On Screen

...The hot topics were Alger Hiss' attempt to gain reinstatement to the Massachusetts bar, and the efforts of Robert and Michael Meeropol-coinciding with the publication of their book, We Are Your Sons-to use documents secured under the Freedom of Information Act to reopen the case of their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for conspiracy to commit espionage...

...Since the screenwriter cannot be accused of misunderstanding himself, I suspect that Doctorow's new sentimen-talization of the historical continuity of the Left can be explained by the difference between 1971 and 1983-In two words: Ronald Reagan...

...if my Washington acquaintances are still preaching the same line on the basis of the same spotty knowledge, another is ignorance...

...Why does the case refuse to disappear...

...Meanwhile, the letters columns of the Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books have been clogged with angry charges and countercharges...

...Fear can make minds fuzzy, and to judge from, say, the pages of the Nation, liberals are afraid the spirit of the McCarthy era is alive today...

...Goodman concludes with a plea for "simple honesty and common humanity...

...Leslie Fiedler, writing in Encounter in 1953, similarly stressed the need "to treat as persons, as real human beings, those who most blasphemously deny their own humanity...

...I think they worked for the FBI...

...Both call for reasoned and restrained argument, not epithets...

...No, this was politics New York Intellectual Style...

...Since the New Left never quite resolved the complications of its relationship to the Old Left, it is not surprising that liberally inclined writers of the later generation should turn for illumination to the issues that preoccupied the earlier one...

...In this respect, the continued use of the term "Stalinist"-whether by conservatives, neo-conservatives, social democrats, or independent Leftists of various stripes?adds little to a rational discussion of the failings of radical politics, Old or New...

...The novel further contends, as Radosh and Milton found, that the FBI deliberately exaggerated the wife'scomplicity in order to pressure the husband to confess...

...Even Vanity Fair, better known for exploring the affairs of the flesh than the life of the mind, has stepped into the fray with two essays on the Rosenbergs pegged to the premiere of Daniel-one of them by Arthur Miller...

...The most interesting thing is that in reviving an old quarrel it has revealed how little we have learned...

...This clearly wasn't a gathering friendly to my views on the Rosenbergs...

...I've been reminded more than once of that evening, particularly since the publication this summer of Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton's The Rosenberg File, and the simultaneous paperback reissue of E.L...

...Indeed, the activist is absent altogether...

...Neither came...

...Partly because the Freedom of Information Act has given scholars access to material that was classified for over a quarter century...

...I had been mistaken for "one of them...

...And the novel, again like the scholars, declares the couple guilty, even though the prosecution manipulated the evidence...

...So Doctorow the novelist, while far from reactionary, can hardly be accused of fellow-traveling, much less Stalinism...

...In fact, most of Rad-osh and Milton's conclusions about the Rosenbergs had already been presented in The Book of Daniel-not, of course, as inferences from the actual record but as the views of the various characters...

...The camera pulls back, and an appallingly cliche helicopter shot reveals the crowd to be an island of activity in the middle of New York's Central Park...

...For instance, the novel anticipates the historians' demonstration that the American Communist Party was indifferent to the welfare of the imprisoned Paul and Rochelle Isaacson (Doctorow's fictional names), being primarily concerned with exploiting their plight -and especially their children's-for propaganda purposes...

...Oh yeah," he said, "The New Leader...

...A wave of apprehension immediately swept over me...

...The American Left is in this great moment artfully reduced to the shabby conspiracies of a couple named Paul and Rochelle Isaacson...

...The tactics used against the Rosenbergs are, alas, only too deserving of assault, but they have often been presented not as abuses of the system but as symptoms...

...The least interesting thing to say about Daniel is that it is a clumsily directed film with earnestly inept performances by Timothy Hutton as the title character and Mandy Patinkin as his father...

...Male and female alike sported wire-rimmed glasses, long hair (still fashionable then), frizzy sweaters, or tweed jackets with elbow patches...

...that some people opposed Richard Nixon, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist without supporting Hiss or the Rosenbergs...

...A lot of its writers were in trouble during the McCarthy years, right...

...The other guests did not seem to share my surprise...

...that it was possible to fight both McCar-thyism and Stalinism...

...Yet as my fellow contributor Walter Goodman has written elsewhere, "the plain fact is that it is the Left that has kept up the drumbeat [of the Rosenberg affair] as part of a continuing assault on America's institutions of justice...

...I could have taken this opportunity to inform my bespectacled acquaintance of the role that was really played by the writers and editors of The New Leader, Partisan Review, Commentary, and other like-minded journals in the political discourse of the late '40s and early '50s...

...I ate sparingly, saving space for the entree-a juicy steak, I hoped, or a hearty stew...

...They also began their work in the '70s, when the influence of the New Left was still felt in American politics...

...Sometimes, though, the pursuit of truth must be curtailed in the interest of maintaining decorum...

...Doctorow's The Book of Daniel and release of the movie Daniel, directed by Sidney Lumet from Doctorow's script...

...I was safe...

...More generally, why does concern with Stalinism persist in intellectual circles after most American Stalinists have died...

...Goodman goes on to characterize the current controversy, like the origi-nalone.asatussle between " those committed to the innocence" of Julius and Ethel and "those committed to their execution...

...The Rosenberg F/fehas outraged the Old Left, or what remains of it, and opened a new round of debate that will reach a climax, if not conclude, later this month with a forum jointly sponsored by the New Republic and the Nation at New York's Town Hall...

...Another passage has Artie Sternlicht, an Abbie Hoff-manesque radical, telling the son of the executed parents: "TheAmerican Communist Party set the Left back fifty years...

...Radosh, Milton and Goodman himself can't be the only reasonable intellectuals...

...Narrating his own story in the book, Daniel speaks bitterly of "one of the Great Moments of the American Left...

...If Daniel can be taken as any indication, one of the Left's major shortcomings today is sentimentality...

...The first course was a spinach and mushroom salad, the second a sliver of quiche...

...Unfortunately my companion, blissfully unaware of such decades-old disputes, chose the moment to mention casually that I was a contributor to The New Leader...

...Still, the reasons for re-examining the fate of these convicted criminals in the first place bear some exploration...

...The rest were mostly middle-level bureaucrats in government or private nonprofit agencies...

...Communists have no respect for people, only for positions, " says theeponymous son, Daniel Lewin, ne Isaacson...

...The screenplay, however, has been stripped of both Daniel's ironic first-person perspective and Sternlicht's shrewd understanding of history...

...That is why they arrested Rochelle, to make me talk," Paul realizes...

...I could have pointed out that, as readers of this magazine know, victims of Right-wing Red-baiting could and did suffer at the hands of the Left as well (the Shachtmanites, for example...

...As Eric Bentley has remarked, the Old Left was so two-faced, it couldn't acknowledge its own existence...

...But to my astonishment, only one person reacted, and he hardly seemed ready to perpetrate manslaughter...

...for the proper application of historical understanding, not invective...

...After the names "Michael" and "Robert" were bandied about with great familiarity for a while, it suddenly dawned on me who they were...

...Your folks were framed," a reporter tells Daniel, "but that doesn't mean they were innocent babes...

...I suppose I should have anticipated their delicacy from looking at them...

...Not about the truth, which I don't think was ever that much in doubt even on the Left, but about civility, which is as badly strained now as it was 30 years ago?thanks to both sides to the dispute...

...Reading Doctorow's novel for the first time, I was surprised to discover that he, too, writing in 1971 just after the New Left's apogee, was quite critical of the Old Left...

...The key problem of the Stalinist Old Left was duplicity that reached the point of immoral self-deception: portraying the national interest of the Soviet Union as "internationalism," clothing the Party line in the rhetoric of "peace," justifying barbarism in the name of "history" or "progress...

...It is interesting to note that the authors of both books claim they initially believed in the innocence of their subjects, then changed their minds as the evidence mounted to the contrary...

...By now the conversation had turned to politics, though strangely enough not to the provincial Washington variety that seems to outsiders like the petty squabbling of a company town...

...Thirty years later, the Rosenbergs are still news...

...Moreover, I was rendered speechless by my interlocutor's ignorance, not to mention that of his friends...

...Remember Orwell's description of British Socialists...

...In fact, nothing else was served...

...Thus Daniel—unlike The Book of Daniel, where three possible endings are offered-Suggests that its hero's future lies with the New Left, as his roots are to be found in the Old...

...It seemed to me that if someone was espousing a cause nearly as old as he was, he could at least inform himself of its history...

...The Rosenberg File and Allen Weinstein's book on Hiss, Perjury, are the foremost results of the investigations that ensued...

...I made small talk while desperately trying to signal my date that I wanted to escape...

...The movie ends with Daniel-having failed as he does in the book, to definitively settle the question of his parents' guilt-attending a large peace rally...

...Surely, though, some of the participants must fall between these two extremes...

...Some were lawyers, though none appeared to be practicing what he or she professed...

...The target is the system...