Cold War Ideologues Want to Kill Them Again

Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!

Martyrs of Anti-Soviet Witchhunt

Shortly after 8 p.m., on 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Jewish Communists from New York, the Rosenbergs were framed up on charges of “conspiring” to pass the “secret of the atomic bomb” to the Soviet Union during World War II, when the USSR was allied with the U.S. Their 1951 trial was replete from beginning to end with perjured testimony, concocted evidence, a heavy dose of anti-Semitism and a judge who illegally consulted with the prosecution before meting out a sentence under provisions of a law that didn’t apply to their case—all against a backdrop of bloodcurdling calls to “fry the Reds.”

Around the world, millions raised their voices in an outcry demanding “justice for the Rosenbergs.” But from the White House on down, the American ruling class was united in its determination to make an example of these courageous leftists who never renounced their support to the Soviet Union, and refused to name names to save their lives. The great Soviet spy Kim Philby, in his book, My Silent War, rightly called them “the brave Rosenbergs.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on the altar of Cold War anti-Communism, in which the U.S. rulers saw the USSR as the main obstacle to U.S. imperialist world hegemony. Thus, Julius Rosenberg was arrested three weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War and less than a year after the first Soviet A-bomb test. Setting the tone for the trial, the prosecutor ranted in his opening arguments that the Rosenbergs stole “the key to the survival of this nation and…the peace of the world.” As we explained in our article “In Defense of the Rosenbergs!” (WV No. 86, 21 November 1975), following World War II:

“As the predominant capitalist power, the U.S., planning for an ‘American century,’ tore apart the U.S.-Soviet alliance and prepared the ground for a nationwide anti-red scare. When the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949 and later that same year Mao’s Red Army overthrew capitalism in China, politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy were building their political careers through a crusade to exorcise ‘Communism’ from American life.”

It was against this backdrop the Rosenbergs were put to death.

The Rosenberg Case and the Russian Question

The horrific memory of this case has been nearly impossible to bury. The capitalist rulers—often with liberals and social democrats taking the lead—have found the need to frame up and execute the Rosenbergs again and again. On the one hand they seek to defend the secret police, prosecution, judiciary and highest federal authorities who framed them. On the other, the Rosenberg case was, and still is, the question of the Russian Revolution. The 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led Russian working class was the greatest event of human history, and its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, after decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, a world-historic catastrophe. America’s imperialist rulers, the most dangerous in history, would like to wipe out of the consciousness of the proletariat and the oppressed any attachment to the program or ideals of communism—and that means driving a stake through the memory of those martyred in defense of the land of the October Revolution.

Today, with the financial crash leading the international capitalist economy into a freefall, the massive unpopularity of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the floundering occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. bourgeoisie seized on a chance to fry the Rosenbergs again. The latest exhumation and assassination was sparked by an interview (12 September) by the New York Times’ Sam Roberts with the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell, who had served over 18 years in prison. Responding to whether he had been a Soviet spy, Sobell, now 91 years old and ill, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it in those terms.” Regarding Julius Rosenberg, Sobell offered, “His intentions might have been to be a spy.” Yet Sobell maintained that sketches and other atomic bomb details the government claimed were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, were of little value. “What he gave them was junk.” According to Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg “knew what he [Julius] was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

We don’t know if Sobell’s “confession” is true or not—whether his interview was a last grab for attention near the end of his life or merely an expression of his coming to peace with U.S. imperialism. We do know however that every previous effort to “prove” the Rosenbergs’ “guilt”—from Ronald Radosh’s 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, which featured the dubious jailhouse informer Jerome Tartakow, to the Venona papers released in 1995—have had as much credibility as Bush’s tales of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Rosenbergs were legally lynched for political purposes. As the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) wrote in the Militant (27 October 1952): “The Rosenberg decision above all else was an act of ruling class terror by a state that is preparing a war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.”

What is indisputably true is that for the U.S. capitalist masters, guilt or innocence mattered not at all. Nor is guilt or innocence in this case the key question for revolutionaries. The nuclear arms capacity developed by the Soviet Union was an important component to the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. As we wrote 25 years ago, at the height of Carter/Reagan’s Cold War II, in “They’re Trying to Kill the Rosenbergs All Over Again” (WV No. 340, 21 October 1983):

“For revolutionaries, on the contrary, those who helped the Russians achieve nuclear capacity did a great service for humanity. Had U.S. imperialism maintained a nuclear monopoly, it would have meant historic defeats for the international proletariat. It would have meant nuclear destruction from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Who can doubt that U.S. imperialism would have destroyed Vietnam totally with nuclear weapons if they did not fear a retaliatory Soviet strike? Would Cuba exist today if the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly? It is clear that the USSR’s advance to nuclear capacity and then to nuclear parity has thus far been instrumental in staying the nuclear hand of U.S. imperialism.”

The Soviet Union was destroyed by imperialist-backed counterrevolution, but the question posed by the Russian Revolution—that of the proletarian seizure of state power—is as vital as ever. The imperialists seek to rewrite history in order to ensure that the rule of capital is never again challenged. We honor the Rosenbergs’ memory today, not least in our unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea—against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution.

As always, the Rosenberg case is used to serve the political needs of the day. Sobell’s “confession” was leaped on by the bourgeois press and bloggers. “Case Closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet Spies,” trumpeted an op-ed piece by Ronald Radosh in the Los Angeles Times (17 September). Written when he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Radosh’s 1983 book was a rallying point for the liberals, rad-libs and social democrats as they joined U.S. imperialism’s efforts to regiment the population during Cold War II against the Soviet Union. Today, Radosh, portrayed as an expert on the Rosenbergs case, is a neocon, a loud voice in support of the “war on terrorism” and a contributing columnist to FrontPage Magazine, mouthpiece of right-wing racist demagogue David Horowitz.

Written shortly after the FBI was given new powers to spy on and terrorize the population in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Radosh’s L.A. Times article declares, “It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.” Meanwhile, his right-wing acolytes have seized on the Sobell statements to argue that death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the MOVE organization framed up on charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981—is guilty. It is a telling indictment of American capitalist “justice” that from the liberal New York Times to Radosh’s right-wing “fringe,” Sobell’s confession is accepted without question, while the mountains of evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner, is sneered at and barred by court after court.

A Cold War Show Trial

Like many of their generation, the Rosenbergs were inspired by the authority and achievements of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism on one-sixth of the globe and created a society where those who labored ruled. Within less than two decades, the collectivized and planned economy of the USSR propelled a poor and backward country into a world power, with jobs, housing, education and medical care for all. In the 1930s, the capitalist world was mired in the Great Depression, while the rise of fascism and the buildup for a second interimperialist war further exposed the barbarity of capitalist class rule. As a teenager, Julius became determined to help free labor leader Tom Mooney, and as a college freshman protested against fascist students from Italy visiting CCNY. Ethel helped raise money for refugees fleeing fascist terror during the Spanish Civil War. Both were active trade unionists—Ethel in the clerical workers union and Julius as an organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians until he was fired from his job in 1945 for membership in the U.S. Communist Party (CP).

The Rosenbergs looked for political leadership to the Stalinized CP, a product of the degeneration of the Soviet workers state and Communist International. Ardent believers in the disastrous Stalinist popular front against fascism, the Rosenbergs were typical of “progressives” who hoped for a U.S.-Soviet alliance to continue after World War II. CP leader Earl Browder declared, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” But the U.S. ruling class didn’t see it that way.

On the contrary, the Rosenbergs were political scapegoats tried as “atom spies” because U.S. imperialism lost its nuclear monopoly, and with it the capacity for nuclear blackmail against the Soviets. Two months after Washington dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Pentagon mapped out a plan to launch a nuclear attack on 20 Soviet cities. Throughout the next few years, the U.S. repeatedly threatened to nuke Russia during early confrontations in the Cold War—in 1946, in 1948 over Berlin, again in 1950 over Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized on the Soviets’ August 1949 atomic test to unleash his army of G-men to hunt down the “atom spies” in the hopes of launching a series of show trials to frame up the CP for espionage. They went on frequent fishing expeditions hoping to force “confessions” and to get the confessors to falsely point the finger at other CPers.

Government prosecutors have since admitted that the arrest and threat of execution of Ethel Rosenberg was intended solely to force Julius to break down and “confess.” In the last minutes of their lives, a U.S. Marshal stood outside the execution chamber, waiting for a nod from either of them indicating that they would “confess” and “name names.” Two FBI agents waited by a special phone with an open line to Attorney General Brownell, ready to call off the execution if the Rosenbergs capitulated and allowed the government to use them as it had other finks and turncoats. But the Rosenbergs refused to bow.

Fully aware that there was no case against the Rosenbergs for espionage, the government got them on the classic frame-up charge—“conspiracy.” The government knew that the Rosenbergs did not “steal the secret of the atomic bomb.” In fact there was no “secret.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of designing the first atomic bomb, pointed out, “There are no unpublished secrets concerning atomic weapons, and no secrets of nature available to a few.” Judge Irving Kaufman, upon pronouncing the death sentence, accused the Rosenbergs of “treason.” It did not matter that according to the U.S. Constitution, “treason,” a capital crime, is defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. The USSR was an ally of the U.S. in 1944 when the “crime” supposedly took place!

It was hardly coincidental that the judge, the lead prosecutor, Irving Saypol, and the key witnesses were Jewish, chosen in a transparent effort to cover up the stench of anti-Semitism surrounding the trial (see “The Political Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” WV No. 626, 28 July 1995). Two self-confessed perjurers sent them to the chair—Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass and Philadelphia chemist Harry Gold, supposedly a Soviet spy courier. Gold admitted at the trial to having become “so tangled up in a web of lies...it is a wonder steam didn’t come out of my ears,” and never even testified to having met or known Julius or Ethel Rosenberg.

Greenglass, who had apparently stolen a piece of uranium while working as an army technician at the Los Alamos nuclear facility in 1945, set his sister and her husband up as fall guys. Greenglass testified that, after being recruited to a spy ring by Julius, he had handed sketches of the atomic bomb to Soviet spy courier Gold, claiming to have learned the A-bomb “secret” by overhearing conversations of scientists passing through the machine shop at Los Alamos. Greenglass implicated his sister with testimony that she typed up the notes for Julius. That Greenglass’ testimony was perjured was proven yet again in recently released grand jury testimony of his wife Ruth Greenglass, who testified that she wrote up the notes. The only hard “evidence” against the Rosenbergs introduced at the trial was a contribution box found in their home for Spanish Civil War refugees and Ethel’s signature on a petition for a Communist candidate for New York City Council.

Liberals and Social Democrats Witchhunt Reds

While his name has become a synonym for eviscerating the democratic rights of individuals and organizations based on their political views and associations, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was at first a fringe development in the anti-Communist hysteria. The political basis of the post World War II witchhunt was set by the Cold War liberals. As early as 1947, Democratic president Harry Truman put in place a loyalty board to screen all government employees, and the purge of left-wing militants from the CIO began. That same year Congress enacted the strikebreaking Taft-Hartley law, which, in addition to outlawing such labor weapons as secondary strikes, barred Communists from union office. It was the pro-Truman anti-Communists, among them Democrat Hubert Humphrey and United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther who founded the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 to drive the CP and radicals out of the unions.

Some 25,000 union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases leading to the destruction of whole unions. Thousands of others were tracked down by the FBI and driven from their jobs, only to continue to be hounded and witchhunted due to secret employer blacklists. The 1950 McCarran Act, named for the Democratic Senator from Nevada, legitimized secret FBI record keeping on “subversive” individuals and called for the registration of organizations and individuals who purportedly “advocated violent overthrow” of the government. It also provided for the deportation of non-citizens who had been Communists at any time in their lives. Hundreds of Communists were jailed. Nearly 12,000 people were listed on a “Security Index” kept by FBI national headquarters and another 17,000 on the “Communist Index,” while FBI field offices held lists of an additional 200,000 considered to constitute a danger in times of “national emergency.” Humphrey sponsored the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP, and amended the McCarran Act to set up concentration camps for “subversives” in the U.S.

The liberal Cold Warriors shared the same enemy, Communism, but thought that McCarthy overreached—he went after the “innocent” liberals along with the “guilty.” When the names of Cold War liberals were added to the Attorney General’s Subversives List, the liberals dumped McCarthy. The liberals and social democrats wanted their civil liberties and their witchhunt too.

Playing a parallel role was the Independent Socialist League (ISL) of Max Shachtman, successor to the Workers Party. The founders of the Workers Party had split toward social democracy from the SWP in 1940 over their refusal to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. The ISL, a precursor to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), supported the expulsions of the CP-led unions from the CIO. Shachtman, clearly expressing the need to join forces with Reuther, declared that workers “should follow the general line, inside the labor movement, of supporting the reformist officialdom against the Stalinist officialdom” (New International, September 1949). Shachtman proclaimed, “Stalinism is the most virulent poison that has ever coursed through the veins of the working class and its movement. The work of eliminating it makes the first claim on the attention of every militant.” The anti-red purge installed a venal pro-imperialist union leadership that abetted the bosses in fostering racial divisions and presided over the decimation of the unions for decades.

Shachtman’s ISL refused to come out for commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence until just before the execution. In the Bay Area branch, where a vote to support commutation of the death sentence lost by a single vote, the right-wing “hang the spies” faction was destroyed when confronted with Shachtman’s wire to President Eisenhower asking to commute the sentence. Writing in the name of “an independent socialist organization which has been uncompromising in its struggle against Stalinism,” Shachtman assured Eisenhower that their concern arose only from the death penalty which “gives worldwide Stalinism an effective weapon” (Labor Action, 22 June 1953). Still, there was a hue and cry in the party against the decision, as letters poured in to Labor Action bitterly complaining of Shachtman’s “capitulation” and of “this belated jump into the ‘super-liberal’ bandwagon...that hangs on the Stalinist coattails.”

The Shachtmanites were visceral anti-Communists. But most of the left, including the SWP, failed to immediately rally to the Rosenbergs’ defense for other reasons. This was a time when leftist militants were being tried and sent to prison for long stretches based on nothing but their libraries; Congressmen were calling to make CP membership a capital crime and the government was looking to brand left organizations, particularly the CP, as espionage agents. Civil rights activist Carl Braden was jailed for “state sedition” after he and his wife sold a house to a black family in a white neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Robeson, the acclaimed black actor and vocalist, was one of the many stripped of their passports and banned from leaving the country for years. The renowned filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, a British citizen, was barred from re-entering the U.S.

As for the CP, it did not even mention the case until after the trial was over and the death sentence had already been handed down. When the CP did take up the case, it neither denounced the political frame-up nor defended the Rosenbergs as victims of the capitalist state. It merely accused the government of “bad faith” similar to its refusal “to negotiate peace in Korea” (Daily Worker, 6 April 1951). The CP’s betrayal was not simply one of defense policy over the Rosenbergs’ case. The CP betrayed the working class with its program of class collaboration, its policy of tailing the “progressive” bourgeoisie. By the end of World War II, the CP found itself without allies when it was no longer useful for the bourgeoisie to continue the popular front forged during the “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.” Years of class collaboration behind Roosevelt—the no-strike pledge, scabbing on strikes and betrayal of the fight for black rights during the Second World War—closed off the possibility of effectively mobilizing the labor movement against repression. As the Cold War McCarthy period ensued, the CP found itself totally abandoned by its “progressive” friends.

Even had the CP moved sooner and with more energy, it is not likely they could have saved the Rosenbergs from a government intent on killing them. Against the Stalinists’ vapid talk of “bad faith” on the part of the U.S. government, it was the SWP that correctly recognized the anti-Soviet centrality of the Rosenberg trial and hailed the USSR’s nuclear capacity—an important act demonstrating considerable political courage in that period. Though the SWP could have recognized the political character of the Rosenberg case sooner and sounded the alarm earlier and louder, the defense record of the SWP was generally excellent. They protested the 1949 Smith Act prosecutions of the CP, undeterred by the vicious sectarianism which led the CP to applaud the first use of the Smith Act in 1941 against the Trotskyists for their principled opposition to their “own” rulers. While unconditionally defending the USSR during the Second World War, the SWP courageously opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage.

Today, Sobell’s “confession” has left the Rosenbergs’ few liberal defenders uneasy and defensive. That is because they are hostile to the cause for which the Rosenbergs died. What the liberals care about is the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. For Howard Zinn, “The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria” (New York Times, 21 September). Victor Navasky, former publisher of the Nation, told the Times, “I wish Morty and Ethel and Julius had been open about what they had and hadn’t done, or in Morty’s case, ‘come clean’ before this.” He added, “These guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime, and yes, they broke the law, shouldn’t have done what they did, and should have been proportionally punished for it; but the greater betrayal was by the state.”

Today, Shachtman’s heirs in the ISO have published an article “Executed to Send a Message” (Socialist Worker online, 30 September) that makes no mention of the Democrats’ role in the Cold War witchhunt or in the Rosenbergs’ prosecution. The ISO ludicrously seeks to put distance between the Rosenbergs and the CP, stating, “by 1943, they were no longer active in the party,” and giving not the slightest hint that they went to their deaths as supporters of the Soviet Union. Small wonder: this is a group that was formed in opposition to the defense of the USSR and that hailed its counterrevolutionary destruction.

Against such liberals and renegades, we Trotskyists fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe. We hail those, like the Rosenbergs, who gave their lives in defense of the land of October and fight to disarm the rapacious imperialist rulers through socialist revolution. We will not forget—Honor the heroic Rosenbergs! For new October Revolutions!