I lay there, just letting my mind wander. Often I got good ideas this way. Felt good, too. I thought about the names of the principals in this case: all the colors. Strange. Green, gold, rose…which nation’s flag was that? I played with the street names, codenames, names of the lawyers, people at the edge of the drama — Perl, Sidorovich, Glassman, Urey, Condon, Slack, Golos, Bentley. I realized that the initial letters of the names of the four accused — Sobell, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, and Yakovlev — would spell SORRY were it not for the missing 0. Was there some other secret agent of the Phantom, as yet unapprehended, with this initial? Oppenheimer? Oatis? No, he was our man, we’d just got him back from the Czechs. O’Brien, the FBI man? What a fantastic idea! Bobo Olson? The OPA maybe. Always hated the OPA. My first political job. I was glad to see it liquidated six weeks ago — fulfillment of my oldest campaign pledge. Those goddamn hucksters. And that awful joke that went around when I got into politics: Dick Nixon of the OPA, maybe that one would die now. “Meet J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI…!” Obnoxious. Odious. Or how about the Orthogonians — somebody out of my old fraternity at Whittier? A Square Shooter who was a Double Dealer? It would explain why Uncle Sam had pulled me into this case. But it was hard to believe. Football players mostly, hardly the type. We did wear those big “O’s” on our sweaters, though. I remembered those symbolic suppers of beans and spaghetti we used to have. One would taste pretty good right now, and fuck the symbols. Also there was Old Nick, and Ola, and Señor Ortega, a role I had in a play once. No, I was getting pretty far off the track. Then suddenly I recalled that Justice William Douglas’s middle name was Orville. Mmm, that fit, that was probably it, all right. He’d sure set us back with that stay of his, which if nothing else was goddamn disrespectful of the wishes and wisdom of the American people. The tramp who’d reverted to type. Just as the Rosenbergs had caused the Korean War, so perhaps had Douglas enabled the Russians to crush our revolt in East Berlin. Why not?
I felt that I was close, hovering as it were (even though in fact I was flat out on my back) over the answer, not quite able to pick it out. Something about judgment. Time. My generation. My lousy drives. The city. The riddle of history, the letter O. Growing up. Balance. Motion.… I wondered if I should trace the travels of Harry Gold on a map to see if some kind of picture would emerge. Roughly, in my mind’s eye, they seemed to trace out half a cheese sandwich. I remembered that he said somewhere that the Greenglasses asked him where they could find good Jewish delicatessen in New Mexico. Or maybe Gold asked them. I realized the bomb diagrams somewhat resembled cheese blintzes. Deviled eggs. Stuffed cabbages. My stomach rumbled. I realized I should stop thinking about food.
I tried to think instead about the money, the amounts exchanged, what got done with it. Murray Chotiner taught me this rule: When you’re attacking an opponent, looking for scandal, ask first about the money. But the sums here were small and the evidence even for these was dubious. In fact, the only people with real money in this story were the Judge and Prosecutor, Attorney General, and FBI Director. The jury members were modestly but comfortably salaried, most of the witnesses were getting by, while the Rosenbergs were the poorest of the lot. Which was maybe the point: O for zero. They ran a small business that lost money, apparently donated their services to the Phantom for nothing — real fanatics. Well, I could understand Julius’s business failure: I’d gone that route myself once with frozen orange juice, and my father had entertained us all with a whole lifetime of successive failures. I could even understand their working free for the Phantom — I’d do the same for Uncle Sam, though I was glad he had never asked this of me. How could he? Money is dignity, he’s told me that himself. What I couldn’t understand, though, was the Rosenbergs staying poor. Not that poor. Not in America. They didn’t even have a car or a TV. Hell, I was earning money by the time I was eleven years old, picking beans on farms and working in my Dad’s store, pumping gas, grinding hamburger, culling rotten apples and tomatoes — Dad didn’t give me any abstract lessons in the American Way of Life, he simply turned over the vegetable shelves to me, let me fill them, keep them in order, and take the profits. I learned everything I needed to know about hard work. And its rewards. Now, even the simplest lump could pump gas or grind hamburger, so I figured Julius Rosenberg had to be faking it. Their poverty was just a cover. They no doubt had a secret bank account somewhere — Poland probably, since that country had had the brass to offer them political asylum. There were people who said Julie was throwing money around like water toward the end — I think it was the FBI who said this — he was buying clothes, photographs, eating out at expensive restaurants. I wondered if I should take Pat out to an expensive restaurant on our anniversary. There was a good Mexican place on Connecticut I’d heard about. At one time, I’d been eager to take up Mexican food, because I had so many California constituents who ate the goddamn stuff, and I knew it was something you had to get in practice for. Pat would probably want to eat fish down by the river. Where all the mosquitoes were, very romantic. I’d settle, as always, for a good well-done hamburger. And a pineapple malted. Or even a dish of cottage cheese. I eat a lot of cottage cheese, I can eat it until it runs out my ears. And one thing I do that makes it not too bad is put ketchup on it. I learned it from my grandmother.
My stomach growled. I loosened my belt a notch, belched emptily, ate an antacid. I’ve been at this too long, I thought. If I wasn’t careful, I’d make myself sick again. How did other people get where they were without having to work like this? Since the moment I’d got in off the course Sunday, I’d been going at it. I hadn’t even paused to take a shower in the clubhouse (of course, I rarely shower in public places any more — I agree with Ulysses Grant about that, I don’t think it’s wise to let people see what any Incarnation of Uncle Sam looks like without his clothes on — or even in his shorts or pajamas; I just couldn’t understand Eisenhower making his valets help him on with his underpants every morning, it seemed like some kind of unnecessary strategic risk), I’d rushed straight back here and headlong into a full-scale exhaustive study of the Rosenberg case, the trial, the background, personal histories and peripheral issues, appeals, the impact on world affairs, everything. This is my way with every project, scholastic, political, athletic, or romantic: I talk for hours with every person I can find, spend every spare moment studying reports and recommendations, gather up and try to absorb every known bit of information, make hundreds of calls, read whatever philosophy or political science or history I need to accomplish the task. “Iron Butt,” they called me in law school. There was always a tradition of hard work in my family, especially on my mother’s side, the Quaker side. And it always paid off.
I assumed it would pay off now, though I still wasn’t sure just what that payoff was going to be. Of course, I could only think of one thing these days, and that seemed a long ways off, but I knew how important it was to keep your eyes open at all times, miss nothing — one moment of carelessness or distraction, and you could stumble and fall from sight forever. Like that fund they set up for me in California, I hardly thought about it at the time, and I nearly got erased by it. The least detail could make or break you. Or maybe I was making too much of this thing. Maybe it was nothing more than just an exemplary entertainment of sorts. Who could tell what was on Uncle Sam’s mind? Certainly it was very theatrical. There was the drama of a brother sending his big sister to the electric chair; the implied tragedy of the Rosenberg children who would be left orphans; the curious spectacle of Jews prosecuting and judging Jews, then accusing each other of tribal disloyalties; an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution’s presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil…and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody in this case from the Judge on down — indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government, myself included — behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama, speaking in their letters of sinister “plots” and worldwide “themes” and “setting the stage” and playing the parts they had been — rightly or wrongly — cast for “with honor and with dignity.”