The Rosenbergs Revisited
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
A STORY WITH NOHEROS The Rosenbergs Revisited BY DAVID M. OSHINSKY In the summer of 1949 an American spy plane returned from Asia with photographs revealing strong traces of radioactive material....
...in fact, its agents had already done a ' background' investigation of the play's author...
...The American Civil Liberties Union safely ignored the case (a volunteer general counsel and board member of the organization who offered to infiltrate the Rosenberg defense team on behalf of the FBI was wisely turned down...
...Another irony is that the Rosenberg case may have cost Irving Kaufman what he wanted most-a seat on the Supreme Court...
...Radosh and Milton do a superb job in describing the backstage battle over the death sentences...
...Was it simply a coincidence that the defendants, the witnesses, the chief prosecutor, and the judge were all Jewish...
...But a careful study of FBI (and other) documents, Radosh and Milton report, "strongly suggests that Kaufman participated in highly improper ex parte communications with various individuals connected with the prosecution...
...In New York City school officials began distributing metal "dog tags" and holding practice drills in which youngsters were taught to dive under their desks and shield their eyes from an atomic blast...
...Or perhaps he truly believed that the Rosenbergs had dealt a severe bio w to national security...
...The news quickly got worse...
...Though by no means the complete innocent...
...Even the Rosenberg children acknowledge that their father perjured himself by denying membership in the Communist Party...
...that it coincided with the completion of an exhausting project for the Reeves Instrument Company...
...Samuel Allison of the University of Chicago added that "these sketches may not have permitted the reproduction of a lens exactly of the dimensions of those used in our bombs, but that is not important...
...The government's case against her was based on the belated recollections of Ruth and David Greenglass, nothing more...
...Were America's leading scientists (excluding Urey) bullied into silence by the fear that anyone who spoke up for the Rosenbergs would be labeled a Red...
...Though the record indicates [their] rough character," wrote Sharp...
...Three decades later, these questions are very much alive...
...In 1957, the authors note, he phoned J. Edgar Hoover to complain that a journalist planned to interview SobelPs wife for a book he was writing on the spy case...
...From that point forward, he centered his attention on obtaining material about the atomic bomb...
...and his desperate flight to Mexico in the spring of 1950...
...And the bachelor Hoover (who loved his mother dearly) complained that a double execution would leave two small children orphaned...
...For the first time, the clamor for a preventive atomic strike gained responsible adherents...
...July saw the arrest of Julius Rosenberg...
...In November Greenglass added these words: "My darling, I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project that Julius and his friends have in mind...
...Thecon-clusion was obvious: The Soviet Union had exploded an atomic device...
...an ominous footnote to the first decade of postnu-clear history...
...For example: Sobell claims that his trip to Mexico was a family vacation...
...In his excellent assessment of the book, James Wein-stein, editor of In These Times, a Socialist weekly, observes that "any reader not encumbered with an ideological axe to grind will find Radosh and Milton's conclusions convincing...
...On August}, 1948, after "tailing" Max Elitcher all the way from Washington to Morton Sobell's home in Queens, New York, FBI agents broke off surveillance for the evening...
...His recruits included several of his former engineering classmates from the City College of New York-joel Barr, Alfred Sarant and Morton Sobell, among others-who were then working for the Navy, the Army Signal Corps and defense-related industries...
...Of course, the FBI never publicly acknowledged that its agents had followed Elitcher to Queens...
...He added: "I am mean enough to try to stay here [on the Supreme Court] long enough so that K will be too old to succeed me...
...In 1952, the Rosenberg defense team tried to get a series of prominent scientists to state publicly that the government's case was a fraud...
...Radosh and Milton contend that Ethel "probably knew of and supported her husband's endeavors," but they do not portray her as an active co-conspirator...
...Hardly a year has gone by without a new book, a play or a documentary on the Rosenbergs...
...Every nerve, every fiber of my body has been taxed...
...he did, however, attempt to establish his innocence in his 1974 autobiography, On Doing Time...
...One first-grader explained his tag this way: "That's if a bomb gets me in the street, people will know what my name is...
...Throughout the autumn months Congress debated and finally passed the Internal Security (McCarran) Act, an extraordinarily repressive measure...
...after all, the Rosenbergs had embarrassed the "respectable" Jewish community...
...All of our democratic institutions are directly involved in this great conflict...
...it compromised our system of justice...
...Weinstein's words cannot be casually dismissed...
...In the summer of 1943 he began his own spying operation without the encouragement of Soviet authorities...
...They would have revealed the idea of the lenses, and with this idea, a trained physicist could have easily designed them accurately...
...Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the Rosenbergs to death by electrocution...
...Perhaps he gave the people what they wanted...
...As a former Communist, he knew several members of the Rosenberg spy ring intimately...
...On January 22, 1950, a New York jury found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury...
...In her 1945 confession to the FBI, for instance, Elizabeth Bentley, aSoviet courier known as the "Blond Spy Queen," talked at length about a government engineer who lived on "the lower East Side of the City of New York...
...The punishment to be meted out in this case must therefore serve the maximum interest for the preservation of our society against these traitors in our midst...
...Ever since Hiroshima, Americans had been taught to depend on nuclear superiority, to assume that the technology was uniquely their own...
...On September 26 Congressman Harold Velde (R.-Ill., a future House Un-American Activities Committee chairman) echoed the words of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and other "experts" in the field: "The Russians undoubtedly gained 3-5 years in producing the atomic bomb because our government from the White House down has been sympathetic toward the views of the Communists...
...Greenglass worked on these molds for a considerable period of time and must therefore have been familiar with their charge...
...Why were so many people outside the United States convinced of the Rosenbergs' innocence...
...As Radosh and Milton write, "it would have been awkward to have to admit that the Bureau had flubbed a chance to crack the Rosenberg spy ring a f ull year and a hal f before the British obtained a confession from Klaus Fuchs...
...The Rosenberg File supports at least three of these contentions, adding fresh material gleaned from various primary sources...
...In December word reached home that American troops in Korea were in full retreat before an advancing Communist Chinese Army...
...Describing himself as "a soldier of Stalin," Julius wanted to help the Russians modernize both their economy and their military machine...
...Indeed, by your betrayal you have undoubtedly altered the course of history to the disadvantage of your country...
...But the web of circumstantial evidence against Julius, in particular, is simply overwhelming...
...But resistance arose over the sentence that Ethel should receive...
...New York's Sherry Netherland Hotel placed Geiger counters in its best suites...
...The Soviet Union lacked the ability to deliver an atomic weapon, but Administration officials prepared for the worst...
...Unfortunately, the book raises more questions than it answers...
...The reasons were transparent...
...Second, the Communists needed something, anything, to deflect attention from the outrageously anti-Semitic purges and executions then taking place in Czechoslovakia...
...The Russians had stolen the biggest secret of all...
...I have deliberated for hours, days, nights," he declared...
...It is so difficult to make people realize t hat this country is engaged in a life and death struggle with a completely different system...
...And most of them have had one thing in common: a desire to propagandize, not to inform...
...The new finding could mean only one thing: espionage...
...In short, the Rosenbergs had become pawns in a propaganda war?a war in which their deaths would be counted as a victory" for the Communists, the prosecutors, the judge and the FBI...
...In June, 1944, for example, Greenglass wrote his wife:" Darling, I have been reading a lot of books on the Soviet Union...
...Then, in 1952, the party reversed itself and launched a sickening campaign to exploit the suffering of the couple and their children...
...his Communist connections...
...His behavior, so strongly approved in 1951, seemed more vindictive and less heroic as the years rolled by...
...Again, in 1969, when a play sympathetic to the Rosenbergs had a short run in a Cleveland, Ohio, theater, Kaufman contacted the Bureau to express his 'alarm' over the fact that the play received not one but two reviews in different sections of the New York Times...
...Since war with Stalin was inevitable, why not fire the first shot...
...The authors answer both questions in convincing fashion...
...They did so, FBI documents reveal, because Elitcher had become "tail conscious" and because his car was safely parked in front of Sobell's house...
...America's nuclear monopoly had come to an end...
...Julius Rosenberg was deeply committed to the Soviet cause and to the "coming revolution" in America...
...There is no smoking gun in The Rosenberg File, no document that clinches the case once and for all...
...They are really geniuses, every one of them...
...must have been overwhelmed at finding himself publicly branded an 'atom spy' and psychologically unprepared to adjust to the isolation and powerlessness of prison life...
...Supreme Court...
...Sobell's friendship with Rosenberg...
...They portray him, instead, as the victim of circumstances-a man who had the astonishingly bad luck to funnel industrial secrets to a friend involved in a much more dangerous game...
...Radosh and Milton approach this problem by posing some questions of their own: Were Greenglass' sketches as useless as some people alleged...
...The Supreme Court maj ority, led by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, resembled a lynch mob in the days preceding the execution...
...Air raid drills became the order of the day, with "simulated" Russian bombings in large metropolitan centers...
...Senator John McClellan (D.-Ark...
...And why did his superior at Reeves Instrument tell the FBI that "Sobell's taking time off was strange, inasmuch as the project on which he had been working was not completed and his assistance was greatly needed...
...Radosh and Milton do not charge Sobell with anything remotely resembling atomic espionage...
...By quoting from letters and memos buried in (of all places) the Rosenberg-Sobell defense files, they conclude that Greenglass did provide rather valuable information to the Soviet Union...
...In August his wife Ethel and his friend Morton Sobell joined him in prison...
...I judge that Mr...
...Early in 1951 the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell were convicted on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage (although Judge Irving R. Kaufman, a master of hyperbole, accused them of "putting" the A-bomb "into the hands of the Russians...
...Neither my husband nor I have ever been Communists and we don't know any Communists," she told reporters on the eve of her arrest...
...Kaufman's speech that day was a masterpiece of Cold War rhetoric: "The issue of punishment in this case is presented in a unique framework of history...
...and that the timing was unrelated to the arrest of David Greenglass (though "it seemed to us that America was veering toward fascism in 1950 with mass roundups, concentration camps, and death ovens a la Hitler...
...Kaufman understood the correlation between public opinion and his own career...
...The crimes of the Rosenbergs were very real indeed...
...It later turned out that Sobell and Elitcher had taken a midnight ride to Manhattan in Sobell's automobile...
...Writing to a friend in 1958, Justice Felix Frankfurter said of Kaufman: "I despise a Judge who feels God told him to imposeadeath sentence...
...Their evidence comes from private correspondence unavailable to previous researchers...
...In 1944, quite by accident, Julius learned that Ethel's brother, an Army sergeant named David Greenglass, had been assigned to a ma-chineshopat Los Alamos, New Mexico, site of the famed Manhattan Project...
...First, the Rosenbergs had made it crystal clear that they were willing to go to their deaths without squealing on their comrades, so they were no longer a danger to the party...
...The American Jewish Committee called for the death sentence in a pathetic attempt to show that Jews could be tough on Jews...
...I can see how farsighted and intelligent those leaders are...
...Unlike other students of the case, the authors take issue with Nobel prize-winning physicist Harold Urey, who sent a telegram to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the eve of the executions saying that "a man of Greenglass' capacity is wholly incapable of transmitting the physics, chemistry and mathematics of the bomb to anyone...
...When Ethel was arrested in 1950, one of the prosecutors said privately that "the case is not too strong against Mrs...
...The statute of limitations on the real charge-diplomatic espionage-had run out...
...the scientific evidence against the Rosenbergs was extremely weak...
...He continued to interfere in the case long after it had left his jurisdiction-Indeed, long after the Rosenbergs had been executed...
...The effort failed...
...An overwhelming majority of Americans applauded the outcome, yet some nagging questions remained...
...Caught between the accusations of her brother and blind loyalty to her husband, Ethel performed dismally on the witness stand...
...The Rosenberg case did violence to America in a number of ways...
...The American Communist Party behaved with predictable hypocrisy...
...Like Julius, Ethel Rosenberg lied boldly about her political convictions...
...This was part of the government's "lever strategy"-a strategy that would lead an unyielding woman directly to her death...
...In 1953, following numerous appeals, the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing Prison, just north of New York City...
...and it made us look frightening-and vengeful-In theeyes of the world...
...We would become the first aggressors for peace...
...This information was not a magic formula for A-bomb production," note Radosh and Milton, "but it could well have enabled the Russians to avoid the highly expensive and elaborate duplication efforts undertaken by the United States, which included building enormous fuel-processing plants in two locations-one for plutonium in Washington State and two for different methods of uranium processing in Tennessee...
...He eventually changed his mind after receiving secret FBI reports that "Ethel was not a good mother after all...
...It tarnished the independent Left while strengthening the radical Right...
...It allowed opportunists to masquerade as patriots and zealots to pose as martyrs...
...Radosh and Milton believe that Morton Sobell was deeply involved in industrial espionage...
...Significantly, Radosh and Milton' s analysis of the FBI's performance is more original, and ultimately more damning than those of the Rosenbergs' supporters...
...He went by the code name "Julius," she recalled, and he" was tall, thin, and wore horn rimmed eyeglasses...
...he claimed to be," they declare, "Morton Sobell...
...Why did he haunt the port city of Vera Cruz, trying desperately to book passage out of the country for himself and his family...
...It didn't get any stronger as time passed...
...I have come to a stronger and more resolute faith and belief in the principles of Socialism and Communism...
...Plainlywe must act now unless we want to welcome a second Pearl Harbor with open arms...
...It would win for us a proud and popular title," argued Navy Secretary Francis Matthews...
...with the result that it has been infiltrated by a network of spies...
...The irony," the authors observe, "is that for whatever reasons Kaufman?a New Yorker, a Jew, a Democrat, a man of otherwise libertarian instincts?felt compelled to impose punishments harsher than even J. Edgar Hoover [at the time] thought called for...
...reading, "Small farm-out beyond the atomic blasts," or "An estate in Belle Meade, Virginia-a safe 58 miles from Washington...
...On April 5, 1951-judgment day for the Rosenbergs and Sobell?Kaufman dramatically portrayed himself as a man alone, doing the work of God, the boys in Korea and freedom-loving people everywhere...
...The FBI was concerned too...
...the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason...
...Their primary determinations, that the Rosenbergs were spies as well as victims of Cold War justice, have earned the applause of most reviewers and the contempt of the sectarian Left, which lives in its own world of government plotting, Soviet benevolence and selective objectivity...
...Toledo's Mayor Michael DiSalle tried to calm worried residents by joking that he would build large neon signs directing Russian pilots to Cleveland and Detroit...
...In Washington, D.C., real estate agents put ads in local papers David M. Oshinsky is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers and author, most recently, of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy...
...February brought thearrest of a British scientist, Klaus Fuchs, for passingatom-ic secrets to the Russians...
...The Sheriff of Kansas City inspected the surrounding quarries and found they could accommodate 840,000 people ?or bodies...
...They simply believed that their words would do more harm than good...
...Most books on the Rosenberg case agree on four major points: the Cold War atmosphere made a fair trial almost impossible...
...Why did he use a series of aliases when registering at hotels and purchasing airline tickets inside Mexico...
...Since other details in her confession did not match Rosenberg's background, the FBI took no action (despite the fact that Rosenberg had just been dismissed from the Army Signal Corps for alleged membership in the Communist Party...
...Count me in dear, or should I say it has my vote...
...Junewitnessed the North Korean attack across the 38th parallel...
...Was a fair trial really possible in the prevailing atmosphere of anger and fear...
...There are very few heros in the Rosenberg story...
...It was quickly-and quietly-discarded because the responses did nothing to help the Rosenberg cause...
...I believe your conduct...
...the Rosenberg lawyers performed dismally in court...
...Domestic reaction was severe...
...Clearly these scientists were not afraid to testify for the defense...
...others urged compassion for a variety of reasons...
...One memo from Malcolm Sharp, a law professor involved in Sobell's 1958 appeal, records with obvious dismay that Urey himself had doubts about the "irrelevance" of the Greenglass sketches...
...Far from framing the couple, they Find the Bureau apparently overlooked numerous "leads" in the case prior to 1950...
...Or perhaps he wanted to show the gentiles that a Jew could be tough on traitors...
...March, April and May were filled with Congressional testimony about Communist influence in the State Department...
...On the contrary, it appears that she was arrested in order to pressure Julius into confessing...
...At first its publications ignored the Rosenbergs...
...Urey's ambivalence was shared by others as well...
...He told the Rosenbergs: "I consider your crime worse than murder...
...The Korean War, coupled with the loss of America's atomic monopoly, sent shock waves through the nation...
...From the outset, they contend, the prosecutors, the Justice Department and J. Edgar Hoover were determined to send Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair...
...President Eisenhower denied clemency without ever understand-ing what the case was about...
...Years later, in a self-serving memo, an FBI official wrote: "It does not appear thatasurveyofallthe tenants of Knickerbocker Village [where Rosenberg lived] was conducted in view of the meager information and belief that 'Julius' was a cover name...
...A death-house questionnaire, prepared by prosecutors in the event that Julius would break down at the last moment, had this startling question attached:" Was your wi fe cognizant of your activities...
...Thus, the Justice Department worried that the execution of a woman with no previous criminal record would damage America's standing in the world...
...has already caused...
...How can one explain such behavior...
...It damaged our national security...
...That is what made the publication eight weeks ago of The Rosenberg File (Holt, 608 pp., $22.50) so different...
...In The Rosenberg File, Radosh and Milton demolish Greenglass' self-serving portrayal of himself as a troubled, immature, unwitting accomplice who had been "sucked into" the process by his overbearing brother-in-law...
...Authors Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton have sifted through a mass of new evidence, more than 200,000 pages released under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Although Greenglass' lens-mold sketches were admittedly crude, they still served an important purpose for the Soviets: They corroborated the information provided by Klaus Fuchs, reinforcing the fact that America had abandoned the uranium bomb in favor of a plutonium, implosion-type model...
...At the center of this battle was Judge Irving R. Kaufman, an astute young jurist with barely disguised ambitions to sit one day on the U.S...
...What the authors have done is to bolster the testimony of the prosecution witnesses-ruth and David Greenglass, Max Elitcher and Harry Gold-while shredding Julius' various denials (including the crucial one that he knew nothing about the atom-bomb project until after the Hiroshima explosion...
...On September 23 President Harry S. Truman broke the news in a one-sen-tence statement to the press: "We have evidence an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR...
...Was it possible-just possible-that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were framed...
...Furthermore, evidence gathered after publication of The Rosenberg File demonstrates that Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant fled behind the Iron Curtain following the arrest of David Greenglass in 1950, and that both men wound up working for the Soviet defense establishment...
...Why, then, did Sobell choose to cash in his return tickets in Mexico City...
...But their fate, as Radosh and Milton accurately put it, "remains a blot on America's conscience...
...Hans Bethe of Cornell wrote privately that "Mr...
...Radosh and Milton offer several theories without endorsing anyone of them...
...Nor did Kaufman's apparent maneuverings end with the trial...
...Sobell refused to testify at his trial...
...Before announcing his decision, Kaufman stressed that he had not asked the prosecutors to submit a formal recommendation on the sentences...
...He believed that Ethel was the ringleader and that the Rosenbergs had spied for money...
...And so, it appears, did the Rosenbergs' lawyers...
...One of the most significant (and generally overlooked) findings of The Rosenberg File concerns the importance of the scientific evidence that David Greenglass funneled to the Russians through the Rosenberg spy ring...
...Urey thinks they could have had some value for the Russians in indicating the lines along which our scientists thought it worthwhile to work...
...thought likewise...
...The prosecutors-especially Irving Say-pol and Roy Cohn-wanted the maximum penalty...
...and the death penalty was a form of political murder...
...Their evidence, admittedly circumstantial, is based on several factors: the testimony of Max Elitcher about a midnight ride to Rosenberg's neighborhood...
...Why had the British sentenced Klaus Fuchs to only 14 years in prison...
...The purpose of the trip, as Elitcher would testify, was to dropoff some material to Julius Rosenberg that Sobell considered "too good to throw away...
...This was not the worst of it...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 19
