It was a congressional aide, of all people, who clued me in to “The Public Burning,” Robert Coover’s magnificent novel about American politics, which is even more relevant today than when first published, to puzzlement and acclaim, in 1977. We were eating pastrami sandwiches on I Street in Washington, D.C., sometime during the hopeful early days of the Biden administration, and I asked the aide for a tip — one never just has lunch or a drink in Washington. Instead of conveying the latest piece of Capitol Hill gossip, as is the norm, he directed me to Coover’s classic.
It remains the best tip I’ve ever gotten, a scoop I am pleased to share with you now. Coover died in October, just as reality finally caught up to his masterpiece, an “extraordinary act of moral passion,” as a reviewer for The New York Times wrote at the time, a “destructive device that will not easily be defused.” Starring Richard Nixon, “The Public Burning” mocks our politics and our culture by wallowing in both. References to 1950s ephemera score writing so alive that the sentences seem almost to vibrate, like particles let loose by a madman. “It is a glorious, slam-bang, star-spangled fiction,” the novelist William H. Gass wrote in an introduction to a 1998 edition, “and every awful word of it is true.”
Well, true-ish. The novel’s title refers to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, in 1953: “thieves of light to be burned by light,” as Coover describes their turns in the electric chair at Sing Sing. In “The Book of Daniel,” published six years earlier, E.L. Doctorow had rendered their deaths as family tragedy; here, they are a national farce staged smack in the middle of Times Square.
A sign glows above the stage where the Rosenbergs will fry: “AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.” Only the words are “metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passers-by” until a less sunny message materializes: “AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD.” D’oh!
Coover’s imagination is chronically unrestrained, but the premise of “The Public Burning” is startlingly simple. Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, is going to wrap up affairs in Washington before taking the train to New York to watch the Rosenberg spectacle. As far as plot goes, that’s really about it.
The novel opens with that most mundane of Washington rituals: a news conference. Three days earlier, Eisenhower had warned Dartmouth graduates not to “join the book burners,” a reference to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his counsel Roy Cohn, who helped prosecute the case against the Rosenbergs. Now Eisenhower is defending those remarks before the Washington press corps, as he did in real life. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Justice William O. Douglas (to whom Coover dedicates the novel) is about to grant a stay of execution in the Rosenbergs’ case.
Nixon is contemptuous of his boss, a “casual straightforward bumbler.” He has more respect for Cohn and McCarthy, practitioners of the dark arts he will master when, 16 years hence, it’s his turn in the Oval Office. “Roy was smart and close to the hot center, but like Joe, he lacked real cunning,” the vice president muses, adding later, “They always outreached themselves.”
Nixon knows to move carefully, never forgetting his humble beginnings. He is no blue-blooded Ivy Leaguer, and he realizes these facts could make him more fit to lead America, not less. “I knew I still had much to learn,” Nixon thinks as Eisenhower takes questions from the press. “People still took me for a carnival barker, a used-car salesman, a fast-buck lawyer — I was still too fluent, too intense, too logical.”
As the Douglas stay is reversed in Washington and preparations for the execution resume in Manhattan, Nixon rushes around the capital, at once aimless and full of purpose, his frenetic activity a chance for Coover to take us ever deeper into the recesses of Nixon’s mind. His Nixon is sensitive, cruel, vulnerable and grandiloquent. He is hustle culture before hustle culture was a thing. He is working on his brand, honing his warrior mind-set without the help of a single productivity podcast. Only an America could make a Nixon, and only in America could a Nixon make it.
Above all, Nixon is powered by ambition. Ambition is redemptive; it’s what elevates men above the common run of humanity. And politics is ambition expressed in its purest form, as dominion over others. “If these were chains, I chose them,” Nixon thinks.
He is obsessed with the Rosenbergs because they seem to him as determined as he is to be world-historical figures. For the moment, they are the center of attention, which bothers him as much as it would a certain other future occupant of the White House. “The Rosenbergs suddenly have a terrific rating — overnight they’ve shot past every show in the country,” Nixon laments.
He can’t help admiring the “pretty goddamn tough” Ethel: “Her ghetto past had haunted her, frustrated her theatrical career, just as I’d been frustrated in my hopes for a New York City law career by my small-town California past, only I didn’t let it embitter me.” That final clause, with its ironic wallop, shows how thoroughly Coover came to understand Nixon and the politics of grievance he practiced to perfection.
Nixon, though, is only half the story. His first-person sections of “The Public Burning” are interspersed with manic interludes that may be the finest example in the entire American canon of what the literary critic James Wood has called “hysterical realism.” Imagine a CNN “Decades” documentary — “I always wanted to know what Tony Danza thought about Caspar Weinberger!” — only directed by someone who didn’t know the strength of the edible he just ate, and you have the right idea.
In these immensely enjoyable and unpredictable montages, Coover tries to capture the entirety of the 1950s, depicting the decade as a battle between Uncle Sam (the United States) and the Phantom (Soviet communism), one that is waged on a landscape of mass media and pop culture. The nation’s poet laureate is Time magazine, its much-mocked style rendered here as verse:
on both sides of the iron curtain
the world heard with a thrill
of east berlin’s
As the execution nears, crowds stream into Times Square. They will not be disappointed. After all, the “Entertainment Committee” includes Cecil B. DeMille, Betty Crocker, Conrad Hilton and Ed Sullivan. Walt Disney has “built a scale model of Sing Sing prison, using all the little braying schoolboy truants from ‘Pinocchio’ for the prisoners.” There will be singing by Gene Autry and a middleweight championship fight.
The Times reviewer predicted that readers would not “find Coover’s thoroughgoing contempt for our politics and folkways a wholly persuasive description of the national character.” Maybe that was true in 1977, but no longer. “You gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-’n’-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin’ meddler,” Coover’s Uncle Sam tells Nixon near the end of the book, before violating him in one of the more arresting sex scenes in American literature. By now, we’ve reconciled ourselves to this version of Uncle Sam — the crazed frontiersman, the savage huckster. The time for illusions is gone.
There is another sex scene, earlier in the book, between Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg, less graphic but still shocking. Nixon was still alive when Coover was shopping his novel to editors in New York, as were Cohn and others the novelist portrays less than flatteringly. The book was finally bought by Viking, whose lawyers prevailed on Coover to make minor changes.
“I was told I should sign the house and everything else over to my wife or even someone outside the family so as not to lose it all when the lawsuits began,” Coover later recalled. Instead, the novel became a finalist for the National Book Award.
In an email after the election, I asked the aide who’d recommended Coover’s book to me what he thought of it now, as we awaited Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House. “America is many things: angry, playful, patriotic, tireless, sentimental, berserk, bullheaded, creative, light and maybe most of all, loud,” he wrote. “What once may have been an over-the-top satire of a president is today, nearly 50 years later, something more.” In other words, welcome to Coover country.
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