I stared gloomily at the paper strewn across my office floor. Which was real, I wondered, the paper or the people? In a few hours, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be dead, their poor remains worth less than that horseshit I’d stepped in, and the paper too could be burnt, but what was on it would survive. Or could survive, it was a matter of luck. Luck and human need: the zeal for pattern. For story. And they’d been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with History, they’d be home free. The poor damned fools. Maybe this was yet another consequence of growing up in the city. One of the first shocks a country boy gets when he leaves home is the discovery that no one has been logging all that terrific history he’s been living through. Until he thrusts himself into the urban fracas, he might as well never have lived at all, as far as History was concerned. In fact, part of the fun of becoming famous was to bend the light back on the old home town and stun them with their own previously unnoticed actuality, make guys like Gail Jobe and Tom Bewley jump and stutter. Yet, I knew what the Rosenbergs felt, because I had felt it, too.
The Rosenbergs’ self-destructive suspicion that they were being watched by some superhuman presence came early, perhaps years ago, back in college, or when Julius got fired maybe, but certainly — and with force — almost immediately after their arrests. In many ways their first letters were the best of the lot: quiet, unassuming, written in haste, often dropping their pronoun subjects and abbreviating, full of ordinary sentences that touched the heart: “Just got through hanging the clothes as Mike didn’t get to sleep until 11:30…”
But then came the death sentence, and what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement — it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction. Oh, there was some impressive political rhetoric in them, and though I was no judge, Ethel’s poem was probably a classic of a sort. And now and then they did make a half-hearted effort to describe something of their lives in prison, the boredom of it, the killing of cockroaches, Jewish services, playing chess or boccie-ball, but frankly it was as though they were responding reluctantly to editorial suggestions from their lawyer or the Party: “Dearest Ethel, Shall I describe my prison cell? It is three paces wide, four paces long, and seven feet high…” And Julius occasionally worked hard at inventing a sympathetic past for himself: “I was a good student, but more, I absorbed quite naturally the culture of my people, their struggle for freedom from slavery in Egypt. As an American Jew with this background, it was natural that I should follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage and seek to better the lot of the common man…” That was admirable, I might have come up with the same phrases myself (“follow in the footsteps laid down by my heritage”: I made a note), but all these half starts quickly collapsed, and more often than not into maudlin self-pity: “Ethel, My Darling, You are truly a great, dignified and sweet woman. Tears fill my eyes as I try to put sentiments to paper…. Our upbringing, the full meaning of our lives, based on a true amalgamation of our American and Jewish heritage, which to us means freedom, culture and human decency, has made us the people we are. All the filth, lies and slander of this grotesque frame-up will not in any way deter us, but rather spur us on until we are completely…” et cetera et cetera. Culpable of deceit, he accuses others of the same thing! With such grandstanding, who would not find them guilty? Who or what did he think History was — some kind of nincompoop? A little unimaginative maybe, and yes, eccentric, straitlaced, captious, and rude — but feebleminded? Hardly.
Maybe Julius had had intimations that something or someone was watching him as long ago as his famous encounter with the street-corner Tom Mooney pamphleteer, in the same way that I’d been touched by Aunt Edith’s history book — but intimations are one thing, real awareness is another. Intimations reach you like a subtle change of temperature; real awareness hits you like a bolt of lightning. I’d seen this awareness crash on others before it fell on me, most dramatically during my HUAC investigation of Alger Hiss, and it was a pretty awesome experience. It was as though the whole world had slowly shifted gears and pivoted to stare down upon the incredible duel of Hiss and Chambers, and when they looked up and saw that Eye there, it nearly drove both of them mad. Poor old Whittaker even tried to kill himself. Though I had basked in the peripheral glow of this gaze and was granted my first close-up glimpse of Uncle Sam, I wasn’t touched directly, I wasn’t burned. It wasn’t until the fund scandal broke last fall that I really for the first time in my life felt the full force of it. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg receiving the death penalty was minor-league stuff compared to it.
I was on my campaign train, the Nixon Special, whistle-stopping north from Pomona, California, toward Oregon and Washington—Change Trains for the Future! — when the gears started to shift for me. SECRET NIXON FUND. I tried to ignore it, concentrated instead on technical problems like microphones and schedules, boning up on local color, dealing with the small-time politicos who got on at one stop and off at the next. I had this weird illusion that if we’d just get up a little more steam we could outrun it — instead, we seemed to draw closer and closer to the hot center, RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY. I tried to skirt it. I joked about it. I shouted at it and ran. But it did no good. The fund issue was becoming a national sensation. Willy-nilly, I was entering the arena.
I decided to counterattack, the only possible defense against a smear, especially when it’s largely true. “I was warned,” I cried out from the back of my campaign train, “that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this government, they would try to smear me! Ever since I have done that work of investigating Communists in the United States, the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear that they have been able to!” But they only laughed and everywhere we went there were more and more hecklers, SSH! ANYONE WHO MENTIONS $16,000 IS A COMMUNIST! The fat was in the fire. Not only Democrats, but Republicans, too, were demanding my scalp. Eisenhower turned his back on me. It was because of him I was in trouble. I’d had to double-cross Earl Warren and his gang at the Convention to break up the California delegation and swing the nomination to Eisenhower, and it was some of those soreheads, I knew, who had spilled the beans on the fund — and now he turned his back on me! He said he didn’t know me well and if I was honest, I’d have to prove it. “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business as of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?” He made me feel like the little boy caught with jam on his face. Stassen and Dewey told me to get off the ticket. Friends were not at home when I called them on the phone. Knowland was summoned by Sherman Adams all the way from Hawaii to take my place. Out on the trail, the people wanted blood. I felt like I’d been hit by a real blockbuster, much of the fight had gone out of me, and I was beginning to wonder how much more of this beating I was going to be able to take. Was the whole nation in the Phantom’s power? I got hit by pennies in Portland. NO MINK COATS FOR NIXON, JUST COLD CASH!
I knew the time had come. Either I had to turn and face it, or else I had to quit. In meeting any crisis, one must fight or run away, but one must do something. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out. I began to notice the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was mean to live with, quick-tempered with the members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. I was preparing, I knew, for battle. It wasn’t just a question of who was on the right side, it was a question of determination, of will, of stamina, of willingness to risk all for victory. I tossed through sleepless nights, elbowing and kneeing Pat until she cried, struggling with myself. Of course, I had no intention of quitting. But I didn’t want to get pulped, either. Back in July, I’d had to lock Pat up in a Chicago hotel room one whole night with Murray Chotiner, who had a helluva job pressuring her out of threatening to leave me if I ran for the Vice Presidency — he said afterwards she was a real tiger — so now I got no pity at all from her. She became thin and haggard and even my breakfasts were lousy. But Jack Drown told me not to worry, Bert Andrews talked to me like a Dutch uncle, and some of my old schoolteachers wished me well. I felt better. “You are the lightning rod,” Chotiner told me, “and if you get off this ticket, Eisenhower won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell in November.” The lightning rod. I knew then that what I did would affect not just me alone, but the future of my country and the cause of peace and freedom for the entire world. It was a crisis of unbelievably massive proportions. I wanted to disbelieve in the Eye. I wanted to ridicule it. But I also wanted to lick the Phantom. And I wanted like hell to be Vice President. If Eisenhower wasn’t going to help me, I’d have to help myself. The soul-searching was over. “General,” I said to him when he called me on the phone from his Look Ahead, Neighbor Speciaclass="underline" “there comes a time when you either have to shit or get off the pot!”