Knowland flashed me a thumbs-up victory signal and the Chamber began to empty out again, as Homer Capehart commenced his arguments on behalf of the report. That reference to the Constitution had just given me an idea. I was just about to hand the gavel back to Bill Purtell and write a note to myself when Lyndon Johnson came rushing back in from the Democratic Cloakroom with Russell Long, who cried: “Mr. President! Will the Senator from Indiana yield?”
Oh oh. I sat back down. Knowland stayed his troops and sent Hendrickson hustling into the Republican Cloakroom. “For what purpose does the Senator from Louisiana request that I yield?” Capehart wanted to know.
“I was not able to be in the Chamber at the time of the takin’ of the last vote, suh!” said Long. “I understand it was a tie vote, and I should like to move to have the vote reconsiduhed!”
“Well,” I said, “does the Senator from Indiana yield for, uh, that purpose?”
“No, damn it, I — Mr. President, I refuse to yield!”
“The Senator from Indiana declines to yield for that purpose,” I said, and rapped the gavel smartly. I didn’t know if it was a proper occasion for rapping the gavel, but it seemed like a good thing to do: BANG! It was like a gunshot, and Long jumped.
“Yeah, well then, uh, Mr. President,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously, “as soon as I kin obtain reckanition, I shall move to have the last vote reconsiduhed.”
Capehart conferred briefly with Knowland, then started up his report again, and once more the Chamber began to empty out. I gave the gavel back to Purtell and headed out for the elevators. The day was fast wearing on and I hadn’t yet clarified my thinking on the Rosenberg case. It was still possible they’d be burnt tonight, I’d have to be out there front and center, and I had to be ready. Why had Uncle Sam asked me out at Burning Tree about the Clark House Players, for example? Why had he brought up that Ayn Rand play I’d been in? Julius’s reading of Horatio Alger, or my duel with Alger Hiss? Kaufman’s link with Justice Clark in—? Knowland intercepted me, his big boozy face flushed from all the exertion. “I’m afraid it’s not over yet,” he said.
“Doesn’t look like it, Bill. Where was Joe McCarthy?”
“I dunno, that sonuvabitch — hammin’ it up for the newspapers probably. And Dirksen, too! Where’d he disappear to?”
“Last I saw Ev, he was on his way to use the head.”
“He was, hunh? Okay, I’ll try to round ’em up. Capehart’ll be good for an hour or two, but don’t go far away.”
“I’ll be in my office.”
“Good boy. And…listen, Dick…” Knowland wrapped one weighty arm around me like an ape, softening some, glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being overheard. “Uh, if you see, you know… Uncle Sam…tell him I hope I didn’t screw things up with this little diversion, I just wanted to get off on the right foot, you understand? Just wanted to set the scene right. Tell him…tell him we’re pullin’ for him and, uh…give him my best, will ya, Dick?”
He’s going to kick your ass so hard, Knowland, you’ll have to take off your bowtie to shit, I said to myself, giving Bill a sincere look. “I’ll do that, Bill. You can count on me.” I took out an index card and wrote a note. I let him think the note was about him, but what in fact I wrote was: LOOK UP HIGH-SCHOOL SPEECH ON CONSTITUTION FOR POSSIBLE USE ON FIGHTING QUAKER MONUMENT.
“Thanks, Dick, I… I hope he’s…okay. Tell him he’s…tell him, Dick, he’s in our prayers!”
4. Uncle Sam Strikes Back
Metal and glass are flying everywhere, the scream of tires and crash of cars send the Viennese locals diving into cellars, but the American soldier on the FEAR Military Patrol leaps for the runaway patrol car, whips the door open, grabs the fleeing Russian soldier by the arm — the car careens, tips, smashes into a second patrol car. The four Russians reach for their weapons, but the Yank’s pistol is already out: the Rooskies, outdrawn, are disarmed, forced to leave the car at pistol point. Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas — the man they were trying to kidnap — is still alive. And free. A lean tattered figure crawls slowly out from under the wreckage of the smashed-up patrol cars, stands, brushes himself off: it’s Uncle Sam! “Yippee!” he mutters, somewhat breathless, “heav’n-rescued again!” He straightens out his crushed plug hat and clamps it firmly on his brow, and on the other side of the world a hundred escaped North Korean prisoners find themselves back inside South Korean stockades. “Our crool and onrelentin’ inimy,” says the Superhero, bugging his eyes, “has damn near discombobulated us!” GI units shore up, as he tucks his shirttails in and buttons up, the breached ROK defense lines north of the Hwachon Reservoir. A figure gaunt and grand is Uncle Sam, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world. He winks and Albert Einstein, no longer with the angels, comes down with the flu. He tugs at his balls and cargo transports airlift the heaviest tonnage of the year. “That pestifferous varmint may have got us in a drefful sityeation,” he declares in the old style of Holy Writ, while pinning a Merit Badge on the American soldier of the FEAR Patrol, “but by Godfrey Daniel, we ain’t been knocked outa this ballgame yet — no sir! if them sarpents mean to have ’em a ginewine knife-plyin’ skalp-t’arin’ punch-up, then, brothers, let the deevastation commence!” Flags are fluttering and somewhere a band is playing “Possum Up a Gum Stump.” Here, as the Evangelist Ed Markham so fairly put it, was a man to hold against the world, a man to match the mountains and the sea!
His eyes burning fiercely like Mandrake the Magician’s, a transfiguring glory in his bosom and a wad of chaw in his jowls, he reaches up and out, seeming to stretch and grow, and with a smile of Christian charity lets fly with the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a Union: “Whoopee-ti-yi-yo! it’s yore misfortune, little dogies, and none o’ my own!” he booms from above, and — ka-BLAM! — decimates a whole paddyful of contentious gooks. “Come on, boys! The only way to resumption is to resume!” One is reminded of Zack Taylor astraddle Old Whitey running down greasy spies or Andy Jackson routing the heathen Creeks, as the Yankee Peddler, gusty and overcast, like a tempestuous blast, leads the Legion of Superheroes forward on the Korean frontier to recapture Finger Ridge and Christmas Hill. His fighter-bombers strike the Phantom’s main highways, destroying bridges and bicycles, making road cuts. Defiance gleams in Sam Slick’s eye, a sneer curls Sam Slick’s lip — no more Mr. Nice Guy now, he’s shooting from the hip! “Fer pleasure or pain, fer weal, fer woe,” he roars, walking softly but swinging a big bat, “‘tis the law of our bein’, we rips what we sew!” And off he goes to quench fires, still earthquakes, keep planes aloft, confound mischief.
His tattered coattails gallantly streaming, he roars through the Third World, up the Iron Curtain, making it flap in the gale of his wake, and into Times Square — what a mess! He sweeps away the Phantom’s debris, reconstructs the Sing Sing stage, wipes the obscene slogans off the walls, chastises the reckless traffic. “Force rules the world still,” he thunders, his chinwhiskers aquiver in the fitful upper breeze, “has ruled it, shall rule it — meekness is weakness, strength is triumphint, over the whole dingbusted earth, still is it Thor’s Day!” Thus, with the timely aid of the Prophets, Uncle Sam manages to transform even this outrageous disruption by the Phantom into a seeming piece of his own Weltord-nung: Thor’s Day! He lifts his steel-blue eyes and spies a message scrawled across the billboard high over the Death House mock-up: COMMUNISM IS THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY SOLVED AND IT KNOWS ITSELF TO BE THIS SOLUTION! He contemplates this a moment, with doubt and strange surmise depicted in his troubled look, then spits in disgust. “The dadblame Phantom’s gone too far on that one,” he snorts dryly, restraining his mounting rage. “I’ll be swacked if that nasty mortiferous booger-man don’t seem to hanker after these burnings even more’n I do!” Then, his anger bursting its bonds, he rips the billboard down and erects new hoardings in its place: FELLOW CITIZENS! GOD REIGNS AND THE GOVERNMENT AT WASHINGTON STILL LIVES! And with that, the air seems to clear, a furtive presence seems to dissipate and let the sun through, and the electrical sign reading AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD begins once more to metamorphose, Uncle Sam accomplishing in three clean moves what it took the Phantom to do in sixteen dirty ones: