The Attorney General pondered the problem a moment, then said: “Well, in that case, we’ll finish it tonight. We’ll set it up as soon as the Court stops sitting.”
“Before sundown,” someone said. “It starts at sundown, their Sabbath.”
“Right, sundown. Thanks.”
Friday. Sunset. The two thieves. Jews condemned by Jews. Some patterns had been dissolved by the overnight delay, it was true, but others were taking shape. Uncle Sam could not be entirely displeased, I thought. But the President only belched grumpily and shifted in his seat. He said he still didn’t understand what the issue in the Supreme Court today was, still didn’t see why there had been this delay. If they were guilty, they ought to be punished; if not, let them go. The speech-writer Emmett Hughes, once part of the retinue surrounding the National Poet Laureate, scribbled away, his dark brows bobbing, taking notes on all this for posterity — not what he was being paid to do, but you could spot these parasites a mile away. I supposed, no matter how tight a ship you ran, there’d always be one of these guys slipping in. “I must say, I’m impressed by all the honest doubt about this expressed in the letters I’ve been seeing,” the President said. Was this true, was he really unable to understand so simple a point of law, or was this too part of his disguise? The good soldier, forthright and true, the man of arms too honest to grasp the devious men of letters? Sometimes simple people are more mysterious than those of us who are more complex.
Herb explained once more about the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 Atomic Energy Act. As soon as he said that the issue was purely technical, I thought: he’s just given it all away, he’s just told them Douglas was right. Just as, in a purely technical sense, Don Wheeler was also right in calling for Douglas’s impeachment. But I also knew Eisenhower would not realize this, or would not seem to. Was he testing us, I wondered? I recalled his offer — his challenge, rather — to reopen this case at any time before the executions if any one of us believed that to do so would serve the best interests of the United States. Thus, each of us was on the spot….
“Well, the proof of admission there’s no frameup,” I said, “is the complete silence of the Phantom-controlled press in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It’s obvious they’re expecting the Rosenbergs to confess and they don’t want to look like a bunch of clowns. And I’ll tell you something else. Morton Sobell’s wife said something very funny recently out in Far Rockaway. She said: ‘Julius and Ethel could save their own skins by talking, but Julius and Ethel will never betray their friends!’ I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Of course, I’d got this from a guy who’d got roughed up at that meeting and so was pretty biased, and a right-wing Jew at that, nervous about the anti-Semitism the Rosenbergs could arouse, but that hardly mattered, I understood the essential truth of it and so did everybody else around the table.
Except perhaps the President. He scowled and unwrapped a cigar. “Well, now,” he said, “if the Supreme Court decides by, say, five to four or even six to three, as far as the average man’s concerned, there will be doubt — not just a legal point in his mind.” He was himself that average man he was talking about, of course. This was the secret of his success. He really was average, a cheerful unimaginative boy from Abilene, and yet he was also the man who won World War II, so that just showed what an average man could do. So long as he was an American. Uncle Sam always chose his disguises to fit the times.
“Well, who’s going to decide these points,” Brownell argued, “pressure groups or the Supreme Court? Surely, our first concern is the strength of our courts. And in terms of national security, the Communists are just out to prove they can bring enough pressure, one way or another, to enable people to get away with espionage. I’ve always wanted you to look at evidence that wasn’t usable in court showing the Rosenbergs were the head and center of an espionage ring here in direct contact with the Russians — the prime espionage ring in the country!”
The President stared blankly at Brownell, then lit his cigar. “My only concern is in the area of statecraft,” he said. “The effect of the action.” He understood: it was as though he hadn’t even heard Brownell’s offer to look at the secret evidence. If there was any. It was strange that no one questioned Brownell on this, even though nobody had ever seen this material, Eisenhower especially. I watched this short-tempered old man, Uncle Sam’s new real-time disguise, and thought: the important thing is that there be room for the Incarnation to take place. A man can’t be solid and a mask at the same time. Yes, image — I knew all about that. The essence of power is paradox and ambiguity. Learning to live with this was the hardest thing of all — I was still too precise, too self-critical, too anxious to make everything perfectly clear. While I worried and sweated over every phrase, Eisenhower just leaned back and let fly. “The area of statecraft…the effect of the action…”
I feared I would never be able to deliver these homilies with such ingenuous sincerity. “All I do is belabor the obvious,” he said, but with him it looked easy. Take “enlightened self-interest,” that maxim he stole from George Washington, and which was still one of his favorites. Uncle Sam once explained this to me. He said that it had long been recognized that self-interest was like some kind of sin, something born of the devil, the source, like money, of all evil — the Greeks knew this, indeed so did the Mana-hatta Indians. Self-interest was irrational and man had long dreamed of the rational utopia, free of self-interest. But reason was also known to be the source of all evil. Enlightenment did not illuminate, but spread a greater darkness. The dream of utopia made men miserable, both through disappointment with their flawed existence and through the horrors they inflicted on each other through pursuit of the rational — and therefore unattainable — ideal. Thus, “enlightenment” and “self-interest” were two sides of the same coin, and if there was evil in the world it was due to our failure to see both sides at once. “Enlightened self-interest” was a stoic formula of acceptance, part of the tragedy of history. But for Eisenhower, it meant: Don’t take any wooden nickels.
He’d traveled the world, this man, and now he was running it, and he still hadn’t progressed past the simplest kind of home-town table talk. In his cowtown world, he could use words like “instinct” and “freedom” and “sincerity” and “decency,” and assume any darn fool would know what he meant by them, and if they pretended not to, they were either cantankerous or nincompoops. Free economy was God’s truth, that was all, plain as the nose on your face, and he figured if you’d just show the Soviets the facts they’d agree with you, they’d have to. After all, as he said when he called on the Almighty to watch over the Communists when Stalin died: “They are the children of the same God who is the Father of all peoples everywhere.” It was easy. “Now let us begin talking to each other,” he’d say. “And let us say what we’ve got to say so that every person on earth can understand it. Let’s talk straight: no doubletalk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let’s spell it out.” Then he could never understand why this didn’t seem to work: “We are trying to present certain salient facts to the world, facts for example as to what our purpose is, our intent, that we are not imperialistic, we are simply trying to help create a world in which free men can live decently, and they have not understood; we have tried to be helpful and have earned nothing but vituperation!” In fact, he even seemed to blame me somehow when things went wrong, as though I were responsible for corrupting the language of the world so that it obscured all these self-evident truths. He thought almost any problem could be solved if America would just keep its heart right into the job, as he put it, and do the right thing. “Heart, Determination, and Productivity.” He cherished old proverbs about the good life and rags to riches, thought the first World War even more glorious than the second, truly believed in Manifest Destiny. He liked to fish and hunt! He still remembered the Alamo! Businessmen to him were simply people who knew how to solve problems and save money, so he filled up his Cabinet with them and admonished them to remember the little fellow — my God, how could you not like him? Laborers were like foot soldiers in the forward march of free enterprise, and he talked about creeping socialism as if it were some kind of mole eating up the golf course. “Before I appoint anybody to any important position, I call him in and ask him about his philosophy,” he’d say with a straight face. It’s amazing how little some people can understand about the world we live in, even on the simplest level!