The dominant “theater of propaganda” in the United States today is not an “official,” government-sponsored one, as in Communist countries, but a semiofficial “revisionist” school of drama, which exploits and distorts historical facts for its own predetermined ends. A case in point is Inquest, subtitled “A Tale of Political Terror,” Donald Freed’s play about the Rosenbergs which might just as appropriately have been called Invitation to a Whitewash.

Though the author claims that Inquest is in the tradition of the Weiss-Hochhuth “theater of fact,” it becomes clear as the evening progresses that the audience has been summoned not merely to witness a courtroom drama and to observe a particular set of “facts,” but to participate in commemorating a ritual murder. To legitimize his position Freed first primes the audience to recognize itself as being in the presence of History, Fact, and Truth, by spreading against the background of the stage, in giant-size lettering, on huge glass panels: “Every word you will see or hear on this stage is a documented quotation or reconstruction from events.” These “reconstructions,” the program further informs us, “draw on letters and verbal reports but they are inventions in the service of truth rather than facts.”¹ With the audience thus prepared, Freed’s “tale of political terror” unfolds in a series of vignettes taking place in “The [FBI’s Perjured] Courtroom; The [Fascist American] World; The [Rosenbergs’ Innocent] Past.”

The drama itself is a crude morality tale, in which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are portrayed as helpless victims of a purported FBI frameup, convicted through the perjured testimony of Ethel’s brother and sister-in-law, David and Ruth Greenglass. The Rosenbergs emerge as confused, naive, fearful, “progressive,” “human,” and, above all else, innocent. David and Ruth Greenglass, on the other hand, are shown as lazy and malicious schemers, weak money-grubbers, compassionless and easily intimidated—in a word, moral monsters—and Harry Gold, the government’s third major witness against the Rosenbergs, is portrayed as an incomparably vain schizoid liar, weak and susceptible, like the Greenglasses, to FBI scheming.

The play’s other characters receive equally subtle handling—in fact, in Inquest you can tell the players without a scorecard. Emanuel Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, one of several at the actual trial, is honest, humane, skillful, beleaguered, and hardworking—the model of a first-rate defense attorney.² Prosecutor Irving H. Saypol, on the other hand, strides forth as a sinister and witting accomplice to the FBI frameup along with Judge Irving R. Kaufman and Saypol’s young assistant, Roy Cohn (who is played as Roy Cohn). Needless to say, the FBI agents responsible for the perjured testimony are type-cast as “fascists.” Finally, Freed renders Tessie Greenglass, David and Ethel’s mother, as a singularly boorish Jewish mama, contemptuous of her talented daughter and overly protective of her son, the spy.

Since Freed has attempted not merely to recreate the events of the Rosenberg case itself but also to evoke the social atmosphere within which it transpired, “the world” of cold-war America frequently intrudes on the play’s courtroom scenes through pictures projected on the glass panels or in quotations spoken by off-stage mimics. These range from anti-Communist harangues by J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy to clemency pleas by the Pope; from photos of the principals at the Rosenberg trial to shots of mass rallies held on behalf of the defendants. Through this gimmickry Freed obviously hopes to conjure forth the atmosphere of “political terror” which he holds responsible for the Rosenbergs’ conviction and execution, but the actual effect often reminds the spectator of those exuberantly inept attempts at “realism” in grade-school Christmas pageants (“I am Joe McCarthy. Kill the Commies”; “I am the Pope. Don’t kill the Commies!”).

In a further effort to validate the courtroom identities which he has assigned them, the author portrays his major characters in a series of incidents from their pre-trial and post-trial lives: Ethel and Julius at home—singing folk songs, loving one another, worrying about their children; David Greenglass and Harry Gold, scheming with the FBI. Also featured is Ethel and Julius’s death-house dialogue in the form of the letters they exchanged during their years of imprisonment prior to execution. But the worst is saved for last: the re-enactment of the “ritual murders.” An “electric chair” is placed on stage and the Rosenbergs, first Julius and then Ethel, go to their deaths in a dignified and unrepentant manner. The audience, having witnessed the tragedy, depart as full communicants in the ghastly rites at hand. What emerges from all this is an evening of oversimplified history and over-sentimentalized drama, an exploitation of the Rosenbergs’ tragic encounter with history for the purposes of illustrating an official moral, namely, that “the state—when it is frightened enough—has been, is now, and will be in the future capable of ritual murder, suppression, death camps, and genocide. That’s the lesson of the 20th century.” Far from paying any respect to the complex and partly-disguised personalities of his two protagonists, Freed has reduced them to the single aspect of innocent victims: “decent, simple, and lovable people”—and nothing else.

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Even more remarkable than the play itself, however, was its enthusiastic reception by most leading critics. How did such an obviously stilted, agit-prop melodrama manage to persuade a critic like Clive Barnes of the Rosenbergs’ innocence? To take an even more improbable case, why should John Simon, known ordinarily for his unsparingly abrasive dismissals of theatrical sham, have succumbed to the drama’s fraudulent piety? The deference shown Inquest by writers like Barnes and Simon apparently reflects their willingness, along with that of an increasing number of troubled “progressives,” to subscribe to a devil theory of recent American life. The couple’s actual guilt or innocence is clearly as irrelevant to these critics as it is to the author himself. “Even if they were [guilty],” Simon acknowledges in an argument similar to that which Barnes employed in his review, “their trial [i.e., Freed’s trial] was a monstrous farce,” for “this is what it is like to live in a frenzied country under a hysterical government and an intellectually and morally inadequate President; this is how faulty trial by jury really is.” That jury trials are meant to be decided on points of evidence and not on moral testaments, remains unimportant to these critics, as one can see from Julius Novick’s review of the play in the Village Voice:

I conceded at the beginning of this review that for all I knew, even after seeing the play (I have done no reading on the subject), the Rosenbergs might just conceivably be guilty, but I have been writing ever since of my love for them, or at least for their stage-images, or for myself-in-them. I have called the Rosenbergs (I was referring specifically to the stage-Rosenbergs, but I meant the real ones too) [sic]—I have called the Rosenbergs “decent, simple, and lovable people”; would I still say this even if they turned out to be guilty? Yes, I think so, although in that case, inside their simplicity would be suspended a deep and sad and dishonorable complexity.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the extraordinary meaning of Mr. Novick’s moral argument would be to substitute the word “Eichmann” for “the Rosenbergs,” change the tenses, and read the quotation back for sound. Of course the Rosenbergs were in many ways “decent, simple, and lovable people,” concerned for their children and intensely in love. But do these fairly common personality traits acquit them of the charge of espionage? Freed seems to think so—and he has evidently convinced the drama critics—but his “reconstructions,” presumably drawn from personal interviews as well as from the couple’s voluminous death-house correspondence, offer no help in answering the question of guilt or innocence. In fact, the author conveniently overlooks those very aspects of Ethel’s and Julius’s personalities which might have some bearing both on the government’s interest in the Rosenbergs and on the possibility of their innocence.

To cite but one glaring example: in a play devoted supposedly to the “facts” of the case, why is no mention made of the fact that the Rosenbergs were dedicated Communists? Not ony does this go unmentioned, but the suggestion is made that the pair had been casually “progressive” people, perhaps a bit to the Left of FDR. In 1970, some twenty years after the trial, and at a time when no possible reason could exist for hiding such a piece of information, one can only assume that the deceit here is intentional, and it suggests that Freed’s drama is either too naive to warrant credibility or too cynical to compel trust. Either way, the author does the Rosenbergs—and their possible “innocence”—a vast disservice.

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At this point a rather brief summary of the Rosenberg case itself might be in order. In February 1950 Klaus Fuchs, a leading, German-born British physicist, was arrested in England. Fuchs had confessed to having been a Soviet espionage agent during the Second World War while he was working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb project. Several months later, the FBI took into custody a Philadelphia chemist named Harry Gold, who promptly admitted to having served as Fuchs’s courier in a Russian-organized spy ring which stole secret information on American atomic research. A series of arrests by the FBI followed Gold’s confession and, in the fall of 1950, a quartet of New York Jewish radicals—the Rosenbergs, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass—stood trial, charged with having conspired to commit espionage. This “crime of the century,” as FBI Director Hoover termed it, aroused enormous public indignation in the United States, since the exposure of the spy ring practically coincided with the American government’s announcement that the Soviet Union had exploded its own atomic bomb, thereby ending America’s nuclear monopoly.

At the trial, Greenglass, a machinist by trade, testified for the government that the Rosenbergs, his sister and brother-in-law, had recruited him into the spy ring. Greenglass had been an Army machinist at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945, and, according to his own testimony, had given Harry Gold (once) and the Rosenbergs (several times) diagrams and other material which could convey to Soviet scientists the firing mechanism and internal structure of the atomic bomb. Harry Gold and Ruth Greenglass corroborated David’s testimony concerning the Rosenbergs’ involvement in the plot, but the government’s case against Morton Sobell rested largely upon testimony by a former friend and fellow-Communist that Sobell had attempted to recruit him into the espionage ring.

During the trial, defense lawyers objected repeatedly to the government’s insinuations that the Rosenbergs’ background in the Communist movement constituted presumptive proof of their complicity as spies. In the end, the jury accepted the credibility of the government’s witnesses and found all four defendants guilty. Judge Kaufman awarded Greenglass, despite his cooperation, a stiff fifteen-year sentence; Sobell received the maximum thirty years in jail allowed by law; and the Rosenbergs, who had allegedly run the spy network, were sentenced to death. Ruth Green-glass, although a confessed accomplice to the espionage, was never brought to trial.

For two years after their sentencing, until their execution in June 1953, public support for the Rosenbergs mounted steadily both in this country and abroad. Although Communists and ultra-radicals dominated the formal nationwide “committee” organized on their behalf, thousands of non-Communists signed the comittee’s petitions, some of which called merely for commutation of the death sentences. Attorneys for the couple challenged the fairness of the trial and at numerous hearings, both before Judge Kaufman and in the appellate courts, introduced “new evidence” to support legal appeals for a new trial. But all of these legal efforts failed, and the couple went to their deaths in 1953. Even many leading anti-Communist Americans protested their execution as an act of cruel and unusual punishment, either on moral grounds or because of questions concerning the credibility of prosecution witnesses.

“Revisionist” accounts of the case began appearing soon after the execution, although as early as 1951 William Reuben, a journalist for the fellow-traveling National Guardian, had written a series of articles charging an FBI frameup. Reuben published an extended version of his argument in The Atom Spy Hoax (1954), and most of his conclusions were echoed in John Wexley’s The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1955). The revisionist analysis of the case received its most thorough and influential statement in Walter and Miriam Schneir’s Invitation to an Inquest (1965), which summarized every conceivable bit of evidence and speculation that suggested the Rosenbergs’ innocence.

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During the trial itself, defense attorneys generally accepted the government’s claim that a spy conspiracy had existed which connected the Greenglasses and Harry Gold. Counsel for the Rosenbergs insisted only that their clients had neither initiated nor joined this conspiracy. Rather, they argued that the Greenglasses had implicated them in a desperate move to curry government favor and save their own skins. Only after Reuben’s articles appeared in the National Guardian did partisans of the Rosenbergs begin arguing a more sinister view of the case. Reuben, Wexley, and the Schneirs based their belief in the Rosenbergs’ innocence squarely upon the notion of a skillfully-laid FBI frameup, which trapped all the defendants, including the Greenglasses and Harry Gold, in an “atom spy conspiracy” that never existed. They find “evidence” for such a monstrous government counter-conspiracy in a number of places, although only some of their major contentions can be described here.

Even while the case was being appealed in the courts, the Rosenbergs’ attorneys gained access to some memoranda stolen from the office of O. John Rogge, lawyer for David and Ruth Greenglass. In these notes, David and Ruth discussed their involvement in the alleged spy plot in terms which differed significantly from their later testimony at the trial. For one thing, they never mentioned Ethel’s complicity and, although they referred to Julius’s involvement, he does not emerge in the notes as a “master spy.” The memos likewise revealed that the FBI had apparently coached the Greenglasses extensively on their testimony. For their study the Schneirs also gained access to recordings of pre-trial conversations between Harry Gold and his attorney, which showed that the Bureau had tutored Gold even more relentlessly before his appearance at the Rosenberg trial. In these conversations, Gold offered a far more innocuous account of his one meeting with the Greenglasses in Albuquerque, New Mexico, than the version he later volunteered at the trial. For one thing, Gold never mentioned having known anything about the Rosenbergs’ involvement in the conspiracy, although in trial testimony he professed a much greater awareness of their role.

By comparing these pre-trial statements with the trial testimony of the three government witnesses—two already under indictment for capital crimes and the third (Ruth Greenglass) threatened with indictment—even those persuaded of the Rosenbergs’ guilt might question the complete credibility of the witnesses through whose evidence the government secured a conviction that led to the death penalty. Almost no documentary material substantiated the confession made by Gold and the Greenglasses at the time of the Rosenberg trial; the prosecution submitted not a single purloined document or other actual proof that espionage had been committed, apart from the sworn statements of its three confessed conspirators. The Schneirs assert, in fact, that FBI agents not only planted the appropriate testimony in the minds of these witnesses but that they manufactured the single piece of “hard” evidence that linked Gold tenuously to the Greenglasses (and thereby to the other alleged conspirators): a photostat of a 1945 Albuquerque Hilton check-in card which Gold supposedly signed after visiting the Greenglasses. The Schneirs subject this document to elaborate analysis and persuade themselves that it was faked. Furthermore, they offer the Atomic Energy Commission’s word, along with that of numerous key scientists at Los Alamos, that the sketches made by Greenglass for the FBI in 1950 to substantiate his claim to have stolen meaningful data on the atomic bomb, were practically worthless to Russian scientists, whether or not the machinist had passed the originals along six years earlier. Basically, however, the revisionist argument stands or falls on the question of whether Gold and the Greenglasses were truthful witnesses or capricious perjurers.

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Donald Freed stuffs many of the “facts” exposed by the Schneirs into the body of his play, although he generally distorts or exaggerates their actual meaning, thereby turning the Schneirs’ elaborate revisionist tapestry into little more than a crude wall poster. Still, Walter and Miriam Schneir themselves, like other revisionist writers on the case, often seem more ingenious than candid in their own selection of “facts.” Throughout their book, for example, they either overlook or explain away rather unconvincingly the Rosenbergs’ lifelong commitment to the Communist movement, a commitment which (according to the testimony of their own friends) had made them passionate union organizers and party recruiters. (“Julie and Ethel could save their own skins by talking,” Mrs. Morton Sobell exclaimed at a 1952 pro-Rosenberg rally, “but Julie and Ethel will never betray their friends.”) The revisionists also neglect to provide a reasonable explanation for the precise manner in which Greenglass acquired the $3,900 he possessed at the time of his arrest—if it had not been received, as David claimed, from Julius as money to finance his escape. Similary, who if not Harry Gold actually gave the Greenglasses the $400 which Ruth deposited in an Albuquerque bank in June 1945 one day after Gold allegedly gave them the money in exchange for atomic information? Why also, were the Schneirs, although unsparingly detailed on even the most minor points, so reticent when alluding to Ethel Rosenberg’s history of psychiatric treatment, both prior to her arrest and in prison?

In a review of the Schneirs’ book in these pages,³ Alexander Bickel pointed out the essential flaw in the revisionist argument:

The remarkable feature of this early record [Bickel observed] is that the rudiments of Gold’s story were there. . . . If, then, the FBI prodded Gold into elaborating these rudiments into a full story by putting to him material from the Greenglass confession [which, even in its earliest version, insisted on Julius’s involvement in the conspiracy—A. W.], and prodded Greenglass to confess by asking him to affirm or deny as much as was known of Gold’s story—if this was the method of interrogation, as no doubt it was, it was normal and proper, and does not in itself destroy or even substantially weaken the credibility of either Gold or Greenglass.

Finally, the revisionists must contend with the fact that the memoirs of another major Soviet agent, Kim Philby, twice mention the Rosenbergs as Russian agents, a curious admission under the circumstances.

“The Rosenberg Case is nevertheless a ghastly and shameful episode,” Bickel wrote. “There is first of all the death sentence, and secondly the death sentence, and thirdly the death sentence, and then again the death sentence.” That the Rosenbergs were executed remains an awful and unwarranted act, and were this the sole concern of Freed’s play, one might question less vehemently its other inadequacies. Unfortunately, no dramatist can acquit the Rosenbergs of espionage on the basis of who (he thinks) they were any more than he could convict them on such specious grounds.

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What if someone were to write a play, the author was asked recently, “taking the position that the Rosenbergs were guilty?”

“But that play has already been written,” said Freed. “It was written by Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover. It was a laugh riot.”

Such a glib retort exposes one essential weakness of dramas like Inquest. In the hands of enthusiastic partisans, the “theater of fact” can easily become fraudulent history. Freed’s eye is obviously less on the “facts” of the Rosenberg case than on its apparent “lessons”; nor do the Rosenbergs themselves attract him as subjects of dramatic concern in their own right. Rather, they interest the author primarily as convenient symbols of those “lessons” which he finds that the 20th century teaches all right-thinking men. The doomed couple are somewhat impersonal objects, and piteous anguish for their fate must persuade a gullible audience that a “murderous pattern” of such ritual slaughters exists in American life stretching in an unbroken line from Sing Sing to Vietnam.

Consider, finally, Freed’s political message, that “lesson” of radical innocence which the critics found so persuasive. Once more the author has provided what he considers an appropriate comparison between past and present. “Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver,” Freed has observed, “are the Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs of today”:

Now we can read letters of the Rosenbergs, hear their words and see them as sympathetic people but in the 50’s they were considered slimy Jewish Communists like the bad niggers of today. What we have to prevent is a play being written 20 years from now that will cause audiences to say, “Do you mean they really fed breakfasts to poor children and that they were sensitive, extraordinary human beings? We thought they were something out of the American nightmare, coming to the suburbs to rape our daughters.”

Bobby Seale must not go to the electric chair in Connecticut. This country cannot take again what we went through in the 50’s.

One might surmise from Freed’s analysis that Bobby Seale is on trial not for murder but for dispensing high-quality porridge to grateful infants. This view of the situation accords with the logic of many who sympathize either with the Panthers or with white radicals like the Chicago Seven, all of whom are seen as merely the latest in an endless string of modern victims of “Amerikan” fascism. Of course, despite the occasional throwback to the past, like Communist historian Herbert Aptheker who addressed the last Black Panther national convention, most of the current crop of parlor revisionists were too young to join earlier cold-war crusades for America’s “moral redemption.” The students who now demand that Bobby Seale be freed, with or without a trial, have no personal recollection of that period after the Rosenberg trial when American Communists organized “spontaneous” local committees to save the pair, working with their usual Progressive party allies to turn the trial into a “cause.” It might even come as a surprise to many of these same young people (surely, though, not to their older supporters?) to learn that the Black Panthers’ “breakfast program” bears as much relation to the specific act for which Bobby Seale is on trial as Julius Rosenberg’s folk-singing did to the charge of espionage against him. But, then, “tales of political terror” generally supply their own logic, and should John Mitchell’s avid prosecutors continue their pursuit of “conspirators,” the New Left’s aging mandarins will possess a more than adequate number of overnight martyrs for public consumption.

Alas, there may be such “lessons” galore in years to come, thereby blurring still further the line between those who practice the “theater of fact” and those who practice “revolution as theater.” One such merging of the two came in a recently-announced forthcoming drama of the Chicago conspiracy trial, starring, naturally, the Chicago Seven. How Messrs. Barnes, Simon, and Novick should sink their gums into that one! For their tolerant critical reception of Inquest, indeed the very appearance of such a play, is symptomatic of a growing crisis in confidence among many leading cultural spokesmen in the United States, a crisis that becomes daily more evident.⁴ The willingness to accept radical myths as unvarnished fact, as in Freed’s equation of the Rosenbergs and the Black Panthers, reflects a deep and often irrational hostility among an increasing number of intellectuals to the entire fabric of American life. Those who can make no substantive distinctions between the Rosenberg trial and the Slansky trial, for example, or between the aims of Bobby Seale and those of Martin Luther King, or even between the dilemmas of Richard Nixon’s “Amerika” and those of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, will not trouble themselves over petty details of historical accuracy or dramatic honesty. They require instead the consoling simplicities of a purely political theater, one in which “facts” are merely “lessons” to be taught and “truth” a code word for correct doctrine. In this connection, Richard Hofstadter’s classic description of the “paranoid style” merits consideration:

The central image [of the paranoid style] is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. . . . The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. . . . He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. . . . The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with . . . defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming “proof” of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent—in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. . . .

The tensions and unrest of recent American life, for reasons that would require another essay to elaborate, have made fashionable the simple coherence of revisionist history and theater, both of which appeal to the overheated imaginations that Hofstadter described. It still remains to be seen whether serious historians, dramatists, and critics will fall into line, or whether they will have the stamina to resist the coercions of the current radical moralism.

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¹ One spectator was reminded of the popular law-enforcement television program that opened with an equally intimidating assertion of authority: “The program which you are about to see was taken from the actual files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

² Even most “revisionist” writers on the case concede that Bloch and his fellow defense attorneys, despite their hard work and good intentions, proved singularly inept lawyers, both during the trial and in subsequent appeals.

³ January 1966.

⁴ The roots of this crisis among a certain segment of literary men are explored in Irving Howe's “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & A Critique,” COMMENTARY, October 1968.