Robert Coover - Public Burning

Now, in the Cabinet meeting, in fact, they had started talking about Times Square. I didn’t know how they’d got there, it was just the way these meetings went. Sinclair Weeks was complaining about the shambles up there. I tried to tune into this because I knew that a man was at his best in a crisis when he was thinking not of himself but of the problem at hand. Weeks’s problem at hand was that his son was getting married tonight as part of Uncle Sam’s in-depth campaign to reaffirm the social order in the face of the Phantom’s disruptions, and he was therefore quite naturally distressed about what was going on: could we hold the stage or couldn’t we? We’d all complimented Weeks on this marriage tactic right after the prayer this morning, and I’d wished for a moment that I’d had a daughter old enough to give myself. Weeks was bald-headed like a lot of guys around this table. LIFE had said it: “Ike likes them balding.” Benson. Brownell. Humphrey — the first time the General saw George, he threw his arm around his shoulder and said: “I see you part your hair the same way I do!” He’d never greeted me that way. I sat between Brownell and Humphrey at the Cabinet table, feeling like the Hairy Ape. I ran my hand through my thick hair, tracing the scar there and wondering: What is it suddenly about baldness? That image of Bob Taft’s glowing pate as he turned to walk away from me yesterday in the Capitol flashed to mind. This was something all recent Presidential candidates had in common, I realized, even Adlai. Some personal vanity on Uncle Sam’s part? Or did it make the transformation easier somehow? It didn’t matter, Uncle Sam surely knew that I’d pluck it all out if it came to that. Weeks’s son, of course, was not alone in this endeavor tonight — literally thousands of America’s sons and daughters had been pledged to this nationwide ritual of sanctification, including the son of a deceased Republican Congressman, who was marrying the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller himself.

“Thank God for our young people!” I said, and Eisenhower said: “Amen to that!”

“Say, Dick, what the hell did you do to your nose?” asked Charlie Wilson, uncrossing his eyes long enough to get me in focus.

“I, uh, some demonstrators outside, they had picket staves, and, it, uh, it’s nothing…”

Eisenhower took notice then for the first time and I thought I was about to pick up a few points, but then Cabot Lodge leaned forward and said he deplored “the flood of propaganda instead of factual information about this Rosenberg case,” complaining that left-wing groups all over the world were distorting the facts and arousing a lot of hostility toward the United States, even building it up into a case of official anti-Semitism. Why weren’t we making better use of the Voice of America? Of course, Lodge was under a lot of pressure about this in the U.N. He was very effective, a little too boyish and simple maybe, but an appealing politician. He’d just been named “Father of the Year,” part of a gathering campaign probably. I knew he was one of the favorites around here, and of all the guys around this table, he was the man most likely to challenge me — maybe even three years from now. I knew that was my real task: staying on the ticket in 1956. The chances were good that the General would pass away before 1960, and even if he didn’t, it would be an uphill battle for anybody in the Party to unseat me by then. Everybody else in this potbellied timocracy was too antiquated. Lodge used to sit beside me on the Senate floor — I knew just how he breathed, snorted, moved, smelled, fretted. He’d worked hard last fall for Eisenhower, so hard he’d done what no politician should ever do: he’d neglected his own campaign and lost his Senate seat to Jack Kennedy. On the other hand, maybe that was inevitable, and meanwhile he’d scored a lot of points across the country, Ike had provided him a good national forum in the United Nations, and he even had the aura these days of a “what-if” President: had Taft beat Eisenhower out at the Republican Convention, Lodge would have been a logical Party-unifying Vice Presidential candidate, and with Taft dying now, Cabot would be getting ready to take over the country. I worried about the almost complete ambiguity of his past record and the dapper three-piece suits he wore. Those cool narrow ties: you couldn’t even buy ties like those out in California!

“We must mount a mighty ideological offensive,” I said, “which will prove to peoples everywhere that the hope of the world does not lie in turning toward dictatorship of any type, but that it lies in developing a strong, a free, and an intelligent democracy.”

Not everybody was pleased at this. I rarely said anything at these meetings, and then only about tactics. Why was I sounding off like this? If I was trying to speed things up, I wasn’t succeeding. I sat back, letting my gaze float out through the tall glass doors and on down the long soft green slope of the White House lawn, determined to say nothing that would prolong this goddamned meeting any further. They were terrible, these Cabinet sessions, the consequence of Ike’s “team concept”: get all the “best brains in the country” around a table and reach an inspired consensus. They lasted forever and resulted in lowest-common-denominator policy-making and an appalling dilution of power. Or so it always seemed while sitting in one. Just a screen, probably. Our very drowsiness must have given the American people added confidence: faiths fall when the priests get nervous. Thus, when I took over a couple of months ago and spent the whole time harping about the urgent need to get the next campaign started now, I was only rocking the boat.

I sighed, fished the crossword puzzle out of my pocket, as though consulting statistical notes. Down and through, these clues, from Burning Tree activity to “— in Boots,” like some kind of tortuous labyrinthine sentence. Meaningless, silly even — yet why did it make me think of my dreams again? I found AVER, ASSUAGE, TURN, STOP, and ROAR. Arthur Summerfield was there: his “responsibility”—I glanced up at him uneasily, but he seemed to be sleeping. When I got in trouble last fall, Art was the only major Republican official on the Eisenhower train who was arguing openly and strongly that I should be kept on the ticket, defended, and supported. Of course, we’d all turned up in these puzzles (I wondered in fact if VEEP was not an invention of crossword puzzlers), but why had Art been singled out today? 53 Down: Player chased in a game . HERO? HEIR? HEAD? And who was the Duncecap wearer , the Companion of humidity , who the Hardy heroine , the Candidate for worst dressed woman? This last one was a five-letter word, but luckily it began with “F”—but on the other hand, there was 61 Across: Be superior to , and for this one I already had some of the letters: E — EL!

Beside me, Herb Brownell was bringing up the possibility of issuing a “white paper” on the Rosenberg case, but he interrupted himself momentarily to ask dryly if that crossword puzzle I was working was going to be the next order of business?

I’d been deep in thought, trying out “T” and “H” in those blank spaces, and his question startled me. But I was prepared for it. “No, not the puzzle, Herb,” I said, then sat forward to look around at the others, “but this advertisement beside it.” The others turned to me expectantly, leaving a chagrined Brownell momentarily eclipsed and biting his lip. “It’s for a book ostensibly about Soviet Civilization,” I said, “but in fact it’s a blatant plea for ‘co-existence’—and we all know whose kind of talk that is! It’s published by an outfit up in New York which calls itself the Philosophical Library and they’re not only out to peddle this propaganda, they’re also trying to whip up another new letter-writing campaign to the President!”