Who's Behind the Rosenbergs?
Bernstein, Robert
A few days after the whereabouts of two engineers closely linked to Julius Rosenberg, the late Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, was confh'med by the New York Times to be the Soviet Union, where...
...You're a filthy liar...
...She said other reactionary, Cold War things, but I will not quote them...
...In 1950, after Harry Gold had been arrested and had led the FBI to Greenglass, the Rosenbergs gave the Cohens the signal to leave...
...In 1961 they were convicted as part of the "Naval Secrets" spy ring...
...and shouted Radosh down...
...To begin to understand the role of the Schneirs as latest performing seals in defending the implausible, then, it's necessary to peek back into Stalinist history at such previous masters of the wen-argued lie as Pritt--or William A. Reuben, the Schneirs' immediate predecessor (John Wexley was another) in the role of defender of the Rosenbergs...
...Later, during the question period, Sobell did in fact stand up and protest the quotation...
...The FBI had deliberately planted them to give the wrong impression...
...People screamed, "Let her talk...
...The typists at the Department of Health and Human Services wear mini-skirts and white socks...
...Gold was an "inveterate liar," since he did not tell people he was spying when he was doing so...
...One of the questions addressed to Radosh, both during the debate and during a previous appearance on WBAI, the left-wing radio station in New York, was to the effect: "'Why are you so calm...
...Pritt, British Barrister and King's Counselor: It was, moreover, obvious to anyone who watched the proceedings in court that the confessions as made orally in court could not possibly have been concocted or rehearsed . . . Months of rehearsal by the most competent actors could not have enabled false participants in such a contest to last ten minutes without disclosing the falsity...
...One fact occurred exactly parallel to David Grecnglass's story...
...rides the subway, so you can see just how much the nation's capital means and how much L.A...
...Nobody on the jury was Jewish...
...But there were also many shining young faces, and Victor S. Navasky, editor of the Nation, described to me by a novelist as looking like "a combination of Santa Claus and Don Corleone...
...Another example of Harry Gold's lying was his telling people that he had a wife and children when he did not...
...They were the ones tampered with by the FBI...
...Most of the evidence is circumstantial and I think in almost any situation you can construct an alternative set of explanations that are often equally credible...
...A few days after the whereabouts of two engineers closely linked to Julius Rosenberg, the late Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, was confh'med by the New York Times to be the Soviet Union, where Sarant had worked for the KGB in developing Soviet military computers, a debate was held in New York's Town Hall October 20 on the subject, "Were the Rosenbergs Framed...
...Rebecca West wrote in The New Meaning of Treason of Mr...
...Objectivity and dispassion were an affront...
...As a spy, not letting people know what he was doing and who he was would seem to be an elementary qualification for the job...
...Perlin, pointing an accusing finger at arm's length, shouted a question at Radosh and insisted, "Answer yes or no...
...It is true that Radosh is prone to unflattering fits of giggles when hc is nervous and is not my idea of a modern-day Orwell...
...As to the remaining defenders, they worked it out...
...During that time the FBI didn't know very much about the things that had occurred...
...Well, I'll say one thing...
...5. Sol Stern received no love and kisses when he stated: I thought the most compelling single piece of information in the files was David Greenglass, during his first extensive interrogation by the FBI, saying not only had he been asked by his brother-in-law [Julius] to get information at Los Alamos, but then at the end of 1949 his brother-in-law told him that he was getting people out of the country and he should flee to Mexico and gave him money and a safe route...
...Now after they did all this stuff, they locked it back into their files and did their best to ever keep it from being released to the public...
...Miriam Schneir, who denied that she had ever handed down from one generation to the next, now in the hands of the Schneirs...
...I may not be getting this right, but it goes something like this...
...I observe in one eminent newspaper the statement that the accused seemed to be repeating a well-learned lesson as if hypnotized...
...It had already been explained to them in Our Right To Know, the publication of the "Fund for Open Information and Accountability" (an organization that includes one of the Rosenberg sons, Michael Meeropol), that "the government, the FBI, and the capitalist class that they serve have in Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton two defenders of their p o s i t i o n . . . " and that their book "conforms to age,old anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as disloyal and greedy" and is " a vehicle to advance Robert Bernstein is a free-lance writer based in Hollywood...
...Indeed, there was howling that night...
...Walter Schneir engaged in a series of tantrums when he learned that an additional person, Sol Stern, would remain on the opposing panel during the question period...
...A haunting moment came as Joyce Milton was answering a question about the lost console table that the Rosenbergs were alleged to have used for microfilming and that was later discovered in the home of Julius Rosenberg's sister...
...Speaking on the case again last year on the radio, Reuben referred to such "buzz words" as KGB---opposed, I presume, to real words like CIA and FBI...
...What was this better world...
...The volatile nature of the proceedings, punctuated by occasional outbursts of fury from individuals in the audience virtually on the brink of some kind of breakdown, pointed up the essential fact of the evening: With the dissolution of ideological belief on the totalitarian Left, this case is all that is left...
...We will gradually learn more about other members of the larger Rosenberg spy ring, including names little known at this point...
...and many newcomers who have swallowed the line of American evil, embodied by what America did to the Rosenbergs...
...But he toyed around, asking me hypothetical questions . . . . " 9. Other cries from the audience to Radosh and Milton: "What are you doing with your profits from your book...
...7. Miriam Schneir: "Radosh has traveled a not unfamiliar political odyssey from Communist Party member to ffLrm anti-Communism: the 'God that failed' route . . . . " 8. Joyce Milton quoted Morton Sobell, co-defendarlt with the Rosenbergs, as telling the New York THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 ~ II 3 Times about the Rosenbergs: "I would not take the position that they were completely innocent...
...But we now know from the FBI files there had to be hundreds of people producing these hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and making a record that jibed...
...A t the place where the border between the conscious and the unconscious ends lies LosAngeles...
...You're an ideologue...
...Pritt's writing...
...As friends tried to restrain the trembling woman, her voice again pleaded, "Julius never knew about that...
...A shaking voice rang out: "Julie never knew about that...
...I also travel outside of Los Angeles to Washington, D.C...
...4. Walter Schneir got love and kisses when he declared, attacking Weinstein: _ 9 So he is saying, "For the greater good, whether you were guilty or not, confess and serve the purpose of creating an American left...
...The issue is the FBI and the framing of the Rosenbergs...
...This elicited an uproar...
...and Mrs...
...There are now four hot-tub dealers on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard...
...The Schneirs defined much of what Radosh and Milton have uncovered as the "garbage" of the case: including the role of Jerome David Tartakow, the informer in prison to whom Julius Rosenberg bragged about his espionage activities, and the larger spy network of which Sarant and Barr were a part...
...No peers...
...Morris Cohen, "whom the FBI knew as associates of the Rosenbergs...
...The Schneirs come on as relatively recent, non-ideological converts to the cause...
...In a kind of weirdly derationalized zone lies the city, the state of mind where there is no clear demarcation between the real and the fantasy, the fact and the imagination...
...The debate was jointly sponsored by the New Republic and the Nation, two publications whose current sharp editorial divergence symbolizes the erosion of what was once a left-liberal center: The New Republic takes an anti-Communist line, while the Nation seems more dogmatically pro-Communist under its current management than it did in its Popular Front days...
...This was followed by the strongest outrage of the evening, when Radosh replied, "The problem is--I hate to say it--sometimes the reactionaries are right, like they were right about the Soviet Union...
...Alfred Sarant eventually crossed the border, went to Mexico and finally went to the Soviet Union, Joel Barr in Pads, safe from McCarthyism, disappeared and wound up in the Soviet Union...
...Sol Stern, originally Radosh's coauthor, joined Radosh and Milton on the podium...
...It is true that, as the Rosenberg friends contend, we do not know the whole truth of the case and that more information will continue to filter out from the files and other sources...
...On four separate occasions . . . . it occurred in four separate cities: Morton Sober quit his job and went to Mexico under an assumed name and tried to get out of the country...
...They kept up a loud patter when the Radosh team was speaking...
...national phenomenon...
...Those in the audience under thirty cannot know whence the Schneirs came...
...that Julius Rosenberg was guilty...
...Then there axe Walter and Miriam Schneir, also a younger middle-aged couple, who have inherited the mantle of Rosenberg defenders...
...The participants were Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, authors of the new book The Rosenberg File, which definitively established the guilt of the Rosenbergs, and the pro-Rosenberg authors (Invitation to an Inquest) Miriam and Walter Schneir, who believe the Rosenbergs victims of a government conspiracy...
...And Vivian Glassman went to Cleveland to try and get someone else [William Peril out through Mexico_9 Four separate instances . . . . 6. Lawyer Marshall Perlin's exchange with Radosh...
...The strongest outbursts of emotion during the debate provide a sense of the audience and the night: 1. Radosh was booed roundly when he stated: Lillian Hellman wrote, "Most of the Communists I have met seemed to me people who wanted to make a better world...
...To this, the audience screamed "Shame...
...Schneir jumped up from his seat and walked around the stage furiously, he started to walk off, he finally ignored the proceedings and walked center stage shouting at the audience...
...F o r years the defenders of the Rosenbergs' innocence fought to have the FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, with the cer~dnty that these f'des would confh-m their belief in innocence...
...In this view America was surely turning fascist, and its enemies had to be "antifascists...
...Let me explain to you...
...Julius and Ethel Rosenberg continue to carry a heavy burden...
...It occurred to me that Sobell, even if he wanted to speak out more plainly about the Rosenbergs now, would feel constrained by the emotional expectations of such partisans as the man who cried out in the audience...
...There never was much hope that Los Angeles would become like Boston, and Boston never really had much hope of withstanding L.A...
...A voice out of the past cried out, "Could you tell me what part of the house that was in...
...At the debate on October 20, Marshall Perlin, lawyer for the Meeropols, who keeps a complete set of the, released files in his ofrice, stated that new files had recently arrived, and they looked very good, he hinted darkly...
...I knew that we would have done the same thing if we had been asked...
...Showing great pain and pressure, he insisted he was quoted out of context and that " I made it very clear to him that I was innocent, and that I thought that Julius and Ethel were just as innocent as I was...
...So, too, will the sophistries of the Rosenberg defenders change with the immediate needs of the moment, or the pressures of reality--i.e., the Schneirs will no longer only state of Sarant and Barr as they did in the first edition of their book that they were "presumably living abroad...
...the revival of the Cold War...
...in the pro-Communist National Guardian back in 1951, and authored The Atom Spy Hoax, a book which stated the Russians just didn't need to steal any data, probably had the ability to explode nuclear weapons before 1949 but decided not to do so out of their innate kindness and decency...
...In their unbelief, they have broken with the inevitability of history and come down on the side of emotion and individualism: Julius and Ethel...
...Shortly after the Rosenbergs were executed, a street in an East European country was named after them...
...Well, yes, the files were being released: 250,000 pages so far...
...10...
...The entire case rested on the shoulders of prosecution witness Harry Gold...
...means...
...This view will continue to f'md its advocates among those who cannot accept a world in which the Left stands for anything but innocence...
...The question arises, what cast of mind relates to reality in this way...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...
...But they were the wrong ones...
...In 1975 the 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 files were released...
...and New York and Chicago and Sarasota and San Francisco and I Observe that throughout this great republic the line between the dream and the awake is disappearing as a Benjamin J. Stein's latest book is The Manhattan Gambit (Doubleday...
...Since he had no microphone, all the audience saw was a furious man silently screaming at them...
...Certainly there were many senior citizens, many canes and crutches...
...Let's take the ruminations of one of their antecedents, writing in 1937 about the Moscow purge trials: D.N...
...the Village Voice types...
...I was in the party at that time...
...p From the moral plateau of the Schneirs, it's seen as tawdry...
...In what room was it in Ethel Goldberg's house...
...Of course, what with television and movies coming to shape more and more of daily life, and what with movies and television all coming out of Los Angeles, it was inevitable that the state of mind of Los Angeles would take hold all over the United States, like an irresistible, grinning body s n a t c h e r . All of the momentum, comrade, is on the side of the city that controls the media, just for starters...
...In that moment, Julius Rosenberg was more alive and represented in Town Hall than he ever would be by his ideological defenders...
...Stone, writing of the case and the anti-Semitic trials going on in Czechoslovakia and Moscow at the same time, stated: "How the same people could excuse Slansky and the doctors' plot and at the same time carry on the Rosenberg campaign as they did calls for political psychiatry...
...Joyce Milton continued to speak, now about the sample of uranium David Greenglass was supposed to have stolen from Los Alamos and thrown into the East River...
...It was the voice of Julius Rosenberg's sister, Ethel Goldberg Appel, a coiffured woman in her late fifties...
...That this pretentious idea of the way a left is supposed to be created, on the basis of a giant lie, the same lie that was spread by the FBI, the lie of the Rosenbergs having been spies, is not a left I want any part of...
...Several years later, the street's name was changed...
...There are no Ivy League colleges in L.A., if you get the picture...
...It can be found in his pamphlet, "The Case of Morton SobeU," published in the late 1950s by the National Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell in the Rosenberg Case...
...Not a framework of belief, not a series of issues (even safe ones, like civil rights), but Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Inc...
...My problem is I can't understand why that all happened, and in fact how it could have happened...
...Radosh and Milton's discoveries will continue to be called "garbage," as the Schneirs so delicately put it, and the clean, unsullied part, the view of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as the pure "progressive" couple working for peace and brotherhood...
...The audience of Rosenberg partisans jeered, booed, laughed, and talked during these assertions...
...I'd like to see some feeling from you...
...Later he would come to the conclusion that Ethel shared that guilt, perhaps to a lesser degree...
...But when you take all of the various circumstances into account and try to make sense of them, you can only come to one conclusion about the innocence or guilt, and unfortunately it's very intimately connected with their [the Rosenbergs'] ideology...
...3. James Weinstein, editor of the Socialist newspaper In These Times and a former Communist in the Rosenberg circle, said: I think that on balance the evidence seems clear that Julius was guilty...
...And I do not doubt their motives or their sincerity...
...but I am unable to understand how any correspondent, however far away he was from the courtroom, can have obtained such an impression . . . . --At the Moscow Trial International Publishers, 1937 This judicious and moderate tone prevails throughout Mr...
...It included the Moscow trials, Stalinism, the death of millions in forced labor, the alliance with the Nazis, and the denial of the Gulag...
...They turned up in London as Peter and Helen Kroger, antiquarian book dealers specializing in sadomasochistic pornography...
...A leftist historian, avid defender of the Rosenbergs through 1975, Ronald Radosh read the files and in the process of doing so changed the direction of the book he planned to write: Setting out to prove the Rosenbergs' innocence, he decided been interviewed by Stern or Radosh, listened to their tapes of her enthusiastic conversation with Stern with the frozen look of total immutability...
...Things have not gone well...
...He never said that...
...On the other hand, they write of the flight of Sarant and Barr as one of those "many human mysteries . . . . " A friend of mine remarked, "With all the howling, there are at least 100 people in this audience who know firsthand of what the Rosenbergs did...
...The audience, overwhelmingly proRosenberg, did not bother to listen much during the Radosh and Milton presentations...
...Reuben wrote the initial series of articles on the case, "The Rosenberg Conviction--Is This the Dreyfus Case of Cold War America...
...It was very clear...
...Joyce Milton stated during the debate, regarding the notion that the FBI had rewritten and tampered with the files: "Not only did there have to be people at the top coaching the participants to make their lying consistent...
...2. The loudest applause of the night came when Walter Schneir said, "The issue here is not Stalinism...
...The employment of this procedure (normal, of course, in the Soviet Union) without the keenest critic finding a false note, is a most convincing demonstration of the genuineness of the case...
...Radosh replied, "That reminds me strangely of the way Joe McCarthy asked questions...
...Here is a part of the liturgy of the defense version of the Rosenberg case, Then there are Walter and Miriam Schneir, also a younger middle-aged couple, who have inherited the mantle of Rosenberg defenders...
...A rigid cast of mind, to be sure...
...At this point a man jumped up in the audience and screamed from the depths, "He never said that...
...And they are not only the oldtimers and the Rosenberg children...
...The truth would be found either in other files still to come, or in the files that had been destroyed...
...The level of feeling was high...
...this is one operation...
...The Rosenberg case will remain a pivotal one, for it turns back the clock to a world view that had the remnants of credibility for the Stalinist Left in 1950, before the worst revelations about the Gulag were admitted by the Russians themselves...
...Later he would remind them that even I.F...
...No one in L.A...
...But the unfolding truth will not be a source of comfort to them, and they will continue to reinvent a truth of their own...
...I live in the middle of that miasma and drive its freeways every day...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
