Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: History, Novel, Film

Abstract

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 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