“That’s the style, fella citizens!” thunders Uncle Sam, cracking a mighty bullwhip like a ringmaster—“This is the end, so why pretend—now’s the time to strain every nerve and bend all your energies to keep well in fronta the mighty struggle for men’s minds, hearts, and raw materials! The untransacted destiny of the American people is to establish a new order in human affairs, to confirm the destiny of the human race, and to pull that switch and shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind! Men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do—who shall live up to the great trust? eh? and who’s the yaller low-lived red-mouthed pusley-gutted huckaroo who DARES FAIL TO TRY?”
None dare, of course—except for a few professional troublemakers and close-minded bellyachers, and these the bald eagle, flapping and cawing vehemently, is rounding up and driving toward the Whale’s mouth like a cowboy pushing dogies into the stockyard. One the eagle misses is the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer, who, unnoticed in all the excitement, has finally managed to gain a purchase on the edge of the stage. He now draws himself up, lifts one leg over, and gasps: “I demand a reply to my petitions!”
“Very well,” says Uncle Sam, and he picks up Betty Crocker’s fallen dentures and bites Manny in the nose with them.
Bloch screams and falls from the stage. “What kind of animals am I dealing with?” he rages. “The actions of the Government of the United States in this case reveal to the entire world that the people who are running the Government are much more barbaric than the Nazis when they had power in Germany! I feel ashamed that I am an American today!”
The Square is rocked with hooting and hissing: the people are finding their way back now, getting the feel of things again. “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover!” shrieks Bloch insanely, and the Union County American Legion in hasty assembly demands his disbarment. Bloch is dragged away, his new suit rumpled and his career in ruins, sobbing huskily: “Please tell them I did the best I could for them! Tell them I respect and admire them! Tell them I love them…!”
But his words are drowned out by boos, his own histrionics, and sudden laughter, for just as Manny is being stuffed into the Whale’s belly, somebody else—looking as miserable as an abused dog in his crushed homburg and dirty socks—is being led out like Jonah by a stiff-backed old lady in prim rimless specs! Who is it? Smokey Bear? The Atomic Bum? No, it’s Vice President Richard (Dick) Nixon and his late great Grandma Milhous!
“Everybody’s tryin’ ta git inta da act!” snorts Uncle Sam, hands on hips, winking down over his nose at the old woman. “Awright, Granny, send that onregenerit bluebellied tatereater up here where I can take a swat at him with the flat side a the dictates a reason and justice should it come to the raskil’s imperdint mind to discomboberate us with any more surjestshuns, prayers, or other dierbolical sass!” The old lady returns Uncle Sam’s wink and gives the Vice President a whacking high-buttoned boot in his henchbone, sending him flapping forward through the untangling pack-up like a clipped goose trying to take flight. People add their own toes to his general forward endeavor, holding their noses and hollering taunts at him like “Little Dick, he was so quick,” and
“Oh you dirty beggar,
Oh you dirty crumb!
Ain’t you ashamed
To show your dirty bum!”
Uncle Sam watches these procedures with a rueful smile, then turns his attention to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies, Betty Crocker. He stuffs the false teeth back into her soft gaping jaws and revives her with a splash of six fluid ounces of Tennessee sour mash, observing as he throws that the old girl has taken quite a beating and is probably going to need a face lift once all this is over. Betty rears up, shakes her head, grabs up her rolling pin, smoothes down her skirt, wipes off her jowls with a swipe of her sleeve, snaps her choppers once just to test her grip on them, and then proceeds to lay into every dubious character in sight—not even the bureaucrats are safe, and some Congressmen are seen diving under their chairs. “Hoo-hah!” laughs Uncle Sam, watching her swing away. “I wish the Phantom could see that!”
He cracks his bullwhip over Betty’s head, snatching a couple dozen silver stars off the shirts of patrolmen and state troopers, then a couple dozen more, converts the whip into a Louisville Slugger and, tossing the badges up in the air, swats them out into the night sky (they seem to stick up there and glitter like something out of a fabulous movie they’ve all seen but can’t quite remember. Graceful is his form, and slender, and his eyes are deep and tender, as with a smile that is childlike and bland, he next turns the whip/bat into a Remington and commences to shoot the stars all down again, knocking them off like clay pigeons—crack! pop!—and splattering the heavens with glittering sprays of light like bombs bursting in air! The Singing Saints, their Mormon decorum recovered, zip up and step forward to accompany Uncle Sam’s act with their own rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory,” but before they can even get as far as the “wider still and wider shall,” Uncle Sam—glancing anxiously up at the clock, whose hands have been sliding inexorably up toward eight o’clock—cuts them off: “Whoa thar, fella patriots! Enough a this high-minded bullshit, it is rather for us to be here deddycated to the great task remainin’ before us—thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightnin’ what does the work—or as old Ben would say, when there’s a great heat on the land in a partickyular region and a passel a clouds comes by full of electrical fire—LOOK OUT BELOW! Yea, it is nigh onto Zero Hour, friends and neighbors! We got a pair of misdemeanin’ poachers back there at the settin’-off end of the Last Mile who gotta take their farewell trip to that promised land, gotta pay, as we say, the debt of nature, slip the cable and cock up their toes—and toot sweet! So an end to this foolish hurrahin’, the tea party’s over! It is time to make room on earth for a little warmth, a little zap of love’s bestowin:’ then nighty-night to them scallywags, cuz it’s rubber tire buggy, rubber tire hack, they gotta walk that lonesome valley, and they ain’t a—“
Suddenly, there is a sharp whirr-CLICK!, like gears meshing toward some final connection, and then—BONG! BONG! BONG…!—all the clocks in New York City, all the clocks in the nation, in the world, strike the fateful hour, making people gasp and bite their fingernails: it is eight o’clock! From the belly of the Whale comes a woman’s scream: “In memory of the Rosenbergs!”—and the Whale begins to rumble and tremble as though with a fearsome indigestion, an indigestion that sounds like a lot of hysterical amateurs trying to sing “Go Down, Moses!” The people shrink back—
“Hey, no flinchin’ out there!” booms Uncle Sam. “Soft-heartedness, in times like these, shows sof’ness in the upper story!” He snaps his finger and jabs it at Police Commissioner Monaghan, and George sends his Deputy Patrick Kirley scrambling in to the Whale like a gun-toting antacid to quiet things down in there: one belch and it’s over. “Come on, you doddrabited whey faced no-good varmints! Now is the hour! With firmness in the right as God gives us to see to the right, we are gonna drop the handkerchief and light a candle of understandin’ in these traitors’ hearts which shall not be put out till they’ve sizzled like a wet cat flung into a kittil of bilin’ fat! Huu-u-u WEE! Whilst the stars and stirrups floats in the breezus whar, whar in the name a Jeezus is that miserbul termatis-nosed skaley-heeled rapscallious skonk who will not, with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and skeer-provokin’ loomynations, lay hold—from one end a this continent t’ uther—the hangin’ rope!? EH?? Do you hear me, o ye that love mankind? It is time, I say, to loose the fateful lightnin to reach a fiery rod, and on Death’s fearful forehead write the autygraph a God so’s any squinty-eyed inimy can read it without his spectacles! So let the burn begin! All I got, and all that I yam, and all that I hope, in this life, I’m now ready to stake on it!” He takes a final deep puff on his corncob pipe and—precisely at one minute after the hour—produces his zinger: a huge smoke ring that rises slowly, scalin
g the cloudy summits of the Times Tower, hovers momentarily up there over its tip, then sinks down over it, unrolling like a condom—he blows at it and it bursts into a spectacular fireworks display, in the center of which, halfway up the tower, is the blazing message:
NOW COMES THE MYSTERY!
He flashes a final salute to his wildly cheering citizens in the Square—“I got a million of ’em!” he laughs, tipping his star-spangled plug hat forward on his stately brow in the best Broadway tradition—“And so now I bid you a welcome adoo, brave Americans all—long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light, you may fire when you are ready, Gridley!”—and then he disappears, leaving to Betty Crocker the task of setting the final places at the table.
The first of tonight’s special guests to appear, introduced by Betty (with a nod to the National Poet Laureate) as “the nation’s number one legal hunter of top Communists,” is the chief prosecutor in the case, Irving Howard Saypol, now a State Supreme Court Judge—he strides manfully to his front-row seat with all the calm confidence, as Saint Mark would say, of a Christian with four aces, a natural winner, with a big chest, a burgeoning belly, a tough jaw, cold eyes like Uncle Sam’s, and a cocked pistol in his hip pocket. He is accompanied by his wife, his children, his chief assistants in the case, Myles Lane, Roy Marcus Cohn, Jim Kilsheimer III, and Jim Branigan, Jr., and all their loved ones. The prosecution team is followed out by the various witnesses at the trial, Betty urging them along like a schoolmarm lining up her kids at the toilet door, everyone from chubby-cheeked David Greenglass, his wife Ruth, and dapper little Harry Gold in his now-familiar pinstripe suit, which prison fare is making baggy on him, to the notorious Red Spy Queen, Elizabeth Bentley, who regrettably is not quite a Blue Angel after all (in fact she looks like a spinster librarian, the kind that tear all the naughty pages out of the books), and Jim Huggins, the immigration inspector from Laredo who helped Morty Sobell across the border. Sobell himself, no longer so tight-lipped as he was at the trial, is kept well out of sight, though his wife Helen has been seen tonight, getting herded into the Whale.
And then the Texas high-school marching band strikes up the theme song (no longer, thank heavens, recognizably Russky) from “The FBI in Peace and War.” Saypol, his team, and the carefully developed witnesses got all the headlines at the time of the trial, but of course it was the corps of hard-working agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who really cracked the case—men like Bob Lamphere and Hugh Clegg, Dick Brennan and T. Scott Miller, John Lewis, and not to forget Walt Roetting and John Harrington and all the other unsung backstage heroes of the case—and it is these men (some of them holding replicas of John Dillinger’s death mask up in front of their faces to protect their secret identities) who now march out as a unit to a thundering ovation, carrying on their broad shoulders like an archbishop or a winning football coach their world-famous boss, J. Edgar Hoover, said by many to be the most powerful man in all America. Hoover—who is still tidying up, rolling down his pantcuffs and tossing what looks like a wig and bits of clothing back to his faithful sidekick Clyde Toison, standing in the wings—is a little fatter maybe than his comic books like to show, but he is nevertheless a commanding and heroic figure, especially held way high up like that, and whenever he flashes that beloved Jimmy Cagney grimace of recognition, part menacing grin, part sharp-eyed scowl—which he does now, reaching down at the same time to slap the hand of one of the agents supporting him—you’d think from the enraptured roar of the populace out front that it was at least the Second Coming. They pass down through the honor guard to their seats in the special section, exchanging ritual winks with old acquaintances like Dick Tracy and Bruce Wayne, Steve, Daddy, Rip and Kerry, and receiving unabashedly grateful hugs from Miss Lace and Mopsy and Stupefyin’ Jones.
It is not easy, needless to say, for anyone to follow such giants, least of all the twelve ordinary middle-class citizens—simple bookkeeper types for the most part, unaccustomed to the public limelight—to whose lot it fell to be the jurors in this historic case, and to whose lot it now falls to come out, together with their wives and children, to do their turn on the stage and step down to take their seats on this one night, like Queens for a Day, with the famous and the mighty. They fumble about in the wings, pretending to be distracted, urging each other to go first, then banging into one another in their eagerness to be helpful, knocking fedoras and glasses off, tripping over each other’s feet, apologizing, smiling dismally, some finally backing on as though intending to go the other direction, others stepping out boldly only to freeze in panic when they hit the bright lights, still others getting tangled in the bunting at the edge or stumbling over the electric cables coiling out from under the chair, no one seeming to remember which way they’re supposed to go when they get out there, and so in bug-eyed desperation trailing around after each other in a dizzying welter of wrong directions. But Irving Saypol, who can operate with this jury, as Harry Gold would put it, “in the very manner that a virtuoso would play a violin,” rises opportunely from his seat in the special section to take command, focusing the jurors’ distracted attention and guiding them to their places of honor. Down they come, grateful for Saypol’s timely intervention, to the cheers of the citizenry packed up in Times Square, a veritable phalanx of stalwart middle-Americans, whom Brian Donlevy himself would have been proud to have with him on Wake Island and with whom anyone out in Times Square might identify (and who back in the anonymous jam-up does not dream of being up there in the front rows tonight?).
Then, as Betty Crocker solemnly rings her dinner bell three times in the traditional courtroom manner, out from the wings comes the Boy Judge, Irving Robert Kaufman, flanked by two FBI agents and twelve New York City policemen, his pale round face barely visible through all the thick hips and holsters, and followed by his wife, Helen Rosenberg Kaufman, and their three sons. The Judge, swathed in his flowing black robes of office, steps out briefly from under his forest of protectors to thank the FBI for watching over him and to receive, before taking his front-pew seat, a few honors from, among others, his alma mater, the American Legion, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Federation of Women’s Clubs. Then, recalling his famous farewell to the jury the day before he laid down the death sentences, he lifts one hand in a gesture both papal and pugnacious, clears his soft throat, and exclaims: “God bless you all!”
With all the principals of the case seated, Betty Crocker is left with only two 3 × 5 recipe-sized index cards in her hand. One of course is for the nation’s Chief Executive, President Dwight David Eisenhower, who will address the crowd briefly before the executions. The second is for the man she now announces: the country’s highest-ranking legal officer, Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell. It is not merely for reasons of protocol that the head of the U.S. Department of Justice has been granted the unique honor this evening of sitting at the right hand of the President of the United States—no, more importantly, it is to make public acknowledgment of the fact that, were it not for this one man, these electrocutions would never have taken place at all tonight…if ever. He has overseen the Department’s prosecution of the case in the appeals courts these past several weeks, coped with Communist threats and demonstrations, pursued the execution of the death sentences with vigor, skill, conviction, and intransigence, remaining steady as a rock when others in the Administration might have faltered, and even called the Supreme Court into a historic special session in order to protect the time plan. If any man in America can be said personally to have shepherded the Rosenbergs to their deaths tonight, it is Herbert Julius Brownell, and he it is who now, with his wife and children, steps out on the Death House stage to receive a hero’s welcome from the citizens, this cloud of admiring witnesses, in Times Square. He nods politely at all the people, now on their feet and giving him a standing ovation, but it’s not the sort of thing that the Attorney General enjoys.
Herb works the anxious-glance-at-the-watch ploy to still the crowd, then signals for the Singing Saints,
who lead the congregated in singing Irving Berlin’s sacred classic, “I Like Ike.” And as the chorus mounts to a thundering climax, into it ambles, in that familiar easygoing yet brassy-hoofed putting-green stride, grinning affably but shyly, his grandpa’s belly pushing softly against a brand-new single-breasted suit and his blue eyes twinkling merrily: the 34th President of the United States of America, Dwight David (the Iron-Hewer) Eisenhower! His left arm is raised in a friendly open-handed salute to the screaming, stomping, chanting masses; on his right, smiling graciously: the 30th First Lady of the Land and the prettiest in a coon’s age, the saucy pride of the Hawk-eye State and belle of officers’ clubs these past forty years from one end of the world to the other: Mamie! The place is going wild! America has seen nothing like this man since the day it was born—it is indeed, no fooling, as though George Washington himself were back on earth, alive and well once more and whacking out bogies at Burning Tree! And who knows? it may be so! Ike and Mamie bask briefly in the adulation of the people; then, while the First Lady is escorted by General Jerry Persons to her place in the front pew, the President steps forward, both arms raised as though having his chest measured by a tailor, to address the gathered community, remarking to no one in particular but loud enough for everyone to hear and smile: “I had no idea that our host had such a party as this!”
When things have quieted down enough for him to speak, he assumes a country-philosopher double-chinned pose and, speaking with blurred haste like a man with a mouthful of saltwater taffy, loose teeth, and a hundred things to talk about if he could just remember them, says: “My friends, before I begin the espression of those thoughts that I deem appopriate to this mo-ment I want to say: this one thing—of course, huh! there are a lot of things in a big country such as ours and the kind of world, that we are living in that make interesting subjecks, for conversation and very naturally, I wouldn’t make a serious decoration on such a sujject—supject—uh, at this mo-ment but there are a few thoughts, that crowd into my mind with your permission and I will attempt to utter them in a very informal and homely way…” There is widespread applause at this remark. He tucks one hand awkwardly in his jacket pocket, managing to look bemused, humble, and very important all at the same time. “In many sets—segs—sections of the country in every area, let me say, I have said these things before—and to some of you that are here tonight, some of you here—I hate to be insulting—who I would call contemptries of mine. Whom. What I came to—what I came to repeat—and they are given a new, a sharp meaning by the nature of the tension tormending our whole world and so I don’t mind, repeating what I have said as often as I have spoken pubbick—uh, plubicly, about this sub…ject. What I should like to point out, and I am talking plain common sense—and let me intercheck, whatever the answer be, let it be plainly spoken, I don’t want to sound like Saint Peter. It would be fooling—uh, foolish, to give anything that would appear to be an authoritative conclusion, and certainly I did not come over in the role of a professor to give you a lecher, but I would say this: it is a question that I will not answer, ladies and gentlemen, without a bit more pepprer—uh, pepperation on the thing, of course, I have never thought I had quite all the answers, it’s a damn thorn in the side, but certainly, we can hope for the best—the formula matters less than the fete—faith…”
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