Robert Coover - Public Burning

It’s a scandal, just like the strikes, the rising prices, the legal shenanigans, the erratic weather, the clemency appeals. The Red Puppets of Poland insolently offer political asylum for the Rosenbergs. France’s Le Monde says Uncle Sam is “disturbed” and accuses him of planning a “ritual murder.” “More and more,” says Le Monde , “the Rosenbergs seem to us like the expiatory victims of the cold war…”

Many of America’s own atomic scientists, led by Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey, seem to be siding openly with the spies, claiming that there is no secret to the atom bomb in the first place (but this is a lie — Harry Truman said there was a secret, and so did J. Edgar Hoover), and now the granddaddy of them all, Albert Einstein, writes to a teacher just fired by the City Board of Education for refusing to answer questions about his connections with the Phantom: “The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without…. They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive. What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-cooperation….” New apostates are being won and the letters keep coming in. From Netherlands Women, British Railwaymen, French Lawyers, and the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies. Clerics, novelists, schoolteachers, and 2200 Melbourne ladies. The British Electrical Union! All writing to the President, all urging clemency for the atom spies. Even their sons — which prompts President Eisenhower to complain in a sputtering rage that “they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purpose!”

If he is offended by the boys’ appeals, he is even more outraged when Ethel Rosenberg’s latest letter to her two sons is flashed on the moving electric sign on the Times Tower: Christ on the mountain! he can just feel the damned Phantom’s power radiate through the spellbound crowds in the Square…

My Dearest Darlings,

This is the process known as “sweating it out,” and it’s tough, that’s for sure. At the same time, we can’t let a lot of chickens that go about their business without panic, even when something’s frightening them — we can’t let them put us to shame, can we…?

What’s that about chickens? The people duck their heads and peer nervously up at the sky. Is this it, then?

…Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying too when we were hugging and kissing goodbye, huh, even though I’m slightly older than 10. Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself…

What’s to be done? The National Maritime Union’s strike spreads like a virus, tying up hundreds of ships, and the U.S. Post Office announces a 36 percent rise in parcel post rates. Pickets appear: NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS PERJURY!

…but it would not have been any kindness at all. So I took the hard way instead of the easy…

The Reds walk out of the Korean peace talks, accuse Uncle Sam of bad faith. The Chinese breach the ROK defenses north of the Hwachon Reservoir. Soviet occupation troops raid workers’ homes in East Berlin and mark some thirty thousand ex-Wehrmacht officers for automatic arrest.

…because I love you more than myself, and because I know you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying…

Mrs. Sarah Brock Dodge, U.S. Army nurse in the Spanish-American War, and later personal nurse for General Douglas MacArthur and the Taft family, drops dead as a doornail…

…We need to try to remain calm and free from panic, so that we can do all we can to help one another to see this thing through!

…and then in Japan, an Air Force Globemaster transport with 129 American servicemen aboard falls right out of the sky, the worst disaster in the history of flight! Those damn chickens! “East and West,” TIME say, “from within & without / news crashed / upon the U.S….”

for 120 seconds

the rows of servicemen

held fast to their seat-

belts as the plane lurched

and swayed towards the

air base

some prayed

one boy clutched his

rosary

a second engine

failed & the plane began

to lose altitude more

rapidly

four miles short

of the base the globemaster

slammed steeply into a watermelon

patch broke up & caught

fire skittering bits of

burning metal at a fright-

ened Japanese farmer who stood

nearby

most if not all

of the men were killed

on impact which was so great

that many bodies were torn

from their boots

they were

returning to korea to defend

the embittered koreans against

the great conspiracy that

the rosenbergs had served…

…All my love and all my kisses!

Mommy

Demonstrators march in broad daylight through the streets with signs that read: THE ELECTRIC CHAIR CAN’T KILL THE DOUBTS IN THE ROSENBERG CASE! ROK troops fall back in Korea in the biggest retreat in two years. An anonymous caller tells the police that a bomb is set to go off in Public School 187 in the north part of the city. There are rumors of an all-out strategic exchange. Scrawled across the whitewashed walls of the Sing Sing Death House set atop the information kiosk: WHAT THE BOURGEOISIE, THEREFORE, PRODUCES, ABOVE ALL, IS ITS OWN GRAVEDIGGERS. Then somebody sabotages the stage and the whole business collapses into the street. And in Vienna, three beetle-browed Russians force their way past the landlady and drag Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas out of his flat. Strange perspectives, weird watching faces, peculiar zither music — an Austrian policeman intervenes and a four-man (French, English, American, Russian) Allied Military Patrol speeds to the scene. They block the kidnappers’ escape route, leap out of the car with weapons at the ready. But the Soviet member of the FEAR Patrol commandeers the patrol car, shoves Lukas and his kidnappers in, leaps into the driver’s seat himself, slams into reverse, rams two civilian cars, shifts back into first — for God’s sake!

STAND BY TO CRASH!

— Where Is Uncle Sam?

My old California colleague Bill Knowland was in trouble in his first test as the new Republican floor leader in the Senate, so on the way back to my office Thursday from the emergency meeting of the National Security Council at the White House, I stopped by the Capitol to see if I could be of help. The Hill and Mall were swarming with demonstrators, counterdemonstrators, tourists, cops, dogs, kids, and there were expressions of worry, gloom, apprehension, uncertainty everywhere. There’d been too many setbacks. In the middle of all this, Knowland had decided to pull a fast one: after having told the Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson earlier that there’d be nothing more controversial today than the call of the calendar — which few Senators even bother to show up for — he’d suddenly decided to interrupt the call with an aggressive attempt to ram our new controls bill through and catch the Democrats flatfooted. I wasn’t sure Bill was doing the smart thing, but I understood his motives and had to admire them: he’d just taken over from the ailing Bob Taft, and he was trying hard to put his personal stamp on the leadership job, make it his through partisan conflict. It wasn’t easy to follow a living legend like Taft, Bill had to do something audacious to signal the change and establish his authority. Of course, he could blow it, too, and the chances were just about fifty-fifty — with Wayne Morse now voting with the Democrats, there were forty-eight votes on each side of the aisle, and my vote was the tie-breaker. I was eager to get back to the Rosenberg case, things were in a mess now, thanks to Douglas, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on or what I was supposed to do, but Eisenhower’s relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn’t afford to antagonize them in any way — I had no choice but to be on hand and save the day for Knowland if need be. Besides, it was just the kind of political battle I loved: nobody gave a shit about the bill itself, it was a straight-out power struggle, raw and pure, like a move in chess.