Reconsidering the Rosenbergs History Novel Film

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Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: History, Novel, FilmAuthor(s): Cushing StroutSource: Reviews in American History, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 309-321Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2702238.

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RECONSIDERINGTHE ROSENBERGS:HISTORY, NOVEL, FILMCushing Strout

The Rosenberg case, an international cause celebre in the 1950s, has beenrevived again in several forms. It surfaced as a battle of the books on the Leftin December 1983, when 1500 people packed Town Hall in New York to takesides between the authors of Invitation to an Inquest and the authors of TheRosenberg File, the latest book on the case. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Miltonhave created this stir not because they showed how unfair the prosecution,the courts, and the FBIwere, as they extensively do, but because they alsoreject on historical grounds Walter and Miriam Schneir's Invitation to anInquest, which perceives the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of a governmentframe-up. The case has also been the focus of two films: an older one (in debtto the Schneirs'book) by Alvin Goldstein, The Unquiet Death of Julius andEthelRosenberg, which was shown on television several times in 1983, and anew arrival this past fall, a filmed version of E. L. Doctorow's novel, TheBook of Daniel, directed for Paramount Pictures by Sidney Lumet and star-ring Timothy Hutton and Ed Asner.The novel and its filmed version have their own differences, but they tendto join The Rcsenberg File in attempting to mediate, in their own way,between the prosecution and the defense. In this respectthe debate has movedto a point beyond a dialogue of the deaf between the government's case andthe partisans of the Rosenbergs, between a hyperbolically stated guilt nd ahyperbolically assumed innocence, the stuff of historical and liter. -ymelodrama. As Lionel Trilling warned many years ago, unless we can bringimagination and mind to politics, then politics will take over imagination andmind for its own purposes. The challenge of the Rosenberg case for historiansand artists is to take Trilling's point to heart.The terms of the debate were set for the 1950s by the opposition betweenCommunist propaganda for the defense and anti-Stalinist liberals who tookfor granted the guilt of the Rosenbergs. The novelist Howard Fast introducedthe French to the Rosenberg case with his article in L'Humanite.'Ih%affairhad by then become a Communist party cause, and its defense no longerturned on the efforts of a few courageous radical mavericks who had raisedthe issues when the Communists were silent. Fast'sline of argument was a

309


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310 REVIEWS N AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1984Party line, as The RosenbergFile points out, disingenuously insisting that theRosenbergswere Jewswith the opinions of Progressives, but they were notCommunists to the best of anyone's knowledge. Fast also claimed that DavidGreenglass, a confessed spy, had no connections to the Progessive move-ment, even though the New York Timeshad already identifiedhim as havingbelonged to the Young Communist League (pp. 350-51). This influential useof the term Progressive s a way of refusing to call things by their rightnames was a historical legacy of the Popular Front, with its strategy ofamalgamatingrhetorically all anti-Fascistpositions. Communists and liberalspraised each other, thus blurringthe essential issues that should divide them.This corruption of discourse had its crude expediencies. As The RosenbergFile shrewdly notes, the defense of the couple by Europeanintellectuals wasentangled with the Communist party's anxiety to use anti-Americanism as acover for its own gross anti-Semitic persecutions of fellow Communists in thenotorious Slansky trial. The Rosenberg Defense Committee in France wasfounded on the same day in 1952 that Slansky and ten others were executed inPrague (p. 349). Given this politicizing of the Rosenberg'sdefense, indepen-dent writers on the case needed to distinguishtheirown commentary from thepropaganda put out by the Defense Committee. Moreover, they had to con-front the difficulty of dealing with defendants whose use of the Fifth Amend-ment, while legally justified, tended to obscure their political identities.In this context the literary critics Robert Warshow and Leslie Fiedlerunderstandably contrasted the Rosenbergswith the political candor of Saccoand Vanzetti. Yet both critics exaggeratedtheir point to the extent that War-show wondered if the Rosenbergswould have had any thoughts or feelings ifit had not been for the propaganda they voiced, and Fiedler dismissed themcontemptuously as being merely thevisible manifestation of the Stalinizedpetty-bourgeois mind: rigid, conventional, hopelessly self-righteous. This

wretchedness was more than matched, he conceded, by those with theirown even more wretched 'Down with the Communist Rats -God BlessAmerica' sentimentality and rancor. For him and Warshow alike, however,the tragedy of the Rosenbergswas not their death, but their inability tothinkof themselves as real people. As a Jew, Fiedler was embarrassedthat EthelRosenberg should have pleaded for what she called a small unoffendingJewish family, and he found her style painfullypretentious. BecauseJuliusRosenbergstuck up a copy of the Declaration of Independenceon the wall ofhis cell, Fiedler branded him as being something more devious than aposeur and a hypocrite. 'Yet Fiedlerrightly recognized that a failureof the moral imagination toperceive the Rosenbergs as human beings had insured their execution. Eventhough they had not been charged with treason, but with a conspiracy tocommit espionage for a wartime ally, they were tried as traitors. Fiedler'sown


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STROUT / Reconsideringthe Rosenbergs 311imagination had failed to make the Rosenbergsreal. Their Death House Let-ters sounded to him only like lines from an agit-propchoral production atthe combined celebration of Rosh Hashanah and the anniversary of the Rus-sian Revolution. In the end the Rosenbergshad been true to only one princi-ple, he asserted, the completely unmentioned cause of the defense of theSoviet Union. In his view therefore, theyfailed in the end to become mar-tyrs or heroes, or even men. What was thereleft to die? 2 There was left onlythe question of our mercy versus the impersonal demands of the law. Fiedlerfailed to appreciate Harold Rosenberg'spoint that the law had not been tooimpersonal; that is what law is supposed to be. Actually, in this case the lawhad been bent and distortedby the all-too-human passions that made demonsout of Communists.3

Fiedler saw himself as qualified to talk about the Rosenbergs because hewas a literary man, immune to certain journalistic platitudes and accus-tomed to regardmen and words with a sensibility trained by the newer criti-cal methods. It s 'aclose reading'of recentevents that I should like to think Ihave achieved, he explained, a reading that does not scant ambiguity orparadox, but tries to give to the letters of the Rosenbergs the same scrutiny

wehave learnedto practiceon the shorterpoems of JohnDonne. Though heberated the Rosenbergsfor treatingthemselves as a case, he eagerly confessedas a generalizer to relishing allthat is typical, even about himself.4 In thiscase his confessional tone presumedto speak for liberalJews, as if they had allbeen innocent ellow-travelers and needed to repent. As Harold Rosenbergnoticed, Fiedler had turned such innocence nto a form of guilt, and heignored those liberals and radicals in the 1930s who had been vigorous anti-Stalinists, especially the talented writers associated with the PartisanReview.s From their perspective and painful experience the apologists forSoviet repressionwere far from being innocent idealists; they behaved insteadlike middle-class careerists and philistines, riding what they took to be thewave of the future.

By the end of the 1960s, a decade in which radicals of all kinds polarizedwith their enemy, the establishment, concern for the Rosenbergs was notshared by the youthful agitators and rebels, who generally were like thecounterculturerevolutionary in E. L. Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel,in being thoroughly disdainful of the executed Old Left couple because theyplayed the legal game at their trial instead of judging the judges and speakingfor anew nation with new laws of life. The protagonist's sister despairinglycommits suicide because she sees that her own faith in her parents'politicalmartyrdom is not shared by her New Left associates.A political participant in the sixties who did remember the Rosenbergs inthe next decade was Morris Dickstein, a former student of LionelTrilling's.InThe Gates of Eden:American Culture in the Sixties (1977) Dickstein charged


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312 REVIEWS N AMERICANHISTORY / September1984the 1950s writers with having turned away from public issues, like theRosenbergcase, to celebrate the closet intensities of the private self. Whenthey did consider the case, they blamed the victims. He was appalled atFiedler's one. Its vengefulnessand personal animosity about the Rosenbergssubstituted aesthetic matters of taste and style for political issuesof powerand justice, a failure Dickstein found characteristic of the 1950s newcriticism. He emphasized what Fiedler only touched on, Judge Kaufman'shyperbolic and inflammatory charge that the Rosenbergs had caused Com-munist aggression in Korea, and President Eisenhower's harsh refusal ofclemency on the grossly hypothetical ground that the Rosenbergs hadincreased the chances of atomic war and thereby may have condemned todeath tens of millions of innocent people. Dickstein came of age in the 1960sand he was politically prepared to believe that therecord, even the recordavailable when Fiedler wrote, provides abundant evidence for the mostextremejudgment againstAmerican public officials. From this perspectiveheaccused Fiedlerof refusing evento entertain the possibility that Hiss or theRosenbergs might not have all that much to confess, because, as a 1950sintellectual, he had too much faithin American institutions (pp. 43-44).

Dickstein had participated in the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and hislater experience of the police action at Columbia University against the stu-dent radicalshad made him antipathetic o the law-and-orderliberalismthatwas just beginning to crystallize and which, by a backlash effect, wouldmushroom in strength over the ensuing years (p. 260). He was just as unpre-pared, however, to entertain the possibility that the Rosenbergs had com-mitted espionage as Fiedlerwas unprepared to question deeply enough thetrial that convicted them. Moreover, no critic of the trial can afford to takelightly issues about lawand order, but needs to insist on them whenever thelaw has been twisted by political passions.

In this controversy the Rosenbergs appear as through a glass darkly. Theprosecutor, judge, and President Eisenhower envisioned them as traitorsworse than murderers; for Warshow and Fiedler the couple had vanishedbehind their disingenuous rhetoric. Dickstein challenged both of these views,yet he himself clouded the portrait by ignoring the question of what, ifanything, the Rosenbergs had done to be arrested. Nevertheless, he pointedthe way to a better understandingof them by citing as a major clue to theirpersonalities E. L. Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel.

Likemost novelists dealing with historical issues in their own fictionalizedway, Doctorow has no literal or narrow documentary intention. He usesmodernist nonlinear techniques of flashback and disrupted stream-of-consciousness, which are innovatively brought to bear on a historicalsubject.The novel sets the spy case in a rich historicalcontext, involving threegenera-


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STROUT / Reconsidering the Rosenbergs 313tions of immigrantlife, the Jewish search for social justice, and the recurringtendency of apocalyptic millennialists to forget the biblical warning againstthe worship of false idols. The novel appropriately ends not with definitivetruths, but with the biblical quotation advising to go thy way Daniel; for thewords are closed up and sealed until the time of the end.

Doctorow's exercise of poetic license substitutes for the younger Rosenbergson a daughter, Susan, and changes the family name to the more allusive andevocative Isaacson with its biblical resonance. But these expansions andsubstitutions do not prevent the novel from speaking pertinently andcogently to our understanding of the historical episode that inspired thebook. Michael Meeropol has said, I am not much like Daniel ; but hedescribes himself as constantly into it [the case], reliving it, trying to findthings out, which is exactly Danny's character, and like him, Michael wasunable for many years after the execution to mourn, to let the tearsgo. 6 Thepolitics of Danny and Susan resemble the actual New Left positions of theRosenbergchildren, including the marked variation in emphasis between theolder son, sympathetic to the Old Left interest in doctrine and politicalorganization, and the younger sibling, more attracted to SDS disruption,drugs, and communes.7 Doctorow's license is modestly exercised, especiallywhen compared to Robert Coover's A Public Burning (1978), a satirical fan-tasy which ridicules everyone involved and contrives to have Nixon becomeinfatuated with Ethel Rosenberg.The Book of Daniel looks at the trial and execution from the perspective ofa young radical seeking the truth. Doctorow did not evade the issue ofJewishnessor of guilt by harping on the Rosenbergs' nnocence, as some con-servative critics have unjustly complained, even if he exposed the perversionsof justice in the case and has his hero use William Appleman Williams'srevi-sionist version of cold war history. The novel explores the Jewish element inthe story for three generations, whose ideals have biblical pedigrees, and theprotagonist explicitly rejects both the Hearst philosopher and the liberalbleeder for each of whom guilt or innocence is an absolute. There is nosubstantial differencein these positions, Danny remarks. To say nothing oftheir prose (p. 227).8 To read the novel rightly is to participate in the nar-rator's search for clues about what really happened, rather than taking thefamily myth for granted.Danny's own developing interpretationchallenges any Manicheanism. Thenewspaper man, Jack Fein, points out to him: 'Your folks were framed, butthat doesn't mean they were innocent babes.... -Those guys had to bring ina conviction. That was their job. But no one would have put the finger onyour parents unless they thought they were up to something.... They actedguilty (pp. 213-14). Danny eventually hypothesizes that the dentist who


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314 REVIEWS N AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1984fingered his father in court was complicit with him as a political comrade in asacrificial conspiracy to cover for another Communist couple, who wereactually engagedin espionage. Paul Isaacson had thus gambled his life and hiswife's, without her consent, not only on his belief as a Party comrade in theSoviet Union, but also on his American Popular Frontbelief in the safeguardsof the Constitution and in the expectation that a liberal public opinion wouldnever convict them. It is for this reason that his more realistic and justifiablyfurious wife suspends all communication with him after the failure of thethird appeal at law.Doctorow's fictional hypothesis historically fits with some of the evidence.The FBIwas never sure of EthelRosenberg'sguilt; instead it callously used heras a lever to put pressure on her husband to confess. It fits as well with theDeath House Letters of Julius Rosenberg, which persistently and touchinglyaffirms his confidence that the Bill of Rights and an enlightened public opin-ion will finally acquit them.9It is Doctorow's genius as a novelist to show ushow this credulous outlook was shaped by the Popular Front.Danny specifically notes that a Jewish literary critic who criticized hisparents for hypocritically calling on their Jewish faith could not haveunderstood how someone could forswearhis Jewishheritageand take for hisown the perfectionist dream of heaven on earth, and, in spite of that, orperhaps because of it, still consider himself a Jew. Danny describeshis fam-ily's faith in this way: They rushed after self-esteem. . . . If you discoveredthe working class you found the roots of democracy. In social justice youdiscovered your own virtue. To desire social justice was a way of livingwithout envy, which is the emotion of a loser. It was a way of transformingenvy into constructive outgoing hate. Danny's father, a compulsiveexplainer, took apeculiar kind of bitter joy in reciting to his son all theabuses of justice and truth which offended his natural innocence, while hero-izing JohnBrown, Nat Turner, Thomas Paine, Tom Mooney, JoeHill, Sacco,Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro boys, putting ogether all the historic injusticesand showing how it was all inevitable according to the Marxian analysis.Danny observes that his father was always astonished, insulted, outraged,that American democracy wasn't purer, freer, finer, more ideal.... 'Whydid he expect so much of a system he knew by definition could never satisfyhis standards of justice, Danny asks. It'sscrewy. Lots of them were likethat.... And it was more than strategy, it was more than Lenin'sadvice touse the reactionaryapparatusto defend yourself, it was passion (pp. 119, 32,34-35, 40).

Doctorow understands that during the Popular Front the Party made itselfover, extravagantly and rhetorically, into a reformist organization,celebrating Washington, Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln as its patriot-


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STROUT / Reconsidering the Rosenbergs 315precursors. Danny came to see that his father had internalized this propa-ganda and could never believe that America was not the cafeteria at CityCollege; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it. Danny himselfremembers from the 1940s the Paul Robeson patriotic songs and the RedArmy chorus, singing Meadowland on a record that pictured the smiling,deep-throated soldiers of a valiant ally (pp. 40, 96). Saturated in this left-wing culture, Paul Isaacson lived out his Popular Front faith as ananachronism in loyal defense of Party comrades.

Danny's speculation remains hypothetical in the novel. There were severalother couples, actually, however, including an engineer-friend of theRosenbergs (AlfredSarant), living in Ithacaand working at Cornell, who fledwhen the Rosenbergs were arrested. The Ithaca couple, according to a Rus-sian exile, surfaced later in the Soviet Union, where the engineer became anhonored member of the Defense establishment.10Michael Meeropol suggeststhat both Sarant and Joel Barr eft the country for Russia because they wantedto avoid the destruction of their careers by harassment, but other potentialvictims of McCarthyism found refuge in England. Only Stalinist Communistswould have chosen the Soviet Union. Sarant may merely have been impet-uous and panicked, but Michael Meeropol simply converts the truth thatmost American Communists were not spies into a dogma without exceptionswhen he says they were not traitors; they were not spies 1 - a chronicrefusal of reality by a segment of the American Leftwhich still survives by afailure of political and historical imagination.By its willingness to consider other possibilities than those imagined eitherby the government or the defense, The Book of Daniel prepares us for thecomplexity which characterizes the best historical stories. Danny's specula-tion about his mother is even closer to the actual evidence than the govern-ment'smyth about Mrs. Rosenberg'smasterminding role; and his speculationabout his father comports with a remark made by a Rosenberg supporterat adefense rally, assuring the audience that Juliusand Ethel will never tell ontheir friends. (Mrs. Sobell reportedly fainted when it was pointed out to herthat the remarks scarcely squared with the idea of their total innocence.) 12Doctorow has more to say about the important meaning of this case thanmost historians do precisely because he is interested in the ethos from whichthe Rosenberg family emerged as well as in the climate of opinion in whichthey were convicted.The historian's special obligation, however, is to determine, so far as theevidence allows and requires, what actually happened. In this respect TheRosenberg File convincingly shows how the Rosenbergs became haplessscapegoats of a propaganda war (p. 452) waged by the government againstcommunism, while the authors also persuasively argue that they were not


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316 REVIEWS N AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1984innocent victims of a frame-up. Incorporatingthe Left'scriticism of the trialand execution with the Right'sbelief that the Rosenbergs' role as espionageagents contributed useful atomic information to the Russian cause, thishistorical study runs contrary to the polarizing political tendencies of ourculture.

Its new case for Julius Rosenberg'sguilt is basically two-fold. It rests, first,on the agreementbetween the testimony of a police spy, J. E. Tartakow, andthat of an old friend and political associate (p. x) of the authors, JamesWeinstein, editor of a Socialist newspaper and former student at CornellUniversity, where he was a Communist party member. Tartakow gave theFBI information, allegedly from Julius, about Rosenberg's ast recruit (p.304), a Cornell student whom the Bureau thought was a link betweenRosenberg's spying activities in New York and Alfred Sarant's in Ithaca.Weinstein corroborated this link nearly threedecades laterby tellinghis storyto the authors about his roommate's decision to do secret work and hisassociation with Julius and Sarant (p. 312). The close overlap in the twoaccounts testifies to Tartakow's reliability on some matters and lends weightto his influential tip to the prosecutors that Julius was worried that the FBImight locate the man who had taken passport photos of the Rosenbergsshortly before the arrestof David Greenglass,who eventually fingeredthem.

The other major new piece of evidence for the prosecution was not used atthe trial and is derived from a former FBI counterintelligence officer whoshowed his manuscript to Newsweek, which used it for a story linking JuliusRosenberg circumstantially to Max Elitcher. He was visited, according tocracked KGB codes, by an unnamed Soviet agent at the same time whenJulius admitted to being at Elitcher'shouse. Radosh and Milton treat thisinformation from the code as exactly confirming Elitcher'sown account ofRosenberg'sapproach to him in 1944, four years before the code was cracked(p. 133). Radosh and Milton have not seen the classified KGB material, andNewsweek notes that the story didn'tprove that Rosenberg was a spy ; itonly persuaded the authorities that he was.13Both of these arguments rely on informers whose credibility is highly con-troversial:Tartakow had a long criminal record, and Elitcher(as Radosh andMilton also point out) admitted in court that he had cooperated with the FBI'largely out of fear that he might be prosecuted for perjury for denying hisCommunist party membership on his navy security questionnaire (p. 177).Radosh and Milton think his pretrial statements were strikinglyconsistentwith his testimony in court, even though he had-'originally omitted severalimportant incidents. Because there were no outright contradictions, asthere were in the testimony of the Greenglassesor Harry Gold, they accept it(p. 178). They do not note, however, that the defense got Elitcherto admit


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STROUT / Reconsidering the Rosenbergs 317that he made his first statement to the FBI after he had been interrogated anumber of times by FBI agents and members of the prosecuting staff, sug-gesting that his confession could have emerged from a previous background,

smackingof collusion and rehearsedinstructions, as John Wexley put it inThe Judgmentof Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1977, p. 188).The evidence in these two instances, derived from Tartakow and Elitcher,is crucial to the historian'scase against Julius Rosenberg, but it is by no meansconclusive, given the advantages both witnesses got from cooperating withthe FBI, a strong inducement to perjure themselves. Weinstein's testimony isnot self-serving, and it supports Tartakow on the Ithaca story. While it seemslikely that Julius hoped Sarant could learn something useful to the Russiansfrom working on Cornell's synchroton project, there is no evidence thatSarant or Weinstein's roommate, Max Finestone, actually engaged in anyespionage. Evidence for conspiratorial activity is always hard to obtain -whether done by spies or FBI agents - and so controversy about what actu-ally happened will persist, the credibility of both being debatable. Partisansof the Rosenbergsargue, for example, that the disagreementbetween the NewYork office of the Bureau and its Washington office over the reliability ofTartakow only shows that one branch of the FBImay have been deceivinganother.14 Thus the conspiracy argument can always be sustained byfragmenting the conspiracy to make it more plausible. But skeptics of the FBIreports do not say what would count as evidence against their suspicions, ifThe Rosenberg File is right that not one shred of evidence exists to suggestthat the FBIwas feeding information to Tartakow (p. 534).Use of FBI material under the Freedom of Information Act has stronglyinfluenced the narrative form of The Rosenberg File. It begins with the longstory of intelligence authorities closing in on the trail of a network ofengineers and scientists who had been passing data on defense projects to theSoviet Union at least since 1944, if not earlier p. 7). Writing from this pointof view, Radosh and Milton first introduce Julius Rosenberg into their nar-rative account by a referenceto his warning David Greenglassthat he (Julius)mightsoon have to flee the country with the help of theirRussian'friends '(p. 48). No statement in the text warns us that this is only hearsay from a 1979interview with the Greenglasses. The storyteller has here treated anotherstory as if it were a fact, noted by an omniscient observer. This stance is aconventional and reputable one for narrating history, but in matters as con-troversial, charged, and difficult to sort out as questions about espionage andjustice, the technique is a dangerous one. Only on p. 54 does the narrationpause to point out that the Greenglasses'explanations of Julius'sdropping outof Party activities are really charges, equiring assessment. By then, muchthat is controversial has been treated implicitly as if it were not. The moral is


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318 REVIEWS N AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1984that historians should consider more carefully the problem of narrativepointof view, a matter about which literary critics have usefully alertedsophisticated readers of stories.

Thereafter,however, TheRosenberg Fileincreasinglytakes up the questionof alternative explanations, and its solid merit lies in its admirable fairnessand patience in considering (as the Schneirs do not) both innocent andguilty xplanations of the controversial matters at issue. The upshot in eachcase may not always convince the reader, but whatever the conclusion, it isnot presented dogmatically or polemically, but usually with a regardfor thedifferencesbetween the possible, the probable, and the ambiguous. The thor-oughness of Radosh and Milton in exploring the possibilities is best revealedby their sixteen-pageanalysis in the appendix of the incident involving HarryGold's Hilton Hotel registration card, the discrepancies of its dating havingbeen used to buttressforgery argumentsby Rosenbergpartisans. The FBIfileshere usefully show the correctness of Harry Gold's recollection of being inAlbuquerque on the day in question by his memory of a Catholic parade, anaccurate detail that obliterates mystery-mongering about the hotel card atone stroke (p. 470).My main reservations about The Rosenberg File'sconclusion have to dowith the psychology of Etheland Julius. Radosh and Milton concede that the

official case against Ethel is so flimsy that one might speculate she hadneverbeen entirely comfortable with Julius's chosen course (p. 102). Yet theyfinally conclude that she probably knew of and supported her husband'sendeavors . . . (p. 450). The basis is unclear. She might, after all, as a goodCommunist, more realistic than Julius, have balked at any plot that mightjeopardize their lives. Michael Meeropol remarked, Ithink it's a mistake tosee her as a passive person, 15but her independence is compatible with morethan one explanation.Introducing the interview with the Meeropols in the Socialist Review, oneof its editors observes that Radosh and Milton make 'little attempt to explorethe psychology, morality, or personal motivation of Ethel and JuliusRosenberg. 6 Actually, they explicitly accept Fiedler'sand Warshow's harshindictment of the Rosenbergs as hypocritical ideologues engaged in doubletalk that confused peace, democracy, and liberty with the defense of theSoviet Union (pp. 340, 547-50). Their innocence was thus merely a reflec-tion of their objectiveMarxistviewpoint that no crime was done. The bookassumes they had no faith in capitalist American justice (p. 395). But thisexplanation hardly explains Julius'spinning up of the Declaration of Indepen-dence on his cell wall, or his persistent faith that he and his wife would besaved by a liberal Supreme Court and progressive public opinion. It is thegreat merit of Doctorow's novel that it understands the way in which patrio-


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STROUT / Reconsidering the Rosenbergs 319tism and communism were blended in the Popular Frontperiod so as to giveDaniel's father a grossly unrealistic confidence that he would never beindicted or punished for aiding a wartime ally whose American party hadtouted itself as twentieth-centuryAmericanism. Radosh and Milton percep-tively recognize that Party leaders in the Popular Frontperiod stress the pointthat Party membership was thoroughly compatible with American patrio-tism (p. 53), but they do not adequately take it into account in portrayingJulius Rosenberg.

Doctorow, in a recently televised interview, has said that he workedclosely with the director of Daniel, but the film has nevertheless damaginglysimplified the novel. There are no biblical resonances, no political reflectionson the Red Scare, the Moscow Trials, the cold war, and Disneyland's plastichistory, because the narrator has been pared away, except for some recur-ring ruminations and images about cruel devices for punishment. There is noreal sense of a three-generationdevelopment in the idealization of and disillu-sionment with America. Susan's appalled discovery that New Leftrebels carenothing for the example of the Isaacsons is entirely missing, leaving themotivation for hersuicide obscured. The novel's ironic reflections on the NewLeft in relation to Danny's political heritage are omitted, and a sentimentallyricism about an antinuclear, Sheep Meadow rally is substitutedfor the SDStakeover of the library at Columbia University, where Danny is working onhis thesis. It is a parodic miniapocalypse to measure against the biblicalmillennial expectation cited at the end of the novel. The film does includeDoctorow's view, as one characterputs it, that between the government andthe Party, Danny's parents never had a chance. But the film audience isunlikely to make much sense out of Danny's musings about theother coupleor to understandthe irony in the father's mistaken confidence in the police atthe Peekskill riot or the point of his being named Isaacson, evoking the testingof Abraham's loyalty in the Bible. Visual imagery is a poor medium for ideas.Doctorow's more simplified, comic, and anachronistic Ragtime was far moresuitable to the screen.

Unfortunately, filmgoers are likely to think that the point of Daniel is thatthe Rosenbergswere innocent, while the press response to TheRosenbergFiletends to suggest that its authors were only interested in showing theRosenbergs'guilt. These crude misreadings are retrogressive, turning back tothe moment in the debate before Doctorow, Radosh, and Milton usefullycomplicated and enriched our sense of the difficult truth by their willingnessto transcend any simple choice between innocence and guilt, or between theParty and the government.

Some radicals have complained that The Rosenberg File lacks compassionin treating the Party's myth-making as equalor comparable to unfairly exe-


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320 REVIEWS N AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1984cuting two people and in using the case to fuel the cold war and smear theLeft.17 But Radosh and Milton show in grim detail how the Rosenbergswereforced topay with their lives for America'sdismay at ts loss of the nuclearweapons monopoly (p. 446). They agree, however, with I. F. Stone thatCommunistsshamefully sacrificed calm consideration of the Rosenbergcaseto the needs of world Communist propaganda (p. 453). In some quartersstill, to point to this shame is to elicit anger, accusations, or indifference.Scapegoating the Rosenbergswas not a government monopoly. Radosh andMilton extensively discuss the puzzling blunders in Bloch's conduct of thedefense, which resisted the last-minute legal efforts of maverick radicals tosave the Rosenbergs. The authors suggest that pressuresfrom the Committeeto Secure Justice could only be satisfied by the Rosenbergs' martyrdom (p.409). In this sense there was a complicity in guilt for the crime of theRosenbergs'death; between the government and the Party-oriented elementsin the defense committee, they were caught in a vise. In the end Radosh andMilton departfrom Fiedler'sview of the Rosenbergsto salute them for havingshowed tremendous courage and loyalty, virtues that were hardlyreciprocated by the Party they died to defend (pp. 452-53).No study can be definitive when the FBImaterial is still incomplete, butThe Rosenberg File has the great merit of refusing to protect either thegovernment or the radicals from any unpleasant or inconvenient truths.Though some radicals apparently told Radosh to publish only truths thathurt he establishment p. xii), this opportunism is of no benefit in the longrun to the Left, which has been badly discredited in the eyes of Americansbecause some leftists failed to distinguish between serving justice and servingthe interests of the Soviet Union. Radosh himself once served on the executivecommittee of a national organization for reopening the Rosenberg case. But,like Alan Weinstein and the Hiss case, he did not gerrymanderthe evidence tosuit his political inclinations. As the debates over our political trials prove,this form of intellectual integrity is an uncommon achievement.Cushing Strout, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and HumaneLetters, Cornell University, is the author of The Veracious Imagination:Essays on American History, Literature,and Biography (1981).

1. Robert Warshow, 'The Idealism of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, The Immediate Experi-ence (1962), p. 80; Leslie Fiedler, 'Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs, An End to Innocence(1955), pp. 26-27, 38-39, 40, 42.2. Fiedler, pp. 32, 42, 45.3. Harold Rosenberg, 'Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past, The Tradition of the New(1959), p. 235.4. Fiedler, pp. vii, ix.5. Rosenberg, p. 237.


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STROUT / Reconsidering the Rosenbergs 3216. 'New Light on the Rosenberg Case: An Interview with Michael and Robert Meerepol,Socialist Review 13 (November-December 1983): 90.7. Jonah Raskin, Life after Death: The Sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ramparts 12(November 1973): 49; Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of the

Rosenbergs (1975), p. 306.8. I have analyzed The Book of Daniel in my The Veracious Imagination: Essays onAmerican History, Literature, and Biography (1981), pp. 85-90, 173-79.9. In his last ten days he still hoped to shame the august court into reviewing the case (WeAre Your Sons, p. 221).10. Mark Kuchment, The Fate of Sarant, New York Review of Books 30 (November 24,1983): 58-59. Kuchment rightly notes that merely because Sarant enjoyed the confidence of theSoviets does not necessarily mean that he violated American laws.11. New Light on the Rosenberg Case, pp. 84, 96.12. Louis Nizer, The Implosion Conspiracy (1973), p. 469. Radosh and Milton cite themeeting but not the remark.13. Allan J. Mayer and David C. Martin, Crackinga Soviet Cipher, Newsweek (May 19,1980): 32.14. New Light on the Rosenberg Case, p. 85. This is Michael Meeropol's argument.15. Ibid., p. 83.16. Ibid., p. 72.17. Ibid., p. 75.

Documents

Reconsidering the Rosenbergs History Novel Film