Robert Coover - Public Burning

She was pretty goddamn tough, all right. Once, when she was only nineteen years old, she led 150 fellow women workers in a strike that closed down National Shipping. This was during the Depression and the company was fighting for its life, so naturally they hired a new staff and tried to keep operating. But Ethel led the girls in an illegal riot that terrorized the non-union girls and shut the plant down again, in spite of the protective efforts of the whole New York City police force. When a delivery truck tried to crash the picket line, Ethel and the girls hauled the driver from his cab, stripped him bare, and lipsticked his butt with I AM A SCAB. My own butt tingled with the thought of it. When more trucks came, they blocked up the streets, threw themselves down in front of the wheels, slashed up the trucks’ cargo, and pitched it all out in the gutters. Later, in the war, she got a job at the Census Bureau in Washington, the same time I was there in the OPA. We might have met. Julius was back in New York. “It’s all right, miss — after all, I am Dick Nixon of the OPA.…” I grinned to myself. Yet I supposed she was a lot like the people I hated so much in that place — all those ruthless, self-serving, supercilious, cynical wheeler-dealers. That old violent big-city New Deal crowd — we were still trying to get rid of the sonsabitches. Everybody maneuvering for advancement, managing to make a little work look like a lot so as to build their little pyramids — I discovered I could have done the work of the entire OPA all by myself and still take long weekends, but when I tried to introduce a little efficiency, they ostracized me. If anything turned me into a conservative, it was that six months in the OPA. Maybe Ethel was the one most like Hiss…. On the other hand, she didn’t last long there either, maybe she was as unhappy as I was. Now she sobbed herself to sleep at nights, hugged her pillow so tightly she got cramps, was frightened by mice, needed cold compresses to soothe her migraines. Poor Ethel…

I stared gloomily at the paper strewn across my office floor. Which was real, I wondered, the paper or the people? In a few hours, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be dead, their poor remains worth less than that horseshit I’d stepped in, and the paper too could be burnt, but what was on it would survive. Or could survive, it was a matter of luck. Luck and human need: the zeal for pattern. For story. And they’d been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with History, they’d be home free. The poor damned fools. Maybe this was yet another consequence of growing up in the city. One of the first shocks a country boy gets when he leaves home is the discovery that no one has been logging all that terrific history he’s been living through. Until he thrusts himself into the urban fracas, he might as well never have lived at all, as far as History was concerned. In fact, part of the fun of becoming famous was to bend the light back on the old home town and stun them with their own previously unnoticed actuality, make guys like Gail Jobe and Tom Bewley jump and stutter. Yet, I knew what the Rosenbergs felt, because I had felt it, too.

The Rosenbergs’ self-destructive suspicion that they were being watched by some superhuman presence came early, perhaps years ago, back in college, or when Julius got fired maybe, but certainly — and with force — almost immediately after their arrests. In many ways their first letters were the best of the lot: quiet, unassuming, written in haste, often dropping their pronoun subjects and abbreviating, full of ordinary sentences that touched the heart: “Just got through hanging the clothes as Mike didn’t get to sleep until 11:30…”

But then came the death sentence, and what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement — it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction. Oh, there was some impressive political rhetoric in them, and though I was no judge, Ethel’s poem was probably a classic of a sort. And now and then they did make a half-hearted effort to describe something of their lives in prison, the boredom of it, the killing of cockroaches, Jewish services, playing chess or boccie-ball, but frankly it was as though they were responding reluctantly to editorial suggestions from their lawyer or the Party: “Dearest Ethel, Shall I describe my prison cell? It is three paces wide, four paces long, and seven feet high…” And Julius occasionally worked hard at inventing a sympathetic past for himself: “I was a good student, but more, I absorbed quite naturally the culture of my people, their struggle for freedom from slavery in Egypt. As an American Jew with this background, it was natural that I should follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage and seek to better the lot of the common man…” That was admirable, I might have come up with the same phrases myself (“follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage”: I made a note), but all these half starts quickly collapsed, and more often than not into maudlin self-pity: “Ethel, My Darling, You are truly a great, dignified and sweet woman. Tears fill my eyes as I try to put sentiments to paper…. Our upbringing, the full meaning of our lives, based on a true amalgamation of our American and Jewish heritage, which to us means freedom, culture and human decency, has made us the people we are. All the filth, lies and slander of this grotesque frame-up will not in any way deter us, but rather spur us on until we are completely…” et cetera et cetera. Culpable of deceit, he accuses others of the same thing! With such grandstanding, who would not find them guilty? Who or what did he think History was — some kind of nincompoop? A little unimaginative maybe, and yes, eccentric, straitlaced, captious, and rude — but feebleminded? Hardly.

Maybe Julius had had intimations that something or someone was watching him as long ago as his famous encounter with the street-corner Tom Mooney pamphleteer, in the same way that I’d been touched by Aunt Edith’s history book — but intimations are one thing, real awareness is another. Intimations reach you like a subtle change of temperature; real awareness hits you like a bolt of lightning. I’d seen this awareness crash on others before it fell on me, most dramatically during my HUAC investigation of Alger Hiss, and it was a pretty awesome experience. It was as though the whole world had slowly shifted gears and pivoted to stare down upon the incredible duel of Hiss and Chambers, and when they looked up and saw that Eye there, it nearly drove both of them mad. Poor old Whittaker even tried to kill himself. Though I had basked in the peripheral glow of this gaze and was granted my first close-up glimpse of Uncle Sam, I wasn’t touched directly, I wasn’t burned. It wasn’t until the fund scandal broke last fall that I really for the first time in my life felt the full force of it. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg receiving the death penalty was minor-league stuff compared to it.

I was on my campaign train, the Nixon Special, whistle-stopping north from Pomona, California, toward Oregon and Washington— Change Trains for the Future! — when the gears started to shift for me. SECRET NIXON FUND. I tried to ignore it, concentrated instead on technical problems like microphones and schedules, boning up on local color, dealing with the small-time politicos who got on at one stop and off at the next. I had this weird illusion that if we’d just get up a little more steam we could outrun it — instead, we seemed to draw closer and closer to the hot center, RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY. I tried to skirt it. I joked about it. I shouted at it and ran. But it did no good. The fund issue was becoming a national sensation. Willy-nilly, I was entering the arena.