Rosenbergs

8 Key excerpts on "Rosenbergs"

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  Imagining Russia

  Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in U.S.–Russian Relations

  • Kimberly A. Williams(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  As a result of this conflation, anyone who strayed from the conservative Christian agenda—including liberals, radicals, Jews, immigrants, leftist artists and intellectuals, and labor, civil, and women's rights activists and organizations—became suspect and were effectively rendered “communist” in U.S. popular and political culture. This led not only to ruined careers and public ostracism, but also to the eventual implosion of the political left as a result of internal disagreements and self-imposed censorship. But regardless of the truth of their guilt or innocence, the Rosenbergs were swept up in the summer of 1950 into a discursive maelstrom in which every identity by which they could possibly have defined themselves was in direct opposition to the accepted norm of that historical moment. Both Ethel and Julius were active members of the Communist Party in the era of McCarthy, HUAC, and the Korean War, and the war framed their arrest, trial, and execution. 26 They made their lives and raised their children in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a well-known center of Jewish life and culture in the United States. They were working class during the arguably rhetorical ascendance of middle-class prosperity. They were the Jewish children of Russian immigrants living in a country with an overwhelmingly white, Christian body politic at a time of increased paranoia concerning the domestic “infiltration” of foreigners and the concomitant conflation of Jews with communist ideology. 27 The predominant national/ist narrative of post-war America required significant adjustment to accommodate the anathema that the Rosenbergs represented

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  Secret Agents

  The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America

  • Marjorie Garber, Rebecca Walkowitz, Marjorie Garber, Rebecca Walkowitz(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART TWO

  Agents

  Senator Joseph McCarthy. (AP/Wide World Photos) Passage contains an image

  9

  Before the Rosenbergs

  Espionage Scenarios in the Early Cold War Ellen Schrecker

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were typical victims of the McCarthy era, unique only in the severity of the sentence imposed on them. They were or had been Communists and their trial and execution were the culmination of an intensive five-year campaign to root Communism and all the individuals, ideas, and organizations associated with it out of American life. Whether or not the Rosenbergs were spies, most of their fellow citizens thought they were and assumed that their punishment, though extreme, was justified.

  That consensus has long since disappeared. Instead of having perpetrated the so-called crime of the century, the Rosenbergs became its victims—convicted on rather meager evidence and sentenced to death by a judge who colluded with the prosecution. No one, not even the most vocal advocates of the couple's guilt, believes that their trial was fair. It was, as Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton put it, “a grave miscarriage of justice.”1 Among the leading culprits were J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Judge Irving Kaufman, and an anti-Communist consensus that allowed the Rosenbergs to be killed and thousands of other political undesirables to be fired, jailed, deported, or otherwise punished.

  That consensus did not evolve spontaneously. It had been carefully nurtured and orchestrated by a network of anti-Communist activists. The most important member of that network was, of course, Hoover. Whatever his sexual orientation, there was nothing closeted about J. Edgar Hoover's commitment to anti-Communism. It was his lifelong mission. And he pursued his crusade against Communism with the same passion and brilliance that he devoted to building up the FBI and his and its reputation.2

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  No Respect

  Intellectuals and Popular Culture

  • Andrew Ross(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 While scientists had publicly made it clear, from the mid-forties on, that there was no atom bomb “secret,” and that the Manhattan Project had made no significant discoveries in the course of its development of the bomb, the assumption that a “secret” existed and had been passed on to Soviet Russia nonetheless formed the basic premise of the Cold War and, consequently, set the agenda for future U.S. foreign policy.

  Unlike other famous defendants in the “trials” of this period—blue-chip liberals in the State Department like Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, hard-core intellectuals like J. Robert Oppenheimer, or committed cultural workers like the Hollywood Ten—the Rosenbergs appeared to be “just folks.” In fact, official calculations of the enormity of their alleged crime seemed to escalate in direct proportion to the increasingly mundane revelations of their everyday middle-of-the-roadness. While their “guilt” was being measured against the average mean of their very ordinary lives, their “innocence,” for a while, seemed to rest upon the disparity between these prosaic lives and the fantastic figures cut by spies and foreign agents in the pages of detective novels and in crime melodramas on radio and television. Michael Meeropol, one of the Rosenberg sons, recalls how the family was listening to The Lone Ranger at the time of his father’s arrest by the FBI in 1950: “The radio episode concerned bandits trying to frame the Lone Ranger by committing crimes with ‘silver-looking’ bullets. Just as someone was exposing the fraud by scraping the bullets to show they were softer than silver and only silver-colored, an FBI man turned off the radio. I turned it on: he turned it off again.”4 As things got worse for the family, no 18 one could be sure whether the radio had in fact been figuratively turned off, or whether the “case” was being constructed out of the generic formulae of a broadcast spy fiction. This, at any rate, was his father, Julius’s, response to the FBI charges; he said they were “fantastic—something like kids hear over the television on the Lone Ranger program.”5 As for Michael, for whom the primal scene of his future political life had been the coitus interruptus of a radio program, his visits to his parents in Sing Sing prison were all confusingly experienced through the imaginative filter of “private detective radio shows” in which the FBI tended to be the unquestioned heroes. Television, of course, was the harder drug, and Meeropol remembers that many of the auto and beer commercials that first captured his fancy were actually the scene of a second birth; they were written by the man who was to adopt the Rosenberg children after their parents’ death.6

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  Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibility of Computer Professionals

  • Bernadette Longo(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • ACM Books

    (Publisher)

  Sobell was convicted of espionage along with the Rosenbergs, but received a 30-year prison sentence instead of death. In 2008, at the age of 91, Sobell admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg stole classified, non-atomic information on radar and artillery devices and passed it along to Russian contacts. 43 He explained, “I helped an ally (admittedly illegally) during World War II. I chose not to cooperate with the government in 1950. The issues are now with the historians.” 44 Facing the need to decide whether to grant the Rosenberg’s plea for executive clemency, Eisenhower decided against clemency, stating publicly that their crime “far exceeds that of the taking of the life of another citizen; it involves the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation and could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.” 45 In a private letter to a friend who was in favor of commuting the sentence to life imprisonment, Eisenhower explained more about his views regarding the need for a stronger stance against Communism: As to any intervention based on consideration of America’s reputation or standing in the world, you have given the case for one side. What you did not suggest was the need for considering this kind of argument over and against the known convictions of Communist leaders that free governments—and especially the American government—are notoriously weak and fearful and that consequently subversive and other kinds of activity can be conducted against them with no real fear of dire punishment on the part of the perpetrator. It is, of course, important to the Communists to have this contention sustained and justified. . . . The action of these people has exposed to greater danger of death literally millions of our citizens

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  The Venona Secrets

  Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

  • Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Regnery History

    (Publisher)

  50

  Morton Sobell was sentenced to thirty years in prison; David Greenglass, despite testifying truthfully about his own activities and those of his sister and brother-in-law, was sentenced to fifteen years.51 Sobell, who declined to testify in his own defense, served eighteen-and-a-half years in federal prison. He still denies his guilt but admits his leftist sympathies. In 1979 he visited Communist Cuba and when he returned tried to organize a shipment of electronics, books, and magazines for Cuban institutions.52

  For a time, while the Rosenbergs sat on death row, the Communists continued to ignore the case because it showed a too obvious link between the American Communist Party and Soviet espionage. Without the open support of the Communist Party, the defense campaign started in low key with the publication in August 1951 of a series of articles by leftist journalist William A. Reuben. Published in the National Guardian, a New York weekly edited by Cedric Belfrage, a British citizen exposed in Venona as a Soviet agent, the case did not receive much attention. No Daily Worker stories appeared on the Rosenbergs until after the death sentences were pronounced. Even then, for months there were only occasional stories, mainly citing other people’s views that the death penalty was too harsh. It was not until January 3, 1952, that the official voice of the Communist Party, the Daily Worker, in a small story on page 3, announced the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case.

  Soon thereafter a major Communist campaign was launched on behalf of the Rosenbergs. There was a reason. The Rosenberg case was needed to distract attention from the case of Rudolf Slansky, the general secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who was arrested in December 1951. He was Jewish, as were most of his codefendants in the purge trial that the Czech Communist secret police ran a year later. To counter the bad image created throughout the world by the Czech Communist anti-Semitic purge, the Rosenberg defenders stressed the Rosenbergs’ Jewish origin to accuse the United States of anti-Semitism. They ignored the fact that the judge, Irving Kaufman, was also Jewish, as was the prosecutor, Irving H. Saypol, and much of his staff.

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  Judgment and Mercy

  The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs

  • Martin J. Siegel(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Three Hills

    (Publisher)

  10

  The clerk read the indictment—a jumble of legalese that boiled down to the government’s accusation that Julius and Ethel, David Greenglass, a radar expert named Morton Sobell, and their absent Soviet handler Anatoli Yakovlev had conspired to violate the 1917 Espionage Act during wartime by transmitting national security information to the USSR. It didn’t matter that Russia had been an American ally during the war; the law covered information given to any “foreign power.”

  Attention then turned to selecting a jury from among the three hundred people called in for the job. The process was remarkable mostly for the absurdly long list of groups and publications Judge Kaufman read to them to determine political bias—over 150 in all. Most were on Clark’s list of subversive organizations. Several potential jurors expressed opposition to capital punishment and were immediately excused, though Kaufman reiterated that he was the one who would decide any sentence.

  As the hours ground on and selection continued, Manny Bloch hit what would become a recurring note throughout the case: that no one should get the strange idea that communism was on trial. When a potential juror confessed that he couldn’t give the same credence to testimony from a communist as from someone else, Bloch rose to “dissipate any misimpression … that the question of membership in the Communist Party is involved.” Puzzled, Kaufman asked whether Bloch wouldn’t want to know if a juror was biased against his clients. It was a sensible question. As one writer put it after the trial, how was a potential juror supposed to keep an open mind when “almost every newspaper, magazine, television or radio commentator, church sermon, employer’s speech, government spokesman, had done so much to fill his mind with fear and loathing of anything connected with communism?”11

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  Write like a Man

  Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals

  • Ronnie Grinberg(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  In 1948 Cohen wrote an internal report for the AJC, “The Problem of Disassociating Jews and Communism in the Public Mind.” He asked the AJC “to organize a direct campaign, using whatever media and channels available, designed to counteract the association of Jews and Communism frequently found in the public mind.” 83 Cohen saw Commentary as central to that initiative. According to Norman Podhoretz, who succeeded Cohen as editor in 1960, “The increasingly hard-line articles that he regularly published on Communism and the Soviet Union, while reflecting his own extreme anti-Stalinism, were also part of a secret program to demonstrate that not all Jews were Communists—even though, as all the world knew but as Commentary would have folded before admitting, Jews were disproportionately represented in the American Communist Party.” 84 The situation for American Jewry was especially perilous after the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on suspicion of espionage in the summer of 1950. Found guilty in March 1951 for passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Russians, the couple was executed by electric chair on July 19, 1953. Though Julius’s guilt was established years later, following the release of declassified US and Russian documents after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ethel’s death sentence remains controversial. In any event, evidence of the Rosenbergs’ crimes was kept from the public at the time. Many leftists and American Jews believed they were innocent, and that anti-Semitism undergirded the case. 85 The Rosenberg case terrified and divided the American Jewish community. It was “a definitional ceremony,” according to historian Deborah Dash Moore, “in which opposing versions of American Jewish identity competed for ascendancy.” On one side was a left-wing labor radical tradition “informed by Jewish and universal values.” On the other side was Cold War liberalism and an assimilated middle-class Jewish community

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  The Brother

  The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case

  • Sam Roberts(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  conspiracy he had summoned up when he had opened his case. But he methodically stripped away the layers of legal arcana, theatrically building to a stem-winding finale:

  I have said that there is much about this that we have not disclosed or that we do not know, but there is one part of the scheme that we do know about. You know about it because it was disclosed right before you. We know that these conspirators stole the most important scientific secrets ever known to mankind from this country and delivered them to the Soviet Union. We know that Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg infected Ruth and David Greenglass with the poison of communist ideology. We know that Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were engaged in a continuing campaign to enlist recruits for the Soviet cause through the Communist Party. And we know that in 1944 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg carried their campaign one step further and persuaded David Greenglass to steal atomic bomb secrets for the Rosenbergs to be turned over to the Soviet Union.

  Making few apologies for David and Ruth, Saypol rebutted the defense’s rationale point-blank:

  There is no condonation for the activities of the Greenglasses in 1944 and 1945. David Greenglass is a confessed member of the Rosenberg espionage ring. You heard his testimony and you observed him. You heard him confess his guilt. You heard him describe in detail his participation in this conspiracy. By his own plea of guilty, by his own voluntary act, without weaving a web of lies in an attempt to deceive you, he has made himself liable to the death penalty, too. The spurious defense that Greenglass or the Greenglasses, in order to satisfy a business grudge, a business dispute against the Rosenbergs has concocted a story about espionage . . . is as much of a concoction as the story of the defendants that Greenglass went to his worst enemy, Julius Rosenberg, for help when he wanted to flee the country.

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