The Rosenberg File

IT is now forty years since the Rosenbergs were electrocuted, and the anniversary has given impetus to persistent questions and charges. Why were they killed, both of them? In England, Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist who provided the Soviets with far more accurate and useful information on the atomic bomb than anything that might have come from the Rosenbergs, got only 14 years, the maximum allowed under English law. (That law, like ours for treason, differentiates between betrayal to an enemy and betrayal, as it were, to a friend, and at the time of the atomic spying, 1944—45, the Soviets were allies, fighting Hitler.) Tried at a later time, a time of anti-Soviet “hysteria,” under a hoary conspiracy statute dredged up to sustain the desired outcome (runs the charge), the Rosenbergs were eliminated for treasons which our own laws of treason would not have recognized. Would a government thus proved to be hellbent on sacrificial murder (we are asked) have scrupled at framing two innocents? Excessive punishment, ergo innocence, ergo beatification— runs the familiar non-sequitur.

In the academy, something like this alleged connection between the punishment and (the absence of) crime is now being presented under the auspice of post-modernist theory. Typical is a new book by Virginia Carmichael: Framing History; The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press). The “framing” referred to in the title is not a “frame-up” in the familiar sense, where police and prosecutors deliberately concoct evidence and coerce perjuries in order to trap an innocent victim, but rather the narrative “frame” which (the post-moderns stipulate) precedes and therefore creates all renderings of factual reality. Driven by a story-line which saw the cold war as an apocalyptic struggle with the forces of evil and saw the Atom Bomb as a “secret” which America somehow “owned” and which therefore could be lost only by theft, the FBI and the prosecutors needed traitors and, somehow, found the Rosenbergs. Was the frame-up intentional and malicious? The postmodernist scoffs at the traditionalist’s fetish with mundane intentions. In their manner of reading, everything is a kind of frame-up. Did the Rosenbergs actually do the things they were accused of? How can we ever know, and who really cares? We are all trapped in our narrative cocoons (the Rosenberg defenders too, Dr. Carmichael concedes), incapable of resolving issues of disputed fact. The Rosenbergs had to be executed; the narrative demands an ending, in every sense of the term.

IT is now forty years since the Rosenbergs were electrocuted, and the anniversary has given impetus to persistent questions and charges. Why were they killed, both of them? In England, Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist who provided the Soviets with far more accurate and useful information on the atomic bomb than anything that might have come from the Rosenbergs, got only 14 years, the maximum allowed under English law. (That law, like ours for treason, differentiates between betrayal to an enemy and betrayal, as it were, to a friend, and at the time of the atomic spying, 1944—45, the Soviets were allies, fighting Hitler.) Tried at a later time, a time of anti-Soviet “hysteria,” under a hoary conspiracy statute dredged up to sustain the desired outcome (runs the charge), the Rosenbergs were eliminated for treasons which our own laws of treason would not have recognized. Would a government thus proved to be hellbent on sacrificial murder (we are asked) have scrupled at framing two innocents? Excessive punishment, ergo innocence, ergo beatification— runs the familiar non-sequitur.

In the academy, something like this alleged connection between the punishment and (the absence of) crime is now being presented under the auspice of post-modernist theory. Typical is a new book by Virginia Carmichael: Framing History; The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press). The “framing” referred to in the title is not a “frame-up” in the familiar sense, where police and prosecutors deliberately concoct evidence and coerce perjuries in order to trap an innocent victim, but rather the narrative “frame” which (the post-moderns stipulate) precedes and therefore creates all renderings of factual reality. Driven by a story-line which saw the cold war as an apocalyptic struggle with the forces of evil and saw the Atom Bomb as a “secret” which America somehow “owned” and which therefore could be lost only by theft, the FBI and the prosecutors needed traitors and, somehow, found the Rosenbergs. Was the frame-up intentional and malicious? The postmodernist scoffs at the traditionalist’s fetish with mundane intentions. In their manner of reading, everything is a kind of frame-up. Did the Rosenbergs actually do the things they were accused of? How can we ever know, and who really cares? We are all trapped in our narrative cocoons (the Rosenberg defenders too, Dr. Carmichael concedes), incapable of resolving issues of disputed fact. The Rosenbergs had to be executed; the narrative demands an ending, in every sense of the term.