moments of doubt and difficulty, laid bare everything I owned and owed—not just a car, but a
1950 Oldsmobile
, not a bank debt, but
a $4500 debt to the Riggs National Bank of Washington
—it moved people to hear me pronounce that name:
The Riggs National Bank of Washington
. I mentioned Tricia's age, the Hiss case, Abraham Lincoln and the common people, Pat's maiden name and her respectable Republican cloth coat—she sat over there and modeled it for me, she looked great, even her terrible skinniness, the circles under her eyes, were a plus for me—and when I got to Checkers, I even told exactly how the dog had arrived in a crate at Union Station in Baltimore—I said that:
Union Station in Baltimore
. “And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it!” Now, that was very goddamn moving, it could still make me choke up a little, and it made me one of the most famous Vice Presidential candidates in American political history—it was virtually a kangaroo ticket after that, old war hero at the top or no.

Darryl Zanuck the movie mogul called me up afterwards to tell me it was “the most tremendous performance I've ever seen!” I'd asked for letters in my support, and over 300,000 of them came to the Washington Republican Party headquarters—they were stored for posterity in Whittier now in a box labeled “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ike caved in and called me “a brave man.” We created the Order of the Hound's Tooth, my own cufflinks gang, and threw a party. Later, in Wheeling, the General embraced me and called me “my boy” and let me walk on his right side. I felt like love and death were all around me, and I remembered that moment so long ago, coming home and being kissed by little Arthur, soon to die—I couldn't help but cry. “Good old Bill!” I'd wept, falling on Knowland's shoulder, but what I'd really meant was: “Mom! It's your good dog Richard! I'm home!” Clean as a hound's tooth. Thanks to Checkers. Thirty years since I wrote that letter to Mom, pretending to be an abused dog—not that things come full circle in this world, but that in a random universe, ironical patterns are thrown up, and sometimes, as pattern, they turn and operate on the world…

Even today that letter broke my heart—why hadn't the Rosenbergs been able to get that kind of feeling in their correspondence? That “swarm of black thing” was more terrifying than anything they'd said in over two years of self-pitying anticipation of the electric chair. “It is incredible,” Ethel wrote to Julius on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary and their first spent in prison, “that after 12 years of the kind of principled, constructive, wholesome living together that we did, that I should sit in a cell in Sing Sing awaiting my own legal murder.” What was more incredible to me was that she apparently could not recall a single day, a single event, from those twelve principled et cetera years worth mentioning. In all her letters, there was only one image that came to her mind from the past: that her younger boy used to call a certain kind of ice cream “Cherry-Oonilla.” The very loneliness of that image made it all the more touching. As for Julius, his recollections of the past read like the obituaries in small-town newspapers. There was not even any mention of their idyllic 1943 holiday in a rented cabin in Peekskill, where they presumably swam and hiked, chopped wood, made love in a hammock in front of their friends. Of course, it was right after this that they dropped out of overt radical activities, maybe in fact this was where they took their spy-training program, the love-play just a cover….

Nevertheless, pedantic and other-directed as they were, these letters seemed to be the most meaningful contact Julius and Ethel had with each other. Perhaps the prison setting estranged them. Maybe they feared what each knew about the other. People had claimed early on to have seen them kissing each other through the wire mesh, but this must have lost its charm pretty quick, and maybe it had been a lie. After they had meetings together or with the boys, their letters were full of apologies for their tears, bad tempers, or sullen silence. They found it easier to write to each other than to speak to each other. And behind all the rhetoric, something real did trickle through: in Julie's case, an eagerness to please, to be admired, not only by the world, but by Ethel, too; in Ethel's, her loneliness and her love. “Dearest Julie, I hold your dear face between my hands as I used to do so long ago and kiss you with all my heart.… I talk with you every night before I fall asleep and cry because you can't hear me.… I see your pale drawn face, your pleading eyes, your slender boyish body and your evident suffering…. Oh, what shall I do? Hold me close to you tonight, I'm so lonely….”

Well, I knew from my own experience how love, awkward in the flesh, could blossom through the mails. Even now, I often wrote Pat letters at night for her to read in the morning. It was a way of working things out for yourself, exploring your own—then suddenly it occurred to me, what should have been obvious all along: she didn't love him. She never had. She needed him, but she never loved him. “Daddy, I never saw you and Mommy kiss.” She had loved, yes, she was a lover, but she had no proper object for her love. I understood this. She was using his slender boyish body as I had used Pat's cloth coat: to cop a plea. She had married Julius to fulfill something in herself, the old story, something maybe that got into her that day long ago when she got knocked down by the police fire hoses on Bleecker Street, but it was a portion of her will she had wed, not a lover: “Julie dear, I have such utter respect and regard for you; how well you know the score! Hold me close and impart to me some of your noble spirit!” Yes, a perfect marriage, and he had not disappointed her, this young activist, not up till now anyway; but she could recall nothing—or would not—of their past together, was given to confusion and tantrums when they met, even forgot their anniversary last year, though in prison she had almost nothing else to think about, and for the last few months had apparently stopped writing to Julius altogether, as though he no longer had ears to hear, or never did. And thus the deep longing in these letters mailed to the world: “Sweetheart, I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She could as well have been speaking to me.

I sighed, leaned back in my chair. The letters, transcripts, notes, records littered the room, but I was no longer disturbed by this, I even perceived a certain order in it—like an image of time, I thought, not knowing quite what I meant, except that by tomorrow the office would be clean again, and so, no doubt, would I. There was a special fragrance in this soft summer day blowing in through the open window that reminded me of California, the old California which was in the middle of the world, not today's remote, statistical, old-man California over on the other side of the voting continent, and I could hear a song wafting up from the streets below, one I recognized: “Among My Souvenirs”—it was one of the few that the Rosenbergs had mentioned in their letters. Something like the memories of last night rolled over me again, but now not so much as separate strung-out recollections, but rather as a kind of concentrated mass of feeling and abstract imagery that kept swelling and receding like a sort of slow heartbeat. I wanted to hold it constant, examine it, lose myself in it—it seemed to me that the resolution to this whole problem lay concealed in it, my speech, everything, as though on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my vision—but it kept slipping away. Then I'd sit back and it would sweep over me again. It was very strange, very sweet, I could almost taste it, smell it, feel it filling my lungs, spreading through my limbs, it was warm and dusty and dense, like the heart of a garden, the heart of a city, concrete and leafy all at once. A kind of dusty summer ballpark of the spirit. It seemed almost too beautiful, too heroic, to be a real memory, it was more like…like the memory of a daydream, and not even of the dream, but of the sensation of dreaming.

On my desk lay Picasso's doodles of the Rosenbergs. Julie resembled Ronald Colman, only more scholarly, while Ethel had a kind of Little Annie Rooney look—the lost waif. She looked like someone you could talk to. In spite of all our obvious differences, I realized, we had a lot in common. We were both second children in our families, we both had an older brother, younger brothers, both had old-fashioned kitchen-bound mothers and hard-working failure fathers, were both shy and often poor in health, I admit it, both preferred to be by ourselves except when we were showing off publicly on a stage, both found escape in books and schoolwork and music, both were honor students, activists and organizers, loved rhetoric and drama, worked hard for our parents, had few friends, never dated much and mated late, had dreams. Ethel dreamed of some glorious future as an artist or musician, a singer maybe, or actress. She entered an amateur-night competition at Loew's Delancey Street theater one night and won second prize singing “Ciribiribin.” She was spotted by a Major Bowes talent scout, who put her on the professional amateur-night-competition circuit, and by the time she was seventeen she was all but making a living at it. She took voice and piano lessons from some lady at Carnegie Hall, paying for them out of her lunch money, and she bought a used piano and dragged it home—her finances were even better than mine, she supported herself and her family and still knew how to invest. She always kept a rigid schedule, writing it out every day, charting her consistency, always woke up at six, practiced an hour, went off to work, studied scores at lunch break, took lessons in the evening—like me plotting out my college activities program or preparing for a political campaign.