The Rosenberg File
Flaherty, Francis J.
Books: MYTH & BETRAYAL ALL AROUND T HIRTY YEARS after the executions, the Rosenberg case still roils the American psyche. This perennial fascination is not strange. No novelist...
...These secondary conclusions have not placated believers in the Rosenbergs' innocence...
...Or was it an innocent purchase THE ROSENBER| FILE A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH Ron~d Radeeh tnd Joyce Milton Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $22.50,608 pp...
...In response, Radosh and Milton offer the statement of the hotel manager, one 9 March 1984:151 Fletcher Brumit, who told the FBI that all the hotel cards for June 3 were dated "June 4 , " probably through a missetting of the stamping machine...
...Did co-defendant Morton Sobell journey to Mexico on a vacation...
...A white flying horse, "incorruptibly innocent," carries Lake into his immediate future, where h'e discovers, on a latenight, second-story job, a Beatrice named Beverly, daughter of an Ahab turned millionaire publisher...
...And so, Radosh and Milton seem to have answered the question of the Rosenbergs' guilt as definitively as it ever will be...
...Helprin's second book, Refiner's Fire (1977), an ambitious, multi-layered narrative (which unfortunately collapses under its shifting textures) no doubt further impressed Gardner as a bold testament to heroic action in pursuit of noble values...
...Thomas DePietro H ONESTY, courage, sacrifice, patience: we rarely find these ideals celebrated in serious contemporary fiction...
...There are tantalizing hints of the Rosenbergs' family squabbles, of failed family businesses, of FBl-orchestrated frame-ups, of amoral minions of a foreign power skulking through sunny American streets, of passwords and converted console tables and other romantic accoutrements of espionage, of two orphans with names forever blackened...
...The authors of The Rosenberg File have marshaled this morass of facts and have generally concluded that the Rosenbergs were guilty...
...Many may question whether Radosh and Milton would have carried their case under the strict reasonabledoubt standard of the criminal law -- the standard the jury putatively applied to the Rosenbergs...
...The U.S...
...For many on the left, the Rosenbergs were the noble victims of a government conspiracy to drum up support for the Cold War...
...Gardner sighted few truth-seekers on the literary horizon...
...This is the saddest subtheme of the book: that so many people may have used the Rosenbergs as a means to an end...
...Books: MYTH & BETRAYAL ALL AROUND T HIRTY YEARS after the executions, the Rosenberg case still roils the American psyche...
...For many conservatives, the Rosenbergs were the stealthy servants of Stalin, ATOM SPIES as the New York Daily News labeled them, who scampered off with America's most precious secret...
...And like Dante's saintly intercessor, she suggests divine things: she (quite literally) scores the music of the cosmos...
...In the court of history, where all burdens of proof are equal, the Radosh and Milton solution, more plausible, wins in this and in most other instances...
...Set in a past that never was (hut that closely resembles turn-of-the-century New York) and a future that probably will never be, Winter's Tale speaks to a time sorely bereft of worthy heroes and genuine visionaries...
...Peter Lake, Helprin's gilded-age wanderer, contains Whitmanic multitudes...
...For example: Harry Gold testified at the Rosenberg trial that he was the courier who traveled to Albuquerque in June 1945 to pick up some atomic data from David Greenglass.The Schneirs suggest he lied, prompted by the FBI...
...The rogues and patriots, lovers and mourners, seers and pragmatists who people Helprin's miniatures here join together on a panoramic historical canvas...
...It touched the nerves of the world...
...the 30,000 pages of government documents not released for national-security reasons may tell a story different from that of Radosh and Milton...
...Communist party, they say, connived to use the Rosenberg case to deflect "international attention from the anti-Semitic Slansky purge trial in Czechoslovakia...
...Among their charges: Radosh and Milton are too credulous of the heavily censored, possibly fabricated FBI documents upon which they rely...
...It is undoubtedly more profitable to ponder that sad record than to bring into its fourth decade the dreary, narrow debate over the long-dead couple's technical guilt...
...Little has changed, in other words, since John Gardner lashed out against his own generation of irresponsible doodlers in On Moral Fiction (1978...
...After combing through 250,000 pages of recently released government documents and interviewing scores of principal and peripheral actors in the debate, historian Ronald Radosh and writer Joyce Milton say that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy and that he successfully recruited his brother-in-law David Greenglass to secure for him top secret atomic data from the laboratory at Los Alamos, where Greenglass was stationed as an Army machinist...
...With varying degrees of persuasiveness, Radosh and Milton make similar charges against a host of other groups and individuals...
...But there was a more nefarious reason for the longevity of the case...
...And while David Greenglass did not steal the atomic secret, his admittedly crude sketches of the atomic lens mold did give the Russians valuable corroboration of the more sophisticated data convicted British scientist/spy Klaus Fuchs had given them...
...Although it suffered from a generous dose of blather and bluster, Gardner's polemic argued for an essentially sound idea: that art should serve morality, not in a self-righteously didactic sense, of course, but in the way art can inspire humanity to venerate beauty, truth, and goodness...
...Lake, after marrying her, witnesses her untimely death, but not before he is transformed by her perfect love, with its intimations of immortality...
...His poignant melancholy engenders new meaning for his life...
...Was the Rosenbergs' console table a gift from the Russians used to microfilm secret documents...
...From his arrival on the Bayonne shore in a boat called The City of Justice to his reappearance at the end of the twentieth century (which beckons that very kind of city), Lake assumes the roles demanded by his various keepers: rugged marsh-dweller, expert burglar, crack mechanic...
...Francis I. Flaherty from Macy's...
...The double death sentence, they say, was a cruel and unprecedented penalty for peacetime espionage...
...The Atomic Energy Commission saw in the case a chance to strengthen its control of atomic policy, and the ACLU "displayed an unseemly eagerness to use the case to curry favor with the government and dissociate themselves from any taint of Red...
...And because it makes so fine a myth, many people -- but not all -- have understandably and often unconsciously treated it so, playing like novelists with the facts, bending the details to fit a larger, ideologically determined theme...
...This is the stuff of myth...
...Rather than chance a vision of a better world, our most lauded writers, from Anne Beattie to Raymond Carver, artlessly chronicle the anxious lives of so many forgettable, self-absorbed nebbishes and nihilists...
...Radosh and Milton also reach some exculpatory conclusions, however...
...But it's during his pursuit by a gang of scoundrels and scamps (his ex-partners, Pearly Soames and the Short Tails) that dreams begin to coax Lake towards a higher reality...
...Gardner's shamelessly Platonic dicta may have struck us as naive, but our studied cynicism conveniently ignores the history of Western art--a history in which the desire to instruct and delight far exceeds the compulsion to shock and numb...
...but a young Mark Helprin earned his discerning praise on the basis of his slim volume of tales-vignettes really--A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975...
...This grand, Breughellike feast of a novel resoundingly answers the call for a moral fiction invigorated by consummate artistry (so it's a shame Gardner didn't live to read it...
...But whatever the allegorical needs of the participants in the Rosenberg debate, the case is fact, not fiction...
...And these same values, whether a respect for the Godhead in nature or a belief in the visionary authority of the innocent, generate the finest pieces in the uneven collection Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981...
...Both husband and wife are Jewish and Communist...
...In example after distressing example, Radosh and Milton suggest that people all across the political spectrum purposely and cynically exploited the Rosenberg case for political or personal ends...
...After all, there is little we can do about the facts, and we can certainly forgive, if not condone, the reflexive making of myths which affirm our politics...
...And this city, like the rest of Helprin's unruly landscape, testifies to the order within disorder--the efficacy of "the plan...
...Or was he fleeing arrest as a member of the Rosenberg spy ring...
...As proof, they cite an Albuquerque Hilton Hotel l:egistration card which is dated "June 4" on the back, even though Gold said he stayed there June 3. With no other hard evidence but for proof that the FBI unsurprisingly searched the hotel during the Rosenberg investigation, the Schneirs present this discrepancy in dates as proof of an FBI fabrication...
...But by any lesser burden of proof, the authors' meticulous explanations and close attention to detail are conclusive against the highly conjectural, government-conspiracy theories of the main champions of the Rosenbergs' innocence, Walter and Miriam Schneir, authors of Invitation to an Inquest...
...And so the public discourse has centered on the more seemly, factual question of the couple's guilt or innocence...
...No novelist could concoct a tale with greater emotional pull or political pregnancy: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an earnest young couple who doted on their two small sons, are electrocuted for spiriting the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians...
...In France, it was le cas Rosenberg...
...Magnanimous message WINTER'S TALE Mark Helprln Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 688 pp...
...Winter's Tale, Helprin's spirited new novel, takes up where the best stories in Ellis Island (~'The Schreuderspitze," "Martin Bayer," and "Tamar") leave off...
...Although these claims carry some weight, and although the complexity of the case should prompt everyone to caution, I think a fair-minded reader would side with the authors of The Rosenberg File...
...The FBI, they say, allowed Ethel to die knowing she was only peripheral to Julius's spying...
...To answer these questions, and there are literally thousands of them, requires reams of direct and circumstantial evidence...
...As Dante, the master poet, sought to make heavenly truth permanent through the power of art, so too does Peter Lake, master artisan, seek to annihilate time enroute to the heavenly city...
...they are convicted and killed at the height of the Cold War...
...and several persons interviewed by Radosh and Milton claim that they were misquoted or misunderstood...
...It would be nice if the daunting factual complexity of the case, together with the human propensity to weave ideologically compatible myths, were the only reasons the matter remained so long unresolved...
...The debate is thus a dazzlingly detailed one of dates and places and sales receipts and ticket stubs...
...She was at most aware of and slightly helpful with her husband's activities, and the government's portrayal of her as a ringleader was part of a cynical "lever strategy" to pressure Julius, who loved her very much, to confess and to name names...
...And Ethel Rosenberg, they claim, was not the spymaster the government charged...
...The well-oiled engine at the h6art of the city and at the core of thi~ novel moves Helprin to risk metaphysical reCommonweal: 152...
...The chief prosecution witness: David Greenglass, Ethel's brother...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
