Robert Coover - Public Burning

It had felt spooky being all alone on the train — the echoey emptiness had seemed to emphasize the essential loneliness of all critical decision-making, to set me apart in some awful way — but I’d been grateful for the chance to relax, take off my hat and sunglasses, my shoes, unbutton and stretch out a little, without having to worry about what other people might think. I’d tried the moustache on. It had felt funny. Stiff. Ticklish. I’d stuffed it in my pocket. It’s not enough to break the play open with one face, I’d thought, saving the other one to use later in case it didn’t work. If I was going to do this thing at all, I had to do it as Richard Nixon — and not even as Richard Nixon, which was already, even in my own mind, something other than myself, but as just…me. I’d realized that in some obscure way, through my contact with the Rosenbergs, even as remote and unintentional as it was, I had somehow become tainted myself — as though I’d had some ancient curse laid on me (though I didn’t believe in curses, I was getting carried away by those stories from my childhood, the ones our hired girl used to tell, and by this train, its lonesome whistle, the daydreaming — contemplation, I mean): in short, I was in a lot of trouble and I’d stay in trouble unless I could somehow absorb this contact, intensify it, and turn it finally to my own advantage. In a sense I was no more free than the Rosenbergs were, we’d both been drawn into dramas above and beyond those of ordinary mortals, the only real difference between us being the Rosenbergs’ rashness and general poor judgment — but then wait: if that was so, was my breaking out a part of the script, too? Oh shit! but then — I hadn’t wanted to think about this, I’d pushed it out of my mind, forcing myself to concentrate on the Rosenbergs instead, how I was going to approach them, what kind of strategy I might best use, what in the end I wanted out of them.

Julius was the weak one, I knew. I’d start with him, and if he cracked, Ethel would have no choice. This was the great thing about conspiracies: you punch a little hole and a whole flood of accusations and counter-accusations comes pouring out. It would probably break up their marriage, but that’d be their problem. They might be looking for a good excuse anyway. And at least they’d still be alive. When things had died down, they’d probably thank me for it. Not that it would be easy. Weak or no, Rosenberg had had two years to shore up his defenses — all those public declamations: he’d thrown up a real stone wall. Mere reason was useless in the face of it, as were threats or cajolery. He’d repel all frontal attacks, I had to sneak over that wall somehow, catch him by surprise from behind.

So what was the angle? To agree with them maybe about the entrapment, the frame-up? I could tell them I’d been the victim of smear jobs, too, I knew what they were up against. But if we were going to make it work, they had to trust me, they had to tell me everything. Of course, if they really were who the FBI said they were, then we were back to square one again. Or if they were really as innocent as they claimed to be: same problem — I had to have something to take down to Times Square tonight. But I was convinced the truth lay somewhere in the middle: the Rosenbergs were guilty of something, all right, but not as charged. And if the Rosenbergs could deliver their half, I could probably deliver mine. The FBI had let the word out in a thousand ways that they had the goods on the Rosenbergs locked away in their files, but their repeated declarations on this subject were themselves cause for suspicion — like the Rosenbergs dropping their Daily Worker subscription, it could be read two ways. Those guys over there still hadn’t grown out of their gangbusting days and the Junior G-Men Clubs, they’d built up a fantastic image for themselves in that Golden Age, and now it scared them that somebody might catch them in a fuck-up. I’d met a lot of them, depended on them in fact for my inside dope over the years, but I had to say that most of them are pretty far removed from reality. Putting on disguises and snooping about after other people makes them think everybody else is doing the same thing only better, even their fellow agents, they get very paranoid, and that filing system of theirs with all those tedious and intertangled dossiers has got them more cloistered than a bunch of goddamn medieval monks. And in spite of all their files and snoopers and crime labs and privileged access, they still crack most of their cases because some guy rats on another, in effect using the FBI as his own trigger, or because some agent plays a lucky hunch. Maybe just because a guy looks like a crook. Or a Commie. This is true. They still believe they can identify criminal tendencies by the bones in the face — they run a regular goddamn seminar down there over John Dillinger’s death mask! And Julius Rosenberg had a very unlucky face. He looked like the stoolies, the finks, the unsympathetic first-reel victims of all those old gangster movies — once they saw him, they probably didn’t think twice. After which, the dossier grew and grew. Like Pinocchio’s nose.

Certainly, through all this, one thing became clear. At the heart of this worldwide conflict and crisis lay a simple choice: Who was telling the truth, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or two admitted Reds? At the trial, in the press, in the appeal courts, there was no contest: for what chance did the Rosenbergs have? Kaufman knew this in advance: every juror at the Easter Trial had had to swear under oath that he’d give the same weight to testimony of either an FBI agent or a member of the Communist Party. Of course this was just bullshit, you couldn’t find twelve decent Americans who’d believe a Commie as easily as a G-man, it was simply Kaufman’s way of protecting himself from a mistrial and assuring the prosecutor of a jury willing to fudge a little, but it showed Kaufman knew what the case would ultimately rest on.

Saypol, free from such scruples, could throw the whole weight of the FBI legend against these ghetto outcasts: “There came a day, however, that a vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation broke through the darkness of this insidious business…” He heaped praises on the FBI. So did Kaufman. So did the President, the press and radio, the Attorney General, the nation’s civic clubs and leading politicians…and me, too, for that matter. So did the FBI itself in its own frequent and popular press releases. Not even the Rosenbergs’ own lawyer could stop himself! What did Kaufman and Saypol really believe? Probably that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. Why? Because the FBI said so. Hoover himself had flatly announced the Rosenbergs’ guilt in the nation’s press, who was going to say it wasn’t so? Maybe Edgar believed it all himself, locked away in his inner sanctum, reading all those eager-beaver reports from ambitious agents, fluttering through all those inventories and interviews, surveillance reports and signed confessions. Sometimes the entire FBI file on the case read like a strange remote dialogue between Gold and Hoover — a speaker, reaching for the truth, a hearer, avidly sanctifying the revelations: a sinner and his distant God. At the time of the trial, the newspapers were full of front-page stories announcing that “meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is following other leads on wartime espionage.” Saypol hinted that there was a lot of FBI material he wasn’t free to use because of these continuing investigations (presumably protecting, for example, some new Herbert Philbrick down in the ranks I, but if he could, the stuff would nail the Rosenbergs to the wall, and who in the courtroom or all America doubted this? There probably wasn’t one American in a thousand who had even paused to think about it. No, if Irving Saypol held up a handful of FBI reports and told them to imagine Julius Rosenberg “reaching out like the tentacles of an octopus,” then an octopus is what everyone willingly saw, surprised only that it had a moustache and wore double-breasted suits.