Robert Coover - Public Burning

I decided to counterattack, the only possible defense against a smear, especially when it’s largely true. “I was warned,” I cried out from the back of my campaign train, “that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this government, they would try to smear me! Ever since I have done that work of investigating Communists in the United States, the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear that they have been able to!” But they only laughed and everywhere we went there were more and more hecklers, SSH! ANYONE WHO MENTIONS $16,000 IS A COMMUNIST! The fat was in the fire. Not only Democrats, but Republicans, too, were demanding my scalp. Eisenhower turned his back on me. It was because of him I was in trouble. I’d had to double-cross Earl Warren and his gang at the Convention to break up the California delegation and swing the nomination to Eisenhower, and it was some of those soreheads, I knew, who had spilled the beans on the fund — and now he turned his back on me! He said he didn’t know me well and if I was honest, I’d have to prove it. “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business as of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?” He made me feel like the little boy caught with jam on his face. Stassen and Dewey told me to get off the ticket. Friends were not at home when I called them on the phone. Knowland was summoned by Sherman Adams all the way from Hawaii to take my place. Out on the trail, the people wanted blood. I felt like I’d been hit by a real blockbuster, much of the fight had gone out of me, and I was beginning to wonder how much more of this beating I was going to be able to take. Was the whole nation in the Phantom’s power? I got hit by pennies in Portland. NO MINK COATS FOR NIXON, JUST COLD CASH!

I knew the time had come. Either I had to turn and face it, or else I had to quit. In meeting any crisis, one must fight or run away, but one must do something. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out. I began to notice the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was mean to live with, quick-tempered with the members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. I was preparing, I knew, for battle. It wasn’t just a question of who was on the right side, it was a question of determination, of will, of stamina, of willingness to risk all for victory. I tossed through sleepless nights, elbowing and kneeing Pat until she cried, struggling with myself. Of course, I had no intention of quitting. But I didn’t want to get pulped, either. Back in July, I’d had to lock Pat up in a Chicago hotel room one whole night with Murray Chotiner, who had a helluva job pressuring her out of threatening to leave me if I ran for the Vice Presidency — he said afterwards she was a real tiger — so now I got no pity at all from her. She became thin and haggard and even my breakfasts were lousy. But Jack Drown told me not to worry, Bert Andrews talked to me like a Dutch uncle, and some of my old schoolteachers wished me well. I felt better. “You are the lightning rod,” Chotiner told me, “and if you get off this ticket, Eisenhower won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell in November.” The lightning rod. I knew then that what I did would affect not just me alone, but the future of my country and the cause of peace and freedom for the entire world. It was a crisis of unbelievably massive proportions. I wanted to disbelieve in the Eye. I wanted to ridicule it. But I also wanted to lick the Phantom. And I wanted like hell to be Vice President. If Eisenhower wasn’t going to help me, I’d have to help myself. The soul-searching was over. “General,” I said to him when he called me on the phone from his Look Ahead, Neighbor Special: “there comes a time when you either have to shit or get off the pot!”

Just saying that released me. I knew now what I had to do. I determined to face the Eye in its nakedest form: the television camera. This was no eye-in-the-sky pipe dream: you could see it there, hard and shiny, black, heartless, unblinking. I would go before it. I would bare my soul and my bankbook before the nation. Actually I only wanted to bare my soul, but Ike insisted on baring the bankbook as well, so since he was paying for it, I agreed. I had learned from my experience in the Hiss case that what determines success or failure in handling a crisis is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high. That experience stood me in good stead now. I found myself almost automatically thinking and making decisions quickly, rationally, and unemotionally. When my advisers excitedly urged me to go on the air after the “I Love Lucy” show on Monday night, I coolly vetoed the idea. “No,” I said. “Tuesday night.” Tuesday—? “That’s right. After Milton Berle.”

On my way to Hollywood to make the speech, I jotted down notes on picture postcards I found on the plane in the seatback in front of me. I was thinking of course of the legend of Abe Lincoln scribbling on a train on his way to Gettysburg. Actually, the notes were useless, I had to throw them away, but the legend — my own now — lives on. This ploy reminded me that Lincoln had said something about the common man, and I got one of my old Whittier profs to look it up for me. Roosevelt had made good use of Fala, I decided to work Checkers in somehow. Use Pat’s cloth coat against the Truman mink-coat scandal. Lay out all the monies I’d ever earned: this gave me the opportunity of using a lot of attractive boyhood images. How poor we were, and all of that. I was glad I hadn’t let Smathers and his old high-school buddy Bebe Rebozo talk me into their real-estate schemes. I decided to demand that everybody in the campaign publish his finances just like me, Eisenhower included. I knew it would piss him off, I did it to needle him, let the disloyal cock-sucker find out what it felt like — Jesus, I was mad at him! Him and all those naïve amateurs around him, I was eager to watch them squirm — and by God I was not going to go to him like a little boy to be hauled off to the woodshed, properly punished, and then taken back into the family, I’d had enough of that shit with my old man! I was going to win this one! I wondered if I could bring George Washington, Nathan Hale, Lou Gehrig, Little Orphan Annie, and Sergeant York into it somehow. This broadcast had to be a smash hit — one that really moved people, inspired them to enthusiastic, positive support, left even the Uncle Miltie fans gasping.

I should have sent the Rosenbergs a copy of that speech. It was just four days before Ethel’s birthday — maybe she heard it on the prison radio. Not likely though; she would have mentioned it in her letters. Too bad. It might at least have helped them prepare their last words. Our purposes, after all, were much the same; to convince a stubbornly suspicious American public — our judges — of our innocence. And we were innocent. The Rosenbergs, in their internationalist confusions, did not see themselves as traitors any more than Hiss, Acheson, or Stevenson did. And the press was wrong about the fund — what I wanted was not the money, but the guys who gave it, a nickel was enough, I wanted their names, their commitments. What did money mean to me? Oh, of course, like all American boys, like Julius Rosenberg out selling penny candy no doubt, I used to dream of rescuing a generous millionaire from being robbed and murdered by a thug and receiving a thousand-dollar reward that propelled me into fame and fortune, being named in the rich man’s will and perhaps even marrying his daughter, who was disguised as a poor girl selling apples on the street corner, but all this was behind me now. Not that I hadn’t made good use of the money, it was what had made it possible for us to buy our Spring Valley home, but to tell the truth, I rarely thought of money any more except when there were bills to be paid. People have accused me of a lack of taste, but it isn’t that, it’s a simple lack of desires. If I were rich, the only thing I could possibly want to buy would be the Presidency.