Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio, Newsreel Announcing the Sentencing:
One of the greatest spy dramas in the nation’s history reaches its climax, as Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, convicted of revealing atomic secrets to the Russians, enter the Federal Building in New York to hear their doom. Another of the spy ring, Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg, who with her husband was convicted of actually transmitting the secrets to Russia through Soviet diplomatic channels.
The ring was first uncovered following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in England. David Greenglass, Mrs. Rosenberg’s brother, confessed theft of the secrets while stationed at the Los Alamos Atomic Project. He later became the government’s chief witness in the prosecution of Sobell and the Rosenbergs. It is a stern jurist they face in Judge Irving Kaufman.
After administering a tongue lashing in which he charged them with the indirect death of thousands of men in Korea, he sentenced both Rosenbergs to death in the electric chair and Sobell to 30 years in prison. At the time these pictures were made, Greenglass still had to hear his fate. It is the first time in peacetime that such a death penalty has been handed down, and while appeals to the highest courts are planned, it certainly appears that the spies are headed along a one way street.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On March 6, 1951, more than 300 prospective jurors were crowded into Courtroom 110 at the Foley Square Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Because of the nature of the case – espionage with the possibility for the death penalty – a record number were recruited for the jury pool. Twelve were chosen, and were later described by Esquire Magazine as, quote “Eleven men and one woman [who] had three things in common: they were all willing to serve, they were in favor of capital punishment, and not one was Jewish.”
The morning of the trial, Julius Rosenberg, his wife Ethel, and Morton Sobell filed into the courthouse, flanked by defense attorneys Emanuel H. Bloch and Marshall Perlin. The trio stood accused of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called, “the crime of the century” – conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union and providing classified information about nuclear weapons, radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines. The three-week trial, which was prosecuted by Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn, and presided over by Judge Irving Robert Kaufman, captured international attention.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: American Subversives. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Welcome to the sentencing of The Defendants. Our story begins with an atomic conspiracy.
Archival Audio, Newsreel Reporting on Morton Sobell: Morton Sobell, the principal in America’s first atomic spy trial, leaves New York’s federal court. An electronics expert, he’s accused with Julius Rosenberg, electrical engineer, of conspiring to give Russia vital secrets of the atom bomb. Rosenberg’s wife is also accused of complicity in the plot against the country’s security.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Martin J. Siegel, author of Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs.
Martin J. Siegel: So, really, the dominoes start tumbling with the arrest and confession of Klaus Fuchs, who was a German-born physicist involved in the Manhattan Project somewhat, and a Soviet spy. And he’s in England when he’s interrogated and admits to his espionage. And he starts identifying other members in the United States of this atomic-oriented spying ring. And so, Harry Gold, who had served as a courier for people at Los Alamos back to New York, and then information was passed on to the Soviets, is apprehended. And he eventually cooperates. And then David Greenglass, who is Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, Julius’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass had been a kind of low-ranking but quite observant machinist at Los Alamos who learned a lot of facts about what was going on in the American project and, most famously, as it would be revealed in the Rosenberg trial, created a sketch of the lens mold, which is one component of the atomic bomb, but provided other information to what was going on, generally names of scientists, things like that. David Greenglass is also arrested, and he begins cooperating with authorities, and he leads them to Julius, who’s arrested shortly after in 1950.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Judge Irving Robert Kaufman was appointed to preside over the trial. At the time of his appointment, he was the second youngest federal judge in the United States. Born in 1910 to a Jewish family and raised in New York City, he excelled at academics and graduated from high school at just 16 years old. He enrolled at Fordham University, where his straight A’s in the required Catholic theology courses earned him the nickname, “Pope Kaufman.” He graduated from their law program in 1931.
Martin J. Siegel: That was the only part of his upbringing and rise that differentiated him a little bit from the typical Jewish story. So many American or so many New York Jews went to the City College of New York because it was free and also provided a great education. Kaufman went to Fordham because his older brother had gone to Fordham. His older brother had gone to Fordham because he wanted to go on to med school. And he thought being another Jewish applicant from CCNY wouldn’t look good to medical school, so he wanted to do something different. He went to the Jesuit institution at Fordham, and Irving followed him. And Kaufman completed a five-year—a sort of interesting five-year program, a combined two years of college and three years of law school. And it was at a place called Downtown Fordham. So it wasn’t up in the Bronx, where Fordham’s main campus was. Fordham was running a program out of the Woolworth Building that was intended to cater to kids in the city and a lot of non-Catholics. Not the typical kind of Irish Catholic kids who went to Fordham in the Bronx went to downtown Fordham, a lot of women, some African-Americans, people of just all kinds who were, you know, filling up the schools and the streets of New York City. And Kaufman was one of them. A lot of Jewish kids went there. And it just provided a really broad exposure to every slice of life in New York.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Kaufman’s appointment to the Rosenberg case was no accident. A politically-minded and ambitious jurist, he was adept at working the levers of power behind the scenes to get what he wanted.
Martin J. Siegel: There’s an interesting story about that, just from his beginnings in life, when he grabbed—because he was such a precocious student and went through school so quickly, he graduated law school at age twenty, before he was old enough to take the New York bar. But instead of just sitting around and occupying himself for a few months, he tried to go around that rule with a family connection to the chief judge in the New York State system, to try to have the rule waived in his case. And the chief judge told him to slow down. A few months’ wait wouldn’t kill him and refused to make the change. That might have been the last time that Kaufman wanted to evade a rule that was in his way, and he didn’t succeed. So it’s kind of analogous to how he ended up getting the Rosenberg trial. He wanted that trial badly because he saw its possibilities for putting him on the front page and for advancing his career.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In addition to motivations around advancing his career and reputation, Kaufman was drawn to the case as one of the most staunchly anticommunist jurists to serve on the federal bench, views that dated back to his education at Fordham.
Early in his career, he was mentored by Hoover, and attorney general Tom Clark.
Gemma Birnbaum: Hoover especially, of course, was obsessed with Red subversion in the United States. And he had been ever since the First Red Scare, which he’d taken a part in, in 1919, 1920. So, you know, Hoover is an influence on Kaufman as well. And by 1949, when Kaufman is appointed, the Truman administration itself is trying to weed out communists in the federal government. Tom Clark is leading that effort as attorney general. So, I think all of those were influences on Kaufman and led him to be even more harshly anti-communist than some others might have been.
So, the trial gets underway in March of 1951. And it’s really just a disaster for the Rosenbergs from beginning to end. Their lawyers were not really seasoned criminal defense lawyers. They had Communist Party lawyers. And there was a suspicion all along—this was really echoed to me from Kaufman’s law clerk, who sat there and watched every day of trial—that the Party almost wanted them to lose, so there would be martyrs for the communist cause. The lawyers who defended the Rosenbergs at trial were not terribly competent. And in their defense, they didn’t have much to work with. They didn’t really understand the charges. When they tried to get scientists or other technical assistance to help them grapple with what this evidence meant and what their clients were accused of doing, almost no one agreed to cooperate with them. So they were sort of on an island. One of the junior defense lawyers in the team said later that they would walk down the street, and near the courthouse, and lawyers and friends they knew would literally cross the street to avoid them. And this is part of the climate of McCarthyism. Nobody wanted to be associated with lawyers who were assumed to be communists because they were defending these assumed communists charged with espionage. So, the case does not unfold very well for the Rosenbergs.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On April 5, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917. Their co-defendant, Morton Sobell, was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Martin J. Siegel: When they were issued in 1951, the death sentences were pretty widely popular. They’re lauded on editorial pages. Kaufman is referred to as a sort of national hero because he’d resisted this pressure from what’s thought to be international communism and death threats he’d gotten. And they take a poll. There’s a Gallup poll that’s done in early 1953. So this is now many months after the sentence. And the death sentences are widely supported by the public.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: After a series of investigative pieces were published in the National Guardian, a left wing independent weekly, calls for clemency began in earnest. The paper had become known for its opposition to the Korean War, and became deeply entrenched in defense efforts for the Rosenbergs, accused spy Alger Hiss, and the Hollywood Ten.
Martin J. Siegel: So, this move for clemency gets started slowly. And it’s a small group at first with some people in New York, just a hundred or so, who organized themselves after an article is written about the case, critical article by some left-leaning journalists who’s written about the case. That kind of kick-starts a movement for clemency, but it builds slowly. But it begins to gather force with, as I said, some isolated criticism in the Jewish world. Again, I don’t think that was the majority view among American Jews. But there are a couple of people here and there, some rabbis, as I say, in the Yiddish newspaper. A couple of Yiddish newspapers in New York criticized the sentences. And ever so gradually, in 1951, in the beginning of 1952, this movement begins to build. They form chapters in different cities.
They begin writing articles and writing their elected officials. And it does have some celebrity support.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The campaign for clemency found support from a number of high profile artists, writers, scientists, and other public figures including Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and National Guardian writer William A. Reuben, who started the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case with friends, operating the group out of his Manhattan apartment. Supporters for Sobell formed the Committee to Free Morton Sobell, and the groups found support nationwide, with regional chapters popping as far as California.
The movement for clemency also began to build support in Europe, and protests over the Rosenberg sentencing reached as far as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.
Martin J. Siegel: There are protests in Paris. There are protests in Rome. More and more articles are written about it. Eventually, a couple of newspapers come out in favor. And a lot of them—the campaign kind of had a couple of different strands. Some people who are left-leaning or just otherwise persuaded by a couple of the articles come to believe that the evidence against the Rosenbergs hadn’t been strong enough, that they’d been framed. But most people who support clemency don’t really believe that. But they come to see the sentences as extreme. Some people say, “Look, this is just gonna be communist propaganda when these people are executed.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Over the two years they were incarcerated at the death house at Sing Sing prison, Julius and Ethel wrote letters to each other, as well as to their young sons.
Martin J. Siegel: I mean, if you read them, you know, they’re very consciously—it’s sort of clear that the Rosenbergs knew they would be for public consumption.
So they’re a mix of political ideology and also loving comments to one another. And, of course, they’re steadfastly maintaining their innocence.
So those letters have an effect. And gradually, more and more people come to support clemency; most of them thinking the Rosenbergs are probably guilty but also thinking these sentences don’t really do America any favors, and they’re too extreme. And they’re gonna make us look bad in the eyes of the world. And maybe the government didn’t prove how important this atomic information was, for example. And so, by the time the executions are approaching in the spring of 1953, there really are a lot of demonstrations. There are thousands of people who gather in New York at demonstrations. There are people picketing the White House. And this holds true right up until the actual executions in June of 1953. So, it becomes quite—on the eve of the executions and when they’re carried out, it’s quite controversial. By then, also, Kaufman’s under a daily barrage of death threats, and his chambers is being inundated with hostile letters. And the FBI, he’s under guard. He and his family are under guard day and night by the FBI. They’re living in his apartment. Eventually, his family has to flee the apartment and go to Connecticut, to the home of a friend. So, it’s quite traumatic for Kaufman and his family as well.
Archival Audio, Newsreel Announcing the Impending Execution: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will die in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison tonight. Warden Denno said earlier that the executions would begin at 8 p. m. daylight time. That’s within the next 15 minutes. We’re told that the President and Attorney General Brownell are standing by in the event the Rosenbergs want to make a clean breast of it.
Federal Judge Kaufman, who sentenced the couple to death, is still in his chambers to deal with any possible last minute developments.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On Friday, June 19, just after 8pm, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed. Written in the final death house letter to their sons, they wrote, “Your lives must teach you that good cannot flourish in the midst of evil. That freedom and all things that go to make up a truly satisfying and worthwhile life must sometimes be purchased very dearly. Be comforted then that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life; and that we were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us.”With their final words to their children, they maintained that they were innocent.
Judge Kaufman would go on to preside over a number of high profile cases, including saving the Beatle John Lennon from a politically-motivated deportation during the Nixon administration, and first amendment cases including the Pentagon Papers.
Martin J. Siegel: But at the same time that all of that is happening, the Rosenberg case never goes away.
It kind of goes into hibernation in the late 1950s and 1960s, but by the late sixties and early seventies, it roars back into America’s consciousness. And that’s in part because the Rosenbergs’ sons come of age and decide that they want to lead this campaign to exonerate their parents. They had taken a different name. They didn’t grow up as Rosenbergs. They were raised by a different family. The last name of that family was Meeropol. And they had hesitated even to reveal their identity in this period of anti-communism, where everybody thought of their parents as spies. But by the late sixties and seventies, the climate’s changed radically. And McCarthyism is now widely, almost universally, seen as having been an overreaction and an ugly period in American history. And it’s also the period of Vietnam and, soon, the period of Watergate. So, people are willing to believe that the government might lie and frame up people as part of its Cold War obsession.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The charge that Julius and Ethel were innocent and framed by the government as part of its Cold War with the Soviet Union began to gain significant traction, and the Rosenbergs’ sons were sympathetic and compelling advocates.
Martin J. Siegel: This kind of idea has a lot of receptive listeners. And suddenly, Kaufman is kind of caught up in this maelstrom of protest. People are protesting his speeches. People are writing op-eds about him. And then, it gets worse for him because a Freedom of Information Act request that the Rosenberg defenders submit to the FBI generates a lot of documents that reveal that Kaufman had had ex parte contacts with Roy Cohn and other members of the prosecution team during the Rosenbergs’ trial. That was a violation of judicial ethics. It was improper. And suddenly, the Rosenbergs have a whole new arrow in their quiver, not just that their parents were innocent and had been framed but that the judge had been corrupt and had colluded with prosecutors to make sure that there had been a conviction. And then, the pressure really ramps up on Kaufman again. There are death threats. There are calls for his impeachment, calls for hearings in Congress. Dozens and dozens of law professors sign an open letter calling for the House and Senate Judiciary Committee to start hearings about Kaufman. And so, this kind of successful, progressive career that he’d built to put the Rosenberg case behind him, all of that is suddenly jeopardized by this wave of attacks and this wave of reexamination of the Rosenberg case.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1969, Morton Sobell was paroled and released from Alcatraz prison. In 2008, after decades of maintaining his innocence, he admitted that he had conspired with Julius to supply the Soviet Union with military intelligence. His confession did not implicate Ethel, which helped lead many to believe in her innocence. He passed away on December 28, 2018, at the age of 101.
Judge Irving Kaufman went on to have a tumultuous and tragic family life; his wife suffered from depression and attempted suicide, and his son died while touring Machu Picchu, in a tragedy that appeared to be connected to a drug addiction.
In the decades that followed, Kaufman never expressed any regret for the death sentences and was ardently defensive of his conduct, though he rarely ever publicly commented on the case.
Martin J. Siegel: But, he did everything possible to influence public opinion about it and squelch criticism. But the only exception to that, I learned from his law clerk in 1977, shortly after his son’s sudden and unexpected and tragic death, Kaufman would muse to that law clerk in chambers that maybe there was something, some sort of karmic payback or something about his son having died so early. His son was almost the same age as Ethel Rosenberg at the time of her execution, how maybe he was paying for what had happened in the Rosenberg case. And that was really amazing to hear from that law clerk because Kaufman was not someone who would generally muse out loud to law clerks. That wasn’t his relationship with his law clerks. He was thrown for such a loop by the death of his son. And it was astonishing to hear that he himself might have connected that up to the Rosenberg controversy.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In spite of the controversies over his ethics violations, he went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. He passed away in 1992 at the age of 81.
Archival Audio, Ronald Reagan Presents Judge Kaufman with Presidential Medal of Freedom: “Only a short walk from here is the office where President Eisenhower told you that of all the crises in his own life, and he specifically mentioned the Normandy invasion, he had never felt so much public pressure as he did during the international campaign to thwart the course of justice in the Rosenberg espionage case. But President Eisenhower also told you that whenever he considered weakening or giving in to that political pressure, he thought of the courage that you had shown during the trial and sentencing, and I know he told you he took inspiration from that. Judge Kaufman, keeping a judiciary independent and protecting the courts from political pressures is both noble and heroic work, and you certainly earned both of those adjectives. And by the way, it’s certainly worth noting one comment you made during the sentence hearing, you said then that betraying a nation’s secrets was a crime worse than murder. Well, sadly, we’ve learned in recent years how utterly appropriate and far-seeing those words were.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by executive director Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the US National Archives, Esquire Magazine, British Movietone via Associated Press, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
