Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: History, Novel, Film Author(s): Cushing Strout Source: Reviews in American History, Vol.

12, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 309-321 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2702238 . Accessed: 29/08/2011 07:14
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RECONSIDERINGTHE ROSENBERGS: HISTORY, NOVEL, FILM

Cushing Strout

The Rosenberg case, an international cause celebre in the 1950s, has been revived again in several forms. It surfaced as a battle of the books on the Left in December 1983, when 1500 people packed Town Hall in New York to take sides between the authors of Invitation to an Inquest and the authors of The Rosenberg File, the latest book on the case. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton have created this stir not because they showed how unfair the prosecution, the courts, and the FBI were, as they extensively do, but because they also reject on historical grounds Walter and Miriam Schneir's Invitation to an Inquest, which perceives the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of a government frame-up. The case has also been the focus of two films: an older one (in debt to the Schneirs'book) by Alvin Goldstein, The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which was shown on television several times in 1983, and a new arrival this past fall, a filmed version of E. L. Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel, directed for Paramount Pictures by Sidney Lumet and starring Timothy Hutton and Ed Asner. The novel and its filmed version have their own differences, but they tend to join The Rcsenberg File in attempting to mediate, in their own way, between the prosecution and the defense. In this respect the debate has moved to a point beyond a dialogue of the deaf between the government's case and the partisans of the Rosenbergs, between a hyperbolically stated "guilt" and a hyperbolically assumed "innocence," the stuff of historical and liter. -y melodrama. As Lionel Trilling warned many years ago, unless we can bring imagination and mind to politics, then politics will take over imagination and mind for its own purposes. The challenge of the Rosenberg case for historians and artists is to take Trilling's point to heart. The terms of the debate were set for the 1950s by the opposition between Communist propaganda for the defense and anti-Stalinist liberals who took for granted the guilt of the Rosenbergs. The novelist Howard Fast introduced the French to the Rosenberg case with his article in L'Humanite. 'Ih%affair had by then become a Communist party cause, and its defense no longer turned on the efforts of a few courageous radical mavericks who had raised the issues when the Communists were silent. Fast's line of argument was a
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Party line, as The Rosenberg File points out, disingenuously insisting that the Rosenbergs were "Jewswith the opinions of Progressives, but they were not Communists to the best of anyone's knowledge." Fast also claimed that David Greenglass, a confessed spy, had "no connections to the Progessive movement,"even though the New York Times had already identified him as having belonged to the Young Communist League (pp. 350-51). This influential use as a way of refusing to call things by their right of the term "Progressive" names was a historical legacy of the Popular Front, with its strategy of amalgamating rhetorically all anti-Fascistpositions. Communists and liberals praised each other, thus blurring the essential issues that should divide them. This corruption of discourse had its crude expediencies. As The Rosenberg File shrewdly notes, the defense of the couple by European intellectuals was entangled with the Communist party's anxiety to use anti-Americanism as a cover for its own gross anti-Semitic persecutions of fellow Communists in the notorious Slansky trial. The Rosenberg Defense Committee in France was founded on the same day in 1952 that Slansky and ten others were executed in Prague (p. 349). Given this politicizing of the Rosenberg's defense, independent writers on the case needed to distinguish their own commentary from the propaganda put out by the Defense Committee. Moreover, they had to confront the difficulty of dealing with defendants whose use of the Fifth Amendment, while legally justified, tended to obscure their political identities. In this context the literary critics Robert Warshow and Leslie Fiedler understandably contrasted the Rosenbergs with the political candor of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet both critics exaggerated their point to the extent that Warshow wondered if the Rosenbergs would have had any thoughts or feelings if it had not been for the propaganda they voiced, and Fiedler dismissed them contemptuously as being merely "the visible manifestation of the Stalinized petty-bourgeois mind: rigid, conventional, hopelessly self-righteous." This "wretchedness" was more than matched, he conceded, by those with their own "even more wretched 'Down with the Communist Rats -God Bless America' sentimentality and rancor." For him and Warshow alike, however, the tragedy of the Rosenbergs was not their death, but their inability "to think of themselves as real people." As a Jew, Fiedler was embarrassed that Ethel Rosenberg should have pleaded for what she called "a small unoffending Jewish family," and he found her style "painfullypretentious."Because Julius Rosenberg stuck up a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall of his cell, Fiedler branded him as being something "more devious" than "a poseur and a hypocrite."' Yet Fiedler rightly recognized that a "failureof the moral imagination"to perceive the Rosenbergs as human beings had insured their execution. Even though they had not been charged with treason, but with a conspiracy to commit espionage for a wartime ally, they were tried as traitors. Fiedler'sown

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imagination had failed to make the Rosenbergs real. Their Death House Letters sounded to him only like lines from an "agit-propchoral production at the combined celebration of Rosh Hashanah and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution." In the end the Rosenbergs had been true to only one principle, he asserted, the completely unmentioned cause of the "defense of the Soviet Union." In his view therefore, "they failed in the end to become martyrs or heroes, or even men. What was there left to die?"2 There was left only the question of our mercy versus the impersonal demands of the law. Fiedler failed to appreciate Harold Rosenberg'spoint that the law had not been too impersonal; that is what law is supposed to be. Actually, in this case the law had been bent and distorted by the all-too-human passions that made demons out of Communists.3 Fiedler saw himself as qualified to talk about the Rosenbergs because he was "a literary man, immune to certain journalistic platitudes and accustomed to regard men and words with a sensibility trained by the newer critical methods.""Itis 'a close reading'of recent events that I should like to think I have achieved," he explained, a reading that "does not scant ambiguity or paradox," but tries to give to the letters of the Rosenbergs the same scrutiny "we have learned to practice on the shorter poems of John Donne." Though he berated the Rosenbergs for treating themselves as a case, he eagerly confessed as a generalizer to relishing "all that is typical," even about himself.4 In this case his confessional tone presumed to speak for liberal Jews, as if they had all fellow-travelers and needed to repent. As Harold Rosenberg been "innocent" noticed, Fiedler had turned such "innocence"into a form of guilt, and he ignored those liberals and radicals in the 1930s who had been vigorous antiStalinists, especially the talented writers associated with the Partisan Review.s From their perspective and painful experience the apologists for Soviet repression were far from being innocent idealists; they behaved instead like middle-class careerists and philistines, riding what they took to be "the wave of the future." By the end of the 1960s, a decade in which radicals of all kinds polarized with their enemy, "the establishment," concern for the Rosenbergs was not shared by the youthful agitators and rebels, who generally were like the counterculture revolutionary in E. L. Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel, in being thoroughly disdainful of the executed Old Left couple because they played the legal game at their trial instead of judging the judges and speaking for "anew nation with new laws of life." The protagonist's sister despairingly commits suicide because she sees that her own faith in her parents' political martyrdom is not shared by her New Left associates. A political participant in the sixties who did remember the Rosenbergs in the next decade was Morris Dickstein, a former student of Lionel Trilling's. In The Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977) Dickstein charged

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the 1950s writers with having turned away from public issues, like the Rosenberg case, to celebrate "the closet intensities"of the private self. When they did consider the case, they blamed the victims. He was appalled at Fiedler'stone. Its "vengefulnessand personal animosity"about the Rosenbergs substituted aesthetic matters of taste and style for political "issues of power and justice," a failure Dickstein found characteristic of the 1950s "new criticism."He emphasized what Fiedler only touched on, Judge Kaufman's hyperbolic and inflammatory charge that the Rosenbergs had caused Communist aggression in Korea, and President Eisenhower's harsh refusal of clemency on the grossly hypothetical ground that the Rosenbergs had increased the chances of atomic war and thereby "may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people." Dickstein came of age in the 1960s and he was politically prepared to believe that "the record, even the record available when Fiedler wrote, provides abundant evidence for the most extreme judgment"against American public officials. From this perspective he accused Fiedler of refusing "even to entertain the possibility that Hiss or the Rosenbergs might not have all that much to confess," because, as a 1950s intellectual, he had too much "faith in American institutions"(pp. 43-44). Dickstein had participated in the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and his later experience of the police action at Columbia University against the student radicals had made him "antipatheticto the law-and-order liberalism that was just beginning to crystallize and which, by a backlash effect, would mushroom in strength over the ensuing years"(p. 260). He was just as unprepared, however, to entertain the possibility that the Rosenbergs had committed espionage as Fiedler was unprepared to question deeply enough the trial that convicted them. Moreover, no critic of the trial can afford to take lightly issues about "law and order,"but needs to insist on them whenever the law has been twisted by political passions. In this controversy the Rosenbergs appear as through a glass darkly. The prosecutor, judge, and President Eisenhower envisioned them as traitors worse than murderers; for Warshow and Fiedler the couple had vanished behind their disingenuous rhetoric. Dickstein challenged both of these views, yet he himself clouded the portrait by ignoring the question of what, if anything, the Rosenbergs had done to be arrested. Nevertheless, he pointed the way to a better understanding of them by citing as a major clue to their personalities E. L. Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel. Like most novelists dealing with historical issues in their own fictionalized way, Doctorow has no literal or narrow documentary intention. He uses "modernist"nonlinear techniques of flashback and disrupted stream-ofconsciousness, which are innovatively brought to bear on a historical subject. The novel sets the spy case in a rich historical context, involving three genera-

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tions of immigrant life, the Jewish search for social justice, and the recurring tendency of apocalyptic millennialists to forget the biblical warning against the worship of false idols. The novel appropriately ends not with definitive truths, but with the biblical quotation advising to "go thy way Daniel; for the words are closed up and sealed until the time of the end." Doctorow's exercise of poetic license substitutes for the younger Rosenberg son a daughter, Susan, and changes the family name to the more allusive and evocative Isaacson with its biblical resonance. But these expansions and substitutions do not prevent the novel from speaking pertinently and cogently to our understanding of the historical episode that inspired the book. Michael Meeropol has said, "I am not much like Daniel"; but he describes himself as "constantly into it [the case], reliving it, trying to find things out," which is exactly Danny's character, and like him, Michael was unable for many years after the execution to mourn, "tolet the tears go."6 The politics of Danny and Susan resemble the actual New Left positions of the Rosenberg children, including the marked variation in emphasis between the older son, sympathetic to the Old Left interest in doctrine and political organization, and the younger sibling, more attracted to SDS disruption, drugs, and communes.7 Doctorow's license is modestly exercised, especially when compared to Robert Coover's A Public Burning (1978), a satirical fantasy which ridicules everyone involved and contrives to have Nixon become infatuated with Ethel Rosenberg. The Book of Daniel looks at the trial and execution from the perspective of a young radical seeking the truth. Doctorow did not evade the issue of Jewishness or of guilt by harping on the Rosenbergs'innocence, as some conservative critics have unjustly complained, even if he exposed the perversions of justice in the case and has his hero use William Appleman Williams's revisionist version of cold war history. The novel explores the Jewish element in the story for three generations, whose ideals have biblical pedigrees, and the protagonist explicitly rejects both "the Hearst philosopher" and "the liberal bleeder" for each of whom guilt or innocence is an absolute. "There is no substantial difference in these positions," Danny remarks. "To say nothing of their prose" (p. 227).8 To read the novel rightly is to participate in the narrator's search for clues about what really happened, rather than taking the family myth for granted. Danny's own developing interpretation challenges any Manicheanism. The newspaper man, Jack Fein, points out to him: 'Your folks were framed, but that doesn't mean they were innocent babes.... -Those guys had to bring in a conviction. That was their job. But no one would have put the finger on They acted your parents unless they thought they were up to something.... guilty" (pp. 213-14). Danny eventually hypothesizes that the dentist who

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fingered his father in court was complicit with him as a political comrade in a sacrificial conspiracy to cover for another Communist couple, who were actually engaged in espionage. Paul Isaacson had thus gambled his life and his wife's, without her consent, not only on his belief as a Party comrade in the Soviet Union, but also on his American Popular Front belief in the safeguards of the Constitution and in the expectation that a liberal public opinion would never convict them. It is for this reason that his more realistic and justifiably furious wife suspends all communication with him after the failure of the third appeal at law. Doctorow's fictional hypothesis historically fits with some of the evidence. The FBIwas never sure of Ethel Rosenberg'sguilt; instead it callously used her as a lever to put pressure on her husband to confess. It fits as well with the Death House Letters of Julius Rosenberg, which persistently and touchingly affirms his confidence that the Bill of Rights and an enlightened public opinion will finally acquit them.9 It is Doctorow's genius as a novelist to show us how this credulous outlook was shaped by the Popular Front. Danny specifically notes that "a Jewish literary critic"who criticized his parents for hypocritically calling on their Jewish faith could not have understood how someone could "forswearhis Jewish heritage and take for his own the perfectionist dream of heaven on earth, and, in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, still consider himself a Jew."Danny describes his family's faith in this way: "They rushed after self-esteem. . . . If you discovered the working class you found the roots of democracy. In social justice you discovered your own virtue. To desire social justice was a way of living without envy, which is the emotion of a loser. It was a way of transforming envy into constructive outgoing hate." Danny's father, a compulsive explainer, took "a peculiar kind of bitter joy" in reciting to his son all "the abuses of justice and truth which offended his natural innocence,"while heroizing John Brown, Nat Turner, Thomas Paine, Tom Mooney, Joe Hill, Sacco, Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro boys, "puttingtogether all the historic injustices" and 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...."'Why did he expect so much of a system he knew by definition could never satisfy his standards of justice," Danny asks. "It'sscrewy. Lots of them were like that.... And it was more than strategy, it was more than Lenin'sadvice to use the reactionary apparatus to defend yourself, it was passion"(pp. 119, 32, 34-35, 40). Doctorow understands that during the Popular Front the Party made itself over, extravagantly and rhetorically, into a reformist organization, celebrating Washington, Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln as its patriot-

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precursors. Danny came to see that his father had internalized this propaganda and could "never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it." Danny himself remembers from the 1940s the Paul Robeson patriotic songs and the Red Army chorus, singing Meadowland on a record that pictured the "smiling, deep-throated soldiers of a valiant ally" (pp. 40, 96). Saturated in this leftwing culture, Paul Isaacson lived out his Popular Front faith as an anachronism in loyal defense of Party comrades. Danny's speculation remains hypothetical in the novel. There were several "other couples," actually, however, including an engineer-friend of the Rosenbergs (Alfred Sarant), living in Ithaca and working at Cornell, who fled when the Rosenbergs were arrested. The Ithaca couple, according to a Russian exile, surfaced later in the Soviet Union, where the engineer became an honored member of the Defense establishment.10Michael Meeropol suggests that both Sarant and Joel Barrleft the country for Russia because they wanted to avoid the destruction of their careers by harassment, but other potential victims of McCarthyism found refuge in England. Only Stalinist Communists would have chosen the Soviet Union. Sarant may merely have been impetuous and panicked, but Michael Meeropol simply converts the truth that most American Communists were not spies into a dogma without exceptions when he says "they were not traitors; they were not spies"1 - a chronic refusal of reality by a segment of the American Left which still survives by a failure of political and historical imagination. By its willingness to consider other possibilities than those imagined either by the government or the defense, The Book of Daniel prepares us for the complexity which characterizes the best historical stories. Danny's speculation about his mother is even closer to the actual evidence than the government's myth about Mrs. Rosenberg'smasterminding role; and his speculation about his father comports with a remark made by a Rosenberg supporter at a defense rally, assuring the audience that "Juliusand Ethel will never tell on their friends." (Mrs. Sobell reportedly fainted when it was pointed out to her that the remarks scarcely squared with the idea of their total innocence.) 12 Doctorow has more to say about the important meaning of this case than most historians do precisely because he is interested in the ethos from which the Rosenberg family emerged as well as in the climate of opinion in which they were convicted. The historian's special obligation, however, is to determine, so far as the evidence allows and requires, "what actually happened." In this respect The Rosenberg File convincingly shows how the Rosenbergs became "hapless scapegoats of a propaganda war" (p. 452) waged by the government against communism, while the authors also persuasively argue that they were not

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innocent victims of a frame-up. Incorporating the Left'scriticism of the trial and execution with the Right's belief that the Rosenbergs' role as espionage agents contributed useful atomic information to the Russian cause, this historical study runs contrary to the polarizing political tendencies of our culture. Its new case for Julius Rosenberg'sguilt is basically two-fold. It rests, first, on the agreement between the testimony of a police spy, J. E. Tartakow, and that of an "old friend and political associate" (p. x) of the authors, James Weinstein, editor of a Socialist newspaper and former student at Cornell University, where he was a Communist party member. Tartakow gave the FBI information, allegedly from Julius, about "Rosenberg'slast recruit"(p. 304), a Cornell student whom the Bureau thought was a link between Rosenberg's spying activities in New York and Alfred Sarant's in Ithaca. Weinstein corroborated this link nearly three decades later by telling his story to the authors about his roommate's decision to do "secret work" and his association with Julius and Sarant (p. 312). The close overlap in the two accounts testifies to Tartakow's reliability on some matters and lends weight to his influential tip to the prosecutors that Julius was worried that the FBI might locate the man who had taken passport photos of the Rosenbergs shortly before the arrest of David Greenglass, who eventually fingered them. The other major new piece of evidence for the prosecution was not used at the trial and is derived from a former FBI counterintelligence officer who showed his manuscript to Newsweek, which used it for a story linking Julius Rosenberg circumstantially to Max Elitcher. He was visited, according to cracked KGB codes, by an unnamed Soviet agent at the same time when Julius admitted to being at Elitcher'shouse. Radosh and Milton treat this information from the code as exactly confirming Elitcher'sown account of Rosenberg'sapproach to him in 1944, four years before the code was cracked (p. 133). Radosh and Milton have not seen the classified KGB material, and Newsweek notes that the story "didn'tprove that Rosenberg was a spy"; it only persuaded the authorities that he was.13 Both of these arguments rely on informers whose credibility is highly controversial: Tartakow had a long criminal record, and Elitcher(as Radosh and Milton 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 his Communist party membership on his navy security questionnaire"(p. 177). Radosh and Milton think his pretrial statements were "strikinglyconsistent with his testimony in court," even though he had-'originally omitted several important incidents." Because there were no "outright contradictions," as there were in the testimony of the Greenglasses or Harry Gold, they accept it (p. 178). They do not note, however, that the defense got Elitcher to admit

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that he made his first statement to the FBI after he had been interrogated a number of times by FBI agents and members of the prosecuting staff, suggesting that his confession could have emerged from a previous background, "smackingof collusion and rehearsed instructions,"as John Wexley put it in The Judgment of 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 means conclusive, given the advantages both witnesses got from cooperating with the FBI, a strong inducement to perjure themselves. Weinstein's testimony is not self-serving, and it supports Tartakow on the Ithaca story. While it seems likely that Julius hoped Sarant could learn something useful to the Russians from working on Cornell's synchroton project, there is no evidence that Sarant or Weinstein's roommate, Max Finestone, actually engaged in any espionage. Evidence for conspiratorial activity is always hard to obtain whether done by spies or FBI agents - and so controversy about "what actually happened"will persist, the credibility of both being debatable. Partisans of the Rosenbergs argue, for example, that the disagreementbetween the New York office of the Bureau and its Washington office over the reliability of Tartakow only shows that one branch of the FBI may have been deceiving another.14 Thus the conspiracy argument can always be sustained by fragmenting the conspiracy to make it more plausible. But skeptics of the FBI reports do not say what would count as evidence against their suspicions, if The Rosenberg File is right that "not one shred of evidence exists to suggest that the FBI was feeding information" to Tartakow (p. 534). Use of FBI material under the Freedom of Information Act has strongly influenced the narrative form of The Rosenberg File. It begins with the long story of intelligence authorities "closing in on the trail of a network of engineers and scientists who had been passing data on defense projects to the Soviet Union at least since 1944, if not earlier"(p. 7). Writing from this point of view, Radosh and Milton first introduce Julius Rosenberg into their narrative account by a reference to his warning David Greenglass that 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 1979 interview with the Greenglasses. The storyteller has here treated another story as if it were a fact, noted by an omniscient observer. This stance is a conventional and reputable one for narrating history, but in matters as controversial, charged, and difficult to sort out as questions about espionage and justice, the technique is a dangerous one. Only on p. 54 does the narration pause to point out that the Greenglasses'explanations of Julius'sdropping out of Party activities are really "charges,"requiring assessment. By then, much that is controversial has been treated implicitly as if it were not. The moral is

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that historians should consider more carefully the problem of narrative point of view, a matter about which literary critics have usefully alerted sophisticated readers of stories. Thereafter, however, The Rosenberg File increasingly takes up the question of alternative explanations, and its solid merit lies in its admirable fairness and patience in considering (as the Schneirs do not) both "innocent"and "guilty" explanations of the controversial matters at issue. The upshot in each case may not always convince the reader, but whatever the conclusion, it is not presented dogmatically or polemically, but usually with a regard for the differences between the possible, the probable, and the ambiguous. The thoroughness of Radosh and Milton in exploring the possibilities is best revealed by their sixteen-page analysis in the appendix of the incident involving Harry Gold's Hilton Hotel registration card, the discrepancies of its dating having been used to buttress forgery arguments by Rosenberg partisans. The FBIfiles here usefully show the correctness of Harry Gold's recollection of being in Albuquerque on the day in question by his memory of a Catholic parade, an accurate detail that obliterates mystery-mongering about the hotel card at one stroke (p. 470). My main reservations about The Rosenberg File's conclusion have to do with the psychology of Ethel and Julius. Radosh and Milton concede that the official case against Ethel is so flimsy that one might speculate she "hadnever been entirely comfortable with Julius's chosen course" (p. 102). Yet they finally conclude that she "probably knew of and supported her husband's endeavors . . ." (p. 450). The basis is unclear. She might, after all, as a good Communist, more realistic than Julius, have balked at any plot that might jeopardize their lives. Michael Meeropol remarked, "Ithink it's a mistake to see her as a passive person,"15but her independence is compatible with more than one explanation. Introducing the interview with the Meeropols in the Socialist Review, one of its editors observes that Radosh and Milton make 'little attempt to explore the psychology, morality, or personal motivation of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg."16 Actually, they explicitly accept Fiedler'sand Warshow's harsh indictment of the Rosenbergs as hypocritical ideologues engaged in "double talk" that confused "peace, democracy, and liberty"with the defense of the Soviet Union (pp. 340, 547-50). Their "innocence" was thus merely a reflection of their "objectiveMarxist viewpoint" that no crime was done. The book assumes they had "no faith in capitalist American justice"(p. 395). But this explanation hardly explains Julius'spinning up of the Declaration of Independence on his cell wall, or his persistent faith that he and his wife would be saved by a liberal Supreme Court and progressive public opinion. It is the great merit of Doctorow's novel that it understands the way in which patrio-

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tism and communism were blended in the Popular Front period so as to give Daniel's father a grossly unrealistic confidence that he would never be indicted or punished for aiding a wartime ally whose American party had touted itself as "twentieth-centuryAmericanism."Radosh and Milton perceptively recognize that Party leaders in the Popular Front period stress the point that Party membership was "thoroughly compatible with American patriotism" (p. 53), but they do not adequately take it into account in portraying Julius Rosenberg. Doctorow, in a recently televised interview, has said that he worked closely with the director of Daniel, but the film has nevertheless damagingly simplified the novel. There are no biblical resonances, no political reflections on the Red Scare, the Moscow Trials, the cold war, and Disneyland's plastic "history,"because the narrator has been pared away, except for some recurring ruminations and images about cruel devices for punishment. There is no real sense of a three-generationdevelopment in the idealization of and disillusionment with America. Susan's appalled discovery that New Left rebels care nothing for the example of the Isaacsons is entirely missing, leaving the motivation for her suicide obscured. The novel's ironic reflections on the New Left in relation to Danny's political heritage are omitted, and a sentimental lyricism about an antinuclear, Sheep Meadow rally is substituted for the SDS takeover of the library at Columbia University, where Danny is working on his thesis. It is a parodic miniapocalypse to measure against the biblical millennial expectation cited at the end of the novel. The film does include Doctorow's view, as one character puts it, that between the government and the Party, Danny's parents never had a chance. But the film audience is unlikely to make much sense out of Danny's musings about "theother couple" or to understand the irony in the father'smistaken confidence in the police at the Peekskill riot or the point of his being named Isaacson, evoking the testing of Abraham's loyalty in the Bible. Visual imagery is a poor medium for ideas. Doctorow's more simplified, comic, and anachronistic Ragtime was far more suitable to the screen. Unfortunately, filmgoers are likely to think that the point of Daniel is that the Rosenbergs were innocent, while the press response to The Rosenberg File tends to suggest that its authors were only interested in showing the Rosenbergs'guilt. These crude misreadings are retrogressive, turning back to the moment in the debate before Doctorow, Radosh, and Milton usefully complicated and enriched our sense of the difficult truth by their willingness to transcend any simple choice between innocence and guilt, or between the Party and the government. Some radicals have complained that The Rosenberg File lacks compassion in treating the Party's myth-making as "equalor comparable to unfairly exe-

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cuting two people" and in using the case to fuel the cold war and smear the
Left.17 But Radosh and Milton show in grim detail how the Rosenbergs were

forced "topay with their lives"for America's dismay "atits loss of the nuclear weapons monopoly" (p. 446). They agree, however, with I. F. Stone that "Communistsshamefully sacrificed calm consideration of the Rosenberg case to the needs of world Communist propaganda" (p. 453). In some quarters still, to point to this shame is to elicit anger, accusations, or indifference. Scapegoating the Rosenbergs was not a government monopoly. Radosh and Milton extensively discuss the puzzling blunders in Bloch's conduct of the defense, which resisted the last-minute legal efforts of maverick radicals to save the Rosenbergs. The authors suggest that pressures from the Committee to 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 the Rosenbergs'death; between the government and the Party-oriented elements in the defense committee, they were caught in a vise. In the end Radosh and Milton depart from Fiedler'sview of the Rosenbergs to salute them for having showed "tremendous courage and loyalty, virtues that were hardly reciprocated by the Party they died to defend" (pp. 452-53). No study can be "definitive" when the FBI material is still incomplete, but The Rosenberg File has the great merit of refusing to protect either the government or the radicals from any unpleasant or inconvenient truths. Though some radicals apparently told Radosh to publish only truths that "hurtthe establishment"(p. xii), this opportunism is of no benefit in the long run to the Left, which has been badly discredited in the eyes of Americans because some leftists failed to distinguish between serving justice and serving the interests of the Soviet Union. Radosh himself once served on the executive committee of a national organization for reopening the Rosenberg case. But, like Alan Weinstein and the Hiss case, he did not gerrymanderthe evidence to suit 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 Humane Letters, 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 Experience (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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6. 'New Light on the Rosenberg Case: An Interview with Michael and Robert Meerepol," Socialist Review 13 (November-December 1983): 90. 7. Jonah Raskin, "Lifeafter 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 on American 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 (We Are 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 the Soviets 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 the meeting 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.