The Rosenberg file: what do we really know about the Rosenbergs and the case against them? - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - 40th anniversary of convicted spies' electrocution

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Jacob Cohen

IT is now forty years since the Rosenbergs were electrocuted, and the anniversary has given impetus to persistent questions and charges. Why were they killed, both of them? In England, Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist who provided the Soviets with far more accurate and useful information on the atomic bomb than anything that might have come from the Rosenbergs, got only 14 years, the maximum allowed under English law. (That law, like ours for treason, differentiates between betrayal to an enemy and betrayal, as it were, to a friend, and at the time of the atomic spying, 1944 45, the Soviets were allies, fighting Hitler.) Tried at a later time, a time of anti-Soviet "hysteria," under a hoary conspiracy statute dredged up to sustain the desired outcome (runs the charge), the Rosenbergs were eliminated for treasons which our own laws of treason would not have recognized. Would a government thus proved to be hellbent on sacrificial murder (we are asked) have scrupled at framing two innocents? Excessive punishment, ergo innocence, ergo beatification--runs the familiar non-sequitur.

In the academy, something like this alleged connection between the punishment and (the absence of ) crime is now being presented under the auspice of post-modernist theory. Typical is a new book by Virginia Carmichael: Framing History; The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press). The "framing" referred to in the title is not a "frame-up" in the familiar sense, where police and prosecutors deliberately concoct evidence and coerce perjuries in order to trap an innocent victim, but rather the narrative "frame" which (the post-moderns stipulate) precedes and therefore creates all renderings of factual reality. Driven by a story-line which saw the cold war as an apocalyptic struggle with the forces of evil and saw the Atom Bomb as a 'secret" which America somehow "owned" and which therefore could be lost only by theft, the FBI and the prosecutors needed traitors and, somehow, found the Rosenbergs. Was the frame-up intentional and malicious? The post-modernist scoffs at the traditionalist's fetish with mundane intentions. In their manner of reading, everything is a kind of frame-up. Did the Rosenbergs actually do the things they were accused of? How can we ever know, and who really cares? We are all trapped in our narrative cocoons (the Rosenberg defenders too, Dr. Carmichael concedes), incapable of resolving issues of disputed fact. The Rosenbergs had to be executed; the narrative demands an ending, in every sense of the term.

In both of these versions, we are encouraged to interpret the case from the perspective of the execution. Let us accept that invitation and recall how and why the Rosenbergs, Ethel as well as Julius, came to be killed, for what it may teach us about the frame-up alleged by the Rosenbergs' defenders and about America at that time.

A Time of Fear

WE CAN begin by agreeing, of course, with the commonplace which Dr. Carmichael serves up as revelation. It was indeed a time of great fear of the Soviets and of the "subversives" who allegedly served them as spies and/or spiritual boosters. And, the bomb was indeed considered a stealable secret, loss of which to the Soviets could prove deadly. When news came, on August 29, 1949, that the Soviets had tested a bomb, years before it was expected, there were indeed many demagogic calls, in the media and on the stump, to find and severely punish, even execute, the thieves, the traitors.

The search quickly produced results. In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in England, after Soviet messages pointing to him were intercepted and decoded. He immediately confessed, in elaborate and checkable detail, about extensive spying--telling, among other things, about the information he had given the Soviets while working at Los Alamos in 1945. In part as a result of Fuchs's confession, his American courier, Harry Gold, was arrested in May, and Gold too confessed, in elaborate and checkable detail, not only about receiving atomic information and conveying it to his Russian superior (whom he named) but also about his life as a spy courier over many years. Gold's confession led directly to a second source of atomic information, David Greenglass, an Army corporal who had worked as assistant foreman in the laboratory at Los Alamos where the lens mechanism for the Bomb was developed. Like Fuchs and Gold, Greenglass confessed immediately, in elaborate and partly checkable detail. (Despite their eager cooperation, both Gold and Greenglass got stiff sentences. Gold, thirty years; Greenglass, fifteen.)

It was Greenglass and his wife Ruth, an active collaborator, who immediately fingered Julius Rosenberg, David's brother-in-law, and then, gradually, over months of interrogation, his sister Ethel. According to the Greenglasses: Julius had totally dropped out of the Communist Party in 1943 in order to do secret work (a familiar procedure). An ardent Communist avid to help the Soviet Union, Julius had aggressively sought the assignment. During the war he had supplied the Soviets with classified military data gathered from the Signal Corps, where he worked, and later, when he was dropped from the Corps for lying about his Communist past, he supplied secret military information obtained from a job at Emerson Electric. When Greenglass entered the army and was sent to Los Alamos, it was Rosenberg--his hero, he said--who first told him, in some detail, about the atomic bomb being developed there and who recruited him to gather information about the bomb. Twice Julius had personally received atomic information from him in New York and directed him to other contacts there; it was Rosenberg, the Greenglasses said, who arranged and funded the elaborate procedures involved in their conveying atomic information to Harry Gold in New Mexico.