Robert Coover - Public Burning

But, like Justice Douglas on his way to the woods, they have not reckoned with Uncle Sam’s resourcefulness and his old-trouper determination that this show will go on — he sends for The Man to Send For, the Clean-Up Man, as TIME calls him, A LEGAL MIND & A POLITICAL BRAIN, Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell. “Get that Court back here, Herb,” he says. “I want this thing now!”

“Won’t be easy. There’s never been a special term of the Supreme Court just to review a stay granted by one of its own members.”

“Yeah? Well, new occasions teach new duties, boy!” His beard seems to darken and a wart flowers momentarily on his cheek: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion! Find Vinson! Lean on him!”

“O-okay, I’ll do what I can — but he’s not one of ours, I don’t know if he’ll—”

“What, not a Republican, you mean? Hell, neither are Kaufman and Saypol. So what? These guys are professionals, they know the score. Come on, boy, hop to it! This ain’t a political campaign, it is a call to arms!” His teeth flash and a silver cigarette holder seems to sprout from between them — he snatches it away and whips it out the window. “I said, shag ass, mister! Put his feet to the fire! I want what I want when I want it!”

“Y-yes- SIR! ” The Attorney General wheels around in his red-leather swivel chair and grabs up the phone. Chief Justice Vinson is on vacation like the rest of the Court, but he tracks him down. “Hey, Fred, get everybody back here! You gotta vacate Douglas’s goddamn stay! Right now! Today, tomorrow — but quick!”

“Vacate a stay? It’s never been done!”

“Yeah, well, the occasion is piled high with you-know-what, and it’s about to hit the fan! Uncle Sam’s breathing hot down my neck, Fred! It’s important in the interests of the administration of criminal justice and in the national interests that this case be brought to a final determination as expeditiously as possible!”

Vinson caves in so fast, Brownell figures Uncle Sam must have got to him first. Justice Hugo Black is dragged, protesting, from his hospital bed, others from crap tables and hunting lodges. Justice Douglas is apprehended in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, heading west. He’s snapped back to Washington so fast his feet don’t even touch the ground. The mothproof dust covers, laid down a day ago for the summer holidays, are hauled off the furniture by emergency cleaning crews, 350 excited members of the public and press are admitted to the big red-draped air-conditioned chamber, and at twelve noon on Thursday, June 18, the Nine Old Men — reportedly “tense and snappish”—file in under a frieze of Truth holding a mirror up to life and take their seats behind the long dark bench. Lawyers crowd in, FBI agents, some of Herb Brownell’s lieutenants, members of the original Saypol prosecuting team, tourists, reporters, and sightseeing foreign dignitaries.

It’s a dramatic moment, unique in United States history, but Uncle Sam does not have time to see out the formalities. Around the world, the Phantom has Sam Slick’s lean back to the wall. The situation in Korea, for example, is still very bleak, riots are breaking out, there’s a new threat of invasions, rumors of nuclear warheads moving into the area, Rhee is as obstreperous as ever, even the Pusan whores are out in the streets bellyaching against the Yanks — biting, as it were, the probang that feeds them — and the Phantom has conjured up a dense fog to hide the North Koreans in their mischief. Undaunted, Uncle Sam sends his forces right into the worst of it. They get cut up, but they hold the line. The hardnosed 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, commanded by an up-and-coming tough-as-nails brigadier general named Westmoreland, is flown in from Japan to round up Rhee’s rampaging prisoners, put them back in the barbed-wire stockades, and quell the riots. This is the same bunch of cowboys used to break up the Red riots in the Koje Island P.O.W. camp last year, they take no shit from anybody. Uncle Sam wants the truce negotiations to proceed, he’s had it with all this yo-yoing, but the Reds say: no roundup, no peace talks. Sam snorts at the cultural ironies and tells them they’d better get their yaller hunkers back to the goddamn table or he’s really gonna cream ’em, but he’s infuriated with Syngman Rhee just the same, WHY’D HE DO IT? the newspapers ask. IT’S A MISTER RHEE! Uncle Sam lines up his boys around the world and they let Rhee have it — the barrage of abuse and repudiation is deafening. Rhee, unabashed, responds with a cablegram to the Ashland, Ohio, Times: The United States, he says, is being influenced by European countries that “are too far gone toward Communist ideology.” Who the hell does he think is running the world anyway?

In East Berlin the situation is even worse, hopeless in fact, it’s a real free-for-all for the Phantom and his T-34 tanks. A few guys throw rocks, West Berlin’s Mayor Ernst Reuter declares that it’s “the beginning of the end of the East Berlin regime,” President Eisenhower announces “with particular satisfaction” an additional fifty million dollars in economic aid to West Berlin, and some trolley wires are pulled down, but there’s not much else that Uncle Sam can do, his own tanks are just too damned far away, and his best stuff is tied down in Korea. Willi Goettling, an unemployed West Berlin housepainter with a wife and two small daughters, is caught by the Russians on the wrong side of the city, accused of being a hired gun of Uncle Sam and “one of the active organizers of provocations and riots in the Soviet sector of Berlin, taking part in the banditlike tumults directed against the organs of power,” and he is taken out and unceremoniously shot. Uncle Sam charges the Phantom with “irresponsible recourse to military action” and lack of imagination. Who’s going to remember Willi Goettling twenty years from now? he asks petulantly, but all he gets in reply is what sounds like a distant fiendish chortle.

Stung, Uncle Sam cranks up the Voice of America wattage to stimulate new riots, organizes a demonstration of two hundred thousand hungry workers in front of the National Palace of the “Red Colonel” in Guatemala, has Herb Brownell arrest fifty-five Chinese for deportation to Red China in retaliation against Chairman Mao’s hassling of the Roman Catholic Missions there, keeps things boiling in Lithuania, where the Kremlin bosses have already had to order drastic party and government shake-ups, and helps Generalissimo Francisco Franco inaugurate four new hydroelectric power plants in Spain, which amazingly all seem to work. “Intimates,” Sam murmurs, kissing Franco on both plump cheeks and stuffing a hundred million in his field-jacket pockets, “are predestined…!” The Radical Party of Argentina cables President Eisenhower, demanding clemency for the Rosenbergs — President Perón, whose own plump cheeks no doubt tingle in anticipation, promptly arrests seven Radical leaders. From one end of the world to the other, all these kissable men: General Sir George Erskine, for example, arriving in Nairobi and announcing his intention to discredit “this Mau Mau business” everywhere and make it “unfashionable” in the eyes of all likely to come into contact with it. It’s a kind of disease, and people must be made to understand that it can easily be fatal. To exemplify this, the British Royal Air Force is given the task of making certain prohibited areas “unwholesome.” In a trial run, a force of 1200 African Kenya Home Guards, supported by British planes and white mercenaries, attacks Mau Mau hideouts in the Aberdare Mountains, and at least thirty of the savages are exterminated by saturation bombing and strafing alone. Smiles Sir George: “By good discipline and common sense, we shall do our duty, distasteful as it may be!”