1953 A decade before President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, another public killing also prompted major paranoid fiction that played with ideas of plots both sinister and fictional. It was the trial and death of the Rosenbergs, supposedly for leaking secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians, the only time in American history when civilians were executed for espionage.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were certainly active communists, certainly spies. Julius had worked during the Second World War in the Army Signal Corps Laboratories, developing complex electronic systems like radar and guided missile controls; Ethel seems to have recruited her brother, David Greenglass, for the Soviets. He worked as a machinist in the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb in New Mexico.
Writing later, his NKVD handler, Alexander Feklisov, claimed that Julius passed him a number of electronics secrets but knew nothing about the atomic bomb. At Los Alamos the major operator was the German-born British theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, who transmitted numerous secrets about the atomic – and later, hydrogen – bombs to Feklisov, using an intermediary called Harry Gold.
Arrested in 1950, Gold implicated Greenglass as one of his informants, and Greenglass, in turn, testified that he gave Julius some diagrams of the bomb, while his sister typed notes on nuclear secrets in their apartment. He later recanted his testimony about the typing. That’s as close to atomic espionage as the Rosenbergs got, yet they were executed, while Gold was sentenced to 30 years, of which he served just over fifteen, Greenglass got fifteen and served ten, and Klaus Fuchs, sentenced by a British court to fourteen years, spent nine in jail before emigrating to East Germany.
There had been sporadic red scares before the war, but America’s shock when the Russians tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949 still reverberates in this author’s memory. The communist witch-hunts, the national paranoia – the whole Cold War mentality – dated from then. Novelists like E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover looked back on it from two decades later as the moment when America went crazy.
Their prose followed suit. At the end of the over 500 big pages of Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), the Rosenbergs are electrocuted in a grand spectacle in Times Square, New York. Popular values are turned upside down in a riot of excessive plotting. America’s mascot, Uncle Sam, who tells part of the story, has become a foul-mouthed, garrulous old bigot, while the principal narrator, the (then) vice-president Richard Nixon, though awkward, mawkish and self-involved, emerges as not half bad. Here, at least, his cynicism is needed, to undeceive.
Where Coover uses real names for fictional characters (Jack Benny, Betty Crocker, Charlie McCarthy and the Marx Brothers are just some of the others who pop up), Doctorow does the opposite. In The Book of Daniel (1971) Greenglass is (substantially) Selig Mindish, the Rosenbergs are the Isaacsons, and their two children (a boy and a girl instead of two boys) are the protagonist Daniel and his disturbed New- Left sister Susan, who commits suicide at the end of the sixties. In his search for answers to why his parents died and others more guilty didn’t, Daniel discovers that the law has its own reasons more to do with the logic of cause and effect than the truth – that bad things happen because plots (apocalyptically, as in the biblical book of the same name) work to complete themselves, regardless. Don DeLillo would later explore the same idea in Libra (see 29 November).
Doctorow’s book ends with book-ends in the plot’s time scheme: a horrific description of the electrocution itself, and the (anti-) climax of Daniel’s search for reasons why it happened. He tracks Mindish down to conservative, suburban Orange County, California, and finally confronts him, senile and unable to explain anything, endlessly riding toy cars in Disneyland. It’s the perfect irony – the failure of memory in the setting that obliterates history in sound-stage nostalgia.