The Boy Judge, unsure whose body is about to be had, turns back in retreat toward the wings, but sees there Attorney General Herb Brownell gesturing frantically, glancing nervously over his shoulder, urging Kaufman to stall until Uncle Sam gets back. “All right,” says Kaufman, trying to keep his knees from knocking together, “get along with your argument, there isn’t much time!”
“Please, try to delay the execution until I complete my argument,” cries Marshall. “It’d be terrible if I could convince Your Honor that you should grant the application and it would be too late!”
Kaufman sees through the crude tactics: a delay past sundown and the executions are not merely postponed until Monday but will have to be completely rescheduled. Which would give them time to fabricate more appeals, and who knows? the state the Supreme Court’s in right now, they might be too lame to sit for a year! “It is unfair to put that kind of burden on a judge,” he complains. “I’m aware of the tragedy involved. Now get on with it.”
While he beats off Marshall’s desperate rhetoric, he sees other defense lawyers pouring through the hole in the line at the boundaries of the VIP section—“We are counsel for the Rosenbergs! We must get through! It is an emergency!”—and squeezing into the VIP seats, grabbing at circuit judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals. Emanuel Bloch has spied Herb Brownell peeking out from the wings — he tries to scramble up onto the stage to reach him, but he’s too clumsy and all he’s getting is slivers for his pains. Brownell, insulted once too often by Bloch, refuses even to acknowledge his presence, strolling out onstage once to look out over his head and step on his fingers. Some pro-Rosenberg demonstrators have leaked through, too — Judge Kaufman’s one abiding passion has been his hatred of quasilegal pressure groups, some of his best work had been his investigation of lobbying for Tom Clark when Clark was Attorney General, and now he feels that anger welling up in him again. They’re running about through the VIP section, dodging Secret Service agents and Rat Packers, distributing “fact” sheets and clemency petitions, accusing Uncle Sam of premeditated murder, and shouting disruptive slogans like “No Secret to the A-Bomb!” and “They were convicted by the atmosphere and not by the evidence!”
Which latter is Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s notorious opinion on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and Frankfurter, perhaps flattered by this recognition, steps back from the edge of the elephant turds where he’d been about to tiptoe in and offer a helping hand to the other six, and now joins, however belatedly, Justices Douglas and Black in dissenting against yesterday’s majority opinion on the stay of execution: “Can it be said,” he asks, “that there was time to go through the process by which cases are customarily decided here?” A rhetorical question, but anyway it saves him a nasty fall. Back in the VIP seats for the House of Representatives, Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter remarks idly to a couple of his colleagues that he thinks the Supreme Court erred yesterday, having taken jurisdiction when “nothing was before it.” Justice Douglas’s act was legal and under the law the whole case now had to be returned to the lower courts, whence it must come back to the full Supreme Court via District and Appeals Courts. Walter assumes he is off-mike, but by a quirk in the acoustical system, his voice carries out over the masses and all the way up to Central Park: ‘“There is absolutely nothing in the act of 1925 that gives the Supreme Court authority to review the action of one of its Justices acting under the statutes!”
The people are getting edgy. They’d thought at first this was part of the show and had laughed at the lawyers, supposing they were clowns in disguise, but now it’s clear that something is wrong. Where is the President? Where is Uncle Sam? The Vice President? J. Edgar Hoover or Cecil B. DeMille? Nothing but confusion up there — even Judge Kaufman (what’s he doing out there on the stage?) seems unsure of himself. More demonstrators are pushing into the VIP section and others are circulating out among the common people — how did they penetrate the defenses so easily? wasn’t Monaghan supposed to contain these elements down in the ghetto somewhere? where’s the Army? where’s the National Guard? why is Betty Crocker out flat on her ass? “This is the hour of our country’s shame!” some guy is yelling. “No government has such a record of legal murders and legal lynchings as the Government of the United States in the past seven years!” There are rumors of FBI forgeries in the atom-spy trial and stacked decks, perjured witnesses. “We are here to proclaim that if the Rosenbergs die, it will be the most brutal murder ever committed in America!” they scream, seizing the microphones. “They are not traitors! It is those who want to kill them who are traitors to America!”
Distantly, out at the edge, there’s a strange clackety noise, starting softly, getting louder: what is it? The prisoners banging their tin cups on their bars! rattling the gates of their cages in protest! To the frightened crowds in the Square, huddling toward the center, it sounds like the Phantom himself shaking his death chains! The Phantom’s spectral image seems to appear, not only on door knockers like old Morley’s in A Christmas Carol, but everywhere they look: in skyscraper windows, in the shadows behind the bright lights, under the stage, in the bottles they drink from! The angry clatter is punctuated by remote but heavy whumps! — foreign A-bomb tests! Spreading over the earth like smallpox! News reports ratatat against the periphery of the crowd like the firing of Sten guns: riots in Liverpool, Toronto, and Turin! the American Embassies besieged in Rome and Paris and Ottawa! a port strike in Genoa in protest against the executions! firing squads in East Berlin! prayer vigils for the Rosenbergs in Iceland and Israel! plane crashes and battle casualties! ten thousand Communists are massing up to riot in Munich! screams of “Murder!” from rioters running amok through the streets of Melbourne and London! Copenhagen and Birmingham! there are reports of Mau Maus, Vietminh, Gooks, Arabs trying to break through at the rim, to get in! to get what we’ve got! “You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb!” cries a French voice above all the rest. It is Jean-Paul Sartre! “Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices: your country is sick with fear! Do not be astonished if we cry out from one end of Europe to the other: Watch out! America has the rabies! Cut all ties which bind us to her, otherwise we will in turn be bitten and run mad!” The French indeed seem to be going berserk: crackly on-the-scene radio reports say they’re running wildly through the streets of Paris, carrying big posters of Eisenhower flashing his famous smile but with each tooth an electric chair! “We are in the midst of a cold war,” remarks Bernard Baruch dryly to a couple of the Presidents sitting beside him, his hand in his pocket, resting on his billfold as on the butt of a six-shooter, “which is getting warmer…”
A new figure, ragged and wild-eyed, now bursts into the VIP section, leaps up on a concrete balustrade, and commences to rant: “If you are happy about the Rosenbergs, then you are rotten to the core!” It’s that Russian-born Red vagrant from L.A. who caused the day’s delay, I.I. Edelman! People laugh at him and throw empty bottles, but they’re frightened, too!
Julius Rosenberg’s bespectacled old mother, Sophie, is pitching about in a fit of incoherent anguish! Other women are falling to their knees and sobbing and praying and beating their breasts!
The people glance up in anxiety at the clock on the Paramount Building: 19:41! Just 20 minutes to Zero Hour!
The pageant actors try to do something about all this, but fall into arguments as to which of them are Secret Service agents and which not! Some of the iconic Buckskin Militiamen, Sharecroppers, and Prohibitionists are getting hard to handle!