Eating - Jason Epstein [42]
That Roy might write a valuable memoir was inconceivable. But with strong editorial help, perhaps something could be salvaged from the helter-skelter manuscript pages he had shown me. To reject out of hand his wish to write a book would have been irresponsible. Roy knew Joseph McCarthy and his sinister retinue as no one else did. Moreover, in person Roy was nothing like the dough-faced consigliere with the hooded eyes whispering into McCarthy’s ear at the Committee’s televised hearings. To my surprise, I had come to like him and hoped that with the help of an editor, Cohn might re-create his complex character as the narrator of his own life: a very long shot, but worth a try, and he was paying for dinner.
As we discussed the manuscript, Roy told me that he had been raised as a New Deal liberal Democrat by his father, a politically connected New York judge. In 1944, he campaigned for FDR on West Seventy-second Street, the beating heart of New York’s liberal Upper West Side. He retained his Democratic Party affiliation throughout his life. His conversion to anti-Communism, he told me, came when, as a twenty-four-year-old assistant U.S. attorney, he joined the prosecution of the atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and was won over by the fervent young FBI agents assigned to the trial. A few days later, when I asked Roy how seriously he took the threat of Communist subversion, he said off handedly, as an actor might dismiss his screen self as just a job, “Communism never worried me. It was Joe’s thing.” To me Roy never displayed strong political feelings of any kind. But the story of his conversion to anti-Communism by the young agents to whom he was attracted seems plausible. Thus he became a hero of the Republican right and used these connections to shape his career. Had the opportunity arisen, he could as easily have become a Stalinist.
Roy told me that U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, the chief prosecutor of the Rosenberg case, was “an idiot” and that he himself was alone responsible for the major government strategy which led to the conviction and execution of the couple. This strategy included a secret arrangement which he claimed to have negotiated with Joe Rauh, a famous liberal lawyer, to spare his client, David Greenglass, a Los Alamos machinist, the electric chair. Greenglass agreed to testify—falsely, as he later admitted—that his sister, Ethel, typed her brother’s stolen notes, which Julius then forwarded to the Russians. This clinched the case for the prosecution. There was much potentially important material of this sort in Cohn’s chaotic pages, and I had hoped that we might salvage enough of it to make a book before Roy died. But Roy was obviously dying when we met at “21,” where he ordered his favorite tuna salad, made especially for him but left untouched that evening.
Roy was interesting on Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided at the Rosenberg trial and was Roy’s neighbor on Park Avenue. Every evening during the trial, according to Roy, the judge and he would discuss ex parte the day’s events and plan tomorrow’s courtroom strategy without the presence of the defendants’ counsel. When it came time to sentence the Rosenbergs, the judge, Roy said, asked him whether he should spare Mrs. Rosenberg’s life, as Pope Pius XII, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso, among many others, had urged, but the judge was unsure and let it be known that he sat for hours in Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue consulting his God on the matter. According to Roy, the closest Kaufman came to the fashionable temple was the phone booth outside, where he discussed Ethel Rosenberg’s fate not with God but with Roy, on the other end of the line, in Boca Raton. It was Roy, by his own account, who settled the matter by reminding the judge that the Rosenbergs were found equally guilty, so Mrs. Rosenberg’s gender should not be a factor, though Roy may have known at the time that Greenglass