Robert Coover - Public Burning

PRES: Have adjudged them guilty and the sentence just.

PRIS: Innocent!

PRES: Given them every right.

PRIS: Please—!

PRES: I will not intervene in this matter.

PRIS: We do not want to die!

PRES: I will not intervene.

I left the President out on Harry’s Balcony, delivering to the sunburnt and straw-hatted crowds below his “Statement Declining to Intervene on Behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” to return to my office, taking as circuitous a route out of the White House as I thought I could get away with — when was the General ever going to show me around this place, I wondered? What I’d been allowed to see of the White House, I’d liked: it was roomy and comfortable, if maybe too public, and it had a lot of interesting corners. I especially liked the Lincoln Sitting Room. There was an old chair I had that would look good in there. I’d never been up to the Solarium where Ike held his stag parties, but I hoped it was like my bell tower back in Whittier, only fancier.

On the way out, I passed Eisenhower’s valet polishing up the Presidential golf clubs for an afternoon on the course. Or maybe to pot around on the White House lawn when the mobs had left. Familiar sight this spring: the Man of Destiny out there in his white sport shirt, tan cap, and gray slacks, whopping golf balls around the grounds like popcorn, like snow-white Eisenhoppers, while his faithful old Army sergeant, now his valet, chased about after them with a yellow bag, reminding old-timers of Woodrow Wilson’s shepherd out on the White House pasture gathering up sacksful of scattered wool tufts and dung for the vegetable garden. His valet did everything for him: helped him on with his clothes, put paste on his toothbrush, buttoned his fly, ironed his shoe strings, probably even wiped his ass when he shat, if he even did that for himself.

A tremendous cheer exploded out on the White House lawn. He’d got to the main part. This, I thought, was what made Eisenhower great, this was why he was our President: he knew how to kill. He knew how to deal with valets and orderlies, and he knew how to kill. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft…” Just close the switches, smile like a monkey, then go out and swat a few. Of course, it was easy for him, growing up in a town that had had Wild Bill Hickok for its sheriff, he probably had it in his blood. I had naturally put myself in his position: could I have refused them clemency? I wasn’t sure. I knew what the national consensus was and I rarely bucked it, but I could see Grandma Milhous shaking her dark head solemnly from her rocking chair, Mom watching me wistfully from a distant room, softening my heart. But then, as I held out my hand to them in reconciliation, there was Dad, rearing up red-faced in front of me with the strap in his hand. Certainly, no matter what choice I made, I would have been troubled and depressed by the decision long before and long after. Eisenhower merely weighed the effects their deaths would likely have out in the world (mainly positive, he supposed: show them we mean business), affably declined to intervene, and departed for the golf links. Nothing more complicated than sizing up the distance of an approach shot and choosing the right iron. And everybody loved him for this. Even Ethel Rosenberg, about to be wired up and wiped out by the callous sonuvabitch, saw him as “an affectionate grandfather” and “sensitive artist.” The Supreme Court had just warned him, I’d read it myself: “Vacating this stay is not to be construed as endorsing the wisdom or appropriateness to this case of a death sentence”—all but a plea for mercy, but the sensitive artist, with a blank happy smile, ignored it. He probably never even read it. Well, he’d been hit by lightning himself, after all, maybe he underestimated the effects.

I first met the General at the Bohemian Grove near San Francisco in 1950, shortly after I’d won the Republican nomination in California for the Senate, and instinctively, with that first handshake, I’d known him: the most popular boy in school, star of the team, reluctant grinning stud, the easygoing joker who was always getting into the kind of funloving trouble I shied from but envied, pulling shenanigans that made the old folks grin and shake their heads, making out with everybody, the natural leader. Oh, I was a leader, too, of course. If there was an election, I ran, and often as not, because I worked my butt off, I won. But a vote isn’t love, an election is not an embrace. The girls looked up to me, but if I grinned or kidded with them like the other guys, they’d get puzzled and upset, push my hands away. It was like we were in some kind of play, like they knew already how things had to come out and I was threatening them with a disturbing change in the plot. Growing up was difficult for me. Of course, I soon discovered that Eisenhower and I had a lot in common, too — we both came from small towns out west and families of brothers, both dreamed of becoming railroad engineers or seeking adventure in Latin America, both loved football, suffered from nervous stomachs, became military officers, played poker, and had had genuine Horatio Alger careers. But there was always a difference. I dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer because I knew I ought to — Eisenhower actually would have been happy throwing his life away on a goddamn train. Or punching cows in Argentina. The only reason I wanted to go to Cuba was to make money and become respectable in Washington and New York. Also I was in trouble with a judge and getting my ass sued off by an irate client in Whittier for fucking up my first big law case, and I figured I might want to go where the rules were less suffocating. And quickly. This could never have happened to Eisenhower, he was too dumb. As for the football team, I sat on the bench and cheered till my lungs hurt, and sometimes they told me they couldn’t have won without me there, but just the same my name wasn’t in the newspapers next day, and nobody carried me off the field on their shoulders, like they did Ike. The only action I ever saw was in practice when they used me as cannon fodder, a tackling dummy with legs. They wouldn’t even give me a school letter, the fucking tight bastards. And so there I was that day in San Francisco, on the very threshold of such fame and glory rarely even dreamed of by one so young, and yet utterly subdued, held in total wonder by that loose-witted old man- He’s been chosen! I thought, though at the time I wasn’t thinking so much of the Presidency.

We were luncheon guests that day of former President Herbert Hoover, who, though shrunken, still emanated vestiges of that ancient power. Like a shadow behind the eyes. He liked me, as most old men did, we were both California Quakers, after all, and believers in the Four Selfs. I’d actually had direct correspondence with his wife some years before when I was student body president at Whittier College, her alma mater, and when I’d first had a chance to meet him, I’d boned up before on all his writings in order to quote back at him some of his pet phrases about “rugged individualism” and “economic liberty,” winning the old boy’s everlasting support, only hoping all the time it wouldn’t some day prove an embarrassment. We’d even got so close he’d confessed to me what it felt like, that awful day in 1932, when he first felt the power going out of him. The strange hollowness, the painful deflation as his body closed in upon the void, the headaches, back trouble.… Naturally, I’d wanted to know everything, what the Incarnation felt like, how you knew when it had begun, the possibilities…