From the Back Cover
“A fresh and fast-paced study of one of the most important crimes of the twentieth century.”—The Washington Post
“[Sam Roberts] is a deft writer able to weave science, history, and criminal investigation into an absorbing narrative that at times reads like a spy thriller—even if you do know how the story ends.”—The Boston Globe
“An absorbing account of the Rosenberg atomic spy drama seen through the eyes of [David] Greenglass . . . whose testimony helped send his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband, Julius, to the electric chair in 1953.”
—The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Sam Roberts is a New York Times reporter and host of NY-1's cable talk show New York Close-Up. He is the author of Who We Are: A Portrait of America Based on the Latest U.S. Census. He lives in Manhattan with his family.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Brother of Death
"I didn't cry. I didn't really kill them."
David Greenglass never cried for his sister. He didn't cry when she was arrested, when she was convicted, or even when she was sentenced to the electric chair, so perhaps it wasn't out of character that he didn't cry on that hellish Friday in June 1953 when she died.
Of all the places David might have imagined himself at the age of thirty-one, having grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and aspired to be an engineer, a maximum-security federal prison in the middle of Pennsylvania was just about the most improbable. Pointing fingers might have seemed tasteless on that of all days, but had David been groping for a scapegoat, his brother-in-law fit the bill.
"I was there because of Julius Rosenberg," he later said.
Well before that day, David had armed himself with an arsenal of alibis. That was his nature. When cornered, he instinctively cast about for a place to lay the blame and, after a perfunctory search, invariably found it elsewhere: a temptress, like his older sister, who seduced him with candy-coated ideology that clouded his ordinarily sober judgment; someone else's innocuous misstep that had tripped him up and sent him careering down a slippery slope; or a conspiracy by powerful people prejudiced against New Yorkers, communists, and Jews. A professional machinist fascinated by electricity, David insulated himself against the idea that the immutable laws governing causes and effects in physics also apply to the more ephemeral world of truth and consequences.
Which was why he so firmly believed that day that the events of the preceding ten years-events and their consequences that were to culminate that night in the first peacetime execution of American civilians for espionage-weren't his fault. In a funny way, David was right. As his mother reminded him, if he hadn't been color-blind, he would have been a Seabee, not an army draftee. Which meant he wouldn't have been granted that transfer, itself inexplicable, the day before his battalion was to be shipped overseas, wouldn't have been assigned to Los Alamos, and wouldn't have been recruited as an atomic spy.
And what had it all been for? The approval of the brother-in-law he now reviled? Blind loyalty to the Soviet Union, whose postwar belligerence had transformed even the Germans into victims and was sending David's own son diving under his elementary-school desk in futile air-raid drills? Still, no one could have imagined that David's role in the events of the previous ten years would generate a familial tragedy of epic dimensions, upend global politics, and shatter a generation. And for all his explanations and excuses, virtually nobody-David included-ever imagined that the death penalty would be imposed or carried out.
It was said that Sacco and Vanzetti united the American left, and the Rosenbergs irreparably divided it. There was little division over David, though. Xenophobic newspaper editorialists hailed him as a brilliant physicist, a courageous catalyst whose wrenching confession exposed a villainous spy ring that was plundering America's scientific secrets. His reputation for heroism, however, was short-lived. Closer examination soon revealed a pliant self-described patriot, neither brilliant nor courageous, who, floundering in quicksand of his own making, grasped at legal straws to save himself. After blurting out his incriminating confession within hours of his apprehension, he immediately threatened to repudiate it. He vowed to commit suicide if his wife, whom he alone had implicated, was prosecuted, too. His confession hadn't been cathartic, an FBI profile later concluded, "because the crime had not weighed on his conscience." Nor, apparently, did the death penalty later imposed on his sister, Ethel, and her husband, Julius. He finally joined in Ethel's appeal for presidential clemency only after being prodded, and even then he revealed as much about himself as about his emotional bond with his sister and brother-in-law. "If these two die," he wrote, "I shall live the rest of my life with a very dark shadow over my conscience."
Even then, he lied: There was no shadow. Because there was no conscience. Had there been, he would have been forced to confront a terrible truth, one that he managed to never contemplate: Perhaps everyone was right, after all-that while a jury had found his sister guilty of acting on her personal political convictions, and while a federal judge had sentenced her to death and a professional executioner had actually pulled the switch at Sing Sing, David himself had generated the lethal jolt when, wearing a weird smile on the witness stand, he delivered three days of testimony that was as flawed as it was fatal.
When David's public performance was finally over, he vanished from public view and lived out the rest of his life in pseudonymity. But the name David Greenglass survived, etched ineradicably in history's pantheon of contemptible characters and soon a noxious cultural touchstone. Dissecting the Rosenberg case, Rebecca West wrote that "few modern events have been as ugly as this involvement of brother and sister in an unnatural relationship which is the hostile twin of incest." In E. L. Doctorow's thinly fictionalized Book of Daniel, David was transformed into the drooling, senile Selig Mindish, a retired dentist of whom it was said, "The treachery of that man will haunt him for as long as he lives." And in the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen's character protested to Mia Farrow's that, despite all appearances, he still loves his oleaginous brother-in-law.
"I love him like a brother," Allen said dryly. "David Greenglass."
No one could say truthfully that David was indifferent to the fate of the Rosenbergs, but on the Friday of their deaths he feared more for his own life. He was worried that fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, would make good on their muttered threats to murder him. David was an inviting target. His confession defined him as a traitor. But his remorseless testimony also condemned him as something else: "A rat," David said. Among Lewisburg's brotherhood of thieves, there was no question which was more reviled.
He was also worried about possible retaliation against his wife. If more than a week elapsed without mail from home, David panicked. "You have no idea how terrifying this long silence is to me," he wrote to his lawyer. "Maybe they killed her. Who knows?"
All that Friday, the drumbeat of radio bulletins drove the events of the previous ten years toward their crescendo and David to an elevated state of agitation. He was afraid, not tearful. He hadn't cried all day. He would not cry himself to sleep. At dinner, prison guards slipped him a potent sedative. By early evening, as an amber shaft of fleeing daylight swept across the ceiling of his cell, David was dead to the world. Sleep used to come naturally to him, in part because he was blessed with an unshakable faith in his own rectitude. Coupled with a wellspring of self-justification, his complacency demanded the most compelling motivation to overcome it. In other words, he had always been unwilling to get out of bed without a very good reason.
David Greenglass was the spy who wouldn't go out in the cold.
One reason he never graduated from the Young Communist League to full-fledged membership in the Communist Party was that it would have meant regularly rising before dawn on weekends to deliver The Daily Worker door-to-door in Lower East Side tenements. David even overslept on July 16, 1945, as many of his colleagues at the Los Alamos laboratory slipped away before sunup to witness the debut at Alamogordo of the atomic bomb-the bomb he was later charged with stealing for the Soviet Union. To immortalize the moment, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory director, reached into ancient Hindu scripture. He invoked the god Vishnu, who, to impress Prince Arjuna into unleashing a cruel but just war, delivered through the earthly figure of Krishna a litany of his most omnipotent incarnations. Oppenheimer quoted but one: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." To justify his sleep, David reached for a more mundane rationale. "You have to understand," he shrugged, "I knew it went off."
Sleep, Virgil wrote of one of the two sentries guarding the vestibule of hell, is the brother of death.
All that unbearably muggy Friday, everyone in Ossining, New York-the grim village on the Hudson River north of New York City that was home to Sing Sing prison and that had inspired the idiom up the river-was anxiously awaiting word from Washington about the execution.
The matter of the Rosenbergs, whom the federal government accused of (among other things) having emboldened Joseph Stalin to instigate the Korean War, had festered far too long. By filing appeal after appeal, their lawyer, Manny Bloch, had succeeded in prolonging their lives for fully two years beyond the date on which Judge Irving R. Kaufman had originally scheduled their executions. Now it was the day after the third execution date set by Kaufman, and the Rosenbergs were still alive. The government's risky gamble-indicting Ethel, the mother of two young children, on flimsy evidence and sentencing her to death largely as leverage against Julius-had backfired. She hadn't flinched, and now American embassies worldwide were besieged. Even the pope had appealed for clemency. But the backlash had produced its own unintended consequences: Washington, holding the Rosenbergs hostage, worried that mercy would be misconstrued as weakness.
Just that week, Judge Kaufman had warned the Justice Department that with the Supreme Court adjourning for its summer recess, further legal wrangling might delay the executions until at least October. And by then, who knew what other obstacles would intrude, what new evidence would ...
