And that was another thing: not just the Rosenbergs, but almost everybody involved in this case was about the same age—my age! Judge Kaufman, for example, who in many ways had emerged as the real star and hero of this thing — he must have been going through his own fortieth-birthday crisis at the time of the trial two years ago. The Boy Judge: I had to admire him. I’d always thought of myself as a fast starter — I’ve been “the youngest ever” to do a lot of things in my life — but even I was no match for Irving Kaufman. He’d entered Fordham when he was only sixteen, had graduated so young from law school he wasn’t even eligible to take the bar exam, and while I was still dusting Tom Bewley’s office library back in Whittier and working on drunk cases, divorces, and traffic shit, he’d already been fighting the big ones, right in the heart of New York City, for over five years! He’d become an assistant D.A., helping gangbuster Tom Dewey and winning fame as the “Boy Prosecutor”—the Roy Cohn of his day. No wonder they got on so well. I hardly thought of national politics until I got asked to run for office in 1946, but Kaufman had already been called in personally by F.D.R. to help choose a federal judge way back in 1939 (fourteen years ago!), and by the time I’d got to Washington as “the Greenest Congressman in Town,” he was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Tom Clark, on a first-name basis with Edgar Hoover, and getting big write-ups in all the newspapers. When Harry Truman made him a federal judge in 1949, he was only thirty-nine years old, the youngest in America. And now he was being touted for the U.S. Supreme Court. His friend Tom Clark, Truman’s old hatchet man, was already sitting there, no doubt promoting his cause. Well, if I was ever in a position to nominate and he hadn’t made it yet, provided the Jewish seat was open, he’d be a likely candidate. I’d have to get over the resentment I sometimes felt at the fact that while I was fighting seasickness and mosquitoes in the South Pacific, Kaufman was sitting out the war in a private law practice, pulling down $100,000 a year with well-heeled clients like Milton Berle, but I figured if I ever became the true Incarnation, all such feelings would drop away like Clark Kent’s spectacles. Certainly he was my kind of judge — and a popular choice with the opposition at the same time: Pope Kaufman, the All-American Christian Orthodox Jew, a Tammany Hall Democrat whose law partner was a prominent Republican leader, hard as nails and heart of gold, “radical one day,” as the New York Post said of him in a headline story, “reactionary the next,” a natural. This judicious balance: it was his special genius. He could appear both strict and generous, scholarly and worldly, intense and serene, innovative and traditional. He’d even produced a set of twin sons. And smoked exactly two cigars a day.
In the Rosenberg trial, this talent helped him make all the right motions with regard to due process and fair play, while in fact keeping tight control over the development of the case. Whenever Irv Saypol seemed in danger of floundering, Kaufman would pop a telling question at the witness and get the Prosecutor back on the track, but he coolly kept his peace when Bloch was making all the obvious blunders on the other side. Whenever Bloch did get onto something at last and begin to peak, the Judge would deflate him with a blunt, sometimes even derisive, interruption, and Bloch would have to start all over. He knew how to heighten a prosecution moment with a brief recess, how even as a Jew to bring the Spirit of Easter into the courtroom, and how to reduce a rebellious defense attorney to abject silence: “Don’t give me any course of instruction as to what is usually done in a courtroom! This is the way I am running this courtroom, and I think I understand the way a courtroom should be run! I don’t care to hear anything further from you!” Then there was that day when the Rosenbergs were taking the Fifth on the Communist issue. They were looking bad enough without any help, but upstairs in the same building gangsters like Joe Adonis and Frank Costello were also taking the Fifth before the Kefauver crime-investigation committee, and Kaufman evidently couldn’t resist. He interrupted the interrogation, cleared the court, asked the jury to stay, and invited down that old New Hampshire windbag, Senator Tobey. “I’m very glad to be here and meet you,” Tobey said to all of them as Kaufman scrambled down off the bench to greet him. “We could use people like you upstairs.” Who could miss the connection? Another time, when Saypol ran into trouble on a query from Bloch about possible wiretapping, it was Kaufman who got him out of it—“It is ridiculous!”—even managing at the same time to remind the jury that whatever the United States Attorney said must, de fide, be true, and obscuring the fact that the question was never really answered (of course Bloch was probably right about the wiretap, but nobody wanted this fundamental case to be obscured by a technicality, maybe not even Bloch — besides, Kaufman liked wiretaps: thirteen years before, he’d been the first prosecuting attorney in the district ever to use one in a federal case; he’d played it on a small portable phonograph, creating a big stir in the courtroom, even the defendants had crowded around to see how it worked). He was like the director of a play who knows how to boost his actors’ egos and give them a sense of participation in the staging and interpretation, while in fact pulling all the strings — a fantastically smooth performance, Bloch himself had to applaud it at the end.
Applause, director, actors, script: yes, it was like — and this thought hit me now like a revelation—it was like a little morality play for our generation! During the Hiss case, I had felt like a brash kid among seasoned professionals; now my own generation was coming into its own — and this was (that lecture at Burning Tree was making sense to me at last) our initiation drama, our gateway into History! Or part of it anyway, for the plot was still unfolding. In the larger drama, of which the Rosenberg episode was a single act, I was a principal actor — if not, before the play is ended, the principal actor — but within this scene alone, I was more like a kind of stage manager, an assistant director or producer, a presence more felt than seen. This was true even of the trial itself: I felt somehow the author of it — not of the words so much, for these were, in a sense, improvisations, but rather of the style of the performances, as though I had through my own public appearances created the audience expectations, set the standards, keyed the rhetoric, crystallized the roles, in order that my generation might witness in dramatic form the fundamental controversy of our time!