Apologia for the Rosenbergs
FINEBERG, S. ANDHIL
An analysis of John Wexley's attempt to prove that the atom spies were really the victims of a vast plot Apologia for the Rosenbergs By S. Andhil Fineberg John Wexley's The Judgment of Julius and...
...Would Julius not have told his lawyer...
...She is living as a private citizen, wife and mother unmolested...
...For many pages, Wexley portrays Rogge as a perfidious partner of Judge Kaufman and Prosecuting Attorney Irving Saypol...
...This he knows by intuition...
...The author confines the review of the case to the trial court record and disregards the voluminous records of the higher courts, where most of his major arguments were presented and contradicted...
...The Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case was undoubtedly involved...
...Wexley has made full use of the memoranda...
...But put the separated passages together and we find that Wexley has Sobell sauntering to Mexico on vacation and at the same time fleeing in panic to Mexico...
...This docs not disturb Wexley...
...Not only Greenglass, however, would have escaped infamy had it been proved that he was incapable of committing the crime of which he was accused...
...How does Wexley meet that...
...Had the Rosenberg trial resulted in a hung jury or in a verdict of innocence, the American public would have accepted the verdict without any adverse manifestations...
...Wexley's account gives no consideration to the Government briefs in the higher courts which answered many arguments which he is merely repeating, nor does he indicate that the higher courts rejected each of those arguments as illogical, unsubstantial or both...
...The defense did not challenge his ability to do so...
...Among these was Mr...
...but not a single indication from any source to show any relationship between public sentiment and the arrest and conviction of the Rosenbergs...
...Surely this is adequate proof that Communist statements on this score are contrary to fact...
...In none of these memoranda has Greenglass shown any doubt that he committed the crime he confessed...
...Why would the Truman Administration have wanted to stage a "frame-up" of the Rosenbergs...
...there is no evidence whatsoever to support such fantastic reasoning...
...According to all the testimony presented in the courtroom, Greenglass was capable of communicating atomic secrets...
...If Greenglass had been sentenced to a year, or two, or five, Wexley would have said: "There is the proof of the deal...
...he writes as he pleases...
...Board of Rabbis and is Community Relations Consultant at the American Jewish Committee...
...The complete file of David and Ruth Greenglass's heart-to-heart talks with their lawyers were taken and were returned after being photostated...
...And what about those who presumably wanted and engineered the Rosenberg trial...
...An analysis of John Wexley's attempt to prove that the atom spies were really the victims of a vast plot Apologia for the Rosenbergs By S. Andhil Fineberg John Wexley's The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Cameron and Kahn) restates at great length the Rosenberg story told by the defunct Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case...
...Other villains in the case include Government officials and the FBI...
...By whom...
...He explains that Judge Kaufman and Mr...
...Fully a half-dozen Jews were accepted as jurors by the prosecution...
...The question then arises: Did Greenglass have to plead guilty...
...Wexley's book shows a basic contempt for the people of the United States...
...Surely if David Greenglass were unable to commit the crime, his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, would have known it and would have communicated that fact to her lawyer...
...No lawyer would permit his client to do this...
...The Committee published the memoranda in which they could find any phrase or line that could be used for their purposes...
...Surely here is proof that the whole miserable story of anti-Semitism based upon that deception is a fraud...
...For then the Government would have had yet another weapon to use in reply to possible charges of anti-Semitism...
...He would have escaped a 15-year prison sentence by declaring, if it were so, that he was incapable of committing the crime of which he was accused...
...And what about Julius Rosenberg, something of a scientist, who had training adequate to judge his brother-in-law's competence...
...Wexley repeats a canard when he blames on the Prosecuting Attorney the fact that no Jew was on the jury of the Rosenberg case...
...They repeat them because in foreign lands millions of people unacquainted with the facts can be led to despise Americans as Communists everywhere do...
...Another villain is needed...
...In several instances, Jewish prospective jurors addressed the Judge and gave the Judge valid reason why they" should be excused...
...Imagine the scene in the courtroom where the Judge and the Prosecuting Attorney-both of them Jewish-are presumably determined to keep Jews off the jury...
...There is nothing there explaining why Greenglass testified against his sister Ethel, other than the fact that she was guilty...
...Wexley calls the Rosenberg case a "frame-up," and identifies it with the trial of Jesus, "the dread Inquisition," "the theocrats of Salem" and "the frame-up of Captain Dreyfus in France...
...This book is nothing more than another piece of anti-American propaganda...
...Having taken full advantage of the assumption that there was a deal, he now calmly says, "Judge Kaufman went back on the deal...
...What about all those guardians of the secret who were thus put to shame...
...Naturally, Rogge had followed the practice in all such cases and investigated the possibility of a lightened sentence...
...Again and again, Jews reached the jury box without any effort on the part of Judge or Prosecutor to dismiss them...
...Wexley has no such hurdles...
...He had to face a jury and bear the brunt of the opposition...
...Perhaps the next version of the Wexley edition will include the defense attorneys as partners of the "frame-up...
...They would have been thoroughly discredited and would have appeared utterly foolish if, instead of convincing the jury that Greenglass was guilty, they charged him with a crime which he could not perform...
...Stealing a bit of uranium is to atomic espionage what forging a check is to murder...
...Why should that administration have encouraged the public to believe that despite the many millions of dollars spent to guard the atomic secrets, a few obscure people stole those secrets...
...Of such is the quality of Wexley's thinking and argumentation...
...Had he not confessed, or had he been tried and found innocent, the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell could not have been convicted...
...His entire case is built on the concept that Americans are so bloodthirsty and our Government authorities so vicious that the Rosenbergs were victimized to appease "the hysteria...
...Wexley must, therefore, expand his story...
...According to Wexley's account, Greenglass was also "framed...
...Yet only by extracting a few phrases and reading his own meanings into them does Wexley find useful kernels in this very extensive material...
...Wexley cites "air-alarm raids in schools'' to prove that terror was in the air...
...In this pilfered treasury of the Greenglasses' innermost thoughts, Wexley should have discovered devastating proof of his major themes, if he were right...
...And so it is with his treatment of Morton Sobell, who at one point is merely taking a normal vacation to Mexico at peace with himself and the world, and at another is also pictured by Wexley as scared to death of the hysteria in the United States...
...Wexley asks us to believe that the prosecution selected Greenglass's attorney, 0. John Rogge, in order to assure Greenglass's confession...
...For example, no one can deny that David Greenglass pleaded guilty to atomic espionage...
...Louis Friedlander (described only as the vice-president of a rubber company), who had taken his place as Juror Number 11 and undoubtedly would have remained had the defense not employed one of its peremptory challenges to dismiss him...
...It could have been stopped before it got under way by public officials who could have saved their own reputations as guardians of American secrets if they had proved the Rosenbergs innocent...
...In no instance did the Judge excuse any Jew who did not of his own volition ask to be excused...
...What Wexley is saying in effect is that any Jewish businessman is willing to convict any innocent Jew of atomic espionage...
...Wexley argues that Greenglass lacked the scientific knowledge necessary to convey atomic secrets...
...With an even more contemptible suggestion: Since Friedlander would have undoubtedly been a juror had the Defense Attorney not removed him peremptorily...
...Why do Wexley and his ilk repeat these specious arguments after they have been repeatedly demolished...
...S. Andhil Fineberg, author of The Rosenberg Case-Fact and Fiction, is on the N.Y...
...Judy Coplon, convicted espionage agent, escaped her deserved punishment on a mere technicality...
...Wexley explains Greenglass's failure to take this road of defense by saying that Greenglass had stolen some uranium from the Los Alamos project and was afraid of the FBI...
...The truth is available to anyone who wishes to look for documentation of hysteria against the Rosenbergs...
...One way to view the Rosenberg case is to study the major facts...
...but, as is customary in such interviews with the prosecution, there were no guarantees...
...Saypol "did not object to Friedlander because Kaufman and Saypol would have been overjoyed with the inclusion of the ripht, dependable kind of a Jew...
...And why should the Civil Rights Congress have remained so supinely quiet from the time of the Rosenberg arrest until more than a year later...
...According to this internationally propagandized version, the Rosenbergs were innocent, the witnesses against them were guilty of perjury, and the trial judge deliberately misconducted the trial...
...Yet, if Greenglass could not in truth communicate atomic information, the Government attorneys were taking a tremendous risk...
...Alas for Emanuel Bloch, defense attorney for the Rosenbergs...
...Wexley claims that Rogge arranged a deal to obtain a life penalty for Greenglass in return for Green-glass's taking the witness stand and telling a long, detailed account-a fictitious one, according to Wexley-which hours of grueling" cross-examination did not dent...
...Wexley says that Mr...
...If such were the case, Greenglass certainly should have pleaded innocence and spared his mother, his wife, his children and himself immeasurable degradation...
...There is none...
...Several would have remained in the jury box had the Judge not found it necessary to excuse them...
...There was no deal...
...Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment...
...Friedlander, being a businessman, could correctly be assumed to be a scoundrel...
...He furnishes no reason to believe this besides conjecture...
...Is it conceivable that if the Rosenbergs were being hounded or if public opinion was poisoned against them, no one would have protested at the time...
...Several of the Jewish panelists whom the prosecution accepted were eliminated by the defense...
...Why were they silent if, as Wexley claims, the whole business of the Rosenberg case was fabricated...
...An extraordinary bit of effrontery was the pilfering of the files of 0. John Rogge's office...
...Why did the Rosenbergs never complain on this score...
...Search even the Communist press during and some months after the trial, and you will not find a word on that score...
...And now along comes Wexley, reluctant to abandon this contemptible lie...
...From shortly after their arrest until their trial began, Americans ignored the Rosenbergs...
...How does he meet the situation...
...That is an incontrovertible fact...
...The former fits in nicely with some of Wexley's fantastic reasoning and the latter supports other arguments that serve the author...
...In every instance of a prospective juror's being dismissed by the Judge, it was for a valid reason which appears in the record and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the person's being Jewish...
...We are asked to believe that instead of risking a five-year maximum penalty if tried and convicted of the minor crime, Greenglass preferred to confess to atomic espionage, which could even bring a death sentence...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
