Public Burning by Robert Coover Read Free Book Online

libraries there of what they considered dangerous authors—people like Howard Fast, Mrs. Clifton Fadiman, Theodore White, Bert Andrews, Dashiell Hammett—and yukking it up in their peejays with hotel clerks and cub reporters. Foster Dulles had had to admit that as a result somebody over there had actually set fire to eleven of the damned books, and now the press was in an uproar about it. The President was clearly confused on this issue. This was because, except for the odd western, he’d never read books, and so respected them more than he ought. Even the westerns were just part of the exercises associated with the reinforcement of his superpowers—he usually skipped past all the technicalities about such things as horse-breeding, trial procedures, and prospecting, all the interesting parts. As for the book-burners themselves, well, Roy’s devices were crude maybe, but after all they were also consistent, just like his courtroom prosecutions and his cloak-and-dagger work for McCarthy’s committee. Roy was smart and close to the hot center, but like Joe, he lacked real cunning. This was ironical because this is just what they were always accused of. They looked mean and shrewd—but they always outreached themselves. I warned Joe about this three years ago, but he wouldn’t listen, he was too excited. In the end, through excess and discredit, they served the Phantom. Risks of the holy encounter. Well, a Jew, a Catholic—maybe they lacked certain defenses, being spiritual outsiders, not quite true full-blooded Americans—too fearful of being misunderstood, of being victimized. Probably. Also Joe was piling up a lot of dough through privileged information—that was okay, but you couldn’t do that and be a crusader, too.
    The President was saying: “By no means am I talking, when I talk about books or the right of dissemination of knowledge, am I talking about any document, or any other kind of thing that attempts to persuade, or propagandize America into Communism, so manifestly, I am not talking about that kind of thing when I talk about free access to knowledge.”
    His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism—he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense. I knew I still had much to learn. 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. I had to study this awkward confusion, this easy stupid grin, this casual good-natured gruffness that blunted all the questions. It angered me that Eisenhower had seemed to come by all this naturally. He’d never had to study for anything, not even war. Who else in all history had ever become the world’s greatest living military hero without so much as firing a shot or suffering a wound, without so much as a field command, a single battle, even five minutes of real combat? I was no hero, but at least I’d got sent to the goddamn South Pacific and had had a pretty frantic month on Bougainville, while the nearest Ike had ever got to real battle was the White House Egg Roll this year. He was a lucky man. They all said this, it was true. It all seemed to fall in his lap. How could you imitate something like that? I felt cheated. I’d been studying all my life, and I still wasn’t there. I worried that I’d never learn enough, worried that Uncle Sam would never use me, and then worried about the worrying. Eisenhower, damn him, never worried at all.
    Maybe inquiry, self-consciousness, impeded the process. Maybe Uncle Sam needed vacuity for an easy passage. Certainly, the President never risked clogging the mechanism with idle curiosities of the intellect. He’d had to lean all his life on his little brother Milton whenever it came to thinking (which was something of a closet problem for the Republican Party, Milton having rubbed shoulders with old Henry