THE CHRONICLER AND THE MEDIA

The even-numbered chapters of The Public Burning constitute “steroidal” versions of the Newsreel sections of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.Footnote ³ Collages of American voices, they act, as E. L. Doctorow, describing Dos Passos's equivalent mode, writes, “like momentary garish illuminations, as from fireworks, of the American landscape.”Footnote ⁴ A veritable “tempest of shifting third-person narrative voices,” they appear to exemplify an intensified version of Bakhtinian dialogism.Footnote ⁵ This polyphonic texture includes voices from establishment media, such as the New York Times and Time magazine (incarnated as the poet laureate in the novel), through to comic book heroes and the Marx Brothers. Coover himself has said that his novel

These loquacious sections provide the reader with a variety of contemporaneous happenings which provide a historical backdrop to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Yet these voices are not free-floating or random; they are collated, and presented to the reader, by an apparently omniscient voice in the third person, who serves, I would suggest, as a kind of contemporary “chronicler,” striving to distill the voices into what Lance Olsen describes as “the voice of postwar society itself.”Footnote ⁷

Chronicles, alongside annals, are in common conception “lower”-level representations of historical reality, because they fail to attain full narrativity of the events they report. As Hayden White writes, “the annals form completely lacks the narrative component, consisting only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence. The chronicle, by contrast, often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it.”Footnote ⁸ Documenting the chaos and information overload of the mid-point of the twentieth century, Coover's even-numbered chapters appear to exemplify this description. In the first of them, “A Rash of Evil Doings,” the chronicler relates,

The chronicler then goes on to report the details of Anthony Eden's gall bladder operation; the breakout of fire in the US military port of Whittier, Alaska; and the Guatemalan regime's redistribution of land belonging to Uncle Sam's United Fruit Company.

This constant stream of historical information relayed to the reader, in the present tense, precludes any notion of the emplotment of history – that is, of history as a story. Hence, although through later chronicle sections the reader learns of the crucial events of the Rosenberg case – the arrest of Harry Gold, the arrest of the Greenglasses and of course the couple's own arrest – they are not sequentialized and there is no cause and effect imputed. What the chronicler provides, then, is what we might call a synchronic (horizontal) picture of history, essentially a snapshot of world history at a particular moment. Here history is seriality, and the elements of the Rosenberg case are not privileged as they are in the diachronic (vertical) or linear representation of the past which we read in the first-person narrative of Richard Nixon. The Rosenbergs are not, in any meaningful sense, the subjects of the chronicler's history, because, as White has demonstrated, annals and chronicles have no subject.Footnote ⁹ Having no subject also prevents the chronicle from having “closure, that summing up of the ‘meaning’ of the chain of events with which it deals that we normally expect from the well-made story.”Footnote ¹⁰ So the final infernal sentence of the chronicle in The Public Burning tells us:

– an aposiopesis suggesting that the chronicler continues his relating of events ad infinitum off-page.

The textual presence of the chronicler should, however, give us pause. If the babble of America was all Coover was striving for through these sections, one might wonder why the need for a chronicler at all – simply let the voices speak for themselves. Moreover, including a third-person, omniscient voice in a novel means that the author faces the risk of its words appearing to hold authorial approval (see Kuehl's comment quoted earlier). And yet the chronicler, does, I believe, serve an important function in The Public Burning. Remembering White's astute point that the chronicle “seems to wish to tell a story,” we can take it further and suggest that the story is always immanent in the chronicle; immanent not in the sense that it lies waiting to be discovered, of course, but in the sense that the elements seem waiting for a narrative to be constructed from them. Hence the apparently discrete events reported in rat-a-tat-tat style in the section quoted above are fleetingly linked by “something” that “passes like a cold unseasonal wind through Times Square” (37). It strips away the white and blue bunting, leaving a “tattered crimson star, fluttering in its wake”; it fans the flames of the fire in Alaska; and stirs “the blacks in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa to rebellion” (37). This “unseasonal wind” which disrupts the American world is, as we learn further along in the novel, a strange gust of “un-American” sentiment, which must surely emanate from the lungs of the Phantom, a supernatural character who gives body to those peculiar fears of the McCarthyite USA. These events, then, do not apodictically present themselves, nor are they casual or random, but they are clearly selected, and selected with a specific purpose in mind. Remembering Hayden White's dictum that a historian's ideology always precedes his/her selection of events, we must conclude that this voice is not the objective authorial surrogate that Kuehl depicts. Creating this voice allows Coover to highlight that at all levels of historical reportage, from the annals to narrative-driven history, events are always mediated through a consciousness before they are constructed as “fact.” Moreover, what becomes clear through the choices of selection that this chronicler makes is that he functions not simply as a surrogate for the voice of a writer in the 1970s, but as a carefully crafted voice of 1950s America.Footnote ¹¹

Channelling these “echoes” of America through the omniscient, nigh deistic consciousness of the chronicler with his 1950s mindset mitigates the polyphony of these sections and hence actually produces a paradoxically monologic version of history. We are reminded that this synchronic mode of historical representation is essentially the same as that of the media which, at least on a day-to-day basis, provide a carefully controlled, horizontal spread of disparate events, all collected in one place and filtered through, in theory at least, the single consciousness of an editor. And it becomes clear through the strength of the voices of the press in the novel that Coover takes as one subject of his satire the monolithic media of this period in American history. In so doing, Coover, I believe, concerns himself with satirizing the manipulative link between, firstly, the official version of events handed down by the political system and the media; and, secondly, the consciousness/conscience of the media and that of the American public.

Indeed, while there is always interplay between politics and culture, rarely can they have been quite so openly and, one might argue, damagingly yoked together as in early 1950s America. When in 1951 subsidiaries of the Congress for Cultural Freedom set up the American Committee for Cultural Freedom involving thinkers and writers such as Arthur Koestler, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sidney Hook, it was with the specific intent of counteracting the influence of mendacious communist propaganda which was allegedly presenting the Rosenbergs as victimized innocents.Footnote ¹² It was due to this desire for a common front against Bolshevism that purportedly flaccid “liberalism” was castigated by those who had previously been considered on both the political right (James Burnham, Dos Passos) and on the left (Schlesinger, Hook, Daniel Bell). In effect this led to a polarization in American society, where one could be only with us/US (anticommunist) or against us/US (communist/traitor). With debate and dissent stifled amongst intellectuals and the media, the Cold War, as Daniel Hallin demonstrates, became the nadir for muckraking journalism.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, John Neville's analysis of media coverage of the Rosenberg trial has led him to conclude that “as long as a public official said it and the statement was accurately reported, the press's responsibility went no further”; they became, then, little more than public stenographers.Footnote ¹⁴

It is precisely this allowing of the government to “frame” the events it reported and the resultant tacit acceptance and perpetuation of the Manichean myth of the Cold War by the media that Coover takes as one of his targets in the novel. Although, as I have suggested, the satire is endemic in The Public Burning through its form, chapter 10, aptly titled “Pilgrimage to The New York Times,” provides an overt articulation of this critique. Here, the venerable paper is cast as a group of sacred tablets to which millions make their morning pilgrimage, including Julius Rosenberg. Seeing a garish, nightmarish version of himself on the tablets, nominally “the accused” but appearing to Julius's mind as “the accursed,” he realizes that “nothing living ever appears here at all, only presumptions … within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is” (192). Here, then, the metaphorical (historical) demonization of the Rosenbergs in the press becomes a (literary) literal one. To be accused of the heinous crime of anti-Americanism is enough to be presumed guilty, and where the Times repeatedly prints questions such as “Is Alger Hiss a Communist?” and “Is Justice Douglas a Traitor?”, the paper transforms its predications into unquestioned truths.Footnote ¹⁵ This helps the Times to create that manufactured and illusory picture of life, which Julius notes, where the binaries of good and bad are clearly demarcated, but which Coover, through his chaotic style of representing life, undermines and subverts. The chronicler himself explains that

Widely employed in 1950s America, this understanding of objectivity was retroactively labelled “objectivity as strategic ritual” by the sociologist Gaye Tuchman.Footnote ¹⁶

With his 1950s mind the chronicler, then, is part of that which he relates; his narrative voice is as enmeshed in the events, in the procession of History (History always begins with a capital H in The Public Burning), as the first-person narrator to whom we will direct our attention presently. Indeed this chronicler, in his conscious attempt to represent – that is, relate – the hegemonic authority of the press, also serves to represent, in the sense of acting as an agent of, that selfsame hegemony. Here, then, we may note Fredric Jameson's point that through the synchronic mode of historical representation we are given “an individual ‘period’ in which everything becomes so seamlessly interrelated that we confront either a total system or an idealistic ‘concept’ of a period.”Footnote ¹⁷ We may, I think, legitimately modify this and suggest that in a sense in The Public Burning's chronicles we get both: the “total system” comes by virtue of the author's attempts at creating a text from “all the sounds of the nation,” but the reductive “concept” – or, more accurately, dominant ideology – of the period stems from the chronicler.Footnote ¹⁸ And for Jameson the synchronic and the diachronic have an intimate relationship, with the synchronic being fuelled by the diachronic, where meaning is constructed through narrative, so that it behooves us now to turn our focus to the narrative constructed by Coover's diachronic historian, Richard Nixon.

NIXON THE STORYTELLER, NIXON THE PERFORMER

Mentioned only once in The Rosenberg File, the standard volume on the case, Richard Nixon had, as vice president, no direct involvement in the trial and execution of the couple, yet in many ways the choice to use him as narrator was a logical one.Footnote ¹⁹ Nixon had dominated the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) after joining it in 1947, proving crucial in the Klaus Fuchs and Alger Hiss trials, and on 2 February 1950 had delivered a potent one-and-a-half-hour speech on the House floor which assailed Truman for not bringing to public attention the communist “conspiracy” within his administration. Crucially, as Lisle A. Rose suggests, Nixon, aspiring to respectability as a politician, stepped aside from the increasing hysteria, having wedged open the door for the rabble-rousing of Joe McCarthy.Footnote ²⁰ No wonder, then, that Nixon in the novel sees himself as

Turning back, during the inauguration of Nixon in 1968–69, to the novel he had left in the early 1960s, Coover found that the new President “emerged from the texts, as it were. He has a way of doing that, fighting his way to the center stage, it's hard to stop him.”Footnote ²¹ On centre stage from the beginning of The Public Burning, the novel is itself a dramatic fictional account of the way in which “the fighting Quaker” clawed his way to the centre of American politics. As Coover commented, “As Eisenhower's vice president, he'd been excluded from the inner circle, and I could see how he might ache to play a bigger role.”Footnote ²²

Placing his literary Nixon in an unfamiliar historical context allows Coover to utilize what he wants from the public knowledge and perception of the historical figure, while still keeping enough of a blank slate upon which he can draw his own fresh character. As Tolstoy did with Napoleon in War and Peace, Coover demytholigizes his character so that he becomes “more three-dimensional than the media image popularized after Watergate … flawed but not yet dishonest.”Footnote ²³ Moreover, Nixon, knowing little of the specifics of the case at the beginning of the novel, also becomes a kind of analogue to the first-time reader of the book. As he familiarizes himself with the facts, so does the reader, but always through the smokescreen of Nixon's opinion, which the reader observes forming and reshaping, much as his/her own may be. Seeing history as “accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out,” Nixon's own diachronic narrative becomes an exercise in filling in the gaps as he assumes the positions of reader, interpreter and storyteller, and provides commentary on, and “meaning” to, the historical snapshots that the reader receives via the synchronic representations of the chronicler (136). Yet the meaning provided by the diachronic historian is only a meaning, it is not, as I would suggest Coover's text highlights, the meaning. In this sense the presence of Nixon is a perpetual reminder of the way in which history remains at all times but a palimpsest of opinion.

In fact Nixon's narration reveals that the relationship between the synchronic and the diachronic is far from the one-way stream which Jameson's argument, cited above, suggests. Describing himself as a “newspaper nut” and explaining how he “felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands,” Nixon highlights the importance of reading the New York Times “because you never knew what you might need in the middle of a cabinet meeting” (54, 198). Seeing himself as an outsider, Nixon relies upon the synchronic representations of the media for a fuller picture of events, but with the media fuelled by the official line, Nixon's view can only remain worryingly monologic. Hence reading papers, which tacitly link the Rosenbergs and the Korean war by putting headlines pertaining to both events cheek by jowl, influences Nixon into wondering “How many Americans had died and would die because of what they had done? Would the Reds have dared invade South Korea, rape Czechoslovakia, support the Vietminh and Malayan guerrillas, suppress the freedom-hungry East German workers, if the Rosenbergs had not given them the Bomb?” (79). Triggered by the media, Nixon couches his rhetorical questions in a way strongly reminiscent of Irving Kaufman's verdict, which Coover poeticizes, though quotes verbatim, in the prologue:

Coover shows here that the relationship between the synchronic and the diachronic is actually one of symbiosis; each feeds off of the other, serving to exacerbate and perpetuate images such as the one presented here of the Rosenbergs disturbing the natural order of America and, by extension, the world.

For Nixon, “the difference between us and the Socialists [is that] our central idea is to look for what works in an essentially open-ended situation; theirs is what's necessary in some kind of universal and inevitable history” (407). Yet Nixon's own diachronic narration tends to undermine these thoughts, for he treats the executions as both necessary (for the good of the nation) and inevitable. Labelling the early 1950s “a time of great national malaise,” a period when “things seem to have gone sour somehow,” he sees the execution as “just what the troubled nation needs right now to renew its sinking spirit” (162, 4). Moreover, by emplotting history, by converting the seriality of the chronicler's history into sequentiality, the executions appear the inexorable end to his story. As White explains,

Hence, thinking early on in the novel, and in contradistinction to the chronicler, that “raw data is paralyzing,” Nixon, convinced that he has “read the ending,” converts the execution into the telos of his story as the inevitable “emergence into destiny” (320, 143, 95).

However, Nixon's adherence to a determined view of history is loosened by the events of the story he relates, and indeed by the very act of telling them. Over the course of a few minutes his thinking on the issue vacillates tremendously, believing the one moment “that everything happening was somehow inevitable,” before changing his mind and exclaiming “Bullshit … maybe in Russia history had a plot … I had to step in and change the script,” but then dismally concludes, “I was no more free than the Rosenbergs were” (362, 363, 367). Nixon's equivocations, and indeed Coover's own use of the motif of determinism in the novel, may I think be clarified by the thought of Hayden White and Leo Tolstoy. “We are left,” writes White of Tolstoy's conception of the plight of the individual in history, “in a paradoxical situation in which we must affirm at one and the same time our determination by history and our freedom from it.”Footnote ²⁵ Yet this paradox, for Tolstoy, is an understandable one, for “there are two sides to the life of every man, his individual one, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.”Footnote ²⁶

This seems a conception that the historical Nixon shared, for in his book Six Crises he was, as John Keener suggests, consistently concerned with that “irreconcilable tension between a narrative of the self and that of a larger, determining power.”Footnote ²⁷ And indeed through the latter stages of The Public Burning Coover clearly utilizes the version that Nixon draws of himself in Six Crises. Hence, in the political sphere, the equivalent of Tolstoy's “hive,” The Public Burning's Nixon is circumscribed by Uncle Sam's notion of “manifest dust-in-yer-eye” (8). Believing that Uncle Sam has selected “chosen ones” who are destined to be incarnated with his spirit and become leaders of the country, Nixon sees himself as being committed to “some higher purpose, some larger script as it were” (54). He believes that “if they [the Rosenbergs] could say to Hell with History, they'd be home free,” for with history as destiny, they are fated for the scaffold. Yet, unlike Nixon, they refuse to play their preconceived “role” in history: “We do not want to die!” cries Ethel in the novel, “but we won't lie to live!” (431). She thus refuses for herself and her husband the part of martyrs, which some on the left desired, and that of traitors, the part that officialdom, and much of the American media, scripted for them. Small wonder, then, that the chronicler concludes, sustaining the metaphor of the execution/History as a drama, that “the Rosenbergs and their lawyers were the only ones not rehearsed” (121).

However, if at the political level Nixon's thinking is constrained by such deterministic thought processes, in the personal sphere he recognizes the power of the subjunctive – that the course of his life and that of the Rosenbergs might all have been very different. With this in mind he creates stories concerning Ethel's childhood, counterhistories that would have led her life to turn out differently. Commenting on her brief experience in the theatre when she was a teenager, he thinks,

This juxtaposition of what did happen and what could just as plausibly have happened is Nixon's acknowledgement that, in the private sphere at least, there are myriad causes for a particular historical eventuality but no reason that makes it inevitable.

Following this logic near the end of the novel, Nixon appears to see the possibility of moral choice at the individual level affecting political decisions. And so he tries, as Lance Olsen suggests, to reconcile the personal and the political by scripting “his private reality and the nation's public history into a meaningful whole.”Footnote ²⁸ On the afternoon of the execution Nixon finally realizes that much of the script has been tampered with, that perhaps “the case against the Rosenbergs had been a complete fabrication, beginning to end” (369). Here, Nixon finally comes to question everything that he has readily assumed before, from the sense of inevitable history which lies behind manifest destiny, to the Manicheanism that gives fuel to the notion of American exceptionalism. Believing that “there was something wrong with this black-and-white view,” Nixon comes to believe that the Rosenbergs were pawns “in a Cold War maneuver that only Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom knew about” (373). Crucially “either/or” has become “and/or” and Nixon has thought the unthinkable, that the myth of the binary opposite might not hold, that the entire Cold War itself may just be a fabrication dreamed up by Uncle Sam and the Phantom as a useful mechanism for binding peoples to their respective nations. Nixon becomes certain that Julius and Ethel are “taking the rap for someone else” and that “they weren't who or what the FBI said they were” (370). For the first time Nixon appears to challenge the inevitability and necessity of the execution, and believes that he may be able simultaneously to save the lives of the two who “were guilty of something, all right, but not as charged,” and to expose the FBI (367–68). Through this act he believes he shall restore the dignity and justice that the USA was conceived in terms of; thanks to him “the government would function, truly function, for the first time since the eighteenth century” (371).

Righteous, politically defiant, and for the good of the nation, Nixon's decision is the moral epicentre of the novel, the moment where he finally appears to have cast off the shackles of deterministic thought, having embraced responsibility and freedom. Yet it soon becomes clear, as his bold move degrades into nothing but a “great power play,” that Nixon's self-aggrandizing tendency will stymie any ethical concern (371). With the FBI crushed, Nixon believes he will have the whole of the American populace “in the palm of my hand. They'd have to believe in something, and I'd be all they had left … Even Uncle Sam would have to toe the goddamned line!” (371). Moreover, on arriving at Ethel's “Death Room” personal gratification takes over, and Nixon forces himself upon her, exclaiming,

His act then slips from being the moral turning point of the book, to being the locus of the novel's greatest tragedy, for, by fashioning this scene as the one where, as Daniel Frick puts it, “the leading man … finally gets the girl,” Nixon shears the move of both its moral impetus and political import, and reverts to playing a scripted role.Footnote ²⁹

Nixon's thought process returns to that of Six Crises, where the emphasis is not on the political possibilities inherent in the moral act, but one quite the opposite, where each political crisis provides an opportunity for personal gain. So this personal clinch with Ethel becomes, I would suggest, Coover's own imagining of a “seventh crisis,” as it were. In farcical mode Nixon is forced, “bareassed,” with “I AM A SCAMP” scrawled in red lipstick across his posterior, to back out of the private, Ethel's Death Room, into the very public execution chamber, located on a stage in Times Square (469). Nixon thus finds himself, finally, where he yearns to be, the unequivocal centre of America, and it is here that he abandons the task of changing the script. He reneges upon his self-proclaimed philosophy of “don't lean with the wind, don't do what is politically expedient, do what your instinct tells you is right,” becoming a practitioner of that “crude worldly pragmatism” which he has previously criticized as the preserve of the Democrats, and slips back into the Manichean theology of the Cold War, turning this crisis into a showpiece demonstration of, and rallying call for, Americanism in the midst of the communist threat (363, 61). “You may wonder what I am doing up here with my, uh, trousers down!”, he addresses the crowd, “Well, let me just say this! We in America, we in the Free World, all of us here tonight – and let me be quite blunt about this – we have ALL been caught with our trousers down!” (Public Burning 473). His barnstorming address catalyses the execution and whips the crowd into a frenzy of Americanism, and in the final gruesome scene of the book proper, when Ethel stubbornly refuses to die after the first charge of electricity shoots through her body, it is the vice president who is first up the steps to pull the switch again, urging on history, honouring his commitment made earlier to Uncle Sam to re-establish “the national character.”

Here in this political and public act of excess is the culmination of the performance element immanent in Coover's novel. Where the book assumes the structure of a four-act opera, it is perhaps ironic that the “intermezzos” provide not the customary relief from performance, but rather a crystallization and intensification of it. The first, a political speech by Eisenhower, poeticized by Coover; the second, a dramatic dialogue between Ethel and Eisenhower; and the third, “a Last-Act Sing Sing Opera” titled “Human Dignity is not for Sale,” have in common that they are performances constructed for the most part from verbatim quotation. So here “real” history is enacted as performance, just as the fictional history of the book as a whole is. The second and third intermezzos, created from the voices of the Rosenbergs, particularly Ethel's, function to keep the couple off the main stage, imprisoning them textually in these plays within the play. But this final act brings all the main characters of the novel onto the stage-like scaffold, and while it is not controlled by them, it certainly belongs to the Rosenbergs. They are released from the interval shows, and given due prominence, where Ethel Rosenberg's performance becomes “a true second act, a topper” (511).

Transforming the executions into “entertainment” serves, as Tom LeClair suggests, as Coover's “large and incisive metaphor for American values.”Footnote ³⁰ That is, the Manicheanism of American life is tied by this final performance to the atavism that courses through the novel, “where entertainer and audience are priest and tribe.”Footnote ³¹ And this public spectacle becomes a politic way of imposing governmental power, by invoking insidious myth. Foucault has suggested that the public execution is designed to restore, or reaffirm, the power of the state “over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt,” and further that “the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and its intrinsic superiority.”Footnote ³² And indeed, many at the time felt the Rosenbergs' punishment exorbitant given that they were aiding a country that was technically an ally of the United States, and in the light of Klaus Fuchs's sentence of fourteen years' imprisonment just four years previously.Footnote ³³ Hence Coover, in morphing the execution into this ritualistic performance, a performance where “the main character was the people,” suggests that the death of the Rosenbergs had more to do with “reaffirming patriotism” and “reactivating power” than it did with justice.Footnote ³⁴ By consolidating and regenerating the most potent source of that power – the monologic American myth – the execution becomes a performance of allegory; in demonstrating its power to quash these two communists, the state hints that it can and will defeat communism writ large.

Performance thus becomes the mode through which Coover codifies the main themes of the novel: myth, atavism and, because of its scripted nature, determinism. For Nixon, by enacting history as spectacular entertainment, by choosing to (permanently) don the mask of the public clown, willingly embraces his scripted state as a way of finally abnegating moral duty. As Isaiah Berlin puts it, through a belief in determinism “we escape moral dilemmas by denying their reality … Freedom notoriously involves responsibility, it is for many spirits a source of welcome relief to lose the burden of both.”Footnote ³⁵ And yet we should not, as I have tried to suggest, read The Public Burning, as David Estes does, as simply “a satiric attack against Richard Nixon.”Footnote ³⁶ In fact, part of the effect of re-creating Nixon, a person who was not directly involved in the case, is that it prevents us from reading it as just a novel critiquing by parody a historical figure's actions. As the author himself has said, “any exploration of Nixon, this man who has played such a large role in American society since World War II, would have to reveal something about us all.”Footnote ³⁷ In this sense Nixon in the novel works beyond the historical referent, as a kind of everyman, a symbol of man's moral journey through life. As we have seen, Lois Gordon may well be right when she points out that the “spirit of American life is not at all concerned with morality”; it does not, I would argue, follow that the individual (in this case, Nixon) has no opportunity to exercise moral agency.Footnote ³⁸ Reading beyond the historical referent it is not, I hope, too trite to suggest that the novel becomes a plea to the reader to not simply accept a given meaning, but to read one's own meaning of history, of current events and, more generally, of life.

I would suggest that for Robert Coover history only becomes History, an unwavering teleogical force, if individuals allow it to by not questioning it, whether that be by accepting the official view of the events transmitted by partisan media, or by blithely accepting history as fate. This, I would suggest, is why Coover dedicated the novel to Justice William O. Douglas, who did step in the way of History by granting on the evening of 17 June a stay of execution for the couple. Yet for Nixon, who saw a person's greatest moments as “those that engulf identity in events larger than himself,” a final, and irrevocable, relapse into his deterministic view of history as scripted performance lets him ignore his doubts, shirk responsibility, and, as he so desired, pass through the “gateway into history.”Footnote ³⁹ The show ends, then, when Nixon's equivocations do, when he has symbolically answered his early question: “Who listens to his conscience unless he must?” (61). In the chilling, Orwellian epilogue to the novel Nixon is thus ready to have Uncle Sam transmit the “true spirit of America” to him, incarnating him as the next President, via, in inimitable Coover style, a ritualistic act of sodomy, and to finally proclaim, “I … I love you, Uncle Sam!” (534, italics in original).Footnote ⁴⁰