Robert Coover - Public Burning

He’d traveled the world, this man, and now he was running it, and he still hadn’t progressed past the simplest kind of home-town table talk. In his cowtown world, he could use words like “instinct” and “freedom” and “sincerity” and “decency,” and assume any darn fool would know what he meant by them, and if they pretended not to, they were either cantankerous or nincompoops. Free economy was God’s truth, that was all, plain as the nose on your face, and he figured if you’d just show the Soviets the facts they’d agree with you, they’d have to. After all, as he said when he called on the Almighty to watch over the Communists when Stalin died: “They are the children of the same God who is the Father of all peoples everywhere.” It was easy. “Now let us begin talking to each other,” he’d say. “And let us say what we’ve got to say so that every person on earth can understand it. Let’s talk straight: no doubletalk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let’s spell it out.” Then he could never understand why this didn’t seem to work: “We are trying to present certain salient facts to the world, facts for example as to what our purpose is, our intent, that we are not imperialistic, we are simply trying to help create a world in which free men can live decently, and they have not understood; we have tried to be helpful and have earned nothing but vituperation!” In fact, he even seemed to blame me somehow when things went wrong, as though I were responsible for corrupting the language of the world so that it obscured all these self-evident truths. He thought almost any problem could be solved if America would just keep its heart right into the job, as he put it, and do the right thing. “Heart, Determination, and Productivity.” He cherished old proverbs about the good life and rags to riches, thought the first World War even more glorious than the second, truly believed in Manifest Destiny. He liked to fish and hunt! He still remembered the Alamo! Businessmen to him were simply people who knew how to solve problems and save money, so he filled up his Cabinet with them and admonished them to remember the little fellow — my God, how could you not like him? Laborers were like foot soldiers in the forward march of free enterprise, and he talked about creeping socialism as if it were some kind of mole eating up the golf course. “Before I appoint anybody to any important position, I call him in and ask him about his philosophy,” he’d say with a straight face. It’s amazing how little some people can understand about the world we live in, even on the simplest level!

By grunts and nods, we’d seemed to come to some agreement that there was no need for a white paper, but that we should enlarge some on the President’s clemency denial previously drafted by the Attorney General, acknowledging the worldwide “concern” over the case, but answering this Phantom-inspired ruckus with a vivid depiction of the horrible nature of the Rosenbergs’ crime (millions of innocent people may die, etc.) and a little self-congratulatory canticle on behalf of the generous and humane system of American justice and due process of law. I pointed out that the case had had 23 applications to the courts and 112 judges had reviewed it, but no judge had ever expressed any doubt that the Rosenbergs had in fact spied for the Russians. Of course, I knew as well they’d never asked themselves the question and so had had no cause to answer it, confining themselves to legal technicalities, not questions of fact, scrupulously avoiding any improper opinionating about “guilt” or “innocence,” as indeed they had to, but I counted on the General’s ignorance of the appellate system, and sure enough he smiled and said: “Put that in, Herb: ‘No judge has ever expressed any doubt…’”

Conversation shifted now to the ceremonies tonight in Times Square, the seating arrangements, special events, electrocution protocol, and Doug McKay, as Secretary of the Interior, gave a brief report on the problems of security and set reconstruction, apologizing somewhat abashedly for his failure to solve the Statue of Liberty boat strike. The more this dragged on, the more anxious and annoyed I became. My staff would have arrived by now and discovered the Rosenberg mess in my office. I worried about that, worried that they’d see it and gossip around the Senate Office Building about what they saw, or, worse, that they’d try to do me a favor and clean it up. They knew I liked a clean room. My desk is always clean. You can’t let your mind get cluttered, I believe that, you have to live like a Spartan, spare and clean, be at your best at all times, be physically and mentally disciplined to make decisions in a balanced way, and people who have messes around them all the time also have messy minds. I have a note to myself somewhere on the subject. But right now, I knew, my office was a goddamn disaster area, the Rosenberg letters strewn everywhere, the trial transcripts, secret FBI reports, my notes, books on the floor — if anybody who knew me well saw it, they’d think old Dick Nixon was losing his mind. Or else that somebody hostile to me, malicious, vindictive, had got in while I was out. But there was nothing I could do about it until this meeting broke up, and at the present rate, I’d be lucky to get over there before it was time to show up in Times Square. I really blew it with that shave this morning, I thought irritably, watching Ike doodle that blackbearded bum. Is he stretching it out on purpose, I wondered — is Uncle Sam just toying with me?

Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson now suggested ringing the area around Times Square an hour before the executions with atomic tanks, which he said he thought he could supply. Joe Dodge, the Budget Director, doubted that this would be economical. Wilson said he just thought he’d throw the idea out to let us kick it around. Watching all these theatrical performances, I thought: Only Uncle Sam is real: there’s no one over his shoulder. An awkward situation, though — he had nothing to believe in except himself. An audience of one. Herb Brownell informed us that the old Look Ahead, Neighbor Special was being rigged up for VIP runs to the city, and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks said that the subway system there had been commandeered to assure us all easy and safe access to the center and out again. Oveta Culp Hobby expressed her appreciation of this. Of course, the whole Cabinet out in public and in one place like that — not to mention Congress, the Supreme Court, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and indeed the better part of America — we were very vulnerable, the Phantom might even throw the big one at us. Foster Dulles gloomily discounted this likelihood, and Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, smiled and said there was nothing to worry about.

After that, the President, apologizing, read through the speech he planned to deliver at the electrocutions tonight for our approval. It was okay, his usual bumbling incoherent but plainly sincere style, and when he was finished I clapped along with all the rest. I was wondering, though, how to get the discussion shifted back to my injuries. “I read it far more for your blue pencils,” he said, as though genuinely embarrassed, “than I did for your applause.” Why is it, I wondered, that people think of me as the cagy and devious one? “Because at first, in our attempt to state a philosophy of government, we were not close enough down to our daily living. One reason I wanted to read it now is so that you can think it over and be ready to tear it to pieces.”

“I think it is wonderful,” said Charlie Wilson. “I am in favor of flying the flag pretty high.”

“I am, too,” boomed Eisenhower, clapping his left hand to Wilson’s shoulder. Art Summerfield awoke with such a start he nearly fell over backwards in his chair. “I would get out and shout it out loud but you have also got to bring basic principles down to living because here is this thing going out to probably one of the greatest audiences that has ever heard a speech. It is going in the papers, here are thousands out in front of us. You want every person there to carry home with him a conviction that he can do something.”