Public Burning Read online

  The Public Burning

  Robert Coover

  FOR JUSTICE WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS,

  who exchanged a greeting with me while

  out walking on the old canal towpath

  one day not long after these events…

  For the sixth time, the mousy little engineer and his wife, waiting in Sing Sing’s death house, had petitioned the highest tribunal…. For the sixth time, a majority of the nine Justices rejected a Rosenberg appeal…. Then, as the clock ticked on toward 11 p.m. Thursday, the hour of death for the spies, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas acted alone. Unexpectedly, the court having recessed for the summer, he granted the stay of execution that the full court had denied. That touched off, within the next 24 hours, one of the most dramatic and novel episodes in all the august annals of the U.S. Supreme Court….

  —“The Last Appeal,”

  TIME, June 29, 1953

  That’s what I’m counting on most of all—the stories.

  —JOSEPHINE PARIS (as played by Ethel Rosenberg) in The Valiant, by H. E. Porter and Robert Middlemass

  Of course, none of us had much money at the time, so we would just meet at someone’s house after skating and have food, a spaghetti dinner or something of that type, and then we would sit around and tell stories and laugh. Dick was always the highlight of the party because he has a wonderful sense of humor. He would keep everybody in stitches. Sometimes we would even act out parts. I will never forget one night when we did “Beauty and the Beast.” Dick was the Beast, and one of the other men dressed up like Beauty. This sounds rather silly to be telling it now, but in those days we were all very young…. It was good, clean fun, and we had loads of laughs.

  —MRS. RICHARD NIXON

  All my humor is situation stuff….

  —MR. RICHARD NIXON

  I did not come to tell you things that you know as well as I.

  —DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER April 7, 1953

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Groun’-Hog Hunt

  PART ONE: WEDNESDAY–THURSDAY

  1. President Eisenhower’s News Conference

  2. A Rash of Evil Doings

  3. Idle Banter: The Fighting Quaker Among Saints and Sinners

  4. Uncle Sam Strikes Back

  5. With Uncle Sam at Burning Tree

  6. The Phantom’s Hour

  7. A Little Morality Play for Our Generation

  INTERMEZZO: The War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness: The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower

  PART TWO: FRIDAY MORNING

  8. What a Glorious Morning for America!

  9. The Vice President’s Beard

  10. Pilgrimage to The New York Times

  11. How to Handle a

  Bloodthirsty Mob

  12. A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle

  13. The Cabinet Meeting

  14. High Noon

  INTERMEZZO: The Clemency Appeals: A Dramatic Dialogue by Ethel Rosenberg and Dwight Eisenhower

  PART THREE: FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  15. Iron Butt Gets Smeared Again

  16. Third Dementia

  17. The Eye in the Sky

  18. The National Poet Laureate Meditates on the Art of Revelation

  19. All Aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special

  20. Yippee, the Divine Concursus

  21. Something Truly Dangerous

  INTERMEZZO: Human Dignity Is Not for Sale: A Last-Act Sing Sing Opera by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  PART FOUR: FRIDAY NIGHT

  22. Singalong with the Pentagon Patriots

  23. The Warden’s Guided Tour

  24. Introducing: The Sam Slick Show!

  25. A Taste of the City

  26. Spreading the Table of Glory

  27. Letting Out the Dark: The Prodigal Son Returns

  28. Freedom’s Holy Light: The Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  EPILOGUE: Beauty and the Beast

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Groun’-Hog Hunt

  On June 24, 1950, less than five years after the end of World War II, the Korean War begins, American boys are again sent off in uniforms to die for Liberty, and a few weeks later, two New York City Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, are arrested by the FBI and charged with having conspired to steal atomic secrets and pass them to the Russians. They are tried, found guilty, and on April 5, 1951, sentenced by the Judge to die—thieves of light to he burned by light—in the electric chair, for it is written that “any man who is dominated by demonic spirits to the extent that he gives voice to apostasy is to be subject to the judgment upon sorcerers and wizards.” Then, after the usual series of permissible sophistries, the various delaying moves and light-restoring counter· moves, their fate—as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses for the sixth and last time to hear the case, locks its doors, and goes off on holiday—is at last sealed, and it is determined to burn them in New York City’s Times Square on the night of their fourteenth wedding anniversary, Thursday, June 18, 1953.

  There are reasons for this: theatrical, political, whimsical. It is thought that such an event might provoke open confessions: the Rosen· bergs, until now tight-lipped and unrepentant, might at last, once on stage and the lights up, perceive their national role and fulfill it, freeing themselves before their deaths from the Phantom’s dark mysterious power, unburdening themselves for the people, and might thereby bring others as well-to the altar, as it were-to cleanse their souls of the Phantom’s taint. Many believe, moreover, that such a communal pageant is just what the troubled nation needs right now to renew its sinking spirit. Something archetypal, tragic, exemplary. Things have not been too good since the new war began—especially since the Chinese Reds came swarming across the Yalu and put our boys to rout—there’s a need for distractions, and who knows? done right, it could bring a new excitement into the world, lift hearts, get things moving again, maybe even bring victory to the Free Peoples of Asia, courage to the rioting workers in enslaved Eastern Europe, fertility and tax reductions to the nation, all this is possible. And though the delays in the courts have at times perhaps been worrying, it is all coming together now in this time and place like magic. Fourteen, after all, symbolizes fusion and organization, justice and temperament; the City is this year celebrating the tercentenary of its own founding as New Amsterdam, its axis the Times Tower is in its Silver Anniversary year, and the Statue of Liberty—Our Lady of the Harbor, Refuge of the Destitute, Ark of the Covenant, Regina Coeli, Mother Full of Goodness, Star of the Sea and Gem of the Ocean—is sixty-nine; Times Square itself is an American holy place long associated with festivals of rebirth; and spring is still in the air. It is even hoped that a fierce public exorcism right now might flush the Phantom from his underground cells, force him to materialize, show himself plainly in the honest electrical glow of an all-American night-on-the-town, give Uncle Sam something to swing at besides a lot of remote gooks.

  Weeks before, the designated area is cordoned off with police barricades and a stage is erected at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue on top of the information kiosk. This stage is built to simulate the Death House at Sing Sing, its walls whitewashed and glaringly lit, furnished simply with the old oaken electric chair, cables and heating pipes, a fire extinguisher, a mop and bucket for cleaning up the involuntary evacuations of the victims, and a trolley for carting the corpses off. The switch is visible through an open door, stage right, illuminated by a hanging spot. Other elegantly paneled doors, right, exit off to press and autopsy rooms, and upstage left another door leads in from the “Last Mile,” or “Dance Hall.” Over this entry, which the Rosenbergs will use, a sign is tacked up that reads: SILENCE. Details from the set of the Warden’s Office in The Valiant, a one-act melodrama by
Holworthy Hall (pseud.) and Robert Middlemass about a condemned man wrongly accused, produced in the early thirties by the Clark House Players on the Lower East Side and featuring starry-eyed sixteen-year-old Ethel Greenglass, are incorporated (a telephone instrument, a row of electric bell buttons, a bundle of forty or fifty letters, etc.), partly to make Ethel feel more at home, partly to impress upon her the ironies of her situation, partly just to surprise her with a little jolt of déjà vu.

  Special seating sections are set up out front, camera platforms are built, backstage VIP passageways, wedding altars, sideshows, special light and sound systems. The streets funneling into Times Square are hung with bunting (the Square is not a square at all, of course, and from above the decorated area looks a little like a red-white-and-blue Star of David); traffic is rerouted so as to cause maximum congestion and rage, a solid belt of fury at the periphery being an essential liturgical complement to the melting calm at the center; and billboards and theater marquees, the principal topographical feature of the district, are consecrated to the display of homespun American wisdom:

  EVERY MAN MUST CARRY HIS OWN HIDE TO THE TANNER

  OUR LIVES ARE MERELY STRANGE DARK INTERLUDES IN THE ELECTRICAL DISPLAY OF GOD THE FATHER!

  AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD

  NICE GUYS FINISH LAST

  THREE MAY KEEP A SECRET IF TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD

  An Entertainment Committee is appointed, chairmanned by Cecil B. De Mille, whose latest success was last year’s Oscar-winning Greatest Show on Earth, with assistance from Sol Hurok, Dan Topping, Bernard Baruch, the AEC and Betty Crocker, Conrad Hilton, whose Albuquerque hotel figured prominently in the prosecution’s case against the Rosenbergs, Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney, Ed Sullivan, the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the various chiefs of staff, Sing Sing Warden Wilfred Denno, the Holy Six, and many more. They audition vocalists, disk jockeys, preachers, and stand-up comics, view rushes of Uncle Sam’s new documentary on the two little Rosenberg boys intended as a back projection for the burnings, commission Oliver Allstorm and His Pentagon Patriots to compose a special pageant theme song, assign a task force of experienced sachems to work up a few spontaneous demonstrations, and hire a Texas high-school marching band to play “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly, “The Anniversary Waltz,” and the theme from High Noon, said to be a particular favorite these days of President Eisenhower. The President, just back from a week of moralizing and whoopee in the Badlands and Oyster Bay, has been visited at the White House this week by the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry, and Gene has been invited to render “When It’s Twilight on the Trail” and “Back in the Saddle Again” at the electrocutions. TIME, the National Poet Laureate, celebrating this spring his own thirtieth birthday, is asked by the Committee to read a commemorative poem, an American middleweight championship bout between Bobo Olson and Paddy Young is appended to the program, and someone hires Harry James and His Orchestra to play overhead on the Astor Roof. Efforts are made to rush through a new ordinance allowing the sale of liquor in city theaters, and thus by extension in Times Square on Thursday night. The weather has turned hot, and in such a pack-up it will help if there’s something with which to wet the whistle. As the day draws near, a massive contingent of New York State Troopers is dispatched to Ossining to relieve the 290 overworked prison police now guarding the Rosenbergs and to escort the atom spies to the city-and all of the other principals in the case are to be brought here as well: the Judge and jury, prosecution team and witnesses, including Ethel Rosenberg’s kid brother David Greenglass, the Los Alamos soldier whose self· incriminating evidence almost single-handedly brought about the convictions of Ethel and her husband and got them condemned to the electric chair. This chair, now looming stark and fearful on the Times Square stage, is the singular responsibility of State Executioner Joseph P. Francel, World War I veteran and Cairo, New York, electrician. Francel, who was badly gassed in the war, is a professional who has hastened hundreds of malefactors to their deaths—in fact, he is celebrating his own fourteenth anniversary this year as Sing Sing Executioner, having first been appointed on Columbus Day, 1939, and will receive a bonus $300 for this double bill. All of this is taken as a good omen.

  Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment—“slick,” as the Evangels put it, “as a snake out of a black skin!” Young Sam, “lank as a leafless elm,” already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse: “Who—Whoo—Whoop! Who’ll come gouge with me? Who’ll come bite with me? Rowff—Yough—Snort—YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon—swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I’m in fer a fight, I’ll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I’ll have to be salted down to save me from spilin’! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin’ to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler—I can ride on a flash of lightnin’, catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-inscrutabullize the heathen Chinee—so whar’s that Johnny Bull to stomp his hoof or quiver his hindquarters at my Proklymation? Whoo-oop! we love our cuppa tea, boys, but we love our freedom more, so bow yore necks and spread, you Hottentots, it is vain to extenuate the matter, the kingdom of sorrow’s a-comin’ and the Child of Calamity with her, and may Great Britain rue the day her hostile bands come hither! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a· mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b’ar to death, and made a grizzly sing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’ in a painful duet with his own arsehole—and I have not yet begun to fight! Yippee! I’m wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain’t never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident: that God helps them what helps themselves, it’s a mere matter of marchin’; that idleness is emptiness and he who lives on hope will die with his foot in his mouth; that no nation was ever ruint by trade; and that nothin’ is sartin but death, taxes, God’s glowin’ Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!”

  The American Autolycus, they called him in the Gospels, referring to his cunning powers of conjuration, transmutation, and magical consumption (he can play the shell game, not with a mere pea, but with whole tin mines, forests, oil fields, mountain ranges, and just before Thanksgiving this past year made an entire island disappear!), and it’s been said that when he steps across the continent and sits down on Pike’s Peak, and snorts in his handkerchief of red, white, and blue, the earth quakes and monarchs tremble on their thrones….

  “Oh, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, I am feelin’ awesome wolfy about the head and shoulders and I must have a fight, those who expects to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of twistin’ noses and scrougin’ eyeballs and rib-brakin’ and massacreein’! So carry the flag, you sons a Liberty, hang on to yer balls and keep step to the music of the Union, our brethren are already in the field, why stand we here idle? Time is money! No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless continent is ours, it’s as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea or that trade follers the flag! Fear is the fu
ndament of most guvvamints, so let’s get the boot in, boys, and listen to ’em scream, let us anny-mate and encourage each other—whoo-PEE!—and show the whole world that a Freeman, contendin’ for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that’s ever set his unfortunate kickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin’ millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history! Boliterate ’em we must, for our cause it is just what the doctor ordered, logic is logic, that’s all I say, and remember, if you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap yore knuckles! I tell you, we want elbow-room—the continent—the whole continent—and nothin’ but the continent! And—by gum!—we will have it!”

  And thus it was that the mighty Sam Slick, star-spangled Superhero and knuckle-rapping Yankee Peddler, lit upon the Western World in all his rugged strength and radiant beauty, expounding what the Disciple Rufus Choate called “the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence,” sharpening his wits on the hard flint of war and property speculation, and honing his first principles by skinning the savages and backwoods scavengers and picking the pockets of the thieving princes of Europe. He’s been committed ever since to propagating the Doctrine of Self-Determination and Free Will and bringing the Light of Reason to the benighted and superstitious nations of the earth, still groping clumsily out of the Dark Ages like breech births from a mother turned to stone, so neither he nor his kith can be easily overawed by this or that putative portent.

  Nevertheless, as General George Washington himself—who as the Primordial Incarnation had led the nation in its escape from what he called “a gloomy age of ignorance and superstition”—once put it: “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency!” This was true then, it is true now. Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas, false starts and sudden brainstorms, erratic bursts of passion and apathy, brief setbacks and partial victories, is later discovered to be—in the light of America’s gradual unveiling as the New Athens, New Rome, and New Jerusalem all in one—a necessary and inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code, as it were, bringing the Glad Tidings of America’s election, and fulfilling the oracles of every tout from John the Seer and Nostradamus to Joseph and Adam Smith. The American Prophet S. D. Baldwin summed it up in a nutshell in the title of his 1854 classic: Armageddon: or the Overthrow of Romanism and Monarchy; the Existence of the United States Foretold in the Bible, Its Future Greatness; Invasion by Allied Europe; Annihilation of Monarchy; Expansion into the Millennial Republic, and Its Dominion over the Whole World. All Incarnations of Uncle Sam have noticed this and been humbled by it, and Dwight Eisenhower, the newest, is no exception. Speaking in Abilene just last fall, the Man of Destiny revealed his own brush with Illuminating Grace: “This day eight years ago, I made the most agonizing decision of my life. I had to decide to postpone by at least twenty-four hours the most formidable array of fighting ships and of fighting men that was ever launched across the sea against a hostile shore. The consequences of that decision at that moment could not have been foreseen by anyone. If there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next twenty-four hours did it…. The greatest break in a terrible outlay of weather occurred the next day and allowed that great invasion to proceed, with losses far below those we had anticipated!” No, friends, America has not arisen: it has been called forth! It’s like the Divine Hawthorne once said: “There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom…!”