Robert Coover - Public Burning

Nevertheless, tough as he was, I could have whipped his ass from Foley Square to Jenkins Hill and back again, could have beat the rap for the Rosenbergs — though of course this would have been a miscarriage of justice. Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, was a dunce, a pushover — in fact, he played so naively into Saypol’s hands at times that I suspected Uncle Sam must have had something to do with frazzling his mind somehow. Giving him bad dreams so he didn’t sleep well or something. He buckled under to the Judge, overpraised the Prosecutor, joined the chorus of admiration for the FBI — who were, though he never seemed to grasp this, his real opponents in this trial: in the final analysis, it was their word against his, and it was his job to destroy their credibility. But this never even occurred to him. He just didn’t know what the game was all about. He neglected to bring in friendly witnesses and refused to cross-examine key government witnesses, bungled the Fifth Amendment procedures, seemed not to hear half of what got said. Nor did he challenge any of the physical exhibits, a lot of which were very dubious looking and should have been exposed to public scrutiny — hell, the FBI has a special section which does nothing but produce fake documents, they have to do this, it’s a routine part of police work, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed doing if they’d given me that job I asked for when I left Duke — and much of the stuff that Saypol offered up looked like it might well have come from that factory. Of course, what choice did Saypol have? The real evidence was in Russia. You had to credit his ingenuity. Just as you had to fault the defense for chickening out under pressure.

Bloch’s crosses were hardly likely to get him into the Hall of Fame either. He failed to ask who if anybody helped Greenglass prepare those new sketches, presumably copies of the originals, for the trial, even leapt up and urged the impounding of the goddamn things in a phony act of patriotic grandstanding that fooled nobody, stamped the drawings as the real McCoy, and drew an awful lot of excitement to the testimony of Greenglass which followed. He neglected to probe into Greenglass’s complicated finances, failed to follow up when Greenglass talked spookily of “memories and voices in my mind.” He did not demand to know the details of the prosecution’s careful rehearsal of David, Ruth, Harry Gold, and the others during the six months preceding. In short, he lacked a win complex. I believe you have to stay on the offensive, wait for windfalls, get what dope you can on your adversary, and then blast him, whether in a courtroom, an election campaign, or a summit meeting. Saypol had built a house of cards and Bloch just didn’t blow. “Every man sitting over here is an honest man,” Bloch said in his summing-up: “The FBI representatives, Mr. Saypol and his staff, every man of them, they are doing their duty.” Saypol must have had a hard time just to keep from laughing.

Bloch’s most astounding blunder was to refuse to cross-examine Harry Gold. Gold was the alleged courier-link between Fuchs, Rosenberg, and Greenglass, and if he was lying — or if the jury could be made to think so — then Bloch and the Rosenbergs had it made. Gold, like most spies, even our own boys over in the CIA unfortunately, was an incorrigible fantasist, who in the course of his operations had invented a wife, twin children, an apartment, a house purchase, a polio attack on one of the children, a separation, his brother’s death, and even a fictitious list of “contacts” which he gave the Russians, sharing intimate moments from this fantasy life with friends and associates, acting it out for the world in all its bizarre detail, while in fact living at home all the time with his mother, at least until she died. His wife’s name in this saga was Sarah O’Ken, a former gun moll of an underworld villain named Nigger Nate; he said he’d met her while courting another girl with one blue eye and one brown eye (his mother had such a pair). John Hamilton, who had once been our National Committee Chairman and who somehow got Gold as a client, told me he sometimes wondered if Gold was even a spy, maybe he was making the whole thing up; he had all the apparatus, all right, but it was all down in his basement, even the stuff he was supposed to have given the Russians, boxes of it, like the raw materials of some novel. He told me Gold was something of a self-destructer, too, a man with no sense of his own being, and as a boy — probably now in prison, still — he played these weird baseball games with decks of cards, inventing a whole league of eight teams with all their players, playing out full seasons, keeping all the box scores and statistics, even taking note of what they looked like! It’s a wonder one of his ace pitchers didn’t turn up in the trial testimony as a contact or something. Maybe one did. And vice versa.

He was apparently fascinating to watch on the witness stand, a man so used to living in make-believe worlds under one cover or another he couldn’t remember rightly the real one any more, yet outwardly very calm and convincing, with an ingenious sense of detail — a man at home within the artifice of a courtroom trial. Maybe Bloch was afraid to probe such talent, no telling what he might come up with. That smug self-confidence reminded me in some ways of Alger Hiss, except that Gold was both creepier and humbler than Hiss and could spin it off with less self-consciousness. He had a round face with a sharp nose and big dark eyes, wore a pinstripe suit with enormous lapels and fat bright ties — he looked like a silent-film comedian doing an imitation of Roy Cohn. Outpost Harry. Must have seemed like a gift from the goddamn gods to the FBI, and maybe that was the best way to think of it. He was the man who supposedly turned up in Albuquerque one day with half a card from the back of a Jell-O box that matched a half that Julius Rosenberg had given David Greenglass, told David “I come from Julius,” and then exchanged some money for some atomic-bomb sketches and other material. Thus, he was the master link that brought it all together, made a “spy ring” out of it. Hamilton told me that in his early conferences with Gold, he’d apparently forgotten all of this, but once he’d had a couple of weeks with the FBI agents, it all “came back” to him. That “I come from Julius,” for example, maybe the key piece of corroborative testimony: at first glance it was very damaging. But in fact, if true, it was strong evidence that Rosenberg was not involved, since these intelligence agents always use made-up names, not real ones, especially in recognition signals. Moreover, Greenglass had felt obliged, after the exchange of money and data, to give Gold Julius Rosenberg’s name and phone number as a way of getting in touch when David was in New York on furlough, so in any case both of them must have assumed Gold was referring to some other Julius. Fuchs, for example: one of his middle names was Julius. So for that matter was Herb Brownell’s. Hamilton didn’t even think this was the real signal used. He said that in his first conversations with Gold there’d been no mention of these signals at all — in fact, no mention of Greenglass or A-bomb sketches either — all this had come later after Gold had had several helpful sessions with the FBI. But even after Gold had begun to “remember” Greenglass, there had still been no Jell-O box and no Julius, just “something on the order of Bob sent me or Benny sent me or John sent me or something like that.”

Admittedly, Bloch didn’t know then what I knew now — and thank God for that, I suppose, God and John Hamilton, who kept his mouth shut — but how the hell are you going to find out if you don’t ask? Bloch had surely read the transcript of the earlier Brothman-Moskowitz rehearsal when Gold had spun off that fantasy-family routine — with that alone I could have split that screwed-up schizoid in two, right slap through the void in his middle. He could’ve walked out of the courtroom afterwards through two separate doors. And one thing about a witness with a penchant for all those cute little supplementary details: keep egging him on and he’ll invent one too many, ask any of those famous inspectors from the classic murder cases of literature. Or take that baseball game played with a deck of cards, I can just imagine what I might have done with that one…