Ethel Rosenberg with her brother, David Greenglass, in better days
David Greenglass died last summer at the age of 92, but the
sleuths from the New York Times found out about it only last week. He had been living for the last half
century in deep obscurity under a false name. His actual name will mean little to most of my readers, but
he will be remembered by future American historians at a level at least one
above the footnote. A footnote was
the best I myself could do for him in The
Anti-Communist Manifestos (p. 355n).
David
Greenglass was the younger brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who with her husband
Julius was electrocuted at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953. The Rosenbergs had been convicted of
treasonous espionage for transmitting to Soviet agents stolen information
containing “the secret of the atomic bomb.” The source of the documents was actually Greenglass, a spy
working as a machinist at the top secret atomic installation in Los Alamos, NM. There was plenty of evidence to convict
Julius Rosenberg. But Greenglass
and his wife Ruth sealed Ethel’s fate as well with testimony claiming that she played
an active conspiratorial role by creating with a typewriter a fair copy of some
of information supplied by her brother.
For their cooperation David was given a comparatively short prison
sentence and Ruth escaped without doing time at all.
All
four were Communists, actual Communists, with a shared background in a
fascinating, vanished world: that of the politically radical intellectual and working-class
Jewish life of New York in the Thirties.
Many on the left regarded the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of Cold War
hysteria and the Greenglasses as lying turncoats. It was an article of faith among Western Communists that the
Rosenbergs had been framed. For
most of them this was a sincere belief, not a cynical pose. As the execution date neared there were
protest demonstrations in several American cities. In Europe, especially France and Italy, the protests were
huge.
What
can we say now, with certainty, probability, or even plausible possibility? Leaving aside the propriety of capital
punishment, we can begin with the fact that there was no such thing as the secret of the atomic bomb, and it is
at least uncertain that David’s crude sketch of the implosion lens was of
practical use to the Russians.
Intention is something else.
Julius was certainly a Soviet agent and a spy. So was David, a gung-ho American Communist of the most naïve
sort, who dissimulated his way through an incompetent security screening, but
then did his level best to convert his fellow workers at Los Alamos to the Soviet
cause! (The Keystone Cops
dimension of our security services is a hallowed tradition). Ethel was certainly an ideologically
committed Stalinist and almost
certainly an active conspirator in the spy ring; but it is likely that the
government prosecutors went after her primarily in a futile attempt to secure a
confession from her husband. It is
quite possible, as was his much later claim, that David’s direct testimony
about her was perjured. He may
have sacrificed his sister to save his wife--if Ruth was the one who really sat
at the typewriter. It is possible,
therefore, that Ethel was wrongly convicted—which is different from being
innocent of the crime of which she was charged.
The
term “historical climate” is a rather vague one, but historical climates do
exist, even if they can usually be described only in retrospect and then with
only partial accuracy. I had
already entered my teenage years when first the Chambers-Hiss affair and then
the Rosenberg trial devolved. I
had strong political interests, and I followed them avidly. But they now seem nearly as distant and
elusive as the ecclesiastical politics of Tudor England. I say “ecclesiastical” with intent, for
I have discovered that the historiography of the Cold War often reveals a kind
of theological superstructure usually associated with faith communities.
My
book The Anti-Communist Manifestos
(2009) had accidental beginnings.
I had taught and admired Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon, and I stumbled upon “Jan Valtin” and Out of the Night by
the merest chance. I began to see
that there had been a genuine literary dimension
to those Cold War Years which were the dawn of my personal political
consciousness. That was a
perception likely to intrigue any literature professor, but I never would have
written the book save for another encounter with the Zeitgeist of 1950. In April of 2007 NYU hosted a one-day
conference on the theme “Alger Hiss and History”. I set off to this conference with the humility of a pupil
rather than the confidence of a professor.
The
venue for the series of talks was the large auditorium of the Law School on
Washington Square South. This is a
big room, and it was mostly full.
I began to get the drift of things when the keynote speaker turned out
to be Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation
magazine, a journal that spent approximately half a century arguing Hiss’s
innocence and demanding his vindication.
As the day wore on I came to realize that of the four hundred people in
that room, three hundred and ninety of them were sincerely convinced of Hiss’s
innocence! To hold any other view
was closer to political criminality than mere stupidity. And like trees planted by the water,
they would not be moved.
I
then knew that I had to write a
book. This not because I thought I
had any new information or insight about Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers. I was and am convinced of Hiss’s
espionage and his perjury, but so by now was practically everybody else—aside,
that is, from the demographic wildly overrepresented in the NYU Law School
auditorium. But I was now
fascinated by the puzzling fact that a whole generation of western
intellectuals—tens of thousands in Europe, but thousands here in America too—could
have become true believers in the Soviet sham, and its full-throated
supporters. I never came up with
a comprehensive explanation, though I had fun looking for one.
