Homer Capehart came into the Cloakroom and started complaining loudly about the collapse of the workers’ riots in East Berlin. “First Czechoslovakia, and now this!” he snapped, glowering narrowly in my direction. Homer seemed edgier than usual today, and for good reason: if Bill Knowland succeeded in getting the controls bill past the Democrats and out on the floor this afternoon, it would be Capehart’s duty to defend it. “Why the hell is it we can’t seem to capitalize on these things?”
I worked up what I hoped was an enigmatic smile, meaning to suggest that there was more to what was going on behind the Curtain than met the eye, but in truth I was pretty disappointed myself. I remembered the day three months earlier when we heard that Stalin had suffered a stroke — if that was all he’d suffered — and was dying. It had been a raw day, one of those gray March mornings that makes the Capital look like a city in Central Europe, and a bunch of the boys had gathered early in the President’s office, waiting for the Old Man to come down. He’d come striding in, wearing a tan polo coat and a brown hat with the brim snapped far down over his eyes, like a Marine on shore-patrol duty. “Well,” he’d barked, making us jump, “what do you think we can do about this?” So we’d thought up a few things and done them. And this was what it had come to. You couldn’t help but feel the frustration of it. And I could see that some of these guys had had their confidence shaken. Though many of them had decried Uncle Sam’s vulnerability as a campaign tactic, none had truly believed it, but now they had seen for themselves: even Uncle Sam could get left with his finger up his ass.
“Give us time,” I said, “it’s a tough ballgame. But we’ve got them on the ropes, it’s the beginning of the end. The seed has been sown, they’ve had a taste of freedom and they won’t soon forget it. It’s like George Humphrey says, ‘You can’t set a hen in the morning and have chicken salad for lunch!’” Which reminded me: I was pretty goddamn hungry. Homer nodded solemnly, shrugged ambiguously, gazed off. Herman Welker, who had joined us, seemed less convinced, belching sourly. He said that over in the House Don Wheeler was outraged by the fact that Justice Douglas had “taken unto himself the authority to grant amnesty to two proven spies,” and was drafting an impeachment proposal, and Bourke Hickenlooper looked up from the old sofa where he was sprawled, going through his morning’s mail, to say that he hoped they smeared that butternut once and forever. Maybe I should find a page, I thought, and send him down for a sandwich.
Uncle Sam had actually prepared me for this crisis during our last match at Burning Tree Golf Club, but I had not understood. Had not taken it all in. I knew now he’d been telling me a lot of things — about history, about guilt and innocence, death and regeneration, about the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere — but I’d been too abashed by my transparent ignorance, too upset by the coincidence of anniversaries and by my fluffed drives, to think clearly. The only accurate description is that I was probably in a momentary state of shock. I had failed to heed one of Eisenhower’s favorite admonitions (which, in fact, he rarely heeded himself): “Always take your job, but never yourself, seriously.” Even the anniversary remark I’d misread — when he’d said that all judges were cabalists at heart, I’d thought he was talking about Kaufman, not Douglas.
Fourteen. Fourteen years ago today Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass were married. That was the same summer, fourteen years ago, that Hitler and Stalin signed their pact: yes, it was a year for weddings. Hitler had seized Czechoslovakia, annexed Danzig, and invaded Poland, divvying it up with Stalin, while Britain and France were celebrating a short-lived marriage of their own. But I was courting Pat at the time, could think of nothing else, hardly noticed the world falling down about my ears (how far away it seemed then!), I thought I’d go to Cuba to get rich or else to the opening of the New York World’s Fair, or freeze orange juice and start a company. If only I could win Pat. It wasn’t easy. She laughed at me when I proposed, made fun of me in public, it was humiliating as hell. She was so goddamned cool, she seemed to know everything, and all I could do was pretend. She tried to put me off, made me drive her into Los Angeles for dates with other guys, kept me on the leash for over two years before she finally gave in — and even then it was possible she capitulated only because she was getting on in years and I was the only real prospect still around. But I didn’t care, as long as I got her. I needed the win and she was it. I felt like a champ — like the Brown Bomber himself, who was ripping up Arturo Godoy, cutting him “crimson,” as the papers said, the night before we wed. This was in 1940, June, just one year after the Rosenbergs had got married. A lot was happening in the world, but we were oblivious to it — Pat and I were anyway, I can’t speak for the Rosenbergs. Of course, Pat was always out of it as far as the news was concerned — the only paper she ever read was the one she helped the kids edit at the high school where she taught.
Contrarily, I’ve always been a newspaper nut. But not that summer. We got married in the beautiful sentimental Mission Inn just as the Germans marched into Paris, honeymooned in Mexico the summer they killed Leon Trotsky down there, and I finally lost my maidenhead the night Harold “‘The Boy Wonder” Stassen keynoted the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell “The Barefoot Boy from Wall Street” Willkie for President (we were all boys then)…but I hardly noticed any of it. It was like I was living on some other plane. It lasted a whole year, longer even. Hitler was attacking Russia by the time we celebrated our first anniversary, and all I remember from that time is the little apartment we had over a garage in Whittier, going to San Juan Capistrano and Santa Monica beach with Jack and Helene Drown, getting out of bed in the morning with Pat, sharing the bathroom, driving into Los Angeles for the opera and a fancy supper from time to time, running civic clubs in town, thinking idly about my law career, mostly just exploring this new condition which I somehow thought of as unique in the world. On my own, I should say. Pat never liked to talk about it, not with me anyway, she just went her own way as before, which for the most part suited me just fine.
We were a perfect pair. At least it was a perfect pairing for me — Pat was a little restless and uncertain for a while, I could tell by the way she nagged. (Something to do with the mating part maybe, which, looking back on it now, wasn’t so good at fírst. I had to spend a stretch in the Navy before I really got the hang of it. Something a lot of people don’t understand about sex: it’s something you’ve got to study just like you study anything else — musical instruments, foreign languages, poker, politics, whatever. I did my homework in the Navy, and Pat was not a little bit surprised when I got out. Happily surprised, I think: we had two kids—whap bang! — before she even knew what hit her, and for a couple of years there it was pretty fantastic.) But for me it was like coming home. Pat had simplified my life, brought it all together for me. Not by doing anything. Just by being Pat and being mine. Without having to say a thing, she became my arbiter, my audience, guide, model, and goal. Sometimes she felt she did have to say something, but it was usually better when she kept quiet. She looked good in photographs. I understood myself better when I looked at those photographs. She was the undiscovered heroine whom I could make rich and famous and who would be my constant companion. When I explained myself to Pat, I knew I was explaining myself to what was good in people everywhere. Everything became easier for me. I wondered if it had been somehow like that for Julius Rosenberg? Had he, too, been waiting for someone to come along and make it possible for him to do what he had to do? Or maybe it was the other way around? Ethel was the one, after all, who’d been doing the waiting. Julius was just a kid when she found him.