Robert Coover - Public Burning

Applause, director, actors, script: yes, it was like — and this thought hit me now like a revelation— it was like a little morality play for our generation! During the Hiss case, I had felt like a brash kid among seasoned professionals; now my own generation was coming into its own — and this was (that lecture at Burning Tree was making sense to me at last) our initiation drama, our gateway into History! Or part of it anyway, for the plot was still unfolding. In the larger drama, of which the Rosenberg episode was a single act, I was a principal actor — if not, before the play is ended, the principal actor — but within this scene alone, I was more like a kind of stage manager, an assistant director or producer, a presence more felt than seen. This was true even of the trial itself: I felt somehow the author of it — not of the words so much, for these were, in a sense, improvisations, but rather of the style of the performances, as though I had through my own public appearances created the audience expectations, set the standards, keyed the rhetoric, crystallized the roles, in order that my generation might witness in dramatic form the fundamental controversy of our time!

Of course, I knew it was foolish to place too much weight on a court record, even as didactic theater, Uncle Sam had already warned me about that. What’s missing in the record is the atmosphere of the courtroom: the expressions on faces, gestures, inflections, betrayed emotions — in short, what are elsewhere called acting values. But it could equally well be argued that the court record, like a baseball box score, was even more reliable than the actual trial: some people were better actors than others, and the emotions of a courtroom could often get jurors into such a state they couldn’t even hear what was being said. Practiced liars could overwhelm the hardest evidence against them, turn it to their own credit, and reduce a whole courtroom to tears, while simpler folk, accustomed to telling what they thought of as the truth, could get caught in a small exaggeration or personal embarrassment and become so flustered that everything they said afterwards sounded false. Some attorneys blew their best material right at the outset like a premature ejaculation, saving nothing back with which to bring the jury to climax just before they retired for a decision, and so finding themselves getting beaten by an opponent with nothing but nonsense, innuendos, and a superior sense of dramaturgy. Class identifications or hostilities could evoke juror responses completely unrelated to the testimony, well-timed comedy could provoke gratitude or ill-timed comedy shock, and evidence suddenly produced by surprise could obscure the fact, later obvious, that it was worthless. The point of Night of January 16th , for example, that Ayn Rand play I was in back in Whittier, was that there was no final conclusion to be drawn, no “right” or “wrong” judgment, the evidence was ambiguous, the testimony contradictory, and each night a jury selected from the audience was invited to render its own verdict. Depending on our various performances, the verdict changed from show to show. I played the part of the District Attorney and prided myself on winning more nights than I lost — one of my most successful roles actually: I was a natural as a prosecutor, could have made a Tom Dewey career out of it. But I would have taken just as much pride in winning for the defense.

The genius of Irving Saypol — himself just forty-five then — was how well he understood all this and used it in the Rosenberg trial. He even stole one of my lines from the play: “I am not going to appeal to your ‘souls,’ or to those ‘deep secret chords of your hearts’—but to your reason alone!” He himself had said somewhere: “A well-turned case is just like a stage play really,” meaning by that not merely that convictions depend upon dramatic entertainment, but that justice is entertainment. His own performance as Prosecuting Attorney was inspired, his backstage manipulations imaginative and exhaustive. With the help of a cooperative and close-mouthed FBI, he had produced a brilliant working script and then had rehearsed his principal witnesses for weeks — he’d even lodged Harry Gold and David Greenglass together up on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison (the “singing quarters”) for several months so that they could perfect their interlocking testimony — while at the same time, he’d seen to it that the defendants were kept too disturbed even to think properly, disrupting their family life, isolating them from each other and driving them to despair over fears for their two kids, depriving them of their freedom and personal dignity, not to mention an ordinary sex life, terrorizing them with ominous rumors, exposing them to vitriolic press and radio campaigns, dividing their own families against them, keeping them ignorant of his own strategy while maintaining tabs on theirs by intercepting their communications and planting FBI informers in the cells near Julie, holding back from them the vast amount of back-up support and research he was getting from the FBI and other government agencies, forcing them to rely entirely on their own limited resources, knowing that no one would come to their aid since to do so could implicate that person in the “conspiracy.” Saypol had even managed to arrange a complete dress rehearsal — sort of like trying the show out in New Haven — in the thematically similar, though less serious, Brothman-Moskowitz trial four months earlier, in which virtually the entire cast — including the Judge and excepting only the accused — was the same. Thus, the Rosenbergs and their lawyers were the only ones not rehearsed, and were in effect having to attempt amateur improvisation theater in the midst of a carefully rehearsed professional drama. Naturally they looked clumsy and unsure of themselves…and so, a bit like uneasy liars.

Saypol was terrific in the courtroom, too: shrewd, thorough, quick on his feet, cold-blooded, and powerful enough in his hushed no-messing-around way to make what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth — at least long enough to wrest a guilty verdict from an impressed jury. True, he accomplished this more with adjectives and style than with verbs and substance, but, given the difficulties, this was all the more to his credit. Knowing he’d have a group of middle-class jurors (most of them were accountants and professed anti-Communists — and here again, in jury selection, Saypol had done his homework, having complete access to police and FBI dossiers withheld from the Rosenberg team), he saw to it that all his witnesses were properly dressed and carefully schooled in witness-box mannerisms, so as to create the undercurrents of awe, rapport, sympathy, or believability he wanted, and he himself stood tall and stern, like Lou Gehrig or Randolph Scott, speaking softly but wielding a stick as big as Uncle Sam’s forearm. Poor old Manny Bloch, contrarily — stocky, stoop-shouldered, and baggy-eyed — looked a little sinister and out at the elbows, and his clients behaved strangely — shrill, pompous, abject, seedy, emotionally unstable — for this jurybox of middle Americans, so like my own constituents. I knew the way Saypol’s mind was running: with this jury, dowdiness was guilt.

Bloch treated him deferentially and sometimes fawned on him, conceding he might be right on this or that minor point, or accepting his word and thanking him for his “courtesies,” obviously angling for Saypol’s pity and sense of fair play, but there was no reciprocal gesture from Saypol. He just accepted the compliments as though deserving them and lashed back, never giving an inch. A natural killer. As he himself once said: “As a prosecutor in a criminal case, one in my position has armament like an iceberg.” Every word was calculated to further the impression that the defendants were tampering with or dodging the truth, and that even their lawyers were embarrassed at having to defend them — a one-track mind, that track leading straight to the electric chair, which Saypol firmly believed in. And those you couldn’t eliminate, teach: “I’ve often wondered,” he has said, “whether the whipping lash wouldn’t be a greater deterrent than what we have now.” Mr. District Attorney. According to Roy Cohn, Saypol loved to play cop, interrogating suspects himself, investigating them — he even carried a gun around in his back pocket like Sam Spade.