Robert Coover - Public Burning

What was I saying? That the FBI, convinced maybe that they’d located the spy ring or at least were very close, but lacking hard evidence, had arm-twisted all these people into concocting a bomb-theft plot? It hardly seemed likely, yet all the linkages, walked through backwards like this (in fact I was now down on my hands and knees, crawling through them), did seem to come undone. Supposing Gold really was Fuchs’s courier, for example: would the Soviets have been so crazy as to risk compromising this connection by sending Gold to the Greenglass flat? Fuchs to the Russians was like a dream come true — he was, literally, almost everything they needed. Greenglass, by comparison, was just some dumbnuts YCL on-the-make Army kid who through sheer stupidity and overzealousness could spoil everything. Who could be sure? he might even be an FBI plant! And anyway, if Rosenberg was in on it, then they hardly needed Gold — anything David had for them, Julie could get. Well, I knew what the pressures were in a place like the FBI. Each division had to justify its budget and salaries, come up with the goods when pressed, and each man had to think of his own advancement: assuming the Rosenbergs were guilty (and perhaps no man at the FBI doubted this from the beginning, one man’s beliefs or assumptions supporting the next, just like in religious cults, augmented by the incredible state of paranoia — Fear Bullshit Insecurity, they called themselves — and the blind obeisance to the Director that prevailed over there), then the man who nailed it down stood to win the prize. Rewards and punishments: this was how it worked. On May 31, 1950, just eleven days after the case had been opened, for example, there were Gold’s interrogators T. Scott Miller and Richard Brennan getting Bureau commendations for their “imaginative, resourceful, and vigorous” handling of the assignment and being recommended for “meritorious increases in salary.” An instant parable for the whole force, all of whom were out there competing for the prizes in this one. The biggest one of all: the Crime of the Century. Hoover, reacting with “shock and anger,” had grabbed up the intercom in 1949 and said: “Get that spy ring!” And so, like unquestioning soldiers of Christ, they had gone out and got one. It would have been just the same at the OPA. Of course, we never electrocuted anybody at the OPA.

And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves — or, as they’d say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers — maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they’d been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and pitied, to demonstrate their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one), were members of the alleged conspiracy. In 1943 the Rosenbergs were known to have dropped out of all overt Communist activities, canceling their subscription to the Daily Worker , refusing to sign any more petitions. Saypol argued that these were signs they were going underground, and maybe that was so. But maybe not: what with the new baby and Julius’s well-paying Army job, a brighter-than-ever future, they might merely have been ducking out on their friends, something they’d still feel guilty about eight years later. In the interim, Julie loses his job, Ethel thinks she’s having a breakdown, they sink into a drab and scummy life, and then suddenly — BINGO! — the A-bomb trial, a chance to recover their pride and juice up their meaningless existences with real content. Sobell, meanwhile, doesn’t know what the hell is happening — is it a fascist takeover? — and in panic flaps off to Mexico. When he hears about the Rosenberg spy ring, he probably believes it. So do the other witnesses: why not? it’s possible…we all believe it…

I lay on my face gazing across the wide spread of scattered paper. I was somewhat lost in all these speculations. At sea. It was a little like lying by the irrigation ditch in Yorba Linda and gazing up at the endless sky, watching truths blow by like shifting clouds, only now it was more serious. What was fact, what intent, what was framework, what was essence? Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn’t he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man’s land, between logical alternatives? I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was the one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. Fortunately, I knew, I’d forget most of this — these errant insights always fled and something more solid, more legal , sooner or later took over. I’d find the right question, take a side, and feel on top of things again. Gain perspective. Courage, Confidence, and Perspective: the Rosenberg formula. It was in all their letters. Maybe it had a secret meaning. Something about the Communist Party. “CCCP,” I knew, was the way the Russians wrote USSR. I had to admit that it resembled somewhat my 1952 “K 1C 3” campaign slogan: Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls. Or Costs — we never got that sorted out. The Great Crusade. Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment. For Peace, Bread, and Roses. Things we’d learned in the thud and blunder of college politics, Julius and I….

Different from me, though. His moustache alone was proof of that. A kind of holyroller in his way. Gullible, emotional. We were more like mirror images of each other, familiar opposites. Left-right, believer-nonbeliever, city-country, accused-accuser, maker-unmaker. I built bridges, he bombed them. A Talmud fanatic at age fourteen, Manifesto zealot at fifteen. He moved to the fringe as I moved to the center. He argued with his Socialist dad, helped kick the Trotskyites out of the Party while he was still just a kid. If he’d been born a Catholic or Lutheran instead of a Jew, he might have been a Nazi. Probably some kind of sexual deviant as well, most of these ghetto types were. Too many people piled up on top of each other, it was easy to imagine a lot of combinations country kids would never think of. When the FBI raided the Rosenberg flat, the one thing they found besides old check stubs chronicling the dismal decline of Julie’s failing business was a set of pornographic records and other records ridiculing religious ceremonies, like the Kol Nidre chant. What Eisenhower in his news conference yesterday called “violations of human decency.” Saypol thought those records were enough alone to hang them on: “An indication of their state of mind,” he liked to say.

Certainly, if what I’d heard about their first reunion inside Sing Sing was true, they didn’t care who was watching, they could go at it like dogs in the playground. They’d been separated since the trial, and had been working themselves up for this meeting. When the door opened and they saw each other, they broke away from their guards, rushed together, smothered each other’s faces with hot kisses, started pawing at one another wildly, pulling at their clothes, Julius had Ethel’s blouse out and her skirt up, she was going for his pants — they’d have been fucking on the floor in front of everybody in five seconds if the guard and matron hadn’t recovered from their shock, grabbed them apart, and locked them up. They called it love but it was clearly a lot more dangerous than that. Warden Denno had issued orders that henceforth they were to be handcuffed, sit at opposite ends of a seven-foot conference table, well guarded, and never be allowed to touch again.