Public Burning (23 page)

Okay. So far so good. The Crime of the Century, by J. Edgar Hoover. But working backwards, like a lawyer, the narrative came unraveled. All that the minor witnesses really substantiated was (1) that people were indeed spying for the Russians in this country, as everybody knew, and (2) that Julius Rosenberg was a left-winger, probably a Communist or at least a sympathizer. But no links between (1) and (2), no hard evidence that the Rosenbergs themselves were spies. The principal evidence against Sobell was his wild flight to Mexico. This was pretty peculiar, all right, but who knew what he was actually fleeing from? He'd been a Communist, after all, and that by itself was a federal crime. The FBI had not been able to connect him in any way to the theft of the bomb secrets, only to a ring of City College classmates with unhealthy opinions, including Rosenberg. So forget Sobell. Yakovlev had been out of the country for years and wasn't apt to come back to the U.S. to deny the FBI charges, and as for Harry Gold, not only was he a notorious fantasist, but his testimony in any case had nothing to do with the Rosenbergs, only the Greenglasses. Moreover, though I got the impression from the files that Gold seemed to know Yakovlev all right, this FBI legend of Fuchs leading them to Gold and Gold to Greenglass just didn't hold up. Gold had hardly begun to speak vaguely of some “unknown individual in Albuquerque” but what the FBI had Greenglass under questioning. Where did they find him? The files didn't say. But they did show that as soon as Gold—with FBI assistance—“remembered” this contact, the FBI showed him a list of twenty possible names and David's was already on it. And prior to that, the FBI had descended on Gold long before getting any help at all from Fuchs. In fact, Fuchs had told them time and again that Gold was
not
his courier, in spite of Harry's signed confession. But the agents working on him in England were very persistent fellows, and Fuchs may well have gone along with them finally just to get them off his back. So, if anything, it was Greenglass to Gold to Fuchs.

What about the Greenglasses, then? Without their testimony the government had almost nothing left: a few suspect associations, meetings, uncorroborated assertions, the open sesame of “I come from Julius,” patently fabricated by the prosecution, a sackful of photo equipment, and the solemn word of the FBI that they knew what they were doing. And maybe they did. Certainly the Greenglass confessions seemed real enough, especially since they involved a brother sending his own sister to her death and himself to the penitentiary, but it was a bit odd that the night the FBI first picked him up for a preliminary interview, David laughingly told them everything. Almost as though it had been rehearsed. All except any references to his sister Eth, who he insisted from the beginning had nothing to do with it. Nailing Julius, though, seemed to please him. By the time of the trial, he had stopped laughing, but he was still grinning. It made him look like Joe McCarthy. His trial testimony, like Ruth's, was smooth and polished—too polished. They seemed to remember odd facts too readily, facts all too similar in type to those used successfully by the Saypol team and approved by Kaufman in the earlier warm-up Brothman-Moskowitz trial. And there was too much that never got said, too much information concealed that might have muddied the argument, too much hanging over the Greenglasses' heads. Not just the thefts either, maybe the FBI was really ignorant of that, but espionage, Communism, and possible perjury as well: their letters through the war showed them to be committed Party zealots, enthusiastically working for a “socialist America” and “raising the Red flag,” Ruth helping to organize New York City units, David proselytizing among his fellow soldiers—they even called each other “comrade” and signed their letters “with all the love of Marx and the humanity of Lenin”! Yet the very openness of these letters seemed to militate against any subplot beneath the text, about the only hint of anything out of the ordinary being David's remark in a 1944 letter from Santa Fe that by 1948 “we should have made our contributions to the world, at least one such contribution.” Which could mean just about anything.

Then would they just jump into wild charges of atomic spying all by themselves? No, but it could have been the other way around. Maybe the FBI had told David that they already had the goods on Ethel and Julius, knew a lot of things in fact that even David didn't know, they only wanted him and Ruth to “confirm” certain things—the FBI often worked this way, and the Greenglasses were easy marks. And maybe the FBI
did
know about the uranium theft and used that to scare him into “cooperating.” After all, the FBI
had
to win this one—their whole reputation depended on it, as well as their budget and a lot of jobs. Including Hoover's: the Democrats had been out to get him for years, and what better opportunity than to be able to turn the “soft on Communism” charge back on the old Master Red-Baiter himself? The British had made a chump out of him with their arrest of Fuchs, now he had to top them to save his neck, and with no other big guns in sight, only a vast network would make it for him. And if some links were lost, maybe others would have to be forged. Or David might simply have been guilty as hell, and jumped at the chance to save his own skin and Ruth's. Certainly, given the apparent commitment of their wartime correspondence, there was something very hard and cynical about their sudden “conversion.” Weirdly, it was only by chance that David got sent to Los Alamos in the first place—another guy in his unit was assigned to go there but went AWOL, and David was his last-minute replacement. Who was that AWOL soldier, and did he know what, in effect, he'd done? But for one moment of an unknown GI's weakness, the Balance of Terror might not even exist and the Rosenbergs might be home tonight, celebrating their anniversary and wishing something exciting would happen to them for a change.

As for a brother sending his sister to the chair, maybe too much had been made of this. There was nothing unusual about it, after all, it happened every day. Fathers threw their children out of tenement-house windows, kids kicked their grandmothers down the stairs, brothers and sisters ratted on each other from the moment they could talk. When you're up against it, survival's the thing, I'm not sure I'd trust my own goddamn brothers in the same situation. Besides, it was widely known that there was a lot of bad feeling between the brothers-in-law, largely because of their postwar business venture which had gone sour, and one thing that became transparent during the trial was the wholehearted eagerness with which the Greenglasses laid it on the Rosenbergs. The files suggested that David had even been blackmailing Julius for some time—this was seen as a corroboration of sorts of the charges, the final $4000 at the end being then a last frantic payoff, Julius well aware that if arrested David would spill his guts. Ethel and Ruthie didn't get along either, old jealousies over David, and old lady Greenglass apparently hated Ethel and the whole Rosenberg lot with her. She seemed almost pleased her daughter was getting the hot seat, letting the world know that if Julius and Ethel died in the chair, she wouldn't even go to their funerals. A lovely family. It was even likely, now that I thought about it, that David and Ruth had hoped for the death penalty all along, so they wouldn't have anybody around afterwards to remind them of what they'd done. Gone from the face of the earth. I'd known guys like Greenglass. Not quite bright enough to come to grips with the world or understand what any of it was about, yet not dumb enough to find a conventional place in the herd and stay out of trouble. You could talk them into anything, they were full of emptiness and longed to be filled up. Women wrapped his kind around their little fingers: his mother Tessie, his big sister Eth, his tough unhappy wife. Greenglass had no real connection with actuality. Yesterday it was Ruth and Ethel telling him what to do, now it was Saypol and Cohn—a man disciplined by shrews at home and so obsequious abroad.

What was I saying? That the FBI, convinced maybe that they'd located the spy ring or at least were very close, but lacking hard evidence, had arm-twisted all these people into concocting a bomb-theft plot? It hardly seemed likely, yet all the linkages, walked through backwards like this (in fact I was now down on my hands and knees, crawling through them), did seem to come undone. Supposing Gold really was Fuchs's courier, for example: would the Soviets have been so crazy as to risk compromising this connection by sending Gold to the Greenglass flat? Fuchs to the Russians was like a dream come true—he was, literally, almost everything they needed. Greenglass, by comparison, was just some dumbnuts YCL on-the-make Army kid who through sheer stupidity and overzealousness could spoil everything. Who could be sure? he might even be an FBI plant! And anyway, if Rosenberg
was
in on it, then they hardly needed Gold—anything David had for them, Julie could get. Well, I knew what the pressures were in a place like the FBI. Each division had to justify its budget and salaries, come up with the goods when pressed, and each man had to think of his own advancement: assuming the Rosenbergs were guilty (and perhaps no man at the FBI doubted this from the beginning, one man's beliefs or assumptions supporting the next, just like in religious cults, augmented by the incredible state of paranoia—Fear Bullshit Insecurity, they called themselves—and the blind obeisance to the Director that prevailed over there), then the man who nailed it down stood to win the prize. Rewards and punishments: this was how it worked. On May 31, 1950, just eleven days after the case had been opened, for example, there were Gold's interrogators T. Scott Miller and Richard Brennan getting Bureau commendations for their “imaginative, resourceful, and vigorous” handling of the assignment and being recommended for “meritorious increases in salary.” An instant parable for the whole force, all of whom were out there competing for the prizes in this one. The biggest one of all: the Crime of the Century. Hoover, reacting with “shock and anger,” had grabbed up the intercom in 1949 and said: “Get that spy ring!” And so, like unquestioning soldiers of Christ, they had gone out and got one. It would have been just the same at the OPA. Of course, we never electrocuted anybody at the OPA.

And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters
believed
there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves—or, as they'd say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers—maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and pitied, to demonstrate their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one), were members of the alleged conspiracy. In 1943 the Rosenbergs were known to have dropped out of all overt Communist activities, canceling their subscription to the
Daily Worker
, refusing to sign any more petitions. Saypol argued that these were signs they were going underground, and maybe that was so. But maybe not: what with the new baby and Julius's well-paying Army job, a brighter-than-ever future, they might merely have been ducking out on their friends, something they'd still feel guilty about eight years later. In the interim, Julie loses his job, Ethel thinks she's having a breakdown, they sink into a drab and scummy life, and then suddenly—BINGO!—the A-bomb trial, a chance to recover their pride and juice up their meaningless existences with real content. Sobell, meanwhile, doesn't know what the hell is happening—is it a fascist takeover?—and in panic flaps off to Mexico. When he hears about the Rosenberg spy ring, he probably believes it. So do the other witnesses: why not? it's possible…we
all
believe it…

I lay on my face gazing across the wide spread of scattered paper. I was somewhat lost in all these speculations. At sea. It was a little like lying by the irrigation ditch in Yorba Linda and gazing up at the endless sky, watching truths blow by like shifting clouds, only now it was more serious. What was fact, what intent, what was framework, what was essence? Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives? I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was the one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. Fortunately, I knew, I'd forget most of this—these errant insights always fled and something more solid, more
legal
, sooner or later took over. I'd find the right question, take a side, and feel on top of things again. Gain perspective. Courage, Confidence, and Perspective: the Rosenberg formula. It was in all their letters. Maybe it had a secret meaning. Something about the Communist Party. “CCCP,” I knew, was the way the Russians wrote USSR. I had to admit that it resembled somewhat my 1952 “K
₁
C
₃
” campaign slogan: Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls. Or Costs—we never got that sorted out. The Great Crusade. Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment. For Peace, Bread, and Roses. Things we'd learned in the thud and blunder of college politics, Julius and I….

Different from me, though. His moustache alone was proof of that. A kind of holyroller in his way. Gullible, emotional. We were more like mirror images of each other, familiar opposites. Left-right, believer-nonbeliever, city-country, accused-accuser, maker-unmaker. I built bridges, he bombed them. A Talmud fanatic at age fourteen, Manifesto zealot at fifteen. He moved to the fringe as I moved to the center. He argued with his Socialist dad, helped kick the Trotskyites out of the Party while he was still just a kid. If he'd been born a Catholic or Lutheran instead of a Jew, he might have been a Nazi. Probably some kind of sexual deviant as well, most of these ghetto types were. Too many people piled up on top of each other, it was easy to imagine a lot of combinations country kids would never think of. When the FBI raided the Rosenberg flat, the one thing they found besides old check stubs chronicling the dismal decline of Julie's failing business was a set of pornographic records and other records ridiculing religious ceremonies, like the Kol Nidre chant. What Eisenhower in his news conference yesterday called “violations of human decency.” Saypol thought those records were enough alone to hang them on: “An indication of their state of mind,” he liked to say.