Robert Coover - Public Burning

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.