Just saying that released me. I knew now what I had to do. I determined to face the Eye in its nakedest form: the television camera. This was no eye-in-the-sky pipe dream: you could see it there, hard and shiny, black, heartless, unblinking. I would go before it. I would bare my soul and my bankbook before the nation. Actually I only wanted to bare my soul, but Ike insisted on baring the bankbook as well, so since he was paying for it, I agreed. I had learned from my experience in the Hiss case that what determines success or failure in handling a crisis is the ability to keep coldly objective when emotions are running high. That experience stood me in good stead now. I found myself almost automatically thinking and making decisions quickly, rationally, and unemotionally. When my advisers excitedly urged me to go on the air after the “I Love Lucy” show on Monday night, I coolly vetoed the idea. “No,” I said. “Tuesday night.” Tuesday—? “That’s right. After Milton Berle.”
On my way to Hollywood to make the speech, I jotted down notes on picture postcards I found on the plane in the seatback in front of me. I was thinking of course of the legend of Abe Lincoln scribbling on a train on his way to Gettysburg. Actually, the notes were useless, I had to throw them away, but the legend — my own now — lives on. This ploy reminded me that Lincoln had said something about the common man, and I got one of my old Whittier profs to look it up for me. Roosevelt had made good use of Fala, I decided to work Checkers in somehow. Use Pat’s cloth coat against the Truman mink-coat scandal. Lay out all the monies I’d ever earned: this gave me the opportunity of using a lot of attractive boyhood images. How poor we were, and all of that. I was glad I hadn’t let Smathers and his old high-school buddy Bebe Rebozo talk me into their real-estate schemes. I decided to demand that everybody in the campaign publish his finances just like me, Eisenhower included. I knew it would piss him off, I did it to needle him, let the disloyal cock-sucker find out what it felt like — Jesus, I was mad at him! Him and all those naïve amateurs around him, I was eager to watch them squirm — and by God I was not going to go to him like a little boy to be hauled off to the woodshed, properly punished, and then taken back into the family, I’d had enough of that shit with my old man! I was going to win this one! I wondered if I could bring George Washington, Nathan Hale, Lou Gehrig, Little Orphan Annie, and Sergeant York into it somehow. This broadcast had to be a smash hit — one that really moved people, inspired them to enthusiastic, positive support, left even the Uncle Miltie fans gasping.
I should have sent the Rosenbergs a copy of that speech. It was just four days before Ethel’s birthday — maybe she heard it on the prison radio. Not likely though; she would have mentioned it in her letters. Too bad. It might at least have helped them prepare their last words. Our purposes, after all, were much the same; to convince a stubbornly suspicious American public — our judges — of our innocence. And we were innocent. The Rosenbergs, in their internationalist confusions, did not see themselves as traitors any more than Hiss, Acheson, or Stevenson did. And the press was wrong about the fund — what I wanted was not the money, but the guys who gave it, a nickel was enough, I wanted their names, their commitments. What did money mean to me? Oh, of course, like all American boys, like Julius Rosenberg out selling penny candy no doubt, I used to dream of rescuing a generous millionaire from being robbed and murdered by a thug and receiving a thousand-dollar reward that propelled me into fame and fortune, being named in the rich man’s will and perhaps even marrying his daughter, who was disguised as a poor girl selling apples on the street corner, but all this was behind me now. Not that I hadn’t made good use of the money, it was what had made it possible for us to buy our Spring Valley home, but to tell the truth, I rarely thought of money any more except when there were bills to be paid. People have accused me of a lack of taste, but it isn’t that, it’s a simple lack of desires. If I were rich, the only thing I could possibly want to buy would be the Presidency.
And so we had presented to the public the facts of our case, the Rosenbergs and I, using the medium we found to hand — but where the Rosenbergs had fallen back on exaggerated postures of self-righteousness and abused innocence, I had remained humble and sincere. And objective. Where they had lathered their Death House letters with sententious generalities and vague romantic intimations of lives together that had been all sweetness and light (“Twelve glorious years we’ve spent together, always sharing, seeking together life’s joy…”), I had named names and places and times, reported specific conversations and moments of doubt and difficulty, laid bare everything I owned and owed — not just a car, but a 1950 Oldsmobile, not a bank debt, but a $4500 debt to the Riggs National Bank of Washington—it moved people to hear me pronounce that name: The Riggs National Bank of Washington. I mentioned Tricia’s age, the Hiss case, Abraham Lincoln and the common people, Pat’s maiden name and her respectable Republican cloth coat — she sat over there and modeled it for me, she looked great, even her terrible skinniness, the circles under her eyes, were a plus for me — and when I got to Checkers, I even told exactly how the dog had arrived in a crate at Union Station in Baltimore — I said that: Union Station in Baltimore. “And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it!” Now, that was very goddamn moving, it could still make me choke up a little, and it made me one of the most famous Vice Presidential candidates in American political history — it was virtually a kangaroo ticket after that, old war hero at the top or no.
Darryl Zanuck the movie mogul called me up afterwards to tell me it was “the most tremendous performance I’ve ever seen!” I’d asked for letters in my support, and over 300,000 of them came to the Washington Republican Party headquarters — they were stored for posterity in Whittier now in a box labeled “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ike caved in and called me “a brave man.” We created the Order of the Hound’s Tooth, my own cufflinks gang, and threw a party. Later, in Wheeling, the General embraced me and called me “my boy” and let me walk on his right side. I felt like love and death were all around me, and I remembered that moment so long ago, coming home and being kissed by little Arthur, soon to die — I couldn’t help but cry. “Good old Bill!” I’d wept, falling on Knowland’s shoulder, but what I’d really meant was: “Mom! It’s your good dog Richard! I’m home!” Clean as a hound’s tooth. Thanks to Checkers. Thirty years since I wrote that letter to Mom, pretending to be an abused dog — not that things come full circle in this world, but that in a random universe, ironical patterns are thrown up, and sometimes, as pattern, they turn and operate on the world…