Cartoonists had had a heyday with it. Not even Julie Rosenberg, who had a genuinely sinister mug, right down to the weak chin, pointed nose, and pencil-line moustache, had had to take the kind of punishment I’d received every week from Herblock and the others. Picasso had actually made the sonuvabitch look handsome, very Anglo-Saxon, whereas Herblock always showed me as a jowly, wavy-haired, narrow-eyed tough, linked usually with McCarthy and Jenner, and with suggestions of some bad odor about me, like a little boy who’d just filled his pants or something. He hadn’t given any of us a day’s rest since we came into office back in January, you’d think we were invading Mongol hordes or something, instead of fellow Americans. His cartoon Ike looked a lot like Jiggs from “Bringing Up Father,” only daffier, he drew Herb Brownell like a kind of Dracula, and Joe McCarthy was shown as a sweaty, hairy, cleaver-wielding tramp. I don’t know about these other guys, but cartoonists had always had fun with my face. Already back at Whittier College, they were happily nailing me with a few harsh lines: a solid black bar for eyebrows (no eyes), a stretched ski-slope S for a nose, a small sour turndown comma for a mouth, encompassed by curly black hair cut square, little parenthetical ears, meat-platter cheeks, and a stiff neck — just three mean marks and a dark frame. I didn’t mind. It was one of the consequences of power. If not a condition: maybe politicians needed faces like that to become recognizable. Something to set you apart: people respected the almost magical force emanating from archetypes, no matter what sort, or who put them there. Or maybe the caricature came first and the face followed….
“Dick!” Pat called from the foot of the stairs. The maid had the sweeper going in the living room, and I could smell bacon frying on the stove in the kitchen. So much for corned beef hash. “Your car’s here!”
“What—!” I glanced at my watch: holy shit! nearly eight! I was going to be late for the goddamn Cabinet meeting! I scrubbed my face angrily — it smarted where I’d hit the wall last night, but I deserved it for so much lollygagging — and applied talcum and deodorant, hobbled into the bedroom for a fresh white shirt, muttering irritably under by breath. I was ordinarily a very punctual man: down to breakfast every morning by seven, fruit, toast, a cup of coffee with a half teaspoon of sugar and a touch of cream, break up the squabbles between the girls, check the newspapers and thumb through the Congressional Record, get picked up by John just before eight, read The New York Times on the way in, and be at work in my office before most of my staff turned up. That I was nearly an hour behind this morning was yet another sign of how disturbed I was by this damned thing—I’ve got to get to the office, I thought with some anxiety, rushing stiff-legged down the stairs, knotting my tie on the run, folding a white handkerchief for my breast pocket, tripping over Julie’s doll Tiny, and taking the last of the stairs three at a time, and clean up that mess!
10. Pilgrimage to The New York Times
The Friday-morning commuters into the center gather, as is their ancient custom, before their great civic monument, The New York Times, there to commune with the latest transactions of the Spirit of History as made manifest in all the words and deeds of living and dying men fit to print. On great slabs of stone, lead, and zinc, words and pictures appear and disappear, different ones every day, different yet somehow reassuringly familiar. It is as though — the slabs seem to tell us — a certain constancy of purpose motivates the Spirit, even when perverse, bringing a kind of fragile episodic continuity to the daily debris of human enterprise, a “handle” as they say on the Great White Way, though it’s not certain whether this is thanks to the Spirit or to The New York Times’s monumental sign language. TURKS URGE GREEKS / TO RUSH BALKAN TIE. PANAMA AND FRANK / SEE KAYE ON FILM. FAVORITISM REFUTED / IN WESTERN PEA SALE. It is a kind of hunting magic, a talisman against the terrible flux: men fear only surprises, HOLY NAME PARADES IN BROOKLYN.
Some have broken fast, some do so now before the monument. Symbolic foods appropriate to the sober occasion are taken: eggs, smoked flesh, the seeds of living things, uroboric bagels and doughnuts, sustenance drawn from swollen teats, SENATE GROUP FOR OLEO IN NAVY. British Girls Advance, PRODUCERS TRAIL MARY MARTIN. There is a ceremonial drone of wheels on rails, clicking turnstiles, respectful murmurings and rustlings, rhythmically accented by sudden hornblasts and whistles, the wheeze of air brakes, the blowing of noses, the clatter of dishes and whump of doors, a man asking for tickets, CHINESE STAB AT 6 U.N. POINTS. The Milkman Is Slipping. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WEEK BACKED, EXECUTED GERMAN / A JOBLESS PAINTER. The worshipers move methodically among the slabs, breaking bread and sipping hot stimulants, muttering the traditional responses, snorting and farting, momentarily losing themselves, absorbing the positional metaphors that will preserve the earth’s gravity one more day and stay their own panic. PLANTS DISPERSED / TO FOIL BOMBINGS. BRONX PASTOR’S SON GETS CALL. Weddings, murders, mergers, wakes. Recipes and riots, batting averages and book reviews. The Cold War between Uncle Sam and his enemies, hot wars in the bushes. Ominously, the world chooses to publish today The Art of the Checkmate, and Frankenstein, say the slabs, is being reissued. Reissued?
VERY RECENTLY, 19 COPIES OF THIS BOOK WERE LITERALLY BURNED. Shadows cloud the pilgrim faces as they learn that the French World War I ace who shot down seventy-five Bosch planes from his old Spad biplane is dead, but the shadows are dispersed a moment later by the revelation that Ruth Hussey has had a daughter after two sons. Martha Raye is obtaining a divorce from Nick Condos on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The communicants try to imagine this cruelty and wonder if they will be able to watch some of it tonight in Times Square.
Or whenever. If ever. There is a pervading unease here at the monument this morning: something is wrong, every responsible voice in the nation has been insisting the executions had to take place last night and they didn’t, and now even The New York Times, ordinarily impervious in its grandeur to common panic, must acknowledge that the nation needs these deaths and needs them soon, for as Arthur Krock announces, deep inside the maze:
The operation of justice in the United States is subject to inordinate delays, anyhow, and the Communists have already taken full advantage of this in the Rosenbergs’ case to injure the reputation of the judicial system here with our friends abroad and otherwise make effective anti-American propaganda. By granting the stay, and on the grounds he gave, Justice Douglas has enabled the enemies of this nation to besmirch it further….
They read that as a consequence of Justice Douglas’s action the Supreme Court is today in special emergency session — CASE SEEN IN PERIL — and that before it the associate counsel for the atom spies has said of the New York Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol that “there never was a more crooked District Attorney in New York than the one who tried the Rosenbergs!” Perhaps, they conclude hopefully from this, the Phantom has overreached himself. ROSENBERGS MAY FIGHT / INDICTMENT IF DEATH / SENTENCE IS UPSET. Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”‘), a movie review of Devil’s Plot, and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30. “Something to fit every taste.”