The Uses of Fear (1978)
When they died, twenty-five years ago today, we all felt a tearing and a shudder, of great explosions threatened, of darkness, mystery, and confusion.1 When the Rosenbergs were executed, many of us at once saw, and had seen all through the trial, the history of the Truman Doctrine ramifying without scale through all our lives.2 This was long before we knew the letters of this couple to their sons—these are published now—or of the testimony, so long in following.3 That can be seen now.
What was the climate in which they were killed?
The people I talked to then were these: men and women haunted by the mushroom cloud, not understanding either the science or politics of the atomic age, and feeling that doom hung over them; enormous numbers of those wanting to work for a world of deepening chances of life, but afraid of all the hints and more than hints of personal and public treachery that were in the air; the young who still would not accept other people’s ideas of guilt or innocence, but would stick to their own definitions.
The nervousness and hysteria of any of these people could be worked on, in terms of anti-communism; and we can see the history of this vast dread, in huge movements, in the Truman Doctrine, in the soldiers we knew, in the private lives of all of us.4
I knew officers whose training in Russian at that time and for years before was, they believe, given them to fit them for war with the Soviet Union, our ally.5 One issue of Collier’s (not yet suspended) was edited by Robert Sherwood; its text and huge maps told and showed key points in Russia, strikes at which could most simply defeat the Soviet Union; there were, earlier, refusals to let persons I knew were passionately committed to the people of the United States, who were also radical, to go up on rooftops and spot German planes.6 In very small, a book of mine about Willard Gibbs and science and imagination in America was in one instance attacked for speaking of Russian science, its thermodynamics and nitrate industry.7 All my material in these pages had come from the New York Public Library; but, said the reviewer, it was patently a fact that no slave society could produce science.8 The person who was sent to me said, Everybody calls you a communist; why shouldn’t you be one? I said it was the worst reason I had ever heard for joining anything; and soon after my recruiter was writing a long series of articles against her past for a news syndicate.
Whittaker Chambers assumed that I was a spy in Spain, but didn’t he assume that of everyone?9
Did the Rosenbergs really spy? some people asked. Do they still ask that? What is happening now is that the information, long denied, is becoming available. You can see the hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence at the Fund for Public Information. It was refused for a long time, but now the material is coming in from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. This may be the largest difference between that time and this.
Then, they said we were paranoid if we said there was secret material or secret charges, as there were in the Rosenberg case. Now, it appears that all the charges made against them were made before there was evidence; that, in the atmosphere of changes, fearful family split, and increased pressure—particularly on Ethel Rosenberg—no evidence could be open, no appeal for clemency heard. Even the Jewish issue was raised; the attempt was made to get her to appeal to all Jews on these issues.
You know the facts as they were given, and how difficult it is to retain the sequence and characters of the trial. This is one of the most dramatic and murky parts of this terrible story. Most people that you speak to now cannot quite remember specific points or sequence.
The sons of the Rosenbergs, who have gone through their own transformation, learned much about people in the student movement and later, as they were sent on field trips by their professors. One son, sent to Catalonia, learned in that marvelous and generous country the conditions of close living between people and people, people and the soil of ordinary life. These sons of tragic learning are working, not only to find the whole truth of their parents’ evidence, but for other such knowledge, with the Fund for Open Information.
With the opening of documents, we have a real difference with the closed tone of mystery and violence of twenty-five years ago. But we have ramifications all over the world of the causes and buried story of the Rosenbergs.10
There will be meetings, TV broadcasts, TV movies all next week. Look at your programs. Books are William Reuben’s, the Schneirs’, and the Meeropols’, and the letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, with her poem. And the story of her last act; her kiss given to the death-house matron. The most savagely anti-Rosenberg book is probably Louis Nizer’s.11
The fear which surrounded and webbed the events of twenty-five years ago has to be answered factually; but really, it is belief that answers fear. Poets must bring to consciousness those things we cannot bear to face or talk about. One son said it was healing to be in Catalonia, where so many people had lived through their parents’ execution under Franco; they could not talk about it also.
In our period, it is clear that if the Rosenbergs were innocent, they were being pushed to their death to make them lie. Then their refusal to lie and their sacrifice has given a gift to many Americans and many others, as William Reuben said, who had faith in the outcome, would speak out for them and join a developing struggle for freedom for us all.
Michael Meeropol, one of their sons, working now in Springfield, Massachusetts (the Greenglass relatives, who gave information—look at it yourselves, and see now whether you think it was false—are living “on the Island”), this son of the woman who said that her sons would know brotherhood and love said to me the thing that confirmed my belief in this time, and the difference between now and twenty-five years ago.12 He said of the bushel of records at last coming in: “We are not afraid of anything that may turn up.”
(New York Times, 1978)
1. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested for espionage in 1950, for sharing information about the Manhattan Project with the Soviets. Ethel’s knowledge of and involvement with her husband’s crimes remain doubtful. Both were executed on June 19, 1953. This edition is based on Rukeyser’s corrected fc. Sentences cut from the published op-ed, titled “The Fear” (New York Times, June 19, 1978), have been quietly restored. Rukeyser’s intended title, restored here, recalls themes of fear and use common to her work since her 1940 lecture series The Usable Truth, included in this volume.
2. The 1947 Truman Doctrine initiated US cold war containment policy by establishing a global sphere of influence to stop the spread of Soviet communism.
3. The Rosenberg sons’ memoir prints their parents’ letters, which maintain their innocence but contain no exculpatory evidence or countertestimony. See Robert Meeropol and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). Rukeyser’s published op-ed excludes mention of this volume.
4. The published version changed “could be worked on” to “would be worked on.”
5. Unidentified persons.
6. Robert Sherwood, playwright, screenwriter, and later a speechwriter for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before Collier’s ceased publication in 1957, anti-communists attacked the magazine for its editorials critical of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Rukeyser references Robert E. Sherwood et al., “Preview of the War We Do Not Want,” a special issue of Collier’s, October 27, 1951. Intended to dissuade the Soviet Union from instigating a conflict, the article features journalist Edward R. Murrow, writer Arthur Koestler, and other prominent intellectuals “reporting” on an imagined World War III. Rukeyser corresponded with Sherwood about the issue and the anti-communist backlash it provoked. See Robert E. Sherwood, letter to Muriel Rukeyser, January 25, 1952, 1 ts. p., LC II:3. In the published article, Rukeyser refers to herself rather than anonymous “persons I knew” as looking out for German aircraft. She also openly acknowledges her radicalism but in the past tense: “. . . refusals to let me—true, I was a radical—go up on rooftops in New York to spot Nazi planes.”
7. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1942).
8. Unidentified review.
9. Whittaker Chambers, fiction writer and playwright. In the 1930s, he edited the communist magazine New Masses, for which Rukeyser wrote reviews. In 1948, Chambers testified before HUAC about his involvement with American communist spies the previous decade. He implicated his ex-lover Alger Hiss as both a spy and a homosexual, thus sparking the US State Department’s purge of lesbian and homosexual employees, now known as the Lavender Scare.
10. Published article specifies “political causes.”
11. Books mentioned: William A. Reuben, The Atom Spy Hoax (New York: Action Books, 1955); Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest: A New Look at the Rosenberg-Sobell Case (New York: Dell, 1968); Meeropol and Meeropol, We Are Your Sons; Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg, The Rosenberg Letters, ed. Lewis John Collins (London: Dennis Dobson, 1953), with Ethel Rosenberg’s poem “If We Die,” 6; Louis Nizer, The Implosion Conspiracy (New York: Fawcett, 1974).
12. Greenglass was Ethel Rosenberg’s maiden name. David and Ruth Greenglass, her brother and sister-in-law, implicated her during police interviews, purportedly to exonerate themselves. “The Island” refers to Long Island, New York.