Robert Coover - Public Burning

Earlier, after the usual opening minute of silent prayer, the old General had raised his head solemnly, taken a drag, and told us all that the last forty-eight hours had been a particularly trying time for him. We all knew this, but we’d listened appreciatively. In South Korea, he’d said, President Syngman Rhee’s insubordinate release of 26,000 prisoners of war was wrecking his truce negotiations and had cast serious doubt on the entire Free World chain of command. Then, Supreme Court Justice Douglas’s last-minute stay of the Rosenberg executions had made a mockery of all the elaborate preparations this week and brought that whole case to a new crisis — damn it, he’d written his son John a great letter all about the Rosenbergs on Tuesday, had assured Gene Autry on Wednesday that the burnings were all set, and then had gone ahead yesterday right on schedule and issued that cautionary “Statement on the Prevention of Forest Fires,” and now he was going to look like a darned fool. And finally, as if these weren’t troubles enough, someone had advised him last night that he should stop wearing double-breasted suits! He’d glanced gloomily at the ceiling and then at old Ezra of the Council of Twelve Apostles and said that he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he felt more in need of help from Someone much more powerful than he. We’d all nodded our assent, exchanged worried glances, feeling the chill of our adversary’s presence, his power and his wile: to derange a trusted ally, penetrate the highest court in the land, and mock the disguise of Uncle Sam: where would he strike next?

Whichever crisis the President had been talking about, Foster now resumed his briefing on the one in Korea, saying that the situation there was the gravest since the day the Communists first invaded the Republic back on June 25, 1950. We all knew this but were somehow reassured by Dulles telling us so. His remarks, however, kept getting interrupted by messengers from Foggy Bottom who came running over with fresh and apparently alarming communiqués. It was hard to know what was in them, but each one made his head jerk and his glasses skid down his nose. John Foster Dulles. The Gray Beagle of Foggy Bottom. Outwardly austere and even obstinate, he was inwardly an emotional and ambivalent man, a masked manic-depressive, lacking conviction and uncertain of his principles, a typical weakness of high-church Protestants. But we sat there listening to him make his agonizing reappraisals and nodded in gloomy assent. Terrible situation. That damned Rhee — who did he think he was? There were even mutterings around the table about the merits of good old-fashioned assassination: Ike himself had often said aloud that he wished the Koreans would overthrow that “monkey,” and he had that look on his face today, which we all mimicked — but in fact, down deep, we all appreciated Rhee’s act. As Joe McCarthy said yesterday: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” And we all loved freedom and a good buffalo hunt as much as the next guy. It was as lawyers we were upset: the scenario we’d been constructing since Ike’s trip to Korea last fall had had all the props knocked out by our own client. Ike had led with strength, secretly telling the Reds to negotiate or Pyongyang would be our next H-bomb test site — and now his own shill had called his bluff.

“There’s one thing I learned in the five years I served in the Army out there,” President Eisenhower said, shaking his head dumfoundedly, “we can never figure out the working of the Oriental mind!”

Foster stared dully at the President over the tops of his spectacles a moment, then turned back to his latest communiqué, while others around the table picked up on this newest theme of Oriental inscrutability. I participated in these discussions as usual, making occasional observations on detail, crisp and to the point, avoiding generalizations and speech-making, and so keeping up a certain reputation, but my mind was on the excitement outside, the demonstrators and counterdemonstrators, the Supreme Court now or soon to be in session, the trial and the executions, and those dreams last night, those memories of an unspent youth which had left me feeling so edgy and reckless. I developed the ability long ago to do this, to say or do one thing while thinking of another. It’s a political expediency, like appearing to answer a question emphatically while in fact evading the whole point of the question, or learning to repeat verbatim questions from the floor in order to have time to think of answers. I leaned forward and said that, bad as things were, they nevertheless all but assured the passage of our foreign-aid bill through the House today, but I was thinking: What are all those people doing out there? Why has Uncle Sam let this thing get so out of hand? What are the dirty pictures that they’re all joking about? Why is George Humphrey laughing so loudly — are the others feeling what I’m feeling, too? Why is old Foster sitting so hunched over, why is Oveta’s throat so flushed, what’s Ezra Benson doing with his hands in his lap? Why is the President humming “One Dozen Roses”? “We mustn’t forget,” I said, “that the principal enemy in Korea is still Communism.” The General glanced up sharply. I realized that he had just said this himself. “Like the President says,” I said. Around the table, the others nodded solemnly. Charlie Wilson, sitting beside the President, gazed straight at me, his eyes crossing with sleep.

The President reminded us—“bear in mind,” he said, wagging a finger at us — that South Korean forces at this moment held two-thirds of the United Nations line in Korea. If Rhee ordered them to attack, what could we do to stop them? How could we prevent this near-truce we’d come to from collapsing into a full-scale resumption of hostilities? We could hold back ammunition, but that would only mean that the attack would flounder and the inevitable Communist counterassault would overrun the remaining U.S. troops. Likewise, if Rhee pulled his forces back altogether, the rest of us could not hold the line. We simply had to get Rhee back in the harness. Much of this was directed at me. I’d had the job all winter of winning over the Asia-first hardliners on this truce idea — they kept calling it a “peace without honor”—and so Rhee had put me in a bind, too.

I pretended a certain personal frustration — everyone knew I’d taken a public stand with those who wanted to liberate the captive nations of Europe, unleash the democratic forces of Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese mainland, and press for total all-out victory in Korea, hitting them, if necessary, with everything in the bucket — but to tell the truth, I was secretly relieved that being Eisenhower’s Vice President put limits on me. I could use a word like “liberation,” for example, and get read a thousand ways at once — I’m a rhetorician, not a general, and for me that’s power. But today, all those shades of meaning demanded a certain gloominess, my best face in fact, so no one at the table could be surprised I was wearing it.

“It’s one of the lessons of politics,” I said grimly. “Those one thinks are his best friends often turn out to be the heaviest cross he has to bear.” A few heads bobbed up around the table to glance at me suspiciously — I gazed steadily at each of them. Which of them would challenge me, I wondered? Which would stand in my way? I knew that those who reached the top had to develop a certain tough realism as far as friendships and loyalties were concerned — there are no enduring loyalties in politics excepting where they are tied up in personal interests. “What happens any place in the world affects our freedom,” I said, “and it might affect the peace of the world. I think that we can keep our freedom, and I think that we can win the struggle against slavery and for freedom throughout the world. I think the way to have peace is to be strong and be prepared to resist those who threaten peace.” Amazingly, they all listened to this without batting an eye. I wish I had a friend, I thought. One real friend. I took out my handkerchief and mopped my brow. Then, with a shudder, I realized I’d used it to wipe that little kid’s snot, and I stuffed it back in my jacket pocket. I was still very sweaty and shaken from my encounter with that mob — CHAPFALLEN, as it said in the Times crossword puzzle: Weary to an extreme . The only sensation I could recall like it was when Pat and I had got caught up in the crush of the crowd celebrating V-E Day in Times Square in 1945.