implicate either the Rosenbergs or Sobell, he was not cross-examined
by the defense team. As he vacated the witness chair to return to the
Lewisberg Federal Penitentiary, Saypol called Dr. George Bernhardt.
Bernhardt was a physician who lived only a few doors away from the
Rosenbergs on Monroe Street. He recalled a telephone conversation he
had had with Julius in May of 1950. According to him, the defendant had
said, “Doctor, I would like to ask a favor of you. I would like to know
what injections one needs to go to Mexico.” When the doctor demurred,
Julius had assured him that “it is not for me; it’s for a friend of
mine.” Bernhardt then told him that he would need “typhoid injections
and a small-pox vaccination.”
During this conversation, Bernhardt informed Rosenberg that if his
friend was a veteran “all he would need would be booster doses instead
of going through the entire series of injections, and he said, ‘Yes,
he is a veteran.’” He told his caller that the typhus injection would
not be necessary, however, if his friend was going only to Mexico City
but Rosenberg said, “He will probably go into the interior.” Then,
Bernhardt had recommended, “if he decided to go ... give me a little
notice because I don’t usually stock a typhus vaccine and I would have
to get it, and he said he would let me know.”
Q. Did that complete the conversation which you had with him?
A. That is right.
Bernhardt admitted to Block Junior that he had been treating Julius for
hay fever during May of 1950. Rosenberg used to come to the physician’s
Knickerbocker Village apartment once a week for injections. These
injections were usually given in Bernhardt’s living room. But the
witness couldn’t remember whether he had ever discussed vacations with
his patient or shown him pictures he had taken on Cape Cod. He was
certain, however, that he had never discussed “with Julius Rosenberg
his taking a vacation in Mexico.”
The Government got back to the subject of Morton Sobell again with
the testimony of William Danziger, another City College graduate who
had worked with him in the Bureau of Ordinance. Danziger had left
Washington in March of 1950 to take a job with the Academy Electrical
Products Corporation in New York. Shortly after his arrival, he had
looked up the Sobells and, with his wife, visited them in Flushing. It
was during this visit that Sobell, after learning that his guest was in
“the electrical business,” had suggested to him that he might be able
to use Rosenberg’s machine shop.
In the latter part of June, Danziger visited the machine shop where he
was informed that Julius was “out at a stamping place. I was at that
time rather interested in getting an estimate on stamping, so I went
out to the stamping place and saw him out there.” In July, Danziger
dropped in at the shop once more “to look over the ... facilities.”
Rosenberg told him that “he was rather tied up at that time” and would
be unable to accept any new work “for some months.” If Danziger wanted
some work done, he was advised “to contact him some time in the future.”
On June 20th, Danziger telephoned Sobell and told him that he was
looking for an electric drill in order to do some repair work at his
home. Sobell informed him that “he was getting ready to leave for a
vacation in Mexico,” but if Danziger wanted a drill, he would have to
come to Flushing to get it. When he arrived at the Sobell apartment
that evening, he noticed that “there was packing going on, there were
valises standing there.” He also saw a car in the driveway with some
valises in it. After Sobell gave him the electric drill, he told
Danziger that “he was going to Mexico City by air.”
Some weeks later, Danziger received a letter addressed to him at the
Academy Electrical Products Corporation from an “M. Sowell” in Mexico
City. It was from Sobell and contained two enclosures which he was
asked to “forward ... and I will explain to you when I get back.”
One was a note to Sobell’s parents and the other to Edith Levitov, a
sister-in-law who lived in Arlington, Virginia. Danziger delivered both
notes and also followed Sobell’s directions to “deliver my address to
Max Pasternak.”
Q. Did you know who Max Pasternak was?
A. I knew he was related in some way.
In the middle of July, he received a second letter from Mexico City.
This time, the name on the envelope was “M. or Morty Levitov.” It
contained “a letter for me, an enclosure for Miss Edith Levitov and
a short additional note which he asked me to forward, using somewhat
similar phraseology, ‘I will let you know about it when I get back.’”
Danziger promptly forwarded the note to Miss Levitov and never heard
from Sobell again. Before he stepped down, the witness said he thought
that the return address on the second communication--a Cordova or
Corbova Street--was different from the one on the first envelope.
Then a Mexico City interior decorator with the impressive name of
Manuel Giner de Los Rios sauntered up to the stand. With an interpreter
at his side, he testified in a soft Spanish that he lived in Apartment
5 at 153 Calle Octava de Cordoba. He remembered that the Sobells had
rented Apartment 4 at the beginning of July, 1950, and that he had had
a conversation on the stairs with Morton about a tank of cooking gas on
the day they moved in. A week later, he invited the new tenants to “a
party for the family and friends in honor of the saint’s day....”
The Sobells soon reciprocated by inviting de Los Rios and his wife to
dinner. A few days afterwards, Sobell, who appeared to be “a little
nervous, a little worried,” asked his new friend “how one could leave
Mexico.”
Q. Did he make any statement as to why he wanted to leave Mexico?
A. Only because he was afraid.
Q. Did he say specifically what he was afraid of?
A. He was afraid that they were looking for him so that he would have
to go to the Army.
Q. Did he say who was looking for him?
A. The military police.
“Sometime around the 20th or 22nd of July, 1950,” de Los Rios recalled,
Sobell had gone to Vera Cruz where he stayed “for about fifteen days.”
The decorator had received two letters from him during this period,
both of which began with the salutation, “Dear Helen.” The first was
postmarked Vera Cruz and the second was from Tampico. He delivered each
letter personally to Mrs. Sobell.
The interpreter had his work cut out for him that afternoon. Señor de
Los Rios had no sooner left the courtroom when the bailiff called out
the name of Minerva Bravo Espinosa, who, it turned out, worked in an
optical shop on the Calle Cinco de Mayo in Vera Cruz. On July 26, 1950,
an American who gave his name as “Mr. M. Sand,” had placed an order
with her for a pair of glasses. She had no difficulty in recognizing
Sobell as that man. He had filled out a card “which purchasers make
out to specify what they buy.” At this point, Mr. Kuntz stood up and
announced that “we will concede that we filled out the card and used
the name of Sand and bought a pair of glasses there.”
José Broccado Vendrell, who was one of the proprietors of the Grand
Hotel Diligencias in Vera Cruz, remembered that a “Morris Sand” had
stayed at his establishment until July 30th. Vendrell was followed by
Dora Bautista, a clerk at a Tampico hotel. On July 30th, an American,
who gave his name as “Marvin Sand,” had registered and asked her for
directions to the Banco Granadero. Both witnesses identified Sobell as
the man they had seen. Glenn Dennis, an official of a Mexican airline,
confirmed that a passenger by the name of “N. Sand” flew from Vera Cruz
to Tampico on July 30th, and a “Morton Solt” from Tampico to Mexico
City two days later.
Elizabeth Bentley, fresh from her triumphs before sundry Congressional
investigating committees, contributed little to the prosecution’s
case. Outside of adding to the aura of Communism that permeated the
entire trial, her testimony consisted of innuendo only. In the fall of
1942, she had accompanied Golos, her party superior (and lover), to
the vicinity of Knickerbocker Village, where he was “to pick up some
material from a contact, an engineer.” At that time, she had waited in
a car while Golos talked to his “contact.” From then until November
of the next year, she used to receive telephone calls from a man “who
described himself as ‘Julius.’” Golos had told her that this man “lived
in Knickerbocker Village,” but she had “never met anyone whose voice I
heard, whom I could describe as Julius.”
The government’s last witness was James S. Huggins, an immigration
inspector for the Department of Justice. On August 18, 1950, nine
Mexican security policemen had brought Morton Sobell to his office in
Laredo, Texas. He identified a manifest record which he had filled out
from information given to him by Sobell. At the bottom of the card,
he had written, “Deported from Mexico,” despite the fact that the
Mexican authorities had not shown him any deportation orders. As soon
as Huggins had laboriously typed in the necessary personal data on the
manifest, the defendant was arrested by FBI agents who were waiting in
the outer office.
As Huggins left the witness stand and headed back for the anonymity
of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Saypol announced that
“The Government rests, if the Court please.” In a little less than two
weeks, the prosecution had presented the evidence which it hoped would
convict all three defendants. After some defense motions for a mistrial
because of the infusion of testimony about the Communist Party were
denied, Bloch Junior informed Kaufman that “my first witness is the
defendant Julius Rosenberg.”
It was late on the afternoon of March 21, 1951, that the mustached,
bespectacled Rosenberg sat himself down in the witness chair. A
thirty-three-year-old electrical engineer, he proudly stated that he
had married Ethel on June 18, 1939, and that they were the parents of
two boys, Michael and Robert. Outside of the fact that he knew a great
many people whose names were mentioned during the trial, he denied
that he had in any way been involved in espionage. As for Russia, he
“felt that the Soviet government had improved the lot of the underdog
there ... and at the same time I felt that they contributed a major
share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed six million of my
co-religionists.”
Q. Did you feel that way in 1945?
A. Yes, I felt that way in 1945.
Q. Do you still feel that way today?
A. I still feel that way.
But he was, and always had been, loyal to the United States.
He testified that Greenglass had asked him for $2,000.00 in May of
1950. When Julius asked him why he needed this money, he was told,
“I need the money. Don’t ask questions.” David had also urged his
brother-in-law to see if his doctor “would make out a certificate
for smallpox vaccination.” In addition, he had wanted to know “what
kind of injections are required to go into Mexico.” It was after this
conversation that Rosenberg had questioned Dr. Bernhardt about the
medical requirements for a Mexican trip.
Toward the end of May, David had telephoned Rosenberg and pleaded with
him to come over to his apartment. He told Julius, whom he usually
called Julie, that he was “in a terrible jam.” He said he needed a
“couple of thousand dollars in cash” and, when his brother-in-law told
him that he couldn’t raise that amount of money, he had shouted “... if
you don’t get me that money you are going to be sorry!” Outside of an
inconsequential meeting a few days later, that was the last time that
Julius had seen David until the latter testified at the trial.
Ethel buttressed her husband’s emphatic denials of any espionage
activities. She knew that Julius had purchased their console table
at Macy’s and that “it was about $20 or $21.” Long after the trial,
such a table, which a Macy employee priced at $20.36, was found in her
mother-in-law’s apartment. As far as wrist-watches were concerned, the
one she had been wearing when she was arrested had been given to her
by her husband on her birthday in 1945. She remembered that Julius had
lost his watch on a New York Central train in August of 1948. She was
certain that neither the console table nor the watches had been given
to them by the Russians.
When Saypol took over, both witnesses refused to answer any questions
that had to do with their association with the Communist Party. Julius
informed Judge Kaufman that “if Mr. Saypol is referring to the Young
Communist League or the Communist Party, I will not answer any question
on it....”
Q. You mean you assert your constitutional privilege against
self-incrimination?
A. That’s right.
Ethel bridled at any reference to the word “Communist” and refused
to answer such questions as “Did you ever sign a Communist Party
nominating petition for elective office?” and “Were they [friends with
whom the Rosenbergs had lived for a time] members of the Communist
Party?”
After Thomas V. Kelly, a Macy’s attorney, testified that it was
impossible to check the purchase of the console table because the
store’s records for 1944 had been destroyed, the defense called it
a day. But Saypol had three rebuttal witnesses up his well-tailored
sleeve--Evelyn Cox, a domestic who had worked for the Rosenbergs in
1944 and 1945, Helen Pagano, a legal secretary employed by O. John
Rogge, and Ben Schneider, a commercial photographer. Mrs. Cox was
there to swear that Ethel Rosenberg had once told her that the console
table had been given to her husband as “a sort of a wedding present.”
Mrs. Pagano said that Louis Abel, who was married to Ruth Greenglass’
sister, had brought $3,900.00 to Rogge’s office on June 16, 1950, the
day after David’s arrest, and that this money had been wrapped “in a
brown bag.” Schneider identified the Rosenbergs as the couple who had
ordered some passport pictures from him on a Saturday in May or June of
1950.
On March 29th, the jury, after deliberating more than eighteen hours,
returned verdicts of “guilty as charged” against all three defendants.
One week later, Judge Kaufman sentenced the Rosenbergs to death
because, as he somewhat awkwardly put it, “... your conduct in putting
into the hands of the Russians, the A-Bomb ... has already caused,
in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant
casualties exceeding 50,000....” As for Sobell, he thought that “the
evidence ... did not point to any activity on your part in connection
with the atom bomb project” and sentenced him to thirty years, the
maximum prison term provided by the Espionage Act, with a “gratuitous”
recommendation that he never be admitted to parole. The next day, David
Greenglass, whose sentence had been deferred to the end of the trial,
was sentenced to a fifteen-year term.
After more than two years of fruitless appeals and motions for a new
trial, the Rosenbergs’ executions were set for eleven p.m. on the night
of June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison. But three days before, Irwin
Edelman, “an interested citizen,” filed a motion with Mr. Justice
William O. Douglas, in which he argued that the penalties of the Atomic
Energy Act rather than those of the Espionage Act were applicable and
that, under the former, the Rosenbergs could not have been sentenced to
death. On June 17th, Douglas granted a stay of execution in order to
give Edelman’s attorneys time to argue their point. But Chief Justice
Vinson reconvened the Court on the following day and the full bench,
by a six-to-three vote, vacated Douglas’ stay at noon on June 19th.
After President Eisenhower refused to grant clemency, the couple’s
execution was moved ahead three hours in order to avoid a conflict
with the Jewish Sabbath. A few minutes after eight p.m., Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg passed into what Joseph Conrad once called “the great
indifference of things.”
9
_Contempt by Silence_
The United States
_versus_
Corliss Lamont
On February 9, 1950, a comparatively unknown United States Senator from
Wisconsin, who was beginning the fifth year of a colorless first term,
addressed the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West
Virginia. His subject was “Communism in Government.” Halfway through
his talk, in a gesture that was shortly to become his trademark, he
held up a sheaf of papers and announced to his startled audience
that “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the
Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who,
nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State
Department.” Before he sat down, linotypers, the country over, were
busy punching out the words that were to free him from the obscurity
he abhored. Whether he said 57 or 81 or 205 didn’t seem to make much
difference--Joseph Raymond McCarthy, ex-Democrat, ex-judge, ex-Marine,
had struck pay dirt.
Eleven days later, McCarthy took his attack on the State Department to
the floor of the Senate. In a tumultuous six-hour presentation, that
was interrupted more than one hundred and fifty times, he dredged up
eighty-one cases, all of which had been developed some years earlier by
State’s own security investigators. Of these eighty-one, he discussed
some seventy-six, broken down into varying degrees of risks. He made
no attempt to prove that any of these “risks” were “members of the
Communist Party,” or even that they were all State employees, as he had
alleged at Wheeling, but contented himself with the observation that
there was “something radically wrong” with an agency that did not fully
investigate its own suspicions. Before the stormy session broke up, a
few minutes shy of midnight, the gentleman from Wisconsin was hoarse
and incoherent, and his fellow Senators were so thoroughly confused by
the discrepancies in his figures that they had given up all pretence
of trying to understand them. The Big Lie, or, as one writer later
pluralized it, the Multiple Untruth, had rarely gone over so well.
The immediate result of McCarthy’s February 20th speech was Senate
Resolution 231, which authorized the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations “to conduct a full and complete study and investigation as
to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have
been, employed by the Department of State.” On March 8th, a Foreign
Relations subcommittee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings, Maryland’s
patrician legislator, began what was to be a four-month investigation
of McCarthy’s charges. After more than 1500 pages of testimony had been
taken, most of it supplied by the parvenu accuser, the hearings ground
to a close in late June with Owen Lattimore, a professor of government
at Johns Hopkins, being offered up as a blood sacrifice. Lattimore, who
had never been a State Department employee, was described by McCarthy
as “the chief architect of our Far Eastern policy” and “Alger Hiss’
boss in the espionage ring in the State Department.”
“I’m willing,” he told Tydings, “to stand or fall on this one. If I
was wrong on this, I think the subcommittee would be justified in not
taking my other cases too seriously.” The subcommittee apparently
took him at his word because it found that “starting with nothing,
Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to
develop some information which, colored with distortion and framed by
a blaze of lies, would forestall the day of reckoning.” But, although
Tydings and a majority of his colleagues were convinced that the junior
Senator from Wisconsin had been guilty of perpetrating a “fraud and a
hoax” upon the country at large, the very publicity that the hearings
received quickly established McCarthy as a farce to be reckoned with.
The wrong man and the right moment had met head-on.
In the Fall of 1951, Senator William Benton of Connecticut persuaded
the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections of the Senate’s Committee
on Rules and Administration “to determine whether expulsion proceedings
should not be instituted against Joseph R. McCarthy” for lying to the
Senate and to the Tydings Committee. As Benton put it, McCarthy, by
being unable to substantiate his claimed list of 205 (or 81 or 57)
party members in the State Department, was clearly “a calculating
dispenser of false and perverted information.” But the change in Senate
leadership occasioned by the Eisenhower sweep in 1952 resulted in
the tabling of the subcommittee’s report, a document which raised a
great many intriguing (and unanswered) questions about its subject’s
financial dealings. McCarthy, who had been instrumental in Tydings’
November defeat, became the chairman of both the Senate’s Committee
on Government Operations and its roving subsidiary, the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, and the perennially ill-shaven
gentleman from the lake country had an open field before him.
On September 23, 1953, the Permanent Subcommittee, consisting (as it so
often did) only of its chairman, was ensconced in Room 128 of New York
City’s United States Court House. The day before, a subpoena had been
served on Corliss Lamont, the maverick son of one of J. P. Morgan’s
partners, ordering him to appear at 2:30 the next afternoon to “testify
what you may know relative to the subject matters under consideration
by said committee,” namely Communist infiltration in the Army. Dr.
Lamont, a leading exponent of what he described as “Democratic
Socialism,” who was then teaching philosophy at Columbia University,
was the author of several books, including one entitled _The Peoples of
the Soviet Union_.
When Lamont, who had been cooling his heels for more than an hour in
an anteroom, walked into Room 128 a few minutes after 3:30 on the
afternoon of September 23rd, he had no way of knowing that his case was
to be, in a sense, his interrogator’s epitaph. 1953 had been a big year
for McCarthy. Before it ended, he and his road-show juveniles, Cohn and
Schine, had been involved in some 157 inquiries concerning mainly the
Voice of America and the Signal Corps installations at Fort Monmouth,
New Jersey. During the first two months of 1954, he was, with the
unwilling help of an honorably discharged army dentist and an insulted
brigadier general, to set the stage for his own _Götterdämmerung_. But
Irving Peress, Ralph Zwicker and the Army-McCarthy vendetta were still
tomorrow’s headlines when the mild-mannered Lamont eased himself into
the witness chair and immediately announced that he had a statement
objecting to the subcommittee’s jurisdiction which “I would like to
read into the record.”
The chairman, always a great stickler for the amenities, informed him
that he would have to be sworn before he made any speeches. The witness
indicated that he would rather affirm than take an oath, and McCarthy
promptly acceded to his request. As Lamont adjusted his glasses and
again prepared to read his statement, the chairman interrupted to
ask him, “Why you want to affirm rather than be sworn?” When Lamont
objected to having to explain his religious beliefs, the Senator
snapped, “You will be sworn unless you tell us you have got some ground
for refusing to be sworn.” The exchange ended when McCarthy, who
apparently felt that he was getting in beyond his depth, capitulated,
after warning Lamont that he hadn’t heard the last of the matter. He
couldn’t have been more prophetic if he had tried.
Lamont had barely started reading his prepared statement when the
chairman suddenly exhibited a compelling curiosity to learn the names
of his two attorneys, although one of them, Philip Wittenberg, had
submitted his calling card when the hearing opened. When Wittenberg had
formally introduced himself and his associate, Irving Like, McCarthy
waved Lamont on. The witness, with a remarkable show of almost saintly
patience, picked up where the last interruption had left him, and
continued his statement.