Echoes of the Rosenberg Case: An Autobiographical Postscript
Hook, Sidney
Sidney Hook ECHOES OF THE ROSENBERG CASE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT The judge who sent Ethel and Julius to the chair has lived a life of peerless liberal guilt. Some time in the early...
...At one point, I was about to launch on a systematic study of the Rosenbergs...
...This was at the time Bertrand Russell had reached one of the way stations on his anti-American crusade, and had begun to cite the Rosenberg and Sobell cases, on evidence supplied him by a professor of chemistry at Columbia, as an indication that the U.S...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989...
...The Corporation Counsel appealed to the Second Circuit Court, which by a vote of 2 to 1 reversed on a narrow technical ground, and the case was sent back to be retried...
...It strengthened my conviction that he was unconsciously trying to win favor among his persecutors by a show of ultra-liberalism...
...He made a great to-do about the fact that before sentencing the Rosenbergs Judge Kaufman had consulted with the prosecution...
...By this time he had sent me massive documentary material on the case...
...The meaning of the department's declaration depended, of course, on the phrase "to work secretly for a government intelligence gathering agency...
...By this time I was seriously resolved to go into the case in depth, although at the time I suggested to Judge Rif-kind that Professor Allen Weinstein of Smith College, who had just completed a many-yeared study of the Hiss case, was much better qualified as a historian to dig up and reassess the evidence in the Rosenberg case...
...Contemptuous of his colleagues and their motives, he agreed to accept the settlement and, anticipating a lifelong vendetta against him by his New Left colleagues, changed his profession for a better paying career...
...Nonetheless, Countryman with his political allies had raised such a wave of moral indignation at Judge Kaufman's alleged derelictions that the American Bar Association appointed a subcommittee to defend Kaufman, now chief judge of the Second Circuit Court, against unwarranted criticism arising from his handling of the Rosenberg case...
...The Agency would not even supply a bibliography on the subject...
...Since Selzer's colleagues were city employees, the damages against them of almost a million dollars were to be defrayed by New York City taxpayers...
...Nor have any otherof the partisans of the Rosenbergs...
...Judge Kaufman agreed with his two colleagues on the bench, but he also dissented...
...The CIA, he said, needed voluminous amounts of non-secret information for its work, and the least expensive yet reliable method of obtaining it is through voluntary debriefing of travelers...
...At this point the city, confronted by almost certain defeat, offered to settle for a considerable sum...
...Glazer published a pamphlet which concluded that the Rosenbergs had been fairly convicted on the evidence...
...If Hobbes was right when he said that Hell is truth seen too late, their lives could not have been happy ones...
...was becoming a police state as bad as the Soviet Union...
...Knowing what the Communist party and its coterie of fellow-travelers were capable of doing when the party decided to make a cause celebre of the Rosenbergs, I had no reason to doubt the truth of Judge Kaufman's recital of his persecution...
...That is why he was so eager to settle...
...But the necessity was not pressing...
...At first I thought I had misheard him, but hereaffirmed the statement...
...Although the department had voted a year previously to recommend his promotion to the rank of associate professor, they now voted to deny him tenure...
...He did not meet him or anyone else thereafter...
...Something intervened to prevent me from making the systematic study and, much to his later regret I suspect, I delegated the task to Nathan Glazer, a rising star in the post-World War II field of sociology...
...To his surprise, he was offered no access to any data, classified or non-classified, nor offered any other inducement...
...I knew of Irving Kaufman only as the judge in the Rosenberg and Sobell Sidney Hook's autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, was published in 1987 by Harper & Row...
...Like so many of their comrades, all they would have left is a pervasive fanatical anti-Americanism on every issue and occasion...
...The poor man was so intent on proving that he was not a reactionary, McCarthyite, fascist underling of the capitalist class intent on destroying innocent revolutionists—the standard accusations of his Communist persecutors—that he ruled almost invariably against the government and for dissenters who flagrantly politicized their classroom...
...I never did...
...Kaufman had read several of my pieces on the Hiss case...
...The legal costs of more than $400,000 were also granted...
...Instead he was charged with involvement in a "clandestine government organization...
...His position smacked of the extremism of Justices Black and Douglas...
...I have sometimes wondered in the light of developments in the Soviet Union since the Rosenbergs' death what would have happened if President Eisenhower had not rejected our plea that their sentence be commuted...
...I made what seemed to me a surprising discovery: Judge Kaufman was taking an ultra ritualistic-liberal stance on cases that involved national security, subversive activities, and other related ideological issues...
...A new trial could easily have remedied the oversight and the Corporation Counsel of New York realized it...
...But how would the unfolding of events in the Soviet Union have affected them, the alleged Jewish Doctors' plot that almost resulted in mass calamities for Soviet Jewry, Stalin's death, Khrushchev's famous speech about Stalin's crimes, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the growth of semi-officialanti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and its satellites, the murderous attacks against the people of Afghanistan, the bankruptcy of the socialist economies, the revolution from the top in mainland China, and the Soviet Union reintroducing elements of capitalism...
...Selzer replied that he would think it over and make a decision on his return, at which time, if his decision to be debriefed was favorable, he would telephone...
...But I can assure Judge Kaufman that the members of the department whom he unjustly sustained never forgave him for the sentence he passed on the Rosenbergs...
...Active on numerous other fronts, I put this project on my list and waited for an opportunity to undertake the task...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 19 to the collective actions of the defendants and failed to distinguish the cases of the individual defendants...
...Dankworth Rustow, the department voted to recommend to President Kneller that Selzer be dismissed...
...Judge Rifkind wrote to me suggesting that I investigate the case and evaluate the contentions of those who were so zealously trying to persuade the American public that the Rosenbergs were innocent and unfairly treated as well as improperly punished...
...cases...
...He expressed the hope that I myself would write "a completely objective and nonpartisan book on the Rosenberg case...
...Isometimes wondered whether my observation of the trend of Kaufman's opinions had been accurate, and if so, whether my explanation of it was justified...
...It was held at the Grand Tetons which I had not visited before, one of the most beautiful scenic areas in the United States...
...But I did not know the details of the case as well as I knew the detailsof the Hiss case...
...Receiving no response, he telephoned and was asked to meet with a representative of the CIA...
...Selzer was not requested to contact any particular individuals or type of individual or to search for specific information of any kind...
...He not only wanted to reverse the judgment won by Selzer but to throw the case out of court altogether...
...He seemed to believe thatif he became known as a liberal of the Black-Douglas type (before the double-dealing of Douglas on the Rosenberg case was revealed), his persecutors would absolve him for the death sentence in the Rosenberg case...
...Perhaps the Rosenbergs would have experienced this succession of events, so palpably a betrayal of the ideals they professed, as a prolonged punishment...
...Despite a plea that his colleagues await his return before taking any action against him, they declared that "it is the position of the members of the Political Science Department [of Brooklyn College] that the standards and ethics that underlie membership in the academic community preclude any agreement by a faculty member to work secretly for a government intelligence gathering agency...
...Selzer kept his post until a few months later when he again came up for tenure...
...At the time Selzer was still pursuing his research in Israel...
...He rebuked the department for jumping to conclusions about any objectionable connection between Selzer and the CIA "without clear evidence...
...Of course, Judge Kaufman did not consciously intend his "objective judgment" in Selzer's case to have any bearing on how public opinion and especially left-wing opinion regarded him...
...The representative did not suggest any particular focus for Selzer's work except his own lines of inquiry...
...Selzer had previously gathered data on Nazi war criminals...
...But when I asked him why he sentenced the Rosenbergs to death I was startled to hear him say that he had no alternatives, that they had been convicted of espionage during the war, and that the law at the time carried the death penalty...
...It is noteworthy that the statement did not say that such membership precludes turning classrooms into propagandapulpits for partisan political purposes...
...I telephoned Judge Rifkind and told him how I felt...
...rr he grounds on which the original 1 jury judgment in Selzer's favor was reversed was one involving federal procedure in civil cases...
...Kaufman seemed to be obsessed with his public image, and some of his colleagues on the bench, who were just normal ritualistic-liberals, became aware of what was moving him...
...Some time in the early sixties, I was invited to present a paper on the place of religion in a free society by Chief Circuit Court Judge Murrah at the Tenth Circuit Court Conference, whose members were largely the judges and court personnel of the Western circuits of the United States Court of Appeals...
...On some walks we took together he unfolded a harrowing tale of persecution and calumny at the hands (and mouths) of fanatical partisans of the Rosenbergs who had made not only his life a misery but that of his wife and other members of his family...
...The meeting was memorable in several ways...
...My inquiries showed that the practice for which Judge Kaufman was being mercilessly flayed was quite general at the time, and that only recently had procedures changed so that it was no longer considered good form for the judge to consult with the prosecution before passing sentence on a convicted defendant...
...By this time they probably would have been free...
...He made no attempt to persuade me...
...I ended up believing that his reading of the First Amendment freedoms—so different from that of Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, and Frankfurter was more harmful to the prospects of a free society than the injustices he suffered at the hands of his Communist tormentors...
...He could not have been more mistaken...
...The soul of discretion and tact, he merely said: "Why don't you tell Judge Kaufman what you think...
...I have never been able to find any jurist who subsequently agreed with Judge Kaufman's interpretation of the law...
...In accordance with the common tradition of the bench, he could not very well reply to these systematic efforts to discredit and defame him...
...And finally, what fixed the meeting in my mind, I met and had long talks with Judge Irving Kaufman, who was present as a kind of observer from the Second Circuit Court on which he served...
...With the exception of the only scholar in it of intellectual distinction, Dr...
...Then I read Kaufman's opinion in a case that I had first-hand knowledge about in my capacity as an officer of University Centers for Rational Alternatives (UCRA...
...Among other things, I challenged the assertion that there had ever been, or ever could be, a wall of separation between church and state in America, so long as churches, mosques, and synagogues enjoyed tax exemptions...
...He sued the department for violation of his civil rights and the jury awarded him damages of close to a half-million dollars...
...His unconscious must have guided his pen: Selzer an "espionage agent...
...He agreed to a meeting on June 1, 1976, after notifying the former chairman of his department about the nature of the CIA's interest...
...Subsequently, I received a letter from Judge Kaufman calling my attention to the publication of a book entitled Invitation to an Inquest by two apologists for the Rosenbergs and Sobell...
...I do not mean to suggest that there was anything deliberate in this orientation...
...But before committing myself, for some odd reason I sat down and began reading Judge Kaufman's decisions in more recent cases...
...In his own words, "I emphatically dissent from its decision to remand the case for a new trial...
...Not even Selzer's colleagues dared make that explicit charge...
...The case involved Professor Michael Selzer of Brooklyn College, who was interested in the study of terrorism in Israel and the Near East...
...He engages in considerable specious reasoning to justify what appears as a gratuitous dissent, and then betrays himself by declaring, "After all, Brooklyn College was seeking a scholar and teacher, not an espionage agent...
...Kaufman wondered whether I had familiarized myself with the details of the case or had considered undertaking a book on the subject...
...In July 1976 Selzer visited five coun- tries in order to gather the psychological records of Nazi collaborators, to search for data on the Dachau concentration camp, and to determine whether there was any overlap between known terrorists in Europe and the individuals on his list suspected of terrorism in the Near East...
...A great many well-meaning people, including historically untrained jurists, unaware that Judge Kaufman's behavior was standard procedure at the time, joined Countryman who, I suspect, was perfectly aware of the facts, but who, in mitigation, could plausibly fall back on the plea of obtuseness when the facts became known...
...Feeling as I did, I could not gratify Judge Rifkind's request...
...At the meeting the representative of the CIA asked Selzer whether on his return from Israel and the Near East he would be willing to be "debriefed,"meaning whether he would give his impressions of the situation...
...As the department interpreted Selzer's case, if an American citizen abroad observed some group preparing to seize a neutron bomb or discovered a terrorist plot to destroy an American ship or plane and then went to the CIA or communicated with it, he would fall under the ban...
...The officers of UCRA were loath to see him abandon his action, but in view of his family obligations we did not press him...
...Countryman's hue and cry was taken up by others...
...On his return he telephoned the person at the CIA he had been in touch with and spoke to him, according to his estimate, for about ten to fifteen minutes...
...Most of the Western judges, including Judge Murrah, had a breezy, outgoing temperament, more impressive for their common sense and shrewd judgments than for their legal erudition and dialectical skills...
...To the end, he protested that he had been driven out of his profession because of his political views by a cabal of his colleagues...
...Selzer had run out of resources, and was heavily in debt...
...The representative told Selzer that the Agency routinely made such requests of the large number of businessmen, academics, and others who frequently travel abroad...
...My paper, whose theme I later developed at greater length in the Montgomery Lectures at the University of Nebraska and published in a slender volume called The Place of Religion in a Free Society (1964), was sufficiently at odds with traditional views to provoke a vigorous discussion...
...In an unusual outbreak of common sense for an administrator in those years, Kneller refused to act on the recommendation, defending the right of Selzer to provide "open" information to the CIA...
...The justices held, for reasons not persuasive to me, that "the jury instruction and the special interrogatory actually given were erroneous because they inquired solely as Judge Kaufman was taking an ultra ritualistic-liberal stance on cases that involved national security issues...
...He suspected that there was an overlap which could make his inquiries more specific...
...Nonetheless, I was sympathetic with Kaufman's plight and indignant with the denunciations of him by Communists who had applauded the execution of hundreds of innocent persons in the notorious frame-up trials at Moscow, and later in Prague and Budapest, who were beginning their agitation for the vindication of the Rosenbergs, and a new trial for Sobell, not out of concern for human rights but as a tactic in the Cold War against the West, particularly the United States...
...Knowing something about Countryman's politi18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 cal proclivities and associations, I became suspicious and looked into the matter...
...Selzer was scheduled to be considered for tenure at a meeting of his department in January 1977...
...The chairman of the subcommittee, Judge Simon Rifkind, had been a classmate of mine at City College some fifty-five years earlier...
...But I, together with many others, had petitioned President Eisenhower to commute the Rosenbergs' death sentence, and long before Sobell had completed his term, I had advocated that he be paroled with Harry Gold, the chief witness against the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to thirty years...
...I had known about the case and followed the major details of the evidence...
...This was my view, and one commonly held by many other inquirers...
...rr en years or so later, in the midseventies, the necessity did become pressing...
...Verne Countryman, a law school professor, launched an impassioned attack on Judge Kaufman for his handling of the Rosenberg case some twenty-five years before...
...I had remembered that at the conclusion of the trials, before the verdict of the jury, the Rosenbergs' attorney had thanked the judge for his fairness in conducting the case...
...He wrote the CIA requesting any psychological data of a nonclassified kind that it had on contemporary terrorists...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
