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.”
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!
Of course, I knew it was foolish to place too much weight on a court record, even as didactic theater, Uncle Sam had already warned me about that. What’s missing in the record is the atmosphere of the courtroom: the expressions on faces, gestures, inflections, betrayed emotions—in short, what are elsewhere called acting values. But it could equally well be argued that the court record, like a baseball box score, was even more reliable than the actual trial: some people were better actors than others, and the emotions of a courtroom could often get jurors into such a state they couldn’t even hear what was being said. Practiced liars could overwhelm the hardest evidence against them, turn it to their own credit, and reduce a whole courtroom to tears, while simpler folk, accustomed to telling what they thought of as the truth, could get caught in a small exaggeration or personal embarrassment and become so flustered that everything they said afterwards sounded false. Some attorneys blew their best material right at the outset like a premature ejaculation, saving nothing back with which to bring the jury to climax just before they retired for a decision, and so finding themselves getting beaten by an opponent with nothing but nonsense, innuendos, and a superior sense of dramaturgy. Class identifications or hostilities could evoke juror responses completely unrelated to the testimony, well-timed comedy could provoke gratitude or ill-timed comedy shock, and evidence suddenly produced by surprise could obscure the fact, later obvious, that it was worthless. The point of Night of January 16th, for example, that Ayn Rand play I was in back in Whittier, was that there was no final conclusion to be drawn, no “right” or “wrong” judgment, the evidence was ambiguous, the testimony contradictory, and each night a jury selected from the audience was invited to render its own verdict. Depending on our various performances, the verdict changed from show to show. I played the part of the District Attorney and prided myself on winning more nights than I lost—one of my most successful roles actually: I was a natural as a prosecutor, could have made a Tom Dewey career out of it. But I would have taken just as much pride in winning for the defense.
The genius of Irving Saypol—himself just forty-five then—was how well he understood all this and used it in the Rosenberg trial. He even stole one of my lines from the play: “I am not going to appeal to your ‘souls,’ or to those ‘deep secret chords of your hearts’—but to your reason alone!” He himself had said somewhere: “A well-turned case is just like a stage play really,” meaning by that not merely that convictions depend upon dramatic entertainment, but that justice is entertainment. His own performance as Prosecuting Attorney was inspired, his backstage manipulations imaginative and exhaustive. With the help of a cooperative and close-mouthed FBI, he had produced a brilliant working script and then had rehearsed his principal witnesses for weeks—he’d even lodged Harry Gold and David Greenglass together up on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison (the “singing quarters”) for several months so that they could perfect their interlocking testimony—while at the same time, he’d seen to it that the defendants were kept too disturbed even to think properly, disrupting their family life, isolating them from each other and driving them to despair over fears for their two kids, depriving them of their freedom and personal dignity, not to mention an ordinary sex life, terrorizing them with ominous rumors, exposing them to vitriolic press and radio campaigns, dividing their own families against them, keeping them ignorant of his own strategy while maintaining tabs on theirs by intercepting their communications and planting FBI informers in the cells near Julie, holding back from them the vast amount of back-up support and research he was getting from the FBI and other government agencies, forcing them to rely entirely on their own limited resources, knowing that no one would come to their aid since to do so could implicate that person in the “conspiracy.” Saypol had even managed to arrange a complete dress rehearsal—sort of like trying the show out in New Haven—in the thematically similar, though less serious, Brothman-Moskowitz trial four months earlier, in which virtually the entire cast—including the Judge and excepting only the accused—was the same. Thus, the Rosenbergs and their lawyers were the only ones not rehearsed, and were in effect having to attempt amateur improvisation theater in the midst of a carefully rehearsed professional drama. Naturally they looked clumsy and unsure of themselves…and so, a bit like uneasy liars.
Saypol was terrific in the courtroom, too: shrewd, thorough, quick on his feet, cold-blooded, and powerful enough in his hushed no-messing-around way to make what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth—at least long enough to wrest a guilty verdict from an impressed jury. True, he accomplished this more with adjectives and style than with verbs and substance, but, given the difficulties, this was all the more to his credit. Knowing he’d have a group of middle-class jurors (most of them were accountants and professed anti-Communists—and here again, in jury selection, Saypol had done his homework, having complete access to police and FBI dossiers withheld from the Rosenberg team), he saw to it that all his witnesses were properly dressed and carefully schooled in witness-box mannerisms, so as to create the undercurrents of awe, rapport, sympathy, or believability he wanted, and he himself stood tall and stern, like Lou Gehrig or Randolph Scott, speaking softly but wielding a stick as big as Uncle Sam’s forearm. Poor old Manny Bloch, contrarily—stocky, stoop-shouldered, and baggy-eyed—looked a little sinister and out at the elbows, and his clients behaved strangely—shrill, pompous, abject, seedy, emotionally unstable—for this jurybox of middle Americans, so like my own constituents. I knew the way Saypol’s mind was running: with this jury, dowdiness was guilt.
Bloch treated him deferentially and sometimes fawned on him, conceding he might be right on this or that minor point, or accepting his word and thanking him for his “courtesies,” obviously angling for Saypol’s pity and sense of fair play, but there was no reciprocal gesture from Saypol. He just accepted the compliments as though deserving them and lashed back, never giving an inch. A natural killer. As he himself once said: “As a prosecutor in a criminal case, one in my position has armament like an iceberg.” Every word was calculated to further the impression that the defendants were tampering with or dodging the truth, and that even their lawyers were embarrassed at having to defend them—a one-track mind, that track leading straight to the electric chair, which Saypol firmly believed in. And those you couldn’t eliminate, teach: “I’ve often wondered,” he has said, “whether the whipping lash wouldn’t be a greater deterrent than what we have now.” Mr. District Attorney. According to Roy Cohn, Saypol loved to play cop, interrogating suspects himself, investigating them—he even carried a gun around in his back pocket like Sam Spade.
Nevertheless, tough as he was, I could have whipped his ass from Foley Square to Jenkins Hill and back again, could have beat the rap for the Rosenbergs—though of course this would have been a miscarriage of justice. Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, was a dunce, a pushover—in fact, he played so naively into Saypol’s hands at times that I suspected Uncle Sam must have had something to do with frazzling his mind somehow. Giving him bad dreams so he didn’t sleep well or something. He buckled under to the Judge, overpraised the Prosecutor, joined the chorus of admiration for the FBI—who were, though he never seemed to grasp this, his real opponents in this trial: in the final analysis, it was their word against his, and it was his job to destroy their credibility. But this never even occurred to him. He just didn’t know what the game was all about. He neglected to bring in friendly witnesses and refused to cross-examine key government witnesses, bungled the Fifth Amendment procedures, seemed not to hear half of what got said. Nor did he challenge any of the physical exhibits, a lot of which were very dubious looking and should have been exposed to public
scrutiny—hell, the FBI has a special section which does nothing but produce fake documents, they have to do this, it’s a routine part of police work, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed doing if they’d given me that job I asked for when I left Duke—and much of the stuff that Saypol offered up looked like it might well have come from that factory. Of course, what choice did Saypol have? The real evidence was in Russia. You had to credit his ingenuity. Just as you had to fault the defense for chickening out under pressure.
Bloch’s crosses were hardly likely to get him into the Hall of Fame either. He failed to ask who if anybody helped Greenglass prepare those new sketches, presumably copies of the originals, for the trial, even leapt up and urged the impounding of the goddamn things in a phony act of patriotic grandstanding that fooled nobody, stamped the drawings as the real McCoy, and drew an awful lot of excitement to the testimony of Greenglass which followed. He neglected to probe into Greenglass’s complicated finances, failed to follow up when Greenglass talked spookily of “memories and voices in my mind.” He did not demand to know the details of the prosecution’s careful rehearsal of David, Ruth, Harry Gold, and the others during the six months preceding. In short, he lacked a win complex. I believe you have to stay on the offensive, wait for windfalls, get what dope you can on your adversary, and then blast him, whether in a courtroom, an election campaign, or a summit meeting. Saypol had built a house of cards and Bloch just didn’t blow. “Every man sitting over here is an honest man,” Bloch said in his summing-up: “The FBI representatives, Mr. Saypol and his staff, every man of them, they are doing their duty.” Saypol must have had a hard time just to keep from laughing.
Bloch’s most astounding blunder was to refuse to cross-examine Harry Gold. Gold was the alleged courier-link between Fuchs, Rosenberg, and Greenglass, and if he was lying—or if the jury could be made to think so—then Bloch and the Rosenbergs had it made. Gold, like most spies, even our own boys over in the CIA unfortunately, was an incorrigible fantasist, who in the course of his operations had invented a wife, twin children, an apartment, a house purchase, a polio attack on one of the children, a separation, his brother’s death, and even a fictitious list of “contacts” which he gave the Russians, sharing intimate moments from this fantasy life with friends and associates, acting it out for the world in all its bizarre detail, while in fact living at home all the time with his mother, at least until she died. His wife’s name in this saga was Sarah O’Ken, a former gun moll of an underworld villain named Nigger Nate; he said he’d met her while courting another girl with one blue eye and one brown eye (his mother had such a pair). John Hamilton, who had once been our National Committee Chairman and who somehow got Gold as a client, told me he sometimes wondered if Gold was even a spy, maybe he was making the whole thing up; he had all the apparatus, all right, but it was all down in his basement, even the stuff he was supposed to have given the Russians, boxes of it, like the raw materials of some novel. He told me Gold was something of a self-destructer, too, a man with no sense of his own being, and as a boy—probably now in prison, still—he played these weird baseball games with decks of cards, inventing a whole league of eight teams with all their players, playing out full seasons, keeping all the box scores and statistics, even taking note of what they looked like! It’s a wonder one of his ace pitchers didn’t turn up in the trial testimony as a contact or something. Maybe one did. And vice versa.