At the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Fred Vinson takes his seat under the clock in front of the tall Grecian columns and red plush curtains, hastens perfunctorily through the opening rituals, and announces abruptly: “We think the question is not substantial. We think further proceedings to litigate it are unwarranted. Accordingly, we vacate the stay entered by Mr. Justice Douglas on June 17,1953!”
There’s a moment of shocked silence in the packed courtroom—it’s come so fast it’s caught everyone by surprise, some still haven’t taken their seats—then a burst of cheers and boos. The defense attorneys, dark with anger, leap from their chairs, tipping them over, scramble toward the bench—but Justice Robert Jackson objects to the “irregular manner” in which the new lawyers have entered the case, and they are ordered to carry on their unpleasantries elsewhere. Justice Tom Clark notes that the Court has now considered this case seven times, and a moment of awe grips the courtroom—the seventh occasion!
But Justice Hugo Black, dissenting from the 6-to-2 majority opinion and doubting the Court even had the right to vacate the stay of a fellow Justice in the first place (“…so far as I can tell, the Court’s action here is unprecedented…”), argues crabbily that “it is not amiss to point out that this Court has never affirmed the fairness of the trial!” There he goes again. “What,” the people mutter, “is Black and white and Red all over?”
Justice William Douglas, facing possible impeachment, insists bluntly that “the cold truth is that the death sentence may not be imposed for what the Rosenbergs did unless the jury so recommends,” but before he’s even had a chance to get it all out, Manny Bloch is on his feet, asking for more time to rewrite the clemency appeal, arguing that the doubts of three Justices (Frankfurter has snuck out unnoticed for the time being) is “a matter which is appropriate for consideration on a petition of mercy.” He’s wearing a brand-new suit, having dumped coffee on his old one this morning: no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked.
U.S. Acting Solicitor General Bob Stern snorts at this argument, but Justice Black, cantankerous as ever, points out that clemency from the President is all but pleaded for in the majority opinion itself, which says plainly: “Vacating this stay is not to be construed as endorsing the wisdom or appropriateness to this case of a death sentence.” Stern, who is as aware as Black is that this is a mere protective maneuver by the Court to avoid any hint or complaint of error, says flatly that no more time is needed, and the Court, thinking about this for fifteen minutes (the stage is built, after all, and this show is ready to go on), agrees. No more delays. Even Douglas caves in now and votes with the majority, leaving Black alone in his bilious dissent.
The spectators, reporters, court buffs rush from the courtroom, spreading the word to the thousands left outside, all of whom now grab up their children and cameras and race to the White House: It is nearing High Noon, and now President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone stands between the atom spies and death.
13.
The Cabinet Meeting
Wrinkling his brow and bulging his blue eyes in mock amazement, the President interrupted Foster Dulles and said: “This thing is so foolish as to be fantastic!”
I jerked my head up. What was he talking about now? The Rosenberg stay, Rhee, Berlin? Double-breasted suits? He was chewing his lip, a bad sign, and doodling on his little white pad: some kind of face with a careless black beard. Guiltily, I touched my own cheeks: already a little bristly, and it wasn’t even noon yet. I was still nervous and distracted from having run that gauntlet outside—in fact, I’d barely made it to the White House in time for the opening prayer, slipping through the door just as Jerry Persons was getting ready to shut it—and so was able to tune into the Cabinet meeting with only half my mind, but as usual that was enough, they were never much more than diffuse and errant bull sessions. We sat around the long coffin-shaped table in our high-backed leather chairs, shaking our heads in commiseration, blowing smoke, digesting our breakfasts, struggling to get awake enough to face the inevitable assault of newsmen after the meeting broke up, agreeing with the General whatever he was talking about. Maybe he was only complaining to Foster about waking him up at two in the morning yesterday to tell him about Rhee’s release of the prisoners. Dulles made few mistakes, but that was one of them. He wasn’t apt to make it again.
Earlier, after the usual opening minute of silent prayer, the old General had raised his head solemnly, taken a drag, and told us all that the last forty-eight hours had been a particularly trying time for him. We all knew this, but we’d listened appreciatively. In South Korea, he’d said, President Syngman Rhee’s insubordinate release of 26,000 prisoners of war was wrecking his truce negotiations and had cast serious doubt on the entire Free World chain of command. Then, Supreme Court Justice Douglas’s last-minute stay of the Rosenberg executions had made a mockery of all the elaborate preparations this week and brought that whole case to a new crisis—damn it, he’d written his son John a great letter all about the Rosenbergs on Tuesday, had assured Gene Autry on Wednesday that the burnings were all set, and then had gone ahead yesterday right on schedule and issued that cautionary “Statement on the Prevention of Forest Fires,” and now he was going to look like a darned fool. And finally, as if these weren’t troubles enough, someone had advised him last night that he should stop wearing double-breasted suits! He’d glanced gloomily at the ceiling and then at old Ezra of the Council of Twelve Apostles and said that he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he felt more in need of help from Someone much more powerful than he. We’d all nodded our assent, exchanged worried glances, feeling the chill of our adversary’s presence, his power and his wile: to derange a trusted ally, penetrate the highest court in the land, and mock the disguise of Uncle Sam: where would he strike next?
Whichever crisis the President had been talking about, Foster now resumed his briefing on the one in Korea, saying that the situation there was the gravest since the day the Communists first invaded the Republic back on June 25, 1950. We all knew this but were somehow reassured by Dulles telling us so. His remarks, however, kept getting interrupted by messengers from Foggy Bottom who came running over with fresh and apparently alarming communiqués. It was hard to know what was in them, but each one made his head jerk and his glasses skid down his nose. John Foster Dulles. The Gray Beagle of Foggy Bottom. Outwardly austere and even obstinate, he was inwardly an emotional and ambivalent man, a masked manic-depressive, lacking conviction and uncertain of his principles, a typical weakness of high-church Protestants. But we sat there listening to him make his agonizing reappraisals and nodded in gloomy assent. Terrible situation. That damned Rhee—who did he think he was? There were even mutterings around the table about the merits of good old-fashioned assassination: Ike himself had often said aloud that he wished the Koreans would overthrow that “monkey,” and he had that look on his face today, which we all mimicked—but in fact, down deep, we all appreciated Rhee’s act. As Joe McCarthy said yesterday: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” And we all loved freedom and a good buffalo hunt as much as the next guy. It was as lawyers we were upset: the scenario we’d been constructing since Ike’s trip to Korea last fall had had all the props knocked out by our own client. Ike had led with strength, secretly telling the Reds to negotiate or Pyongyang would be our next H-bomb test site—and now his own shill had called his bluff.
“There’s one thing I learned in the five years I served in the Army out there,” President Eisenhower said, shaking his head dumfoundedly, “we can never figure out the working of the Oriental mind!”
Foster stared dully at the President over the tops of his spectacles a moment, then turned back to his latest communiqué, while others around the table picked up on this newest theme of Oriental inscrutability. I participated in these discussions as usual, making occasional observations on detail, crisp and to the point, avoiding generalizations and speech-making, and so keeping up a certain reputation, but
my mind was on the excitement outside, the demonstrators and counterdemonstrators, the Supreme Court now or soon to be in session, the trial and the executions, and those dreams last night, those memories of an unspent youth which had left me feeling so edgy and reckless. I developed the ability long ago to do this, to say or do one thing while thinking of another. It’s a political expediency, like appearing to answer a question emphatically while in fact evading the whole point of the question, or learning to repeat verbatim questions from the floor in order to have time to think of answers. I leaned forward and said that, bad as things were, they nevertheless all but assured the passage of our foreign-aid bill through the House today, but I was thinking: What are all those people doing out there? Why has Uncle Sam let this thing get so out of hand? What are the dirty pictures that they’re all joking about? Why is George Humphrey laughing so loudly—are the others feeling what I’m feeling, too? Why is old Foster sitting so hunched over, why is Oveta’s throat so flushed, what’s Ezra Benson doing with his hands in his lap? Why is the President humming “One Dozen Roses”? “We mustn’t forget,” I said, “that the principal enemy in Korea is still Communism.” The General glanced up sharply. I realized that he had just said this himself. “Like the President says,” I said. Around the table, the others nodded solemnly. Charlie Wilson, sitting beside the President, gazed straight at me, his eyes crossing with sleep.
The President reminded us—“bear in mind,” he said, wagging a finger at us—that South Korean forces at this moment held two-thirds of the United Nations line in Korea. If Rhee ordered them to attack, what could we do to stop them? How could we prevent this near-truce we’d come to from collapsing into a full-scale resumption of hostilities? We could hold back ammunition, but that would only mean that the attack would flounder and the inevitable Communist counterassault would overrun the remaining U.S. troops. Likewise, if Rhee pulled his forces back altogether, the rest of us could not hold the line. We simply had to get Rhee back in the harness. Much of this was directed at me. I’d had the job all winter of winning over the Asia-first hardliners on this truce idea—they kept calling it a “peace without honor”—and so Rhee had put me in a bind, too.
I pretended a certain personal frustration—everyone knew I’d taken a public stand with those who wanted to liberate the captive nations of Europe, unleash the democratic forces of Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese mainland, and press for total all-out victory in Korea, hitting them, if necessary, with everything in the bucket—but to tell the truth, I was secretly relieved that being Eisenhower’s Vice President put limits on me. I could use a word like “liberation,” for example, and get read a thousand ways at once—I’m a rhetorician, not a general, and for me that’s power. But today, all those shades of meaning demanded a certain gloominess, my best face in fact, so no one at the table could be surprised I was wearing it.
“It’s one of the lessons of politics,” I said grimly. “Those one thinks are his best friends often turn out to be the heaviest cross he has to bear.” A few heads bobbed up around the table to glance at me suspiciously—I gazed steadily at each of them. Which of them would challenge me, I wondered? Which would stand in my way? I knew that those who reached the top had to develop a certain tough realism as far as friendships and loyalties were concerned—there are no enduring loyalties in politics excepting where they are tied up in personal interests. “What happens any place in the world affects our freedom,” I said, “and it might affect the peace of the world. I think that we can keep our freedom, and I think that we can win the struggle against slavery and for freedom throughout the world. I think the way to have peace is to be strong and be prepared to resist those who threaten peace.” Amazingly, they all listened to this without batting an eye. I wish I had a friend, I thought. One real friend. I took out my handkerchief and mopped my brow. Then, with a shudder, I realized I’d used it to wipe that little kid’s snot, and I stuffed it back in my jacket pocket. I was still very sweaty and shaken from my encounter with that mob—CHAPFALLEN, as it said in the Times crossword puzzle: Weary to an extreme. The only sensation I could recall like it was when Pat and I had got caught up in the crush of the crowd celebrating V-E Day in Times Square in 1945.
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.
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