When the news conference was over and we’d cleared everybody out of there, Herb sprang the news.
The President drew himself up — a tall man, after all, and strong — in fact, his countenance was already changing — and with jaw set and fists clenched, yet with perfect composure, perfect equanimity, said simply:
“Friends, this is a job for Uncle Sam!”
2. A Rash of Evil Doings
A United States Supreme Court Justice — himself a controversial appointee from the Era of Compromise — thwarts the long-planned execution of the atom spies, disappears.
Two ore tankers go aground in the mud of St. Clair, Canada.
A coffee plot is uncovered in Brazil.
Russian tanks tool up, roll toward East Berlin.
From North Korea come horrific images of brainwashed GIs staring vapidly and twitching like zombies, while in the South, the port of the capital is bombed and underground rumors abound of trouble afoot, strange stirrings in the prisoner compounds.
In Times Square, the “c” has vanished from the SILENCE sign tacked up over the stage door of the execution chamber mock-up, and the letters are scrambled to spell SENILE, a cross-eyed Uncle Sam chalked crudely on the wall above it. The electrical sign reading AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD has been altered to AMERICA THE DOPE OF THE WORLD, and now, metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passersby, becomes:
AMERICA THE ROPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE RAPE OF THE WORLD
What’s happening?!?
The men of Local 333 of the United Marine Division of the International Longshoreman’s Association strike the two boats that take sight-seers out to Bedloe’s Island, throwing up what The New York Times calls “an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty!”
Judge Irving Kaufman, now guarded day and night by FBI in mufti and twelve boys in blue at his Park Avenue home, receives two bomb threats against his life, and total strangers send him telegrams: “May your children become orphans!”
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the heir-designate to Prime Minister Churchill, is struck down in London, taken to the hospital for a gall bladder operation, and fire breaks out in the key U.S. military port of Whittier, Alaska.
AMERICA THE RAKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE FAKE OF THE WORLD
King Sihanouk of Cambodia, having fled to Thailand, takes encouragement from the sudden dissolution and demands from the French full independence for Cambodia. The French will to stand firm falters.
The Phantomized Guatemalan regime seizes lands belonging to Uncle Sam’s United Fruit Company, redistributes them to greedy and incompetent peasants.
Francis Cardinal Spellman’s tireless epistolary efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, Italy, without a government, slips to the left, just as the body of a twenty-year-old student in the Passionists’ seminary at Caravete is found in the woods, skull smashed by a stone. There have been fires in the convent library, two watchdogs have been poisoned, and all the Passionist brothers and pupils found potassium cyanide in their morning espresso one morning of late. The village’s small community of newly-converted Protestants is suspected; anti-American feeling grows apace.
AMERICA THE FATE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HATE OF THE WORLD
Something passes like a cold unseasonal wind through Times Square, tipping over police barricades, blowing holes in the set, and stripping away all the white and blue bunting in the streets, leaving — from a Busby Berkeley overview — a tattered crimson star fluttering in its wake. This same wind blows through Whittier, Alaska, fanning the flames, spreading the fire through docks and warehouses, forcing back the hundreds of stevedore troops battling the blaze, and then through Africa, stirring the blacks in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa to rebellion. It whistles through the Federal Council of Italian Evangelical Churches, which cables President Eisenhower “to be great in your mercy and spare the lives of the Rosenbergs,” and it even touches the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Nepaclass="underline" they erupt into a sudden feud over the exploits of Heroes Edmund Hillary and his guide Tensing Norkay, now down off the roof of the world, the British claiming that Hillary had to drag the reluctant Sherpa (they persist, out of habit, in calling him “the native”) up Everest’s summit behind him, while the Nepalese, who have declared May 29 a new national holiday — Tensing Day — retort that in fact it was their man who had to carry the fagged white man up on his back. An international crisis develops, and America seems unable to do anything about it.
Elsewhere, the Phantom strikes out even more boldly, using every weapon from hysteria to hyperbole, tanks to terrorism. In Korea, firing thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, the Phantom’s troops attack along a broad front, capturing Finger Ridge and Capitol Hill, breaking through Allied lines near Outpost Texas, scattering chickenshit ROKs and exhausted GIs in all directions. “If this is getting ready for peace,” bitches a shot-up U.S. rifleman as they cart him away on his stretcher, “I’d just as soon go back to the old war!” TIME, the National Poet Laureate, records this sentiment for immortality, then adds:
americans could not forget
korea and it spoiled
some of their pleasure in
tv sets and Cadillacs
Uncle Sam wants the hell out of this war, but Syngman Rhee is threatening it go it alone. He sends mobs of schoolgirls out in the streets to attack the GIs from the rear in protest against the truce negotiations under way. Key to these negotiations are the North Korean prisoners of war in South Korean compounds, most of whom are said to be anti-Communist. “Just so Rhee don’t go berserk,” mutters a U.S. negotiator, “and let them prisoners go!”
Almost as a kind of reflex, the guard is doubled on the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs are said to be gloating over their new stay of execution. The Phantom whips up anti-American demonstrations in their behalf in Milan, Toronto, Jakarta, Genoa, Paris, London, and swamps the White House with protest letters — nearly ten thousand letters asking Eisenhower to spare the couple are passing like stuffed ballots across his desk every day now. The Rosenberg lawyers, augmented by a gang of last-minute interlopers, are scrambling frantically through ancient lawbooks in search of any new shyster tactic that might confound Uncle Sam.
To gain time, the Phantom sends his terrorists into action in Malaya and French Indochina, and his tanks into East Berlin. The Russian T-34s come clattering in over the cobblestones, “rocking and snarling,” as TIME say, wagging their big 85-mm guns about like magic wands…
the machine guns and submachine guns
began chattering the crowds broke threw
themselves into gutters and down subway
stair wells to dodge the bullets but
not all made it…
Some run, some stand, some die, many are glad they stayed at home, most are frightened, and everyone soon vanishes, as the Rebellion in the Rain gutters out, all of it watched morosely by Uncle Sam, sitting helplessly on his blistered duff on the wrong side of Potsdamer Platz. Soon, nothing can be heard in the divided city but the soft dripping of rainwater, the clink of knives through the evening rituals of black bread, butter, cheese, and sausage, the odd Soviet firing squad off in the fields….
AMERICA THE NATE OF THE WORLD