Showing posts with label SOVIET SPIES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SOVIET SPIES. Show all posts

Saturday, November 11, 2017

*Once Again, Honor The Heroic Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Click On Title To Link To Rosenberg Defense Fund For Children

I pass along this commentary from Workers Vanguard as one that may be (and should be) of interest to the radical public. Veteran's Day seems to a right kind of day for honoring the Rosenbergs.

Workers Vanguard No. 923
24 October 2008

Cold War Ideologues Want to Kill Them Again

Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!

Martyrs of Anti-Soviet Witchhunt


Shortly after 8 p.m., on 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Jewish Communists from New York, the Rosenbergs were framed up on charges of “conspiring” to pass the “secret of the atomic bomb” to the Soviet Union during World War II, when the USSR was allied with the U.S. Their 1951 trial was replete from beginning to end with perjured testimony, concocted evidence, a heavy dose of anti-Semitism and a judge who illegally consulted with the prosecution before meting out a sentence under provisions of a law that didn’t apply to their case—all against a backdrop of bloodcurdling calls to “fry the Reds.”

Around the world, millions raised their voices in an outcry demanding “justice for the Rosenbergs.” But from the White House on down, the American ruling class was united in its determination to make an example of these courageous leftists who never renounced their support to the Soviet Union, and refused to name names to save their lives. The great Soviet spy Kim Philby, in his book, My Silent War, rightly called them “the brave Rosenbergs.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on the altar of Cold War anti-Communism, in which the U.S. rulers saw the USSR as the main obstacle to U.S. imperialist world hegemony. Thus, Julius Rosenberg was arrested three weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War and less than a year after the first Soviet A-bomb test. Setting the tone for the trial, the prosecutor ranted in his opening arguments that the Rosenbergs stole “the key to the survival of this nation and…the peace of the world.” As we explained in our article “In Defense of the Rosenbergs!” (WV No. 86, 21 November 1975), following World War II:

“As the predominant capitalist power, the U.S., planning for an ‘American century,’ tore apart the U.S.-Soviet alliance and prepared the ground for a nationwide anti-red scare. When the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949 and later that same year Mao’s Red Army overthrew capitalism in China, politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy were building their political careers through a crusade to exorcise ‘Communism’ from American life.”

It was against this backdrop the Rosenbergs were put to death.

The Rosenberg Case and the Russian Question

The horrific memory of this case has been nearly impossible to bury. The capitalist rulers—often with liberals and social democrats taking the lead—have found the need to frame up and execute the Rosenbergs again and again. On the one hand they seek to defend the secret police, prosecution, judiciary and highest federal authorities who framed them. On the other, the Rosenberg case was, and still is, the question of the Russian Revolution. The 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led Russian working class was the greatest event of human history, and its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, after decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, a world-historic catastrophe. America’s imperialist rulers, the most dangerous in history, would like to wipe out of the consciousness of the proletariat and the oppressed any attachment to the program or ideals of communism—and that means driving a stake through the memory of those martyred in defense of the land of the October Revolution.

Today, with the financial crash leading the international capitalist economy into a freefall, the massive unpopularity of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the floundering occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. bourgeoisie seized on a chance to fry the Rosenbergs again. The latest exhumation and assassination was sparked by an interview (12 September) by the New York Times’ Sam Roberts with the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell, who had served over 18 years in prison. Responding to whether he had been a Soviet spy, Sobell, now 91 years old and ill, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it in those terms.” Regarding Julius Rosenberg, Sobell offered, “His intentions might have been to be a spy.” Yet Sobell maintained that sketches and other atomic bomb details the government claimed were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, were of little value. “What he gave them was junk.” According to Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg “knew what he [Julius] was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

We don’t know if Sobell’s “confession” is true or not—whether his interview was a last grab for attention near the end of his life or merely an expression of his coming to peace with U.S. imperialism. We do know however that every previous effort to “prove” the Rosenbergs’ “guilt”—from Ronald Radosh’s 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, which featured the dubious jailhouse informer Jerome Tartakow, to the Venona papers released in 1995—have had as much credibility as Bush’s tales of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Rosenbergs were legally lynched for political purposes. As the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) wrote in the Militant (27 October 1952): “The Rosenberg decision above all else was an act of ruling class terror by a state that is preparing a war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.”

What is indisputably true is that for the U.S. capitalist masters, guilt or innocence mattered not at all. Nor is guilt or innocence in this case the key question for revolutionaries. The nuclear arms capacity developed by the Soviet Union was an important component to the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. As we wrote 25 years ago, at the height of Carter/Reagan’s Cold War II, in “They’re Trying to Kill the Rosenbergs All Over Again” (WV No. 340, 21 October 1983):

“For revolutionaries, on the contrary, those who helped the Russians achieve nuclear capacity did a great service for humanity. Had U.S. imperialism maintained a nuclear monopoly, it would have meant historic defeats for the international proletariat. It would have meant nuclear destruction from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Who can doubt that U.S. imperialism would have destroyed Vietnam totally with nuclear weapons if they did not fear a retaliatory Soviet strike? Would Cuba exist today if the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly? It is clear that the USSR’s advance to nuclear capacity and then to nuclear parity has thus far been instrumental in staying the nuclear hand of U.S. imperialism.”

The Soviet Union was destroyed by imperialist-backed counterrevolution, but the question posed by the Russian Revolution—that of the proletarian seizure of state power—is as vital as ever. The imperialists seek to rewrite history in order to ensure that the rule of capital is never again challenged. We honor the Rosenbergs’ memory today, not least in our unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea—against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution.

As always, the Rosenberg case is used to serve the political needs of the day. Sobell’s “confession” was leaped on by the bourgeois press and bloggers. “Case Closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet Spies,” trumpeted an op-ed piece by Ronald Radosh in the Los Angeles Times (17 September). Written when he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Radosh’s 1983 book was a rallying point for the liberals, rad-libs and social democrats as they joined U.S. imperialism’s efforts to regiment the population during Cold War II against the Soviet Union. Today, Radosh, portrayed as an expert on the Rosenbergs case, is a neocon, a loud voice in support of the “war on terrorism” and a contributing columnist to FrontPage Magazine, mouthpiece of right-wing racist demagogue David Horowitz.

Written shortly after the FBI was given new powers to spy on and terrorize the population in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Radosh’s L.A. Times article declares, “It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.” Meanwhile, his right-wing acolytes have seized on the Sobell statements to argue that death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the MOVE organization framed up on charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981—is guilty. It is a telling indictment of American capitalist “justice” that from the liberal New York Times to Radosh’s right-wing “fringe,” Sobell’s confession is accepted without question, while the mountains of evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner, is sneered at and barred by court after court.

A Cold War Show Trial

Like many of their generation, the Rosenbergs were inspired by the authority and achievements of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism on one-sixth of the globe and created a society where those who labored ruled. Within less than two decades, the collectivized and planned economy of the USSR propelled a poor and backward country into a world power, with jobs, housing, education and medical care for all. In the 1930s, the capitalist world was mired in the Great Depression, while the rise of fascism and the buildup for a second interimperialist war further exposed the barbarity of capitalist class rule. As a teenager, Julius became determined to help free labor leader Tom Mooney, and as a college freshman protested against fascist students from Italy visiting CCNY. Ethel helped raise money for refugees fleeing fascist terror during the Spanish Civil War. Both were active trade unionists—Ethel in the clerical workers union and Julius as an organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians until he was fired from his job in 1945 for membership in the U.S. Communist Party (CP).

The Rosenbergs looked for political leadership to the Stalinized CP, a product of the degeneration of the Soviet workers state and Communist International. Ardent believers in the disastrous Stalinist popular front against fascism, the Rosenbergs were typical of “progressives” who hoped for a U.S.-Soviet alliance to continue after World War II. CP leader Earl Browder declared, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” But the U.S. ruling class didn’t see it that way.

On the contrary, the Rosenbergs were political scapegoats tried as “atom spies” because U.S. imperialism lost its nuclear monopoly, and with it the capacity for nuclear blackmail against the Soviets. Two months after Washington dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Pentagon mapped out a plan to launch a nuclear attack on 20 Soviet cities. Throughout the next few years, the U.S. repeatedly threatened to nuke Russia during early confrontations in the Cold War—in 1946, in 1948 over Berlin, again in 1950 over Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized on the Soviets’ August 1949 atomic test to unleash his army of G-men to hunt down the “atom spies” in the hopes of launching a series of show trials to frame up the CP for espionage. They went on frequent fishing expeditions hoping to force “confessions” and to get the confessors to falsely point the finger at other CPers.

Government prosecutors have since admitted that the arrest and threat of execution of Ethel Rosenberg was intended solely to force Julius to break down and “confess.” In the last minutes of their lives, a U.S. Marshal stood outside the execution chamber, waiting for a nod from either of them indicating that they would “confess” and “name names.” Two FBI agents waited by a special phone with an open line to Attorney General Brownell, ready to call off the execution if the Rosenbergs capitulated and allowed the government to use them as it had other finks and turncoats. But the Rosenbergs refused to bow.

Fully aware that there was no case against the Rosenbergs for espionage, the government got them on the classic frame-up charge—“conspiracy.” The government knew that the Rosenbergs did not “steal the secret of the atomic bomb.” In fact there was no “secret.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of designing the first atomic bomb, pointed out, “There are no unpublished secrets concerning atomic weapons, and no secrets of nature available to a few.” Judge Irving Kaufman, upon pronouncing the death sentence, accused the Rosenbergs of “treason.” It did not matter that according to the U.S. Constitution, “treason,” a capital crime, is defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. The USSR was an ally of the U.S. in 1944 when the “crime” supposedly took place!

It was hardly coincidental that the judge, the lead prosecutor, Irving Saypol, and the key witnesses were Jewish, chosen in a transparent effort to cover up the stench of anti-Semitism surrounding the trial (see “The Political Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” WV No. 626, 28 July 1995). Two self-confessed perjurers sent them to the chair—Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass and Philadelphia chemist Harry Gold, supposedly a Soviet spy courier. Gold admitted at the trial to having become “so tangled up in a web of lies...it is a wonder steam didn’t come out of my ears,” and never even testified to having met or known Julius or Ethel Rosenberg.

Greenglass, who had apparently stolen a piece of uranium while working as an army technician at the Los Alamos nuclear facility in 1945, set his sister and her husband up as fall guys. Greenglass testified that, after being recruited to a spy ring by Julius, he had handed sketches of the atomic bomb to Soviet spy courier Gold, claiming to have learned the A-bomb “secret” by overhearing conversations of scientists passing through the machine shop at Los Alamos. Greenglass implicated his sister with testimony that she typed up the notes for Julius. That Greenglass’ testimony was perjured was proven yet again in recently released grand jury testimony of his wife Ruth Greenglass, who testified that she wrote up the notes. The only hard “evidence” against the Rosenbergs introduced at the trial was a contribution box found in their home for Spanish Civil War refugees and Ethel’s signature on a petition for a Communist candidate for New York City Council.

Liberals and Social Democrats Witchhunt Reds

While his name has become a synonym for eviscerating the democratic rights of individuals and organizations based on their political views and associations, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was at first a fringe development in the anti-Communist hysteria. The political basis of the post World War II witchhunt was set by the Cold War liberals. As early as 1947, Democratic president Harry Truman put in place a loyalty board to screen all government employees, and the purge of left-wing militants from the CIO began. That same year Congress enacted the strikebreaking Taft-Hartley law, which, in addition to outlawing such labor weapons as secondary strikes, barred Communists from union office. It was the pro-Truman anti-Communists, among them Democrat Hubert Humphrey and United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther who founded the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 to drive the CP and radicals out of the unions.

Some 25,000 union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases leading to the destruction of whole unions. Thousands of others were tracked down by the FBI and driven from their jobs, only to continue to be hounded and witchhunted due to secret employer blacklists. The 1950 McCarran Act, named for the Democratic Senator from Nevada, legitimized secret FBI record keeping on “subversive” individuals and called for the registration of organizations and individuals who purportedly “advocated violent overthrow” of the government. It also provided for the deportation of non-citizens who had been Communists at any time in their lives. Hundreds of Communists were jailed. Nearly 12,000 people were listed on a “Security Index” kept by FBI national headquarters and another 17,000 on the “Communist Index,” while FBI field offices held lists of an additional 200,000 considered to constitute a danger in times of “national emergency.” Humphrey sponsored the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP, and amended the McCarran Act to set up concentration camps for “subversives” in the U.S.

The liberal Cold Warriors shared the same enemy, Communism, but thought that McCarthy overreached—he went after the “innocent” liberals along with the “guilty.” When the names of Cold War liberals were added to the Attorney General’s Subversives List, the liberals dumped McCarthy. The liberals and social democrats wanted their civil liberties and their witchhunt too.

Playing a parallel role was the Independent Socialist League (ISL) of Max Shachtman, successor to the Workers Party. The founders of the Workers Party had split toward social democracy from the SWP in 1940 over their refusal to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. The ISL, a precursor to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), supported the expulsions of the CP-led unions from the CIO. Shachtman, clearly expressing the need to join forces with Reuther, declared that workers “should follow the general line, inside the labor movement, of supporting the reformist officialdom against the Stalinist officialdom” (New International, September 1949). Shachtman proclaimed, “Stalinism is the most virulent poison that has ever coursed through the veins of the working class and its movement. The work of eliminating it makes the first claim on the attention of every militant.” The anti-red purge installed a venal pro-imperialist union leadership that abetted the bosses in fostering racial divisions and presided over the decimation of the unions for decades.

Shachtman’s ISL refused to come out for commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence until just before the execution. In the Bay Area branch, where a vote to support commutation of the death sentence lost by a single vote, the right-wing “hang the spies” faction was destroyed when confronted with Shachtman’s wire to President Eisenhower asking to commute the sentence. Writing in the name of “an independent socialist organization which has been uncompromising in its struggle against Stalinism,” Shachtman assured Eisenhower that their concern arose only from the death penalty which “gives worldwide Stalinism an effective weapon” (Labor Action, 22 June 1953). Still, there was a hue and cry in the party against the decision, as letters poured in to Labor Action bitterly complaining of Shachtman’s “capitulation” and of “this belated jump into the ‘super-liberal’ bandwagon...that hangs on the Stalinist coattails.”

The Shachtmanites were visceral anti-Communists. But most of the left, including the SWP, failed to immediately rally to the Rosenbergs’ defense for other reasons. This was a time when leftist militants were being tried and sent to prison for long stretches based on nothing but their libraries; Congressmen were calling to make CP membership a capital crime and the government was looking to brand left organizations, particularly the CP, as espionage agents. Civil rights activist Carl Braden was jailed for “state sedition” after he and his wife sold a house to a black family in a white neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Robeson, the acclaimed black actor and vocalist, was one of the many stripped of their passports and banned from leaving the country for years. The renowned filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, a British citizen, was barred from re-entering the U.S.

As for the CP, it did not even mention the case until after the trial was over and the death sentence had already been handed down. When the CP did take up the case, it neither denounced the political frame-up nor defended the Rosenbergs as victims of the capitalist state. It merely accused the government of “bad faith” similar to its refusal “to negotiate peace in Korea” (Daily Worker, 6 April 1951). The CP’s betrayal was not simply one of defense policy over the Rosenbergs’ case. The CP betrayed the working class with its program of class collaboration, its policy of tailing the “progressive” bourgeoisie. By the end of World War II, the CP found itself without allies when it was no longer useful for the bourgeoisie to continue the popular front forged during the “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.” Years of class collaboration behind Roosevelt—the no-strike pledge, scabbing on strikes and betrayal of the fight for black rights during the Second World War—closed off the possibility of effectively mobilizing the labor movement against repression. As the Cold War McCarthy period ensued, the CP found itself totally abandoned by its “progressive” friends.

Even had the CP moved sooner and with more energy, it is not likely they could have saved the Rosenbergs from a government intent on killing them. Against the Stalinists’ vapid talk of “bad faith” on the part of the U.S. government, it was the SWP that correctly recognized the anti-Soviet centrality of the Rosenberg trial and hailed the USSR’s nuclear capacity—an important act demonstrating considerable political courage in that period. Though the SWP could have recognized the political character of the Rosenberg case sooner and sounded the alarm earlier and louder, the defense record of the SWP was generally excellent. They protested the 1949 Smith Act prosecutions of the CP, undeterred by the vicious sectarianism which led the CP to applaud the first use of the Smith Act in 1941 against the Trotskyists for their principled opposition to their “own” rulers. While unconditionally defending the USSR during the Second World War, the SWP courageously opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage.

Today, Sobell’s “confession” has left the Rosenbergs’ few liberal defenders uneasy and defensive. That is because they are hostile to the cause for which the Rosenbergs died. What the liberals care about is the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. For Howard Zinn, “The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria” (New York Times, 21 September). Victor Navasky, former publisher of the Nation, told the Times, “I wish Morty and Ethel and Julius had been open about what they had and hadn’t done, or in Morty’s case, ‘come clean’ before this.” He added, “These guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime, and yes, they broke the law, shouldn’t have done what they did, and should have been proportionally punished for it; but the greater betrayal was by the state.”

Today, Shachtman’s heirs in the ISO have published an article “Executed to Send a Message” (Socialist Worker online, 30 September) that makes no mention of the Democrats’ role in the Cold War witchhunt or in the Rosenbergs’ prosecution. The ISO ludicrously seeks to put distance between the Rosenbergs and the CP, stating, “by 1943, they were no longer active in the party,” and giving not the slightest hint that they went to their deaths as supporters of the Soviet Union. Small wonder: this is a group that was formed in opposition to the defense of the USSR and that hailed its counterrevolutionary destruction.

Against such liberals and renegades, we Trotskyists fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe. We hail those, like the Rosenbergs, who gave their lives in defense of the land of October and fight to disarm the rapacious imperialist rulers through socialist revolution. We will not forget—Honor the heroic Rosenbergs! For new October Revolutions!

Monday, June 19, 2017

*On The Anniversary Of The Execution Of The Rosenbergs- E.L. Doctorow's Fictional Treatment "The Book Of Daniel" And Sidney Lumet's Film "Daniel"

*On The Anniversary Of The Execution Of The Rosenbergs- E.L. Doctorow's Fictional Treatment "The Book Of Daniel" And Sidney Lumet's Film "Daniel"


Repost

Commentary- June 2, 2009


This June marks the 56th Anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state. I have defended the Rosenbergs elsewhere in this space, including a review last year of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, titled "Heir To An Execution".(Check Archives). Directly below are some remarks made in additional to that review in light of a flurry of controversy around their names that surfaced in the Fall of 2008. This year I have chosen to review E.L. Doctorow's 1971 fictional treatment of some aspects of the case and the film based on the book. Needless to say I stand by my defense of this heroic radical couple. Justice still awaits in their case.

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Commentary made in addition to a September 14, 2008 review of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, in this space.

Honor the Heroic Soviet Spies Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobel

In the commentary above I alluded, somewhat obliquely, to the Verona Tapes-the decoded Soviet transmissions from World War II- as an earlier American governmental source for the proposition that Julius Rosenberg was providing scientific information of some sort to the Soviet Union during that period. Recent news has highlighted the possible truth of that assertion. First the release of classified grand jury testimony in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case mentioned above. Also the assertion by convicted Rosenberg co-conspirator Morton Sobel that he passed scientific information to the Soviets during that period. More recently, in some interviews in The New York Times, the Rosenberg children (Meeropols), after having spend their adulthoods trying to build a case for their parents’ innocence have seemingly come to the position that their father, at least, was indeed working for the Soviets.

Let’s be clear here. For those who saw military defense of the Soviet Union, Stalinist warts and all, as an internationalist socialist duty until its demise in the early 1990’s the question of honoring Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has not hinged on their guilt or innocence of the charges of aiding the Soviet Union leveled by the American government. Nor has it hinged on opposition to the death penalty, although we are opposed to that barbaric punishment. The question has always been, if not openly then otherwise, the service they were in a position to provide to the first workers state. In the interest of “muddying the waters” we have never earlier proclaimed them, as we have with Kim Philby and his Cambridge cohorts, Richard Sorge or Leopold Trepper, heroic Soviet spies. Now, apparently, we can openly acknowledge our debt at last to Julius and Morton Sobel. The case remains unclear about Ethel although we honor her as a soldier of the revolution as well. Some little piece of historic justice is finally possible in their cases.

I would add here that although I had spend a fair portion of my life as a military defender of the Soviet Union and the other workers states of East Europe while they existed that, as a practical matter, that defense never got beyond the propaganda stage. Apparently, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobel, in their attempts to defend the interests of the Soviet Union as they saw that duty, were in a position to do more. Although the political gap that separated us was, at times drawn in the blood of our murdered comrades at the hands of the Stalinist henchman that they defended, they acted as soldiers of the revolution here. That is the why of honoring them in this space.

Finally, I have mentioned before that I have always liked the idea of Julius organizing in the 1930’s in behalf of freedom for the jailed militant labor leader Tom Mooney while at City College of New York (CCNY). As those who follow this space know the late Professor Irving Howe, the social democratic founder/editor of Dissent also was at CCNY during this period as an anti-Stalinist socialist who was won to Trotskyism, for a moment, during this same period. He, along with a fair number of others recruited from the Socialist Party milieu at CCNY dropped out of the Socialist Workers Party (the main organized Trotskyist organization in America at the time) over the question of defense of the Soviet Union when it mattered in the late 1930’s. I pose this question- When the fight for socialism is on the line who do you want with you- Julius Rosenberg or Irving Howe? To ask the question is to give the answer. The Rosenbergs and Sobel were not our people- but they were our people.


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Book/ DVD Review

This review is being used for both book and DVD versions of Doctorow's work as the central points to be made in regard to both works are similar. The film starring Timothy Hutton as Daniel and directed by the acclaimed Sidney Lumet fairly closely hems to Doctorow's story line. Hutton does an excellent job as Daniel. Obviously, such dramatic moments as the attempts to run away from the state authorities by the Rosenberg children after their parents' arrest, the touching visiting scenes by the children in the prison just prior to the executions, the executions and the tragic fate of one of the children (in the book, not real life) get more attention than in the book. But that is cinematic license, and here is not overplayed.

The Book Of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow, Random House, New York, 1971

Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton, directed by Sidney Lumet, DVD release 2008

At first blush the Rosenberg Cold War Soviet espionage case of the 1950's, that ended in the execution of both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state despite a worldwide campaign to save their lives, would not appear to be a natural subject for fictional treatment. Unlike, let us say, Kim Philby and the various Cambridge spies the Rosenbergs' biographies and political profiles do not have the stuff of larger than life drama. Moreover, whatever their efforts were on behalf of the defense of the Soviet Union, as they saw it, the details do not jump out as the makings of a spy thriller. And the well-known historical novelist (`Ragtime", Loon Lake", etc.), E.L. Doctorow, does not go into any of that material. What Doctorow has attempted to mine, and I think within the parameters that he has set himself successfully so, is the effect that the political actions of the Rosenbergs had on their children at the time, on their children's futures (in state custody and later adopted privately) and on the trauma of being the "heirs to an execution" in adulthood. Add to that the biblical implications ("The Book Of Daniel") that Doctorow weaves into his story and that is more than enough material for one novel.

Naturally, the question of the fate of the children of famous (or infamous, as the case may be) is a fair subject for treatment, fictional or otherwise. There is a whole flourishing body of literature concerning this topic. What makes the Rosenberg children distinct (a boy and girl, rather than the real two boys, fictionally named Daniel and Susan Issacson here) is that they were son and daughter to parents who in the eyes of the American state and significant parts of the American population were traitors. Not a good way for young kids to develop their self-esteem. That struggle, placed in the context of the traumas over personal identification which were rift as they grew to adulthood and that helped define the 1960's the time of the action of this story, drive the main themes of the story. The interlocked questions of life in the academy (Daniel is something of a professional graduate student), life on the political streets (Susan has chosen a psychologically dangerous way to cope with her heritage by going full-bore into the left-wing political activity of the period) and coming to grips, successfully or not, with their legacies give the plot substance.

Aside from Doctorow's main themes of exploring the thorny question of the responsibility that parents have for their children, either as parents or as political people, the last part of the book where Daniel, as a coping mechanism if nothing else, begins to get "political" provides some interesting (for the time) theories about what happened in the Rosenberg case. The themes of "good Jew, bad Jew" (as shown by the large cast of Jewish characters in the trial process), the alleged inadequacies of the defense, the scarcity of government evidence (the Rosenbergs were convicted of that old stand-by "conspiracy"), the nature of the early Cold War period and the personal and political limitations of the Rosenbergs themselves get a full workout here. In the end though, as I mentioned in a commentary reviewing Rosenberg granddaughter Ivy Meerpol's film, "Heir To An Execution", concerning the personal characters of the Rosenbergs they did their duty as communists, as they saw it. For that they deserve all honor. And someday some real justice to clear their names.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

*Honor The Memory Of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg- Soldiers of The Revolution

Click On Title To Link To The Rosenberg Defense Fund For Children

The very recent disclosures through the release of previously classified documents of possible perjury to the grand jury by Ethel Rosenberg's brother and sister-in-law and co-defendant Morton Sobel's seeming confession that he acted as a spy on behalf of the Soviet Union during World War II have forced me to post this review earlier than I had anticipated. The comments I made below I stand by. I, however, am beginning to develop an even stronger respect for what Julius Rosenberg tried to do in defense of the Soviet Union- when it counted by someone who could do something about it. More later on these soldiers of the revolution.


DVD REVIEW

Heir To An Execution, directed by Ivy Meeropol, 2004

This year marks the 55th Anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state. As I mentioned in a March 2007 review of a book on their case –they were not our people, but they were our people (meaning they doggedly adhered to the Stalinist line to the end but also upheld the defense of the Soviet Union, as they understood it, as well). Below is a DVD review of a documentary of their lives produced by one of their granddaughters who, although she does not appear to be particularly political, has as many questions about the fate of her grandparents as we militant leftists do.



The first two paragraphs are taken from that previous March 2007 review to set the stage for the kind of questions that their granddaughter, Ivy Meeropol, daughter of Julius and Ethel’s son Robert attempted to deal with on this political case although the thrust of her work was to find out how the case affected her family and their friends as much as anything else.


“Eisenhower, Stalin, the Cold War, the Korean War, atomic bombs, atomic spies, air raid shelters, the “Red Scare”, McCarthyism and the Rosenbergs- in the mist of time these were early, if undigested terms, from my childhood. Ah, the Rosenbergs. That is what I want to write about today. Out of all of those undigested terms that name is the one that still evokes deep emotion in these old bones. For those who have forgotten, or those too young to remember, the controversy surrounding their convictions for espionage in passing information about the atomic bomb to the now defunct Soviet Union and their executions defined an essential part of the 1950’s, the hardening of the Cold War period in American history. Their controversial convictions and sentencing evoked widespread protests throughout the world. Thus, those who seek to learn the lessons of history, our working class history, and about justice American-style should take the time to carefully examine the case and come to some conclusions about it….

…And what questions drive the scholarship on the case? Was their trial a frame-up in classic American-style against leftist political opponents of the Cold War and American foreign policy? Were they, individually or collectively, “master spies” at the service of the Soviet Union? Were they innocent, if misguided, progressives caught up in the turmoil of the American “red scare” of the post-World War II period? Did the government through its FBI and other security agencies, its attorneys, its judges stumble into a case which would make many reputations? Did the American Communist Party, itself under severe scrutiny and persecution, betray the Rosenbergs? Did the various international campaigns on behalf of the couple work at cross purposes with their various demands for a new trial, reduction of sentence and clemency? What kind of people were these Rosenbergs? In short, were the Rosenbergs heroic Soviet spies, martyrs, dupes or innocents? Those are the questions thoughtful readers are confronted with and I will deal with at least some of them in due course in latter commentaries.”

These same questions mentioned above stalk the viewer today after watching this very personal, and at times tearful, take on the case. Clearly the evident adduced argues more forcefully, especially in light of the Verona tapes, that the Rosenbergs did something illegal, although not what they were executed for. As clearly, as well, they were abandoned by friends and family then and it appears unto the nth generation from Ms. Meeropol’s frustrated efforts to put the picture of their lives together through some of the relatives. Moreover, the toll on the two Rosenberg (Meeropol) children (and through them their children) makes this at some level something of a life time curse.

Yet here is a picture that I have constructed that seems to me to be a little closer to the truth. I like the picture of Julius leading a march in defense of freedom for labor leader Tom Mooney at City College of New York in the early 1930’s. I like the picture of Ethel singing in Times Square for the benefit of the Spanish Republicans. I will stick with my original take on the fate of the Rosenbergs- they, in their own ways and for their own purposes, were soldiers of the revolution, and didn’t complain about it or their fates. Yes, I like that idea. Yes, that is why at the beginning of this piece I could say without hesitation that these were our people, although they were not our people. Watch this and see why and then go out and get some books on the subject.

Thursday, June 02, 2016

*From The Archives-On The Anniversary Of The Execution Of The Rosenbergs- E.L. Doctorow's Fictional Treatment "The Book Of Daniel" And Sidney Lumet's Film "Daniel"

Click On Title To Link To The Rosenberg Fund For Children.

Commentary- June 2, 2009

This June marks the 56th Anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state. I have defended the Rosenbergs elsewhere in this space, including a review last year of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, titled "Heir To An Execution".(Check Archives). Directly below are some remarks made in additional to that review in light of a flurry of controversy around their names that surfaced in the Fall of 2008. This year I have chosen to review E.L. Doctorow's 1971 fictional treatment of some aspects of the case and the film based on the book. Needless to say I stand by my defense of this heroic radical couple. Justice still awaits in their case.


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Commentary made in addition to a September 14, 2008 review of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, in this space.

Honor the Heroic Soviet Spies Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobel


In the commentary above I alluded, somewhat obliquely, to the Verona Tapes-the decoded Soviet transmissions from World War II- as an earlier American governmental source for the proposition that Julius Rosenberg was providing scientific information of some sort to the Soviet Union during that period. Recent news has highlighted the possible truth of that assertion. First the release of classified grand jury testimony in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case mentioned above. Also the assertion by convicted Rosenberg co-conspirator Morton Sobel that he passed scientific information to the Soviets during that period. More recently, in some interviews in The New York Times, the Rosenberg children (Meeropols), after having spend their adulthoods trying to build a case for their parents’ innocence have seemingly come to the position that their father, at least, was indeed working for the Soviets.

Let’s be clear here. For those who saw military defense of the Soviet Union, Stalinist warts and all, as an internationalist socialist duty until its demise in the early 1990’s the question of honoring Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has not hinged on their guilt or innocence of the charges of aiding the Soviet Union leveled by the American government. Nor has it hinged on opposition to the death penalty, although we are opposed to that barbaric punishment. The question has always been, if not openly then otherwise, the service they were in a position to provide to the first workers state. In the interest of “muddying the waters” we have never earlier proclaimed them, as we have with Kim Philby and his Cambridge cohorts, Richard Sorge or Leopold Trepper, heroic Soviet spies. Now, apparently, we can openly acknowledge our debt at last to Julius and Morton Sobel. The case remains unclear about Ethel although we honor her as a soldier of the revolution as well. Some little piece of historic justice is finally possible in their cases.

I would add here that although I had spend a fair portion of my life as a military defender of the Soviet Union and the other workers states of East Europe while they existed that, as a practical matter, that defense never got beyond the propaganda stage. Apparently, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobel, in their attempts to defend the interests of the Soviet Union as they saw that duty, were in a position to do more. Although the political gap that separated us was, at times drawn in the blood of our murdered comrades at the hands of the Stalinist henchman that they defended, they acted as soldiers of the revolution here. That is the why of honoring them in this space.

Finally, I have mentioned before that I have always liked the idea of Julius organizing in the 1930’s in behalf of freedom for the jailed militant labor leader Tom Mooney while at City College of New York (CCNY). As those who follow this space know the late Professor Irving Howe, the social democratic founder/editor of Dissent also was at CCNY during this period as an anti-Stalinist socialist who was won to Trotskyism, for a moment, during this same period. He, along with a fair number of others recruited from the Socialist Party milieu at CCNY dropped out of the Socialist Workers Party (the main organized Trotskyist organization in America at the time) over the question of defense of the Soviet Union when it mattered in the late 1930’s. I pose this question- When the fight for socialism is on the line who do you want with you- Julius Rosenberg or Irving Howe? To ask the question is to give the answer. The Rosenbergs and Sobel were not our people- but they were our people.


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Book/ DVD Review

This review is being used for both book and DVD versions of Doctorow's work as the central points to be made in regard to both works are similar. The film starring Timothy Hutton as Daniel and directed by the acclaimed Sidney Lumet fairly closely hems to Doctorow's story line. Hutton does an excellent job as Daniel. Obviously, such dramatic moments as the attempts to run away from the state authorities by the Rosenberg children after their parents' arrest, the touching visiting scenes by the children in the prison just prior to the executions, the executions and the tragic fate of one of the children (in the book, not real life) get more attention than in the book. But that is cinematic license, and here is not overplayed.

The Book Of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow, Random House, New York, 1971

Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton, directed by Sidney Lumet, DVD release 2008

At first blush the Rosenberg Cold War Soviet espionage case of the 1950's, that ended in the execution of both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state despite a worldwide campaign to save their lives, would not appear to be a natural subject for fictional treatment. Unlike, let us say, Kim Philby and the various Cambridge spies the Rosenbergs' biographies and political profiles do not have the stuff of larger than life drama. Moreover, whatever their efforts were on behalf of the defense of the Soviet Union, as they saw it, the details do not jump out as the makings of a spy thriller. And the well-known historical novelist (`Ragtime", Loon Lake", etc.), E.L. Doctorow, does not go into any of that material. What Doctorow has attempted to mine, and I think within the parameters that he has set himself successfully so, is the effect that the political actions of the Rosenbergs had on their children at the time, on their children's futures (in state custody and later adopted privately) and on the trauma of being the "heirs to an execution" in adulthood. Add to that the biblical implications ("The Book Of Daniel") that Doctorow weaves into his story and that is more than enough material for one novel.

Naturally, the question of the fate of the children of famous (or infamous, as the case may be) is a fair subject for treatment, fictional or otherwise. There is a whole flourishing body of literature concerning this topic. What makes the Rosenberg children distinct (a boy and girl, rather than the real two boys, fictionally named Daniel and Susan Issacson here) is that they were son and daughter to parents who in the eyes of the American state and significant parts of the American population were traitors. Not a good way for young kids to develop their self-esteem. That struggle, placed in the context of the traumas over personal identification which were rift as they grew to adulthood and that helped define the 1960's the time of the action of this story, drive the main themes of the story. The interlocked questions of life in the academy (Daniel is something of a professional graduate student), life on the political streets (Susan has chosen a psychologically dangerous way to cope with her heritage by going full-bore into the left-wing political activity of the period) and coming to grips, successfully or not, with their legacies give the plot substance.

Aside from Doctorow's main themes of exploring the thorny question of the responsibility that parents have for their children, either as parents or as political people, the last part of the book where Daniel, as a coping mechanism if nothing else, begins to get "political" provides some interesting (for the time) theories about what happened in the Rosenberg case. The themes of "good Jew, bad Jew" (as shown by the large cast of Jewish characters in the trial process), the alleged inadequacies of the defense, the scarcity of government evidence (the Rosenbergs were convicted of that old stand-by "conspiracy"), the nature of the early Cold War period and the personal and political limitations of the Rosenbergs themselves get a full workout here. In the end though, as I mentioned in a commentary reviewing Rosenberg granddaughter Ivy Meerpol's film, "Heir To An Execution", concerning the personal characters of the Rosenbergs they did their duty as communists, as they saw it. For that they deserve all honor. And someday some real justice to clear their names.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

From The Bob Feldman '68 Blog- In Honor Of Julius And Ethel Rosenburg- "They Killed The Rosenbergs"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Julius and Ethel Rosenburg executed on this date in 1953 by the American imperial state.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

"They Killed The Rosenbergs"

They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them on the electric chair
They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them to make people scared.

They arrested the Rosenbergs
They broke into their home
They jailed the Rosenbergs
They ignored their sons who moaned.

They framed the Rosenbergs
They used false evidence
They tortured the Rosenbergs
They used a lying witness.

They smeared the Rosenbergs
They charged them with "conspiracy"
They sentenced the Rosenbergs
They sent them up to Sing Sing.

They murder the innocent
They execute the powerless
With barbaric hands they pulled their switch
For the Rosenbergs would not submit.


To listen to "They Killed The Rosenbergs" protest folk song, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Killed+the+Rosenbergs

Many years after the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953 by the U.S. government and no longer alive to deny that they were guilty of any crime, some U.S. academics and mainstream journalists claimed that de-classified KGB documents “prove” that the Rosenbergs were not framed. Yet, as I noted in Downtown (2/17/93), during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing U.S. Justice Department documents. The de-classified documents apparently indicated that, when he worked as a Press Attache’ in the U.S. embassy in Paris, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “was a central figure” in “a State Department/CIA campaign against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” which “was designed to persuade Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved to be put to death,” according to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post.

According to Davis, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

In an April 1, 1987 letter to Deborah Davis, however, Bradlee (currently a vice-president of the Washington Post Company media conglomerate) wrote:

“I worked for the USIA as the Press Attache’ of the United States Embassy in the early 1950s. I never worked for the CIA. I never participated in a `CIA propaganda campaign’…”

Yet a December 13, 1952 U.S. Government Memorandum from Associate Prosecutor Maran to Asst. U.S. Atty. Myles Lane apparently stated:

“On December 13, 1952 a Mr. Benjamin Bradlee called and informed me that he was Press Attache’ with the American Embassy in Paris, that he had left Paris last night and arrived here this morning. He advised me that…he was sent here to look at the Rosenberg file…

“He advised me that it was an urgent matter…He further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris…”

For more information on the Rosenberg Case, you can check out the web site of the Rosenberg Fund for Children at www.rfc.org/case.htm .

Sunday, October 04, 2009

*The Latest From "The New York Review Of Books" Corner- Chapman Pincher On The Cold War British Soviet Moles-Kim Philby And The Boys

Click on title to link to a "The New York Review Of Books" review of a book on the heroic (you know where I am coming from on this)British pro-Soviet spies from the Cold War period. They were from the upper classes of British society (and chums of the author and reviewer). These guys (author and reviewer) still haven't gotten over the fact that one could "betray" "Mother England" for the Soviet Union, of all places. Honor the heroic Soviet spies . Honor master spy Kim Philby. I am trying to see how I can put the whole article in this space. Later on this.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

HEROIC SOVIET SPIES OR BRITISH DUPES?

HEROIC RUSSIAN SPIES OR BRITISH DUPES?

BOOK REVIEW

DECEIVING THE DECEIVERS: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, S.J. Hamrick, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004.

I like a James Bond spy thriller, replete with the latest technology, as well as the next guy. Le Carre’s Cold War-inspired George Smiley series. Even better. So when I expected to get the real ‘scoop’ on the actions of the Kim Philby-led Ring of Five in England that performed heroic spy service for the Soviet Union I found instead mostly skimpy historical conjecture by Mr. Hamrick. The central premise of his book that the Ring of Five was led by the rings in their noses by Western intelligence made me long for one of Mr. le Carre’s books. Apparently the only virtue of the opening of Cold War archives has been not to bring some clarity about the period but to create a cottage industry of conjecture and coincidence that rivals the Lee Harvey Oswald industry. Interestingly, the New York Review of Books (April 26, 2007) in its review of Mr. Hamrick’s book brought in the big guns. The review by Phillip Knightley, who actually has done some heavy work sorting out the Philby case, politely, too politely, dismisses the claims as so much smoke. No disagreement there from these quarters.

Intelligence gathering, as we are painfully aware in light of the Iraq fiasco, is a very inexact science. So mistakes, honest mistakes unlike the fudged Iraq intelligence, are part of the price for increased knowledge about what your enemy is up to. This writer makes no bones about his admiration for Kim Philby and the others who came over to the side of communism, as they saw it. That they were traitors to their English upper class upbringing, to boot, only increases their appeal. One can argue all one wants to about whether the information they provided to the Soviets was good, tainted, ignored or thrown in the waste paper basket. The question for history is did they subjectively aim to aid the cause of socialism. And did they come to regret their youthful decisions. From all the evidence, especially in the case of Philby, they did not. Until someone comes up with the ‘smoking gun’ that the Ring of Five’s work was all a sham socialists should still honor their memories. And that of Richard Sorge in Japan. Also Leopold Trepper and his “Red Orchestra” in Europe during the German Occupation. And, dare I say it, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States.