[EDITOR'S NOTE: David and Emily Alman were neighbors of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in the McCarthy era. The couple later became heavily involved in their appeal process and attempting to get justice for the Rosenbergs. David Alman has just released a new book about this experience, and this is Chapter 1, describing how and why they got involved. You can order this very important book at the URL at the end of the excerpt. —Shel Horowitz, Editor, Peace &
Politics] The city of life... New York
City was our city, Emily’s and mine. We were born in it, went to school
in it, grew up in its poverty, absorbed its street-smarts, breathed
in its clamorous energy. I carried Emily’s schoolbooks, mentally assassinated
every tall hulk of a boy who talked to her, wrote poems to her, eloped
with her, turned a lathe in a shipyard repairing troop ships, scribbled
would-be novels. One bright summer day in 1942, Emily and I walked down
Fifth Avenue, pregnant with our first daughter, looking into the windows
of great stores, feeling the pulse of the time, amused by snobby window
mannequins pretending not to notice us, warmed by the sun and the sleepy
young soldiers and their clinging girls, got caught up in the surging
crowds crossing the streets as though we were members of a multitudinous
biblical crossing to somewhere sublime. There is a great happiness in
carrying a full womb in New York City, the City of life. The city of death... In our New York City, media headlines four years after the war described the peace. The New York Daily Mirror told us the authorities were taking great precautions: “ORDER RED VESSELS HALTED IN BAY TO UNDERGO SEARCH FOR EXPLOSIVES.” On February 12, 1950, the New York Journal-American told us that “PORT’S SECURITY IS NON-EXISTENT.”6 By September 1950, the New York Times was preparing us to expect heavy casualties from Soviet atom bomb attacks: “BOMB TOLL IN CITY OF 160,000 IS SEEN,” but one month later it cited a warning from a U.S. Senator: “TYDINGS SAYS BOMB CAN KILL A MILLION.”7 The New York Daily Mirror had already trumped this figure in February with an estimate of nationwide casualties: “WARNS H-BLITZ COULD KILL 15,000,000.”8 Six months later the same newspaper quoted a general as saying
Some newspapers claimed an exodus from New York City was already underway. “CITY FOLKS FEAR OF BOMBS AIDS BOOM IN RURAL REALTY;” “DOOM OF 27 U.S. CITIES BY H-BOMBS ENVISIONED;” “WAR PERILS START WAVE OF ANXIETIES;” “WHEN RUSSIANS STRIKE IT WILL BE WITH PLENTY OF A-BOMBS ON NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON, D.C.;” “RUSSIA CAN A-BOMB US NOW.”10 One newspaper assured us its headline was a “grim estimate reached in the highest echelons of the Pentagon.” The New York Journal-American warned us no one would come out alive if we were atom-bombed: “WARN H BOMB BLITZ COULD DESTROY ALL NY.”11 We were told the Russians were trying to smuggle atom bombs into the city to be detonated in our neighborhoods, targeting the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, targeting Central Park on Sunday where the worshippers at St. Patrick’s Cathedral went afterward to receive the blessings of the sun, targeting the midtown garment center with its heavy-breathing cutters huddled over massive tables, its stitchers squinting into their sewing machines, its barrel-chested hat blockers marooned in steam, and legions of foremen, snappers, designers, managers, vice presidents, presidents, bosses’ sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, aunts and indescribables rushing in and out of elevators, barking orders, curses, insults and prayers. Elsewhere, the public schools’ masses of children were huddled under snow-white sheets per atom bomb drill instructions from City Hall. One drill instruction told the teachers to warn the children against peeking outside the sheets because the blinding light of a nearby atomic explosion might injure their eyes. Everyone prayed in those days that a new Hiroshima would not unfold at the next tick of a second. Over the
summer months of 1950, we began to learn the names of those who, we
were told, had enabled the Russians to threaten to turn Fifth Avenue,
the garment center, Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, our
tenements and our mansions and Emily and David and little Michelle and
Jennifer into radioactive ash. Why we wrote this book... Emily and I began to write Exoneration in 1995, and I have had to complete it without Emily, since her death in 2004. Our subject is an unfinished chapter in American history, and an important unfinished business of our lives known as the Rosenberg-Sobell case. Despite a number of excellent factual studies of the trial over the past five decades, the true dimensions of the human, ethnic, and Constitutional tragedies embodied in the case had never been fully explored. The appropriate focus of previous studies had been on whether the trial, the verdicts, and the sentences were shaped by the evidence or by political expediency. But the Rosenberg-Sobell case is not simply an espionage case. It is an event precipitated by monumental forces competing for world dominion, and was shaped in part by borderless, mythological ethnic prejudices. There was barely a mention in previous studies, for example, that the 1951 trial, with its all-Jewish cast of defendants, had its counterparts in trials in 1952, in Moscow and Prague, in which the defendants were also all-Jewish or nearly all-Jewish, and in which the defendants were charged with espionage and treason. We believe that many principles of American justice were eroded by precedents injected into the Rosenberg-Sobell trial. The Founders of our Constitution wanted our system of justice to rest on democratically enacted laws, not on fickle or ambitious or vain or self-serving men and women. Every law would prescribe a punishment for its violation. No man or woman who violated one law would be punished by reference to another law that was not violated. By conducting “bait and switch” prosecutions, in which formal indictments for one crime were superseded in the courtroom by oral prosecutions for another crime, the Constitution was dealt a severe blow, one that resonates to this very day. Every blow to the Constitution takes its toll in human tragedy. We wrote
this book in the hope that it will increase public awareness of the
necessity for returning to a Constitutional system of justice. Case summary... The official description of the Rosenberg-Sobell case is that in the 1940s, after the start of World War II, Julius Rosenberg, an engineer, and his wife, Ethel, and Morton Sobell, an engineer and classmate of Julius Rosenberg, and David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, conspired to obtain atomic bomb information for transmittal to the Soviet Union, our then ally. Greenglass was assigned by the army to Los Alamos, NM, as a machinist in a workshop attached to the research laboratory that produced the atom bomb. He became the prosecution’s chief witness. The defendants’ ascribed motive for the crime was their belief in Communism and their desire to enable the Soviet Union to destroy the United States. They were tried before a jury in New York City in March 1951, and were found guilty. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death; the other defendants received long prison sentences. The Supreme Court declined to review the case nine times. Basing ourselves on newspaper accounts of the trial, we initially accepted the official version. A case of idealism, we thought, misused for espionage and treason. Our only quarrel was with the death sentences. We were opposed to capital punishment for any crime whatsoever. During the months that followed the trial, however, a different version of the case emerged. It began with a series of articles by William Reuben, a former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) public relations director, appearing in the National Guardian, a left-wing weekly newspaper. Reuben claimed the charge relating to the atom bomb, and the imputed intent of the defendants to help the Soviet Union destroy the United States, had been prosecution hoaxes for which no evidence had been presented. That began our decades-long exploration of the Rosenberg-Sobell case which, to this day, eludes closure. In September 2008, Morton Sobell, who had served eighteen years of his thirty-year prison sentence, confessed that, in 1944-1945, he and Julius Rosenberg had passed non-atomic classified information to the Soviet Union. The confession
would not have surprised Emily, nor did it surprise me. After reading
Sobell’s confession in the New York Times, I did what Emily
would have done. I telephoned Morton Sobell to tell him he had done
the right thing by his admission. Emily and I had very long ago assumed
the possibility of what Sobell confirmed. Two presidents troubled by the prosecution... Two presidents, twenty years apart, signaled uncertainty about the prosecutions’ conduct. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, made inquiries into the case as far back as March 1953, and later, in his last week in office in January 1969, undoubtedly had a hand in Morton Sobell’s early release from prison. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, had been present when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was advised by his Attorney General to deny clemency to the Rosenbergs. Nixon said in respect to one defendant, Ethel Rosenberg,
Nixon attributed
the “tainted evidence” to “overzealous prosecutors, and those
that are assisting prosecutors, like J. Edgar Hoover...” Haunting questions... A great many questions were spawned by the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, some focusing narrowly on the conduct of the trial, others dealing broadly with the historical conflicts and schisms mirrored by the trial. Was communism the inspiration for the crime? Was justice the inspiration for the prosecution? Why did the Supreme Court refuse to review the case? Why did the post-German-occupation leaders of France and other European nations intervene on the side of the Rosenbergs? Why did Pope Pius XII do so? The most profound question of all, the question that has haunted students of the case for more than half a century is this: why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple in their thirties, the parents of two very young sons, choose to be executed rather than confess? A glib answer was given long ago: they wanted to be martyrs for Communism. But they did not defend Communism at their trial; they did not declare it superior to capitalism; they did not claim the Soviet system was better than ours. They simply said they were innocent. In her last letter to President Eisenhower, delivered to him a few hours before her execution, Ethel Rosenberg admitted “a certain innate shyness, an embarrassment almost, comparable to that which the ordinary person feels in the presence of the great and the famous” had restrained her from communicating with him to ask that her and her husband’s lives be spared. We, too, were haunted by the question, and especially so for a personal reason we will shortly describe. Among the tasks we set ourselves in this book was to try to find an answer that was more credible than the glib and unsupportable one. There were other important questions spawned by the case. The 1951 New York City trial had its counterparts in trials in 1952 in Moscow and Prague, in which the defendants were also all-Jewish or nearly all-Jewish, and in which the defendants were charged with espionage and treason, and in which more than 20 death sentences were imposed. The three trials raised a troubling question: why did the law enforcement agencies of the United States, Moscow and Prague seem unable to find non-Jewish Soviet spies and traitors in their respective populations? Nine months after the New York trial, federal law enforcement officials issued a statement with which the law enforcement agencies of Moscow and Prague were undoubtedly in full agreement. Disloyal persons, our law enforcement officials told the media, would rarely be found among persons of “pure Anglo-Saxon stock.”13 There were troubling precedents arising out of the prosecutorial and judicial conduct at the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, creating models for other trials. A new court system was created out of those precedents in later years, one in which the Constitution has no place, and the courts are accountable only to the transient occupants of the White House. Shortly after the death sentences were imposed, George F. Kennan, a high ranking State Department official who had designed the “containment” policy against the Soviet Union and against communism in other countries, became concerned with the direction which the nation was being led. In an essay in the New York Times, he asked whether the United States was beginning to resemble the
Who we were – 1... At the time of the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, in March 1951, we lived in New York City with our two young daughters in a small three-room apartment in a rent-controlled multi-building complex known as Knickerbocker Village, not far from the Jewish ghetto in which I had been raised. Emily, then
29, was a Hunter College graduate and was employed as a New York City
Probation officer and, on a part-time basis, as a social worker for
elderly people at the 92nd Street YMCA. She would go on to get a doctorate
in sociology, would later chair the Sociology Department of Douglas
College at Rutgers University and, afterward, begin another career as
a practicing attorney. I was 32, had been a machinist during World War
II, and then became a New York State Parole Officer, from which I resigned
to become a full-time writer after having had several novels published.
I later became a businessman and an activist. A civics textbook of the streets... Emily and I were far from being versed in law in 1950 and in the immediate subsequent years. But we had been Probation and Parole officers for about a year, occupations to which we had brought a special knowledge we – and especially I – had obtained on the streets, as well as in our homes, at school, with the police and with friends who were storefront lawyers on the Lower East Side. We knew there were two kinds of trials, those conducted by honest officials and those that weren’t. We knew about plea bargaining, bribed judges, bribed prosecutors, bribed or blackmailed witnesses. We knew corruption was not all of one kind. An official who would disdain a financial bribe might nevertheless perpetrate illegalities against defendants whose color or religion or politics or sex he or she abhorred. When we became involved in law enforcement, we obtained new knowledge that reinforced what we already knew. Emily learned why some probationers were routinely treated more kindly than others. I learned why certain felons who repeatedly violated parole received reprimands from judges, while the same judges sent other parole violators back to prison to complete their sentences. We also learned why, administratively, certain probationers and parolees never found themselves in court for violations they had committed, while others consumed courtroom calendars for the pettiest of infractions. I was not surprised by what I learned because my own dealings with police at a very early age had prepared me well. When I was thirteen years old I decided I wanted to join my father in peddling ice cream and inflated toys in the traffic at the corners of Canal Street and Broadway, not far from the Holland Tunnel. My father told me the traffic cop would expect a daily bribe, although my father believed it would be twenty-five cents a day rather than the dollar he and the other adult peddlers paid. I asked my father why the cop had to be paid. “Because it’s his traffic,” my father said. Sure enough, after I had gone into the traffic a few times, the traffic cop, whom the peddlers called Mad Dog behind his back and ‘Sir’ to his face, motioned me to join him in a little hallway on the street. Mad Dog asked me, “You know you got to pay rent?” “Yes, sir,” I said. He put out his hand. I put a dime in his palm. “You sonofabitch,” he said. “You’re only, what, twelve? And you already know how to Jew us down.” “Yes, sir,” I said. On our way home that evening, my father surprised me. “Don’t be too mad at Mad Dog,” he said. “He’s got a son crippled with polio, about your age. If it happened to you, I’d be a mad dog, too.” I didn’t have to worry about polio because my mother made me wear anti-polio camphor balls wrapped in a handkerchief around my neck. Our street
civics lessons did not make Emily or me cynical. Maybe sad at times,
maybe a little judgmental. But hardly even skeptical, until the Rosenberg-Sobell
case. Neighborhood news... On an afternoon on April 5, 1951, a neighbor knocked at our door and told us that two other neighbors, whom we didn’t know, had just been sentenced to death. Our condemned neighbors lived in another of the Knickerbocker Village buildings. We had been reading about their trial in the newspapers. They had passed secret information about the atom bomb to the Soviet Union during World War II and afterward, when the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union had become our designated enemy. So far as we could tell from the news stories, the trial had been tolerably fair. The tangible and circumstantial evidence (though never actually described in the newspaper stories) must have been good enough to justify the guilty verdicts, although the death sentences troubled us. Our interest in the case was heightened by a past occurrence. One spring day in 1950, Emily had taken our daughters, Michelle, then eight, and Jennifer, two, to a nearby park with another neighbor and her child. Our neighbor saw a woman she knew, and she introduced her to Emily. “This is Ethel Rosenberg,” she said. Emily and Ethel Rosenberg talked for a little while. Ethel had her two small sons with her, close in age to our daughters. It was a pleasant conversation, as Emily remembered it. And then Ethel got up and left with her sons, and she and Emily never saw each other again. Emily’s brief conversation with Ethel Rosenberg, which might have dimmed in memory over time, now became, instead, a persistently relived occurrence. The woman who had simply been another young mother on a park bench with whom Emily had spoken was now a young mother who had been sentenced to death. Their execution was set for the following month. We knew, however, that executions were usually held up while legal appeals were pending. There were similarities in our lives that gave the Rosenbergs’ a claim to our attention. They had graduated from Seward Park High School, as we had; they had two very young children, as did we; like us, they were Jewish, and had been born into similar poverty. It was impossible to look at their photographs and not share with them another resonance. They had bonded with each other at an early age, as had we. They had expressed idealistic visions of a more benign society, as had we, although they trusted Communism to realize their visions, while our trust was not in any single philosophy or political theory. We had drawn the conclusion from history that humankind moves slowly, painfully and sometimes chaotically, toward a better life. Or so we hoped. Our opposition to their death sentences was, of course, shaped by our views on capital punishment. But these views soon became the least of our reasons for questioning the sentences. We had been greatly surprised by Reuben’s claims, for nothing in the newspaper reports of the trial had indicated any reason for doubting the essential elements of the prosecution’s claims. Some claims may have been somewhat exaggerated, some may have simply been oratorical flourishes. From time to time, there may have been some fevered oratory by the prosecution in which the defendants were blamed for our casualties in the Korean War and in future wars, but that kind of oratory was common, and was expected to be sensibly discounted by jurors. The same,
we thought, might be said of Reuben’s claims. His description of some
of the prosecution’s claims as “hoaxes” may have been an author’s
oratorical flourishes. We intended to find out for ourselves. Who we were – 2... We were what are often called “children of the Great Depression.” We had experienced that unstable and tumultuous time at first through our parents, and then directly, when we gradually entered the wider world beyond our homes. In our mid-teens our expectations for the future were bare. The advantages of education and the rewards of hard work and entrepreneurship promised us in our classrooms had become irrelevant. Formerly self-reliant and well educated men and women sat on the same government-issue metal folding chairs as did many of our parents, waiting for their names to be called by investigators for Home Relief assistance, the name given in those years to what we now call “welfare.” A question we asked ourselves was whether we must follow our parents into those chairs, and for how long? Unbeknownst
to us, our country was on the cusp of change. The widespread hunger
and hopelessness that had overcome many millions of Americans under
President Herbert Hoover had begun to slowly give way to new perceptions
and new beliefs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt: an era of a government’s
monumental indifference to its suffering population was being replaced
by a government that created millions of jobs, a system of pensions
and health services for the aged, and unemployment insurance. Unionization
and the formation of cooperatives were encouraged as protective measures
in confrontation with corporate power. In teenagers and young adults,
the resurrective spirit behind what became known as the New Deal began
to create expectations of ordered, stable and creative lives in the
foreseeable future. Our moods were lifted by President Roosevelt’s
advice: We have nothing to fear but fear itself! Emily and her mother... Emily was deeply influenced by her mother, a Lower East Side social worker who chose to work among the poor at a poverty-level wage, rather than rise into administrative levels of charity where the poor were rarely seen. Emily’s father, a sometime businessman and composer, had died when Emily was twelve. At an early
age, Emily felt drawn to the troubled and lost. In a time when street
corner orators were hailing Socialism or Communism or Fascism as paths
to national salvation, Emily chose triage as her philosophy: respect
for the hurt and the hungry, the dispossessed, the abandoned, the inconsolable
and the crazy. She declined the orators’ solutions: she regarded fascism
as a moribund panacea marked by slavery and death, and socialism and
communism as ideals-still-in-the-making, still fully susceptible to
deceit, demagoguery and corruption. A story about Emily... One evening, after she had been a Probation Officer for a few months, Emily warned me she might be fired for something she was about to do at work. The next day, she asked the sitting judge in the court to which she was assigned whether she could speak privately to him when court was over. “What about?” he asked. “If I start explaining it to you now, I don’t think I’ll get far. I just want ten minutes, Your Honor.” After a moment he said, “Ten minutes. I’ll have one of the assistant DAs join us in chambers, if you don’t mind. You’ll both be off the clock.” When they were seated in chambers, Emily said, “Each of my probationers’ cases takes about four or five minutes to process in court. An assistant DA rattles off the charge in about thirty seconds or less. Your Honor asks them did they do what they’re charged with, hooking or petty theft or getting into a brawl. They try to explain, but Your Honor says, ‘Yes or no?’ Sometimes Your Honor says, ‘Spare me the violins, just say ‘Yes or No...’” “I see where this is going,” the judge interrupted her. “Here’s what I say to you, Emily. Spare me the violins. I know my job. Anything else?” The prosecutor said, “If you do what I suspect she wants, we’d have to have twenty-four hour court sessions.” “Your Honor, I’ve only used up four minutes of my ten,” Emily said. “A lot of the women complain they don’t get their day in court. All they’re allowed to say is ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ I can’t tell you how many of them tell me they’re disappointed, that there’s no difference between a court that tells them to shut up except ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and a John or father or brother or boyfriend or pimp who smacks them around until they get the answer they want.” “Whhhoooaaa,” the prosecutor said. “Stop right there, Emily. Comparing His Honor to a pimp? Are you crazy?” “I still have five minutes,” Emily said. “What I’m suggesting, Your Honor, is that you let one or two of them every day have her day in court, tell you about her life. They need somebody important to hear what they have to say. Maybe it’ll give them some hope. Maybe some dignity and respect instead of being made to feel like what their boyfriends or pimps call them.” “The pimp stuff again!” the prosecutor cried out. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” “Time’s up, Emily,” the judge said. “I just want to assure you, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, “that I think this is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I’m praying that you don’t lock Emily up just to teach her a lesson in respect for Your Honor.” The judge looked at Emily in silence for a moment. “This is so outrageous, Emily, that I don’t want to respond to you in my present state of mind. What I think I should do is tell you we can meet again tomorrow after court. I want you to think very carefully about what you want to say to me then. I hope what you say to me tomorrow will make me forget what you said to me today.” He turned to the prosecutor. “You be there, too. Off the clock.” The next day, Emily began the meeting by saying, “I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine that there was a time when Mr. Prosecutor here was quizzed by a committee of some kind to explain why he wanted to be a prosecutor. I imagine there was a day when Your Honor appeared before a committee to explain why you wanted to be a judge. All I’m asking is that the women whose conduct I supervise be allowed to express in more than a single syllable an explanation of their lives and what they hope for. The men in their lives demand of them only a positive single syllable response to whatever it is the men want. The court allows my probationers to choose between two one-syllable words, which is not a huge improvement. These women should be given the right to describe their lives to an official tribune of the state, an authority that has power, the same authority that arrested them for their conduct, incarcerated them at times, put them on probation at times, but never gave them an opportunity to describe their lives.” “That’s hokum,” the prosecutor said. “Every one of these women has a case file, every one of them has been interviewed at great length by intake officers, and some of them have been interviewed more than once and they tell a different story each time.” “No,” Emily said. “They tell their story to laundry-list clerks. Name, address, how old were you, where did you meet, did you seek medical attention, for how long, when did he leave, who does the baby live with, how long did you live there, where did you get the knife, did you sign a foster parent agreement. This tells these women how unimportant their lives are to us. These women should be given a chance to describe their lives in a place that considers their lives important. They should be allowed to describe themselves to someone with authority, in a courtroom with a judge and his gavel up on a bench, an American flag in the corner, and a Bible to swear on and a stenographer and a bailiff and reporters and some spectators.” “Emily,” the judge said. “Do you honestly think that would make any difference in their behavior? That the hookers and knifers would reform and become nurses and Big Sisters?” “What we do for them now isn’t turning them into Florence Nightingales, either,” Emily said. “No, I don’t know what the impact of having their day in court would be. Except that as humans who’ve been arrested, they have a right to it. Maybe they won’t go on nursing the grudge that they never had their day in court, that they were treated as insignificant trash. Maybe some of them will take it as a vote of confidence. I don’t know.” There was silence for a few moments. The judge said, “I’m relieved, Emily, for your sake, that you didn’t make any comparisons to pimps this time.” The prosecutor said, “She didn’t do so directly, Your Honor. But it was there, indirectly, when she talked about the syllables. You remember, certain men only want one-syllable answers...” “For the record,” Emily broke in, “I haven’t made the connections in my mind that the prosecutor has in his. I didn’t ask to meet with any pimps about this problem.” “Well,” the judge said, “You don’t sound as outrageous as you did yesterday. But as impractical as hell. How could it be done? You’re not an attorney. I can’t allow you to act as one and conduct an examination.” “You can appoint a lawyer,” Emily said. “I don’t have a budget for assigned counsel in misdemeanors.” “You can ask a law student to do it.” “Is there anything you don’t have an answer for?” “Try me,” Emily said. In the end, the judge agreed that he would permit Emily to select one probationer, once a week, to describe her life, in fifteen minutes or less. None of the other judges followed the judge’s example. Years later,
when she became a lawyer, Emily saw to it that her clients, many of
whom she represented pro bono, had their day in court, had a chance
to utter what was relevant to them in their lives, however irrelevant
their lives might be to a judge or prosecutor. David… I was at first less skeptical about the usefulness of programmatic ideals than was Emily. I believed that if ideals were used corruptly, the corrupters could be easily replaced. I became a Communist for a number of years. I agreed that all natural resources should be publicly owned and managed for the good of society, that the profit motive was the problem and not the salvation of the United States. But I argued with my comrades that death sentences in the Soviet Union were as much a product of imperfect leaders as they were in the United States. I argued against the Communists’ notion that men and women condemned to death for vile crimes were less worthy of help than men and women condemned to death because they were militant unionists or civil rights activists. I argued that the American Communist leaders were trying in vain to impose the history of Communist Russia on the United States. When, in 1939, the Stalin and Hitler regimes made a compact, I argued that the Soviet Union had betrayed the prayers of hundreds of millions of human beings. That ended my Communist affiliation. But neither
Emily nor I would distance ourselves from actions on behalf of the poor,
the condemned or the discriminated against, regardless of who sponsored
the actions. We had learned from reading Mahatma Gandhi that if you
want to sincerely stand with the wronged, you must be willing to do
so with people who stand for them for other reasons than yours. In those
years, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party would march for
any cause that favored economic, racial, ethnic or gender equality.
They left it to the Socialists, the Communists, the unionists, the anti-lynching
groups, the anti-anti-Semites and the equality-for-women groups to move
the nation, march by march and arrest by arrest, toward the equalities
that have now been partially achieved. A story about David... In 1950, seven Virginia black men were marked for execution, having been convicted of raping a white woman. Because their attorneys were all local white men who had advised their clients to confess and had reluctantly and poorly defended those who refused to confess, it was impossible to know whether all seven men, or some of them, or none of them, were guilty. A man I knew, an African-American lawyer, decided to let other lawyers make the cold rounds of the appellate courts to save the condemned men, while he would make the rounds of churches, unions, newspapers, and liberal organizations to rouse public opinion against their executions. I had just had a novel accepted for publication and felt a freedom that was new to me, and I asked him whether I could help in some way. We explained to white preachers and priests why there were grounds for believing that the defendants had not been fairly tried. Afterward, back in his car, we debated whether we had swayed, offended, or bored the church leaders. There came a February day when it was clear that scores of legal motions and tens of thousands of prayers for compassion had made no mark on the stone faced judges in Virginia and Washington, D.C., nor on the Virginia Governor. “You may as well go on home,” my friend said. “I’ll go sit with one of the families.” “I want to do that, too,” I said. He drove us to a town called Martinsville, and he stopped on a street corner in the Jim Crow section of town. He told me to wait for him. He left the car and walked over to a taxi and spoke to the driver. Then he came back. “He’ll take you to one of the families,” he said. The driver took us deep into farm country, past shacks and huts and tin patched structures, and he stopped outside a dilapidated old shack where half a dozen black men, some young, some old, all of them armed with rifles of one kind or another, stood and eyed me as I got out of the taxi. There were half a dozen old cars parked under some nearby trees. “Bill Patterson wanted me to be here tonight,” I told the nearest of them. They stepped away from the door. It was cold inside, made only a little warmer by a small pot-belly stove. There were two rooms, a small, back one, in which a ten-year old girl sat on a cot, a baby in her arms, her thumb in the baby’s mouth, a blanket over her shoulders. She looked at me without any expression. The outer, larger room had a bed, a table, some chairs and the pot-belly stove. A woman lay on the bed, covered with several blankets that did not hide her trembling and her sometimes whole-body spasms. She made crying, broken sounds, she moaned and sometimes struck her head with her fist. Two women sat on the bed on either side of her, sometimes reaching out to touch her cheek or lips or wrist. I sat on a chair facing the bed, not knowing what to do, thinking, “Maybe I’m doing something just by being here.” From time to time, one or two of the armed men came in and talked briefly with the women and went out again. The sun went down and two oil lamps were lit. The little girl in the other room, her blanket still over her shoulders, the baby still in her arms, came in and climbed up on the bed and began saying out loud, “It’s going to be alright, Mama. It’s going to be alright, Mama...” The whispering of the men outside waxed and waned and, when it waned, the quiet became unbearable. About an hour or so later, I heard a car drive down the dirt road and stop near the door. The women and the little girl and the woman shivering in the bed became very still. We heard a car door open. We heard the men outside speaking to whoever had been in the car. And then there was silence. And then an old man opened the door briefly, his lips tightly shut. He nodded at the two women on the bed and shut the door. And then the silence was broken by the woman striking herself in the head and the little girl crying, “It’s going to be alright, Mama...” That was
one month before the Rosenberg-Sobell trial began. Emily’s initiative... An evening in fall 1951. Emily and I had put our daughters to bed and spent a quarter of an hour or so listening to the news on the radio. Emily said she didn’t want to listen to the radio, she wanted to talk. I shut off the radio. We both stood at a window looking out at an old red brick Roman Catholic church that served as a school for the children of second generation Italian families. “Ever since the April death sentences against the Rosenbergs, I can’t get Ethel out of my mind,” Emily said. “She is a woman I talked with. I still hear the sound and the rhythm of her voice. I see her eyes. Michelle and Jenny were with me in the park that day and they heard and saw her, they saw her sons. My mind is filled with her.” I thought I knew what was coming. “What I have trouble with is understanding the silence,” Emily said. “When two neighbors are about to be killed, how can neighbors be silent? I can’t accept that. We have to do something.” I thought, “Emily doesn’t know how immovable officials become after they order executions.” “Emily, I have to tell you something,” I said. “Yes?” The impatience of patience in her voice was clear to me. I said, “It’s one thing to pit yourself against a bunch of Tammany Hall judges who tell you they don’t want to hear violins. It’s another thing to take on J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the federal judges. They are the government of the United States of America. They can hurt us badly, our daughters and you and me.” I was not a total stranger to threatening situations. But facing down policemen who told me and a black man in a small Virginia city that we were disorderly because we were walking down a street together was nowhere near as threatening as being marked for punishment by the United States government. All she
did was look at me with a mixture of sadness and regret, and I knew
in that moment that I could lose her, that my life would never be the
same again if I said another cautionary word. So I didn’t. Meeting the defense attorney... Emily’s first step was to locate Emanuel Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ attorney. We met with him at his very modest office, within walking distance of the federal courthouse. He had a small waiting room and a lone secretary. Emily told him we had two concerns: were the Reuben articles accurate in their accusations of misconduct by the prosecutors and the judge? Was there any way in which we might help the Rosenbergs’ sons? Bloch was in his late forties, a seasoned civil rights attorney, but nothing had prepared him to defend people indicted for conspiring to commit espionage. He was a sole practitioner, and he needed help in trying the case, but almost every attorney he approached, he told us, had declined to become involved. Bloch’s father, Alexander, was also an attorney and well on in years. For the record, he became Ethel Rosenberg’s attorney. A young woman attorney, Gloria Agrin, volunteered to assist Bloch in technical matters and law research, but the weight of the case was on Bloch’s shoulders alone. Among his problems was that he had no investigative facilities and hardly any funds. We learned later that the Communist Party, which we mistakenly assumed would assist him financially in the Rosenbergs’ defense, did not do so. Consequently, Bloch stood virtually alone for his clients in the courtroom and took the full brunt of responsibility for the verdict and the sentences. Morton Sobell, we later learned, had been represented by two attorneys, neither of them with a significant background in criminal law, who were of little assistance to either Bloch or to their client. On the day we first spoke with him, Bloch was in a state of extreme tension and exhaustion. From the moment the trial ended on March 29, 1951, and before the sentences had been pronounced, he had single-handedly begun the laborious task of analyzing the 2600-page trial record for judicial errors and prosecutorial misconduct on which his appeals would be based. It was just as well, he told us, that because of his representation of the Rosenbergs, many of his other clients had left him. He had also learned that an attempt was being made to prosecute him under the “white slavery” Mann Act for traveling from New York City to Washington D.C. and sharing a hotel room with his fiancée. Bloch told us Reuben’s analysis of the trial was essentially correct. Emily said we wanted to read the trial record for ourselves and asked that he lend us a copy. He seemed reluctant to do so. The few copies he had, he told us, were being passed around among attorneys whose help he was seeking. He also told us he doubted that non-lawyers would understand the nuances and courtroom rituals of the Federal judicial system. He was, correctly, unimpressed by Emily’s previous employment as a New York City probation officer and mine as a New York State parole officer. Bloch, we later learned, had one more reason for not wishing to let us read the trial record: he was concerned that we would regard as errors certain decisions he had made during the trial in respect to cross examination of witnesses, certain advice he had given his clients, and his acceptance without challenge of certain testimony by prosecution witnesses and several prosecution exhibits. In the end, Bloch reluctantly accepted our assurances that if there were matters we did not understand in the trial record, we would discuss them with him, which we did, although not always to his or our satisfaction. As for the Rosenbergs’ sons, Bloch told us, their paternal grandmother and other close relatives were presently taking care of them. He was concerned, however, that new difficulties might arise when the older of the two, Michael, returned to school in September. “I promised my clients that I’d protect the boys as if they were my own,” he told us. “And that’s what I intend doing.” During our conversation he raised, with a touch of bitterness, one other matter. “Do you think,” he asked us, “that it was pure coincidence that all the defendants were Jewish and that the chief prosecutors and the judge were also Jewish?” I thought to myself: the defendants were New Yorkers and the prosecutors and the judge were New Yorkers, and it would hardly be remarkable that they were all Jewish. Emily and I remained politely silent. Bloch must have understood our silence. He said, “Did you know that the trial was originally set for New Mexico, where the alleged crime occurred and that the first indictment was written by the U.S. Attorney in Albuquerque?” “Is that routine?” I asked. “To move trials from where defendants were first indicted to where they live?” He asked, “Is it routine in New York City, where about a third of the population is Jewish, to empanel a jury without a single Jewish juror?” His questions made us uncomfortable and our responses did the same for him. We left Bloch with the trial transcript in our hands and with uncertainty about his implication that there had been an anti-Semitic factor at the trial. Our discomfort had arisen not because what he was implying was unbelievable, but because we did not want to confront the possibility that it was believable. In our minds, if our reading of the trial record supported Reuben’s claims of deceitful misconduct by the prosecutors, Bloch would have strong grounds on which to appeal for reversing the verdicts, and there might even be a basis for an appeal to public opinion if the prosecutorial misconduct had been deliberate. The ethnic implications of Bloch’s questions, even if to some degree true, would muddy the picture with unprovable and inflammatory claims. Months later, we found that Bloch’s questions were being asked throughout Jewish communities everywhere, and not only among Jews, and not only in the United States. We were not yet aware that the following year would be marked by espionage/treason trials of Jews in Moscow and Prague. We made inquiries among our lawyer friends about the three Jewish officials who had represented the government at the trial. Federal Judge Irving Kaufman, who had presided at the trial, had been appointed to his post less than two years before the trial. The chief prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, had begun his career as a Tammany Hall official. His chief assistant prosecutor, a relative, had been Roy Cohn, a very bright young lawyer. The judge and the two prosecutors owed their appointments to Tammany Hall, the oldest political machine in the state. Inevitably, as was true for many Tammany beneficiaries, Saypol and Cohn later found themselves facing the judgment of reform-minded prosecutors and colleagues.15, 16 There were
also two other assistant prosecutors – Myles Lane and James Kilsheimer
II, neither of them Jewish – who played minor roles at the trial. Justice officials’ next move... Less than a week after being sentenced, Ethel Rosenberg was transferred to the death house at Sing Sing, drastically reducing the family’s and Bloch’s visits to her, thereby creating arbitrary hardships for visitation and the preparation of appeals. One month later, Julius Rosenberg was transferred to the death house. If Emily
had any reservations about the course she was set on, the transfers
erased them. She regarded the hasty pre-appeal transfers to the death
house to be a deliberate cruelty, intended to isolate the Rosenbergs
from their family and sons, and to arouse in them a sense of abandonment
that would discourage any faith they might have in obtaining relief
of their situation. The trial record... On studying
the voluminous trial record, we came to a troubling conclusion: the
defendants had not actually been prosecuted for conspiring to pass information
to a wartime ally in 1944-1945. Their formal indictment described the
conspiracy as lasting from 1944-1950, but the last alleged espionage
act listed in the indictment was in 1945. The chronological facts were
ignored and the formal indictment was replaced by an oral indictment
in the courtroom in which the crime was described as having been committed
during the Cold War years, at a time when fear of a Soviet atom bomb
attack was widespread. The chief prosecutor declared at the trial that the defendants had joined
The prosecution declared, on 18 occasions at the trial, that the defendants had committed treason. The judge, in his instructions to the jury, legitimated the accusation of treason, telling the jurors that “irrational sympathies must not shield proven traitors.”18 Article III of the Constitution forbids prosecutors and judges from labeling as treason acts that do not fit its precise Constitutional description: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. The prosecution did not point to any criminal acts committed by the defendants after the Allied victory in 1945. It simply repeatedly described the acts as having been committed on behalf of an enemy nation. The jurors, as the reader will discover, believed the defendants were being tried for committing treasonable acts on behalf of an enemy, and found them guilty of treason. Reuben’s claim that the prosecution had perpetrated two major hoaxes on the jurors was justified. The prosecution had presented neither tangible nor circumstantial evidence to support the accusation that the defendants had passed atomic information to the Soviet Union. Another hoax – that the atom bomb had been enveloped in such secrecy that the Soviet Union could not have developed its own bomb by 1949 without having been helped by defendants – was debatable. Later, in our examination of thousands of government documents in the 1970s relating to the case and the atom bomb, we discovered that General Leslie Groves, who headed the atom bomb project, had informed the Secretary of War, in 1946, that the Soviet Union either already had its own atom bomb or would have it shortly. Among the discoveries made by the authors in their examination of another set of government documents in 1995, was that the espionage committed in 1944-1945 had been discovered in 1948, not in 1950, as Justice officials and the FBI claimed. In those intervening years, the Soviet Union detonated its first atom bomb. Had the defendants been tried before the Soviet’s acquired their atom bomb, the applicable laws and the public’s residual admiration for our ally’s immense sacrifices of life (20 million casualties), would have resulted in sentences that would have, with good behavior, reunited the defendants with their families in three or four years. By trying
the defendants under an oral indictment in the courtroom, for committing
treason on behalf of an enemy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed,
Morton Sobell was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment, and the government’s
chief witness, David Greenglass, was sentenced to fifteen years. The Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case... With the help of William Reuben, Emily formed a committee to organize public support for legal motions to obtain a new trial or a reduction of the sentences or, if those motions were rejected, to obtain clemency for the Rosenbergs from President Harry S. Truman or his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The formation of the Committee was undoubtedly a surprise to Justice officials. In mid-20th century United States, there was the most widespread hostility, even to the point of violence, toward dissenters of any kind. This hostility would seem to logically preclude any public efforts to challenge the mandated fate of persons who were regarded as Communist traitors. Although
Justice officials had to know, from FBI reports, that the initiative
for creating the Committee had not come from Communists, and that the
Communist Party was utterly opposed to its formation, they very quickly
told the media that the Committee was a “Communist-led” group. Justice
officials also had to have known that emissaries from the Communist
Party knocked on our door, and on the doors of other Committee members,
asking us in the most urgent terms to dissolve the Committee. We will
describe these efforts in greater detail later. The fact is that Justice
officials and the Communist Party saw eye to eye on the Committee during
most of its of existence. A Committee of Unimportant Persons... The make-up of the Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg-Sobell Case was hardly daunting to Justice officials. Reuben, a highly decorated World War II veteran, had found only a left-wing limited-circulation weekly, the National Guardian, willing to air his views of the trial. Emily had never helped form a committee of any kind in the past, and was not known as an activist outside her immediate circle of friends. I had had several novels published, none of which became best-sellers. The other members of the Committee emerged from our joint lists of people we knew who might lead us to people we didn’t know. Two newly-minted lawyer neighbors with young children said they wished us well when we asked them to join the Committee. They would support the Committee’s activities, they said, but would not join it, and were unhappy that we were not as cautious as they were. “We wish
we didn’t feel we have to do this,” Emily told them. “What we’re
afraid of is waking up one day and wishing, for the sake of our kids,
we had tried to save the America we grew up in.” Exoneration:
The Rosenberg-Sobell Case in the 21st
Century by Emily and David Alman, Pages 1-19 reprinted with permission
from Green Elms Press, www.greenelmspress.com. |
||