The Significance of the Rosenberg Case
A speech by Michael Meeropol, Professor of Economics at Western New England College and the older son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg given at Matthew Vassar, September 21, 1995. Transcript provided by Arlene Tyner.
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REALLY INTRODUCTORY INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
This lecture is about history and politics and my family. I am pleased to have been invited here and especially pleased to see so many people out there. 1 sincerely hope that before this event is over the size of this Hall will not intimidate you -- that you will treat this like your classroom, in fact, that you'll treat this like your seminar room. In other words, I'm going to start this event but I'm counting on you to finish it. I'm counting on you to pick up on themes and issues I introduce in the first part - my presentation -- and take the discussion into whatever direction you wish. My plan is to speak for 55 minutes, almost a class session. Then, I promise to leave plenty of that time for questions and comments.
INTRODUCTION
This lecture is entitled, "The significance of the Rosenberg Case." What is that significance? In my view, it goes far beyond the fact that my parents were the only American civilians ever executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. The real significance is that they were charged, convicted and executed for supposedly stealing the secret of the atom bomb and placing our nation's very survival in jeopardy. To understand the significance of the case, you have to start there --- not with the crime they were technically accused of: conspiring to commit espionage in wartime to the advantage of a foreign power, but with the public perception that they committed the moral crime of treason. (In fact, the judge in sentencing them to death described their crime as treason!)
Another significance is that the case has always been controversial; not only because of the death penalty, but because of discoveries since the trial of perjuries on the part of the prosecution witnesses, and gross misrepresentations on the part of the government as to the nature of the "crime." Further, research since the 1970s has uncovered an incredible array of judicial improprieties stretching all the way to the Supreme Court. This controversy has led some commentators, from time to time, to admit that the guilt of my parents is not a settled historical truth -which often prompts an apoplectic response from the guardians of correct historical truth --- I invite you to ask me for examples!
THE CASE OF MY PARENTS WAS THE EPITOME OF COLD WAR AMERICA.
1) You had the issue of communism. Wasn't it automatically treason to even BE a communist, because communists owed their loyalty to the Soviet Union, not the United States and would do anything to further the ends of "world socialism"7 And once you get to that position, you reach the conclusion that anyone who is a communist, supports the ends of communists, (even unwittingly) has placed him or herself beyond the pale of "responsible dissent." -- they no longer deserve the protections of the Bill of Rights and other rights of citizenship.
[In my opinion that last point is the key to understanding the 1950s phenomenon known as McCarthyism! -- so I'll repeat it: THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND OTHER RIGHTS OF CITIZENSHIP NO LONGER APPLY TO COMMUNISTS and FELLOW TRAVELERS and others who (even unwittingly) AGREE WITH COMMUNISTS.]
2) You had the issue of the role of the FBI and other government agencies in "creating" cases against dissidents: Did they act within the law or did they break the law for what they believed was the "greater good?" Did the Courts (with a few praiseworthy exceptions) turn a blind eye to violations of due process and other rights because "this [struggle with communism] is a war?" or were my parents accorded all the rights due them with repeated opportunities to appeal to the Appeals Courts and Supreme Court? (as the government apologists have often asserted with great publicity!)
Does the case prove the necessity for having large secret government police agencies to protect our nation from spies and saboteurs masquerading as domestic radicals -- or is it rather that such agencies justify each other by chasing after each other [note: this is the rather self-serving argument made by CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames]. Do these agencies often manufacture cases to justify their own existence?
3) You had the issue of the secret of the Atomic Bomb and beyond that the balance of military power, which came to be known as the "balance of terror!": Were there important scientific, industrial and military secrets that when stolen significantly accelerated the construction of the Soviet A-Bomb? (this is the view of Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun (1) And was the Soviet bomb an unmitigated disaster for the United States and the world? There are some who might argue that nuclear parity, the balance of terror, was a good thing. It had kept the peace between the superpowers between the end of WW II and the demise of the Soviet Union. The Judge who sentenced my parents to death would not have agreed. He blamed them for emboldening the communists to begin the Korean War --President Eisenhower in denying clemency blamed my parents for any nuclear war that might occur in the future.
BEFORE I GET TO THE HEART OF MY PRESENTATION, A LITTLE TRUTH IN PACKAGING.
I'm in a funny position because I'm an interested party --- I believe and always have believed that my parents were framed and were innocent. In 1973, my brother and I abandoned our anonymity and began to work with people engaged in an effort to reopen the case. In 1975 we filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force government agencies to release hitherto secret documents and succeeded in forcing the release of tens of thousands of pages over the next three years (and material is still being reclassified and more will be released in the near future). We have written two editions of We Are Your Sons and I've just edited a complete edition of my parents' letters The Rosenberg Letters. There is no question my brother and I are partisans.
However, because everyone expects me to believe that my parents are innocent -- out of loyalty not necessarily out of objective fealty to the truth -- I have had to subject my personal analyses of the evidence in the case to the most extraordinary scrutiny. I HAVE to act AS IF I were an impartial objective observer (even though I'm not) because if I don't act that way, I can't possibly persuade anybody of anything. Thus, I must acknowledge every argument against my analysis, must acknowledge every piece of evidence thrown up by those seeking to show my parents were guilty, and must show my audiences that I can respond to them rationally, with facts and arguments rather than with anguished emotion.
(by the way, I shouldn't be making a big deal about this. ANY GOOD SOCIAL SCIENTIST, in fact ANY GOOD SCIENTIST of whatever discipline, should follow the same approach.]
I want to charge you in the audience with holding everything I say, both in this presentation and in the question period to that high standard. Even beyond that, I don't want you to accept anything I say just because I say it --- go check it out, I'll be giving out plenty of bibliographical references and, luckily, there will be NO QUIZ TOMORROW!
THE FACTS OF THE CASE.
My parents were charged with conspiracy. They were arrested in the summer of 1950, around the time the Korean War began. They were tried in 1951 while the war raged on, and their executions occurred in 1953 less than a month before the Korean armistice was signed. The government charged that in 1944 my parents convinced Ruth Greenglass to convince her husband David (my mother's brother and sister-in-law) to engage in espionage while he was at the Los Alamos facility where the first two types of Atomic Bombs were built. They further charged that in 1945 Greenglass succeeded in stealing the secret of the Atom Bomb and conveying its "important principle" in one key sketch. Some of these were transmitted to the Soviets via a man named Harry Gold (who supposedly met Greenglass in Albuquerque, NM in June of 1945).
[Gold had previously confessed to being a courier between the Soviets and the British scientist Dr. Klaus Fuchs -- who in February of 1950 had confessed to being a Soviet spy. It's important to note that the Fuchs-Gold part of the alleged spy ring never had any contact with the Greenglass Rosenberg part --- and there's never been any evidence to link Fuchs to my parents or to Greenglass. If you accept the government's case in its entirety, Gold was given a separate assignment on one of his trips -- he met Greenglass once and never met my father or mother.]
However, despite everything I've just mentioned, in order to convict my parents, the jury only had to believe that David and Ruth Greenglass were telling the truth when they described being persuaded by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to do what they confessed to doing, plus at least one overt action --- even something legal like Ruth Greenglass taking the train from NYC to Albuquerque (on the way to asking her husband to be a spy).
So what was the basis of the jury's decision? They believed the Greenglasses because they were confessing to serious crimes, one for which David, at least, could get the death penalty
[as part of a deal, Ruth was never indicted though she was named an unindicted co-conspirator and could have been indicted later on];
they believed the Greenglasses because Harry Gold corroborated what David said when he (Greenglass] confessed to being a spy. Finally, they believed the Greenglasses because the government asked my parents if they were communists and when my parents took the Fifth Amendment, the jury said, in effect, Ah HAH!! --- not only are these folks disgusting commies, but they won't even ADMIT IT!!
THE DARK SIDE OF THE 1950s in AMERICA.
Perhaps a digression is in order: Try to understand the mentality of the 1950s. Americans had won World War II and had looked forward to enjoying prosperity that had been denied them through a decade of depression and four years of wartime shortages. They also looked forward to military security --- they were the only military power not to have suffered massive destruction during the war and they had THE BOMB.
But this tranquility was soon disturbed. By 1949, our ex-ally the Soviet Union was now a sworn enemy -- and it surprised lots of people by exploding its own atomic bomb. Also at that time, American communists and fellow travelers (a pejorative term but it can be purely descriptive -- it means people who are not communists but support communist positions on just about every issue) were the object of strong hatred and fear in the U.S. They had been kicked out of unions, were not allowed in sensitive government work (President Truman had created a Loyalty Program for government employees in 1947], and were vilified in the press and cultural media as enemies of America. Communists were routinely called before congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee. They had to describe sinister activities, recant and name names or risk going to jail for Contempt of Congress. In 1950, the American Communist Party was indicted under the Smith Act which made it illegal to conspire to teach and advocate the overthrow of the US government by force and violence. The top leaders were convicted and sent to prison. Meanwhile, since the middle of 1950, communists had been shooting and killing American GIs in Korea.
A personal story is in order: In the Fall of 1951, I was eight years old, living with my grandmother in Manhattan while my parents were on Death Row during the appeals process. I had the bright idea that if people in the neighborhood knew I was my parents' child, their curiosity would be peaked and they'd read the few newspapers that were attempting to create support for a new trial. The first parent I met was very nice to me. The second parent threw me out of the house telling me she didn't want to catch me hanging around her son again. I heard her refer to me as a "communist" (I think it was the first time I'd heard that word!) She was terrified I would CONTAMINATE her son. THAT was a quintessential episode of the 1950s in my opinion. Note what the woman did was based on FEAR -- not meanness. A good parallel is the story of the ignorant reaction when Ryan White, a hemophiliac with AIDS, was driven out of a small town because other children's parents feared his presence in the school. Ignorance creates fear which, of course can also do some very hurtful things.
It was in this milieu of fear and anger that the prosecution asked my parents if they were communists and if they preferred Soviet communism to American democracy. My parents took the Fifth Amendment with obvious consequences.
THAT WAS IT --- the trial was based on credibility; my parents had no credibility.
Notice by the way, the bind they were in. They couldn't affirm that they were communists to avoid appearing sneaky. Just by admitting they were communists they would make themselves suspect. My father in 1945 had been fired from a government job and he had tried to get his job back by DENYING he was a communist. Admitting that he was a communist at the trial would involve admitting held committed perjury in 1945 and the government could use that to claim he was perjuring himself in 1951 by pleading not guilty to the charge of espionage --- held already admitting being a liar to save his job; wouldn't he definitely lie to save his life??
HOW CAN WE PROVE IT WAS A FRAME-UP?
We look at the specific things the government's witnesses said and see if we can discover independent evidence about those things.
Here's some examples
1) The Gold-Greenglass meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico:
They both testified that Harry Gold came to see Greenglass to pick UP SPY material. The code used was allegedly, "I come from Julius." Using material we pried loose from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, we discovered how this code, was "developed" over a period of months. In August of 1950, under oath both testified separately and said different things: Greenglass said nothing about a code while Gold said, "I bring greetings from Ben in Brooklyn." We have a document from the FBI showing that in December of 1950 Greenglass and Gold were interviewed by the FBI TOGETHER and there Greenglass said, "the name Ben would have meant nothing to me. Now if you had said Julius ..." Gold according to the FBI said, "spontaneously" that "possibly Greenglass was right that he had mentioned the name of Julius..." By the time of the trial "possibly" had been miraculously transformed to "definitely."
In addition, the hotel card the government used to "prove" Gold had been there proved a very shaky piece of evidence: the clerk's initials were not written by the clerk, the wrong date was stamped on the back, Harry Gold signed his own name even though he claimed to always use false names, it had no initials from FBI agents indicating when the card came into their possession. Also, the card was a photostat so it could not be examined for age of paper, and the original was returned to the Hotel (and destroyed) before the appeals process was even over. A number of researchers concluded the card was a forgery. I don't think that meeting ever took place.
2) There was testimony about a gift from the Russians, a console table that had been in my parents' apartment from 1944 till their arrests but was not presented in evidence at the trial. Here is the one example where the Greenglasses and my parents gave diametrically opposite testimony. The Greenglasses said it was a gift from the Soviets with a hollowed out section for microfilming. My parents said it was an ordinary table bought at Macy’s for $21. The jury had no independent means of verification so had to rely on who seemed more credible. (The prosecution helped by asking my father on cross-examination: "Don't you KNOW Mr. Rosenberg, you couldn’t BUY a table at Macy's in 1944 for less than $45?"). The table was found in 1953 and my parents' testimony proved truthful: no hollowed out portion for micro-filming and it was indeed bought at Macy’s for $21.
3) David and Ruth Greenglass' testimony against my mother consisted almost entirely of their statements that my mother typed up the spy notes that David had provided describing the working of the atom bomb. The prosecutor made much of this on summation: 11 ... she ... sat at that typewriter and struck the keys blow by blow against her country and in the interest of the Soviets." The files released by the FBI show that in August of 1950, after my mother's arrest but six months before the trial, David Greenglass denied she was involved in espionage at all.
In February of 1951 one of the prosecutors admitted to a Congressional committee that the evidence against my mother was "weak" [without the typing episode it was virtually nonexistent but that they had to convict her and "give her a good stiff prison sentence" in order to make my father talk! ] So, later
In February, in direct contradiction to that earlier statement, both Greenglasses told the FBI that my mother had "done the typing" --- If the jury had known that the Greenglass testimony changed 180 degrees, they might have thought differently about their credibility (and about my mother Is alleged "guilt") .
4) David and Ruth Greenglass said that as part of a plan to flee the country, they had passport pictures taken and gave them to my father. They claimed that one set was picked up by the FBI and a set of alleged passport photos of the Greenglass family was introduced as evidence. When Walter and Miriam Schneir were researching Invitation to an Inquest in the late 50s/early 60s they went to the photo studio where the pictures were taken, showed copies of the photos still retained as trial exhibits and were told what they had already surmised, they were not passport photos. They were ordinary family snapshots the government palmed off as passport photos.
5) The most important issue, I've saved for last. David Greenglass testified that he had made a number of sketches in jail f rom memory replicating the sketches he actually turned over to Harry Gold and to my father. One of the sketches is in your hands. That sketch revealed the "secret principle" of the atomic bomb according to the government's "authenticating witness" -- who was not a scientists by the way! (It's allegedly a cross section of the implosion-type bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki)
Here the defense made a grand-stand play to impress the judge and jury with the patriotism of the defendants. My parents' lawyer moved that the sketch and testimony about it be impounded. It was sealed and never made a part of the trial record. Unfortunately, that served to accentuate the seriousness of the information allegedly passed by Greenglass with the sketch. But as you look at it you can see it's not revelatory of very much. Top scientists got to examine it and Greenglass' description as well as the other sketches in 1967. Despite strenuous government objections, the sketch was unsealed at that time. These scientists concluded that this sketch was a baby drawing -- it couldn't tell you anything. It lacked dimensions and it was inaccurate in a few places.
Even more important: the government already had in its possession a sketch drawn by the scientist Klaus Fuchs which he said was a copy of what he had prepared and transmitted to the Soviets. Fuchs' sketch described the same type of Atom Bomb as did Greenglass' with dimensions and other accurate elements included. Thus, the government knew how inaccurate and crude Greenglass' sketch was and that the Soviets already had received a much more detailed version of the same bomb from a real scientist. Yet since Fuchs' confession was secret, they could get away with exaggerating the scientific value (if it had any at all) of Greenglass' sketch and totally misrepresenting the importance of Greenglass' alleged activity to the Soviet bomb program.
Note how important this is: Even if you accept every word of the government witnesses' testimony about the conspiracy, the assertion by the prosecution, picked up by the Judge, President, public opinion as to the SERIOUSNESS of the crime was a total fraud. And it was this fraud, of course, that justified the Death Sentence --it was this fraud, of course, that made the crime so horrendous in the minds of the public.
These are not all the examples I can give.
OUR ATTACK.
Beginning in 1975, we were able to put the government somewhat on the defensive. We publicized the conclusions of the Schneirs and others in speeches, TV appearances and in We Are Your Sons. Soon, it was absolutely clear that the trial had been built on a tissue of perjury and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that later reached to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Let me say a bit about that. In 1976 we published the first edition of The Kaufman Papers about the conduct of the trial Judge. There was evidence from the FBI's files and from the Judge's writings that he was a member of the prosecution team and interfered with the activities of other judges long after the case had left his jurisdiction. Worse, we discovered a FIX at the Supreme Court during the last week of my parents' lives, when for a brief short moment we actually had hope they would come home alive. On June 17, Justice William Douglas had granted a last minute stay. While he was considering whether to grant that stay, the Attorney General of the US, Herbert Brownell, met with the Chief Justice of the U.S. Fred Vinson (in secret) and Vinson promised Brownell that IF Douglas granted a stay held call the full court into special session to OVERTURN IT. Note, he didn't say held call the full court into special session to CONSIDER whether or not to overturn it ---. he promised to DO THE GOVERNMENT's BIDDING BEFORE HE EVEN KNEW DOUGLAS' REASONING!! This is extraordinary -- when we released this document there wasn't a peep about this in the mainstream press. Most press reports didn't even mention the EXISTENCE of this document, focusing instead on whether Kaufman's alleged conduct was as bad as we said it was, etc. etc.
THE GOVERNMENT COUNTERATTACK.
1) In 1975 released FBI documents revealed the existence of a jailhouse informer, Jerome Eugene Tartakow, who claimed my father had confessed to him details of his espionage activity. Tartakow's material in the FBI files provided details that were used by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton in their 1983 book The Rosenberg File which rehabilitated the entire government case. My brother and I have exposed distortions, dishonesties and omissions in that book in many different venues and not once have Radosh or Milton ever responded to the substance of our criticisms.
[In the paperback edition of their book, they did find time to mangle some quotes from an interview we gave so as to completely distort what we said.]
I'll have much more to say about Radosh and Milton tomorrow but let me baldly assert that even if every word of the government's case against my parents is true and even if everything in the Venona documents recently released are accurate neither of these conclusions would change the fact that the Radosh-Milton book is an intellectual fraud which violates all canons of good scholarship and fair argument. Many times, I have challenged both Joyce Milton and/or Ronald Radosh to a full debate on their book and all the issues and I renew that challenge here tonight.
About Tartakow, 1) It is simply absurd to imagine that my father who went to his death protesting his innocence never confessing to anybody would gratuitously confess to a stranger he had just met in jail who was imprisoned for, among other things, living off the proceeds of prostitution; and 2) Every statement Tartakow gave to the FBI could have come from the FBI first!
THE DISCUSSIONS GO ON.
Here are some snapshots of much more recent media attention to the case:
- 1990: Tom Brokaw of NBC News asserts that the controversy over my parents case is
finally over because former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stated in his memoirs
(Khrushchev Remembers, the Glasnost Tapes.- that Stalin and Molotov had told him of the
"significant help (my parents had given them] in accelerating the production of our
[the Soviet Union's] atomic bomb"
- 1994: Pavel Sudoplatov, a former Director of the Soviet KGB, published Special Tasks in
which he implicated my parents in Soviet Espionage -- but not related to the Atom Bomb.
The media played down the distinction between atomic and non-atomic espionage in that book
and instead focused on other charges, including the statement that a number of top
American scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were sources of
Soviet scientific information.
- 1995: In the Secret World of American Communism a study of the secret activities of the US Communist Party as revealed by the newly released Comintern files from the former Soviet Union, the authors compensate for the lack of any mention of our parents in any of the files they reviewed by making the following statement: "The evidence against them, ... was overwhelming. Radosh and Milton's The Rosenberg File the definitive historv of the case confirms their guilt..." (p. 224f)
But although for the most part this has been quite one-sided, there was at least one event where evidence pointed in the opposite direction.
- In 1993, at the annual convention of the American Bar Association, their litigation section held a mock re-trial of my parents. Over two days, two statistically representative six-person juries of New Yorkers heard part of the same testimony that occurred at the original trial but very different cross-examinations with a lot more facts available to the defense to impeach key prosecution witnesses. The results were unanimous acquittals by both juries. Again, any one who wants to pursue that event, I invite questions at the end.
These acquittals, by the way, were never mentioned on television news shows, not mentioned in the NY Times, not mentioned in USA Today --- even though it got lots of coverage around the country due to wire service copy and was referred to on National Public Radio. The acquittals did provoke Robert Novak on the CAPITAL GANG TV show to use the ABA action as his "outrage of the week" asserting "Rosenberg was a traitor, his wife an accomplice."
FINALLY WE COME TO THIS PAST SUMMER.
- July 1995: The CIA and the NSA released transcripts allegedly based on a super-secret project known as the VENONA PROJECT. These transcripts supposedly of intercepted and decrypted Soviet cables proved that, you guessed it, once again -- "Honest, we really mean it this time, just as in 1951, 1975, 1990, -- we REALLY have definitive proof that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies ..."
All of the counter-attacks by the U.S. government and their supporters go through a pattern of immediate media acceptance accompanied by rather significant publicity. Since the opposition to the government does not benefit from the deep pockets of the American taxpayers or large advances from publishers, we have to painstakingly analyze the arguments advanced and put together a response that honestly analyzes the evidence and tries to disseminate it as widely as possible. But it I s a very unequal task. For example, most people who have read the Radosh-Milton book do not even know that we wrote a 35 page rebuttal in the second edition of We Are your Sons because most people don't even know there was a second edition of that book. EXAMPLE: Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun accepts everything about my parents' case written in Radosh and Milton's book. In the bibliography he refers to We Are Your Sons' first edition, not the second edition which has our refutation of Radosh and Milton.
However, with time, the fact that there is another side to the question, that the media rush to embrace first Radosh and Milton, then Khruschev, and now Venona was to say the least premature usually gets into the public consciousness. I invite questions about Khrushchev's statement, I won't deal with it now. It is in this context that I want to raise a cautionary note in the wake of the Venona releases. (and I'll close my initial presentation with this hopefully brief discussion).
WHY SKEPTICISM IS WARRANTED ABOUT THE VENONA DOCUMENTS.
Let's start with an important media headline. As you came into the building, you were given an article from USA Today about the release of these documents. The CIA/NSA released them together with an explanatory booklet at a national press conference and got tremendous media coverage. What's wrong with that headline? Simple: THERE ARE NO SOVIET DOCUMENTS!
The NSA claimed that it intercepted encoded Soviet radio transmissions between 1943 and 1945, transcribed them and BROKE THE CODES over a number of years beginning in 1948 and continuing actually through the 1970s. The NSA and CIA are asking us to suspend judgment and take it as an article of faith that this really happened and that they didn't tamper with the texts as they were being decrypted.
More specifically, the agencies say that beginning in 1947 and ending (for the most part) in 1952, they broke enough of the code to decrypt enough messages to discover my father was head of a big spy ring -- that they tipped off the FBI which swooped down, destroyed the spy ring and protected national security. THAT'S WHAT THEY SAY IN THE PAMPHLET ACCOMPANYING THESE DOCUMENTS.
Here's a crucial fact that proves that even if these documents accurately reflect Soviet transmissions, the STORY told about them by the agencies is phony: There is no evidence that the FBI ever put my father under surveillance until David Greenglass confessed and named my father as his espionage superior. So the FBI didn't get this information before 1950, if it ever got it. The Venona project played NO ROLE in catching my father!
I think references to connect my father to Soviet espionage were plugged in AFTER HIS ARREST. This would of course justify the continued expense on this project which was "bearing fruit."
By the way, my father's name is never mentioned. Instead, we are told his cover names were ANTENNA and LIBERAL. One way the government has of connecting LIBERAL with my father is one alleged message which states that LIBERAL's brother-in-law's wife is named Ruth Greenglass and lives on Stanton Street in New York City. Now I don't know about you --- but why bother giving people code names if you reveal the sister-in-law without a code name and even provide the address? No agent would send such a message unless he had a suicide death wish [remember, Stalin was in charge at the time!]. This one really stinks.
There is another transcription that really seems off the wall. In the transcription dated March 6, 1945, states that Liberal is paid $4000. Ronald Radosh, writing in the New Republic, went so far as to suggest that this "may" be the source of the $4000 that David Greenglass testified to receiving from my father in May of 1950. So according to Radosh, my father got $4000 in 1945, stashed it somewhere and five years later gave it to David Greenglass.
Such a windfall flies in the face of the penury in which my family lived. My parents were living hand to mouth for their entire marriage. In fact, I have an incredibly vivid memory of my father coming home with a big smile on his face telling my mother, "I saw my first fifty dollar bill today." When I clamored to see it, he said he "gave it to Dave Schein" (the silent partner in the business to whom he was constantly making loan payments) . Could he have been making up the fact that he had never seen a $50 bill to our mother in the privacy of his apartment? I doubt it.
BUT WHAT IF THE TRANSCRIPTIONS PROVE ACCURATE? WHAT IF JULIUS ROSENBERG WAS "ANTENNA/LIBERAL" AND HE DID DO WHAT "ANTENNA/LIBERAL" IS ALLEGED TO HAVE DONE?
However, despite all the reasons we have to be skeptical of the documents, reasons that all reporters with the exception of Sidney Zion of the NY Daily News and Russell Miller of the London Sunday Times appear to have ignored, people will still want to know what we think if the documents prove to be accurate.
I hope you won't consider the following response flip, but sometimes I almost wish they were true. The Venona releases support our major contentions about the case. The government is so used to lying and getting away with it, they even lied about the contents of their own material as they were releasing them. They say the transcriptions prove our parents guilty -- note the plural. (and note the plural in the USA TODAY headline!) But in fact the only transcription that mentions my mother says she didn't do anything. If these transcriptions are accurate they demonstrate (depending on when the actual content became known) that sometime between 1947 and 1952, the U.S. government learned that there were other scientific sources of information coming out of the Manhattan Project other than Klaus Fuchs. The transcriptions if true also demonstrate that the U.S. government never had any information that David Greenglass did anything more than provide a plan of the grounds of Los Alamos and the names of scientists working on the project (until they got Harry Gold to implicate him, and then got David to confess to more in June of 1950).
Clearly the FBI must have been embarrassed to learn in 1950 from Fuchs and in some year between 1947 and 1952 from Venona that they had failed to catch not only Fuchs but a half-dozen other technical people, possibly scientists. In the face of this embarrassment the FBI promoted "Liberal/Antenna" who was a contact of David Greenglass into a master spy who through David Greenglass had stolen the secret of the Atom Bomb -- even though they knew there were other scientific sources that had passed information to the Soviets. Worse, when Julius Rosenberg refused to accept the role the government had created for him, atomic spy, the government arrested his wife who, according to these transcriptions was NOT INVOLVED in espionage.
One surefire piece of evidence for this is that she was not given a code name. In the Venona transcriptions only a few people are referred to by their real names. Those individuals who were subsequently recruited (including, by the way, Ruth Greenglass, who never was indicted!) were then given code names. The fact that our mother wasn't given a code name but Ruth Greenglass was is proof positive, if we accept Venona as accurate, that the government knew my mother was never a spy.
But the government used my mother as a "lever" against her husband. When she and my father continued to refuse to cooperate, they held her as a hostage in a life and death game of "chicken" and when the end came they killed her knowing she was not guilty.
What is amazing is that you get headlines such as the one from USA Today about these documents rather than a story such as I just told you!
It is true, I have always believed (and still believe) that my parents were innocent of all charges of espionage. if Liberal/Antenna did actually exist as Soviet contacts and if our father was, indeed, Liberal/Antenna, then I would have to modify that belief. But such a modified position should be no cause for a celebration of the veracity of the American secret police apparatuses (FBI, CIA, NSA) and no cause to agree that the witch hunters were right because there really were witches (that is, communist traitors).
If the documents are true, they would demonstrate for the first time that the government KNEW our mother was innocent --- not just that they weren't sure. (If the Venona documents are fake, then we can at most assume the FBI was uncertain as to her guilt because they had prepared a question for our father in June of 1953 in case he were to confess, "Was your wife cognizant of your [spy] activities?"). Yet they killed her anyway --- she was in the parlance of military double-speak "collateral damage."
BY THE WAY:
The existence of other scientific sources from Los Alamos that the FBI was aware of, suggests what may be the most important motive for the "promotion" of my father to master atomic spy once Greenglass was convinced to cooperate.
[It wasn't as I had argued in 1975 a case of "framing" a "random" communist to isolate, stigmatize and cow the communist and fellow traveling left in the early 1950s.]
It was actually a "cover your tail" effort by the FBI to avoid the embarrassment of having permitted successful espionage and catching no one. At least, with the Venona Documents secret and the successful conclusions of the Rosenberg trial the FBI could be hailed as "big spy catchers," and if our parents were to cooperate the FBI could go on and build even more cases against other leftists.
But remember, these documents might be inaccurate in whole or in part. They could be faked in whole or in part. We don't have enough evidence yet to know that. Until we do, I consider my parents innocent until proven guilty!
And so we come full circle to the historical issues I raised at the beginning. The issues in the case are not merely the guilt or innocence of my parents. They relate to a whole series of issues about the American left, the American secret police apparatus and repression in the 1950s and since. If this presentation has stimulated you to think about some of these issues --- and if our discussion for the next bunch of minutes will stimulate you further ' I will have done my job. If the tale of government misconduct in the framing and killing of my parents convinces you to be skeptical of the voices of authority and power, especially when political opponents are being charged with serious crimes, then maybe, just maybe, you and others who hear and listen to my arguments can play a role in making sure nothing like this ever happens again.
I think I'll stop now and invite questions and/or comments on everything and anything. The only thing I ask is that you attempt to make them as brief as possible so we can hear from as many of you as possible. Thanks very much!
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Basic Secondary Sources:
Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (most recent edition) (NY: Pantheon Books, 1983). Advances the thesis that the case was a frame-up and a fraud. Fuchs was a spy, Gold, Greenglass probably not, Rosenbergs and Sobell definitely not.
Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File, A Search for the Truth (NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). Uses FBI files and interviews to advance the thesis that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged.
Robert Lamphere and Tom Schachtman, The FBI-KGB War (NY: Random House, 1986; new edition, Mercer U. Press, 1995). Lamphere was the FBI liaison to the Venona project. He writes from memory about the successful breaking of Soviet codes and how this helped him catch a number of spies. He tells some stories contradicted by the people who released the Venona material this summer -- and interestingly enough was not present at the press conference this summer.
Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons, the Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). Second edition (with three new chapters, omitting one appendix that was in the first edition) (Urbana, Ill: U. of Illinois Press, 1987). The new edition has details from the FBI files about perjuries of prosecution witnesses, unethical and at times illegal conduct by the Judge, and a full refutation of Radosh and Milton's book.
Michael Meeropol, ed. The Rosenberg Letters, A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (NY: Garland, 1994). My parents speak for themselves -- every word of every surviving letter to each other, family, lawyers. Includes a petition for executive clemency and a long historiographical introduction which deals with Lamphere, the Khrushchev statements and some of the revelations coming out of the former Soviet Union.
Morton Sobell, On Doing Time (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). Mort Sobell, co-defendant with my parents, tells his own story, both of the trial and of his years in prison, particularly Alcatraz.
Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz, ed. Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America (NY, Routledge, 1995). A set of papers presented at a conference organized by the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard in 1993. Includes the personal testimony of my brother Robert and some very interesting efforts to place the case in the context of 1950s American culture.
Joseph Sharlitt, Fatal Error (NY: Scribner's, 1989). Covers the activities of the Supreme Court, particularly in the last week of my parents’ lives.
USEFUL ARTICLES:
Michael Parrish, "Cold War Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs," American Historical Review 82 (1977): 805-42. An outstanding piece of historical scholarship that combined with the Sharlitt book really exposed the politicization of the Supreme Court as it held my parents' lives it its collective hands.
Gerald Markowitz and Michael Meeropol, "The 'Crime of the Century' Revisited: David Greenglass' Scientific Evidence in the Rosenberg Case," Science and Society 44 (1980): 1-26.
Gerald Markowitz, "How Not to Write History: A Critique of Radosh and Milton's The Rosenberg File," Science and Society (Spring, 1984).
Edward Pessen, "The Rosenberg Case Revisited: A Critical Essay on a Recent Scholarly Examination," New York History (January, 1984).
TRANSCRIPTS OF HEARINGS AND DEBATES AND OTHER EVENTS
U.S. Congress Hearings before the Sub-Committee on Criminal Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary. House of Representatives 97th Congress. First and Second Sessions on Federal Criminal Law Revision, serial No. 132, Pt. 3, App. 2, "The Death Penalty (Rosenberg Case)," December 16, 1982, pp. 2255-2486. These Hearings involved testimony by Walter and Miriam Schneir, Marshall Perlin (my brother's and my attorney) , myself, Aaron Katz (the head of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case) and Attorney Roy Cohn, one of the prosecutors. It also involved the complete text of the Kaufman Papers (pp. 2237-2403) as well as other interesting documents.
"Were the Rosenbergs Framed?" Transcript of a debate at New York's Town Hall, 20 October, 1983. (available from The Nation Institute)
"In the Matter Of: United States of America v. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg." August 9, 1993. Noon and Pratt Min-U-Script (available from Noon and Pratt (800) 362-2520, Original File abaO8O93.vl,466 pages) . This is the transcript of the ABA Mock Retrial of my parents. It’s probably expensive but it shows how modern lawyers using facts unavailable in the 1950s got a very different result from two juries of randomly selected New Yorkers.
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