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.