Robert Coover - Public Burning

But time, inexorably, has been ticking away: there’s less than half an hour now to 8:01. The remaining speeches have to be scrapped and, except for the box-seat guests of honor, the rest of the VIPs — including all the senior magistrates, top military brass, forty-eight State Governors, and the official, unofficial, kitchen, golf, poker, and bedroom Cabinets, and all their families and dogs — have to come barreling out on the double, Betty Crocker, reeling off the names, sounding like one of those new slow-speed records on an ordinary turntable. Only Foster Dulles is given a brief moment at the microphone to release a few lugubrious epigrams from the doctrines of Massive Retaliation, Liberation of Captive Peoples, and Faith in Christ Jesus and the Future of Human Freedom, just to remind the citizens what these executions tonight are all about and to give Uncle Sam time to slip off and shazam himself into the President, but the rest go whipping by like tracer bullets. Betty Crocker’s voice now is just a shrieking whir of sound, like an electric beater churning through a fast-thickening pastry dough, as they come streaking out en masse, slipping and sliding, elbowing and punching, thundering right over poor Betty, scrambling frantically for their seats like they’re afraid somebody’s going to take them away from them. Most of them are well winded by the exercise, they’re not used to moving this fast, the judges especially, who are additionally handicapped by their long robes, ripping them on the doorjambs as they shoot out from the wings, tripping and falling over them, having to lift them like skirts to tippytoe at full gallop through the elephant droppings. By the time old Fred Vinson, the Supreme Court Chief Justice, hits the shit, it’s much heated up by the frenetic parade and slick as a greased skillet: woops! down he goes! He picks himself up hastily and— zzzipp! whap! — he’s down again. He proceeds more methodically the next time, placing first one foot under him, then the other, rising slowly…his feet slowly slide apart, he gropes for balance and pulls them together again, they spread fore and aft, he tips, rights himself, he’s running in place, clawing for air, he’s on one foot, the other, neither— SPLAT! His old crony Justice Tom Clark rushes to his aid, only to find himself skidding, slithering, pitching out of control, and landing with a mighty— look out, Fred! — ker-FLAP! on the Chief Justice’s hoary head, just as the old fellow was lifting himself on his hands and knees out of the muck. “That damn fool from Texas,” laughs Harry Truman. With the very honor and dignity of the United States Supreme Court at stake, Justices Robert Jackson and Sherman Minton come bounding to the rescue, as Clark and Vinson, leaning on each other, heads together as though in an embrace, butts out for balance, slowly straighten up — cautiously, hanging on, they turn to look toward their seats and what do they see but Jackson and Minton, faces white with panic and feet back-peddling frantically, bearing down on them— CRASH! they’re all down, wheeling around in the mire like the spinners of children’s board games, piling up in a heap finally under the Death House stage. They glance blearily at each other, count themselves, blanch, and duck — and sure enough, here they come: Stanley Reed and Harold Burton, feet flying, robes fluttering, arms outflung and grabbing at space — WHACK! SPLAT! Ker-SMASH! When the shit clears, the six Justices arc seen, exhausted and blinded by the muck, floundering aimlessly on their hands and knees. Dwight Eisenhower, peeping out from the wings, utters a short cry—“Christ on the mountain! what arc those monkeys doing?”—and disappears again.

Standing there backstage with his wife and sons, waiting for the three ritual knocks that will announce his second (formal) entrance as a special guest of honor, Judge Irving Kaufman has been pondering the rewards of virtue and high office, and the essentially — indeed, necessarily — divine origin of the concept of Law, and it occurs to him now, looking out on this scene and listening to one of the prison doctors beside him practicing his lines for later in the show (“I pronounce this man dead… I pronounce this woman dead… I pronounce…”), that it might behoove him to play a part in this rescue, for even if he failed and joined the rest of them down there in the dreck, it might not be the worst thing that ever happened to him. But just as he steps out, unannounced, onto the stage, he hears somebody, far off in the mob, shout his name. Eh—?! The man comes tearing through the jam-up, past the Rat Pack and pageant figures guarding the perimeter (it’s a piece of the Wild West he breaks through), and right into the VIP section. The man — it’s that damned interloping defense lawyer Dan Marshall from Nashville, up to his tricks again! — charges straight down the aisle and up to the foot of the stage: “A writ of habeas corpus!” he cries. “Hear my plea!”

The Boy Judge, unsure whose body is about to be had, turns back in retreat toward the wings, but sees there Attorney General Herb Brownell gesturing frantically, glancing nervously over his shoulder, urging Kaufman to stall until Uncle Sam gets back. “All right,” says Kaufman, trying to keep his knees from knocking together, “get along with your argument, there isn’t much time!”

“Please, try to delay the execution until I complete my argument,” cries Marshall. “It’d be terrible if I could convince Your Honor that you should grant the application and it would be too late!”

Kaufman sees through the crude tactics: a delay past sundown and the executions are not merely postponed until Monday but will have to be completely rescheduled. Which would give them time to fabricate more appeals, and who knows? the state the Supreme Court’s in right now, they might be too lame to sit for a year! “It is unfair to put that kind of burden on a judge,” he complains. “I’m aware of the tragedy involved. Now get on with it.”

While he beats off Marshall’s desperate rhetoric, he sees other defense lawyers pouring through the hole in the line at the boundaries of the VIP section—“We are counsel for the Rosenbergs! We must get through! It is an emergency!”—and squeezing into the VIP seats, grabbing at circuit judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals. Emanuel Bloch has spied Herb Brownell peeking out from the wings — he tries to scramble up onto the stage to reach him, but he’s too clumsy and all he’s getting is slivers for his pains. Brownell, insulted once too often by Bloch, refuses even to acknowledge his presence, strolling out onstage once to look out over his head and step on his fingers. Some pro-Rosenberg demonstrators have leaked through, too — Judge Kaufman’s one abiding passion has been his hatred of quasilegal pressure groups, some of his best work had been his investigation of lobbying for Tom Clark when Clark was Attorney General, and now he feels that anger welling up in him again. They’re running about through the VIP section, dodging Secret Service agents and Rat Packers, distributing “fact” sheets and clemency petitions, accusing Uncle Sam of premeditated murder, and shouting disruptive slogans like “No Secret to the A-Bomb!” and “They were convicted by the atmosphere and not by the evidence!”

Which latter is Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s notorious opinion on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and Frankfurter, perhaps flattered by this recognition, steps back from the edge of the elephant turds where he’d been about to tiptoe in and offer a helping hand to the other six, and now joins, however belatedly, Justices Douglas and Black in dissenting against yesterday’s majority opinion on the stay of execution: “Can it be said,” he asks, “that there was time to go through the process by which cases are customarily decided here?” A rhetorical question, but anyway it saves him a nasty fall. Back in the VIP seats for the House of Representatives, Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter remarks idly to a couple of his colleagues that he thinks the Supreme Court erred yesterday, having taken jurisdiction when “nothing was before it.” Justice Douglas’s act was legal and under the law the whole case now had to be returned to the lower courts, whence it must come back to the full Supreme Court via District and Appeals Courts. Walter assumes he is off-mike, but by a quirk in the acoustical system, his voice carries out over the masses and all the way up to Central Park: ‘“There is absolutely nothing in the act of 1925 that gives the Supreme Court authority to review the action of one of its Justices acting under the statutes!”