The Brother

                                        Reviewed by Harry Reynolds

Sam Roberts      The Brother      Random House     2001      543 pp.    $35

   The untold story of atomic spy David Greenglass and how he sent his

                   sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.

Fifty years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after a trial by jury, were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. The verdict was based essentially upon the evidence of Ethel's younger brother, David Greenglass, and his wife Ruth.

In June, 1953, Julius and Ethel were slain - it's the only honest word for it - by Joseph Francel, an upstate journeyman electrician who pocketed $150 for each death. Each had refused to disclose information to officials who were standing ready to stop the killings if the Rosenbergs would speak. Two days later, their hearses passed thousands of spectators many of whom had compassion for them as innocent victims of the Cold War, for McCarthyism was then our temporary aberration that led many on the left to discount, in favour of the Soviet Union, any accusation of treason. Many others, however, despised the Rosenbergs as traitors. Years of protest and vilification of the government for slaying the innocent Rosenbergs followed. Among the onlookers as the Rosenberg hearses drove by was six-year old Sam Roberts, now a New York Times editor and host of New York Close-Up, the Times's nightly public affairs program on NY 1, and formerly city editor of the New York DailyNews.

At hand is Roberts's book, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. He writes that their deaths "would define the legacy... of an unrelated six-year old boy [Roberts] who ... bore silent witness as a cortege bearing history silently, but indelibly, rolled by". Their deaths became his "lifelong obsession". His obsession explains why in midlife he worked over a 13-year period to inquire into the Rosenbergs' guilt, notwithstanding that their guilt as members of a major Soviet espionage operation was put beyond question on July 12, 1995 with the disclosure by the United States of the once top secret Venona project documents, the brilliant breaking by our government of the Soviet Union's coded documents, a project begun in 1943 and kept secret throughout the Rosenberg case.

Whatever Roberts's reason for writing The Brother, his book is without equal in the vast literature about the Rosenbergs. Its uniqueness lies not in the fact that The Brother is the most current and comprehensive book about the Rosenbergs, or because Roberts successfully traced and dogged David Greenglass after his prison release and interviewed him at length. It is because Roberts's book stands by itself as an extraordinary literary achievement. He has given us a magnificently readable, intellectually rich work. It is a book that talks. One is tempted to say that it has a certain Russian literary quality about it. It reads as if Roberts were next to you, reading the book aloud, quietly laughing at his allusive and occasionally witty asides and wry judgments. All of this in a prose style that has a tensile strength of just the right degree to keep the reader turning one page after another. His Nabokovian description of virtually every fact - down to the Greenglass family's huge kitchen "bathtub that squatted on cast-iron legs and came with a versatile enamel cover", a cover found on that bathtub in the kitchen of every Lower East Side Old Law Tenement - is like watching the exfoliation of things out of the words that evoke them. Like Proust's madeleine, Roberts's casual reference to Ethel's mother's weekly "supply of clear, blue, and green glass seltzer bottles" will stir up in the minds of many memories of long ago. Roberts's mastery of fact reportage, his sense of just the right sequences of scenes, gives one a sense of reading a perfect cinematic script. What kind of wood was used to make the electric chair to which the Rosenbergs were strapped? Look at page 16. What were the exact movements of 20-year old Ruth Greenglass after she arrived in Albuquerque on 26 November, 1944? Read page 89; it reads like a Hollywood movie camera man's shooting list. The Greenglass family at 64 Sheriff Street right off Delancey? Read Roberts' book. You can almost see them, as if transfixed, standing in the daunting August air of the cluttered rooms in which they slept. In short, one reads with a sense of living in the real time of Roberts's narrative, the ultimate art for a non-fiction work that deserves consideration for a Pulitzer Prize.

As for the trial, Roberts lays it out in its almost startling simplicity, for the issue of conspiracy to commit espionage was, in the Rosenberg case, an issue only of credibility - no fingerprints, no papers, no recordings, no witnesses, only the actors, the verdict, and the exit. David Greenglass testified that in 1944 and 1945 he gave information to Julius Rosenberg about Los Alamos and the atom bomb. Ruth Greenglass and Harry Gold, a Soviet courier, corroborated David Greenglass's evidence insofar as it related to them. Proof was given that, after Gold's arrest, the Rosenbergs prepared to flee. In defence, the Rosenbergs denied everything in the Greenglass's story that concerned espionage. It took very little to persuade the jury that the Rosenbergs were liars.

As for the death sentences for which Judge Irving Kaufman and the government were long vilified, the Rosenbergs were traitors who supported a system in which Lenin's ideas of violence, dictatorship and terror were integral, a system in which Stalin used the weapons of the Cheka, erected the forced labour camps of the gulag, maintained the mono-ideological one-party state, extinguished the idea of free, popular elections, legalized administrative arbitrariness, repressed the press and religion, harried intellectuals into the secret hand to hand world of the samzidat, and subjugated Russia to the dread, sadistic Great Terror, to say nothing of the unutterably barbaric genocide of six million peasants in the first state-created famine in history, a famine calculated to break the backs and will of the peasant class. It was on the door of this madhouse of the 20th century that the Rosenbergs, arrogant in their political ignorance, knocked and offered atomic and other military secrets usable against us, a free society. For many the unquestionable legality of the sentences forecloses further inquiry. For others, as it is for this reviewer, though revenge may please, there is the innate feeling of something insuperably abnormal about the death penalty, something like a forbidden reversal by man of the act of creation.

Last, a temptation for the intellectually curious. If Ethel was slain principally because she had typed an alleged description of atomic bomb information supplied by David, what lie, one seemingly so casual and minor, did David tell the jury, a lie that Roberts learned in his interview of David, a lie that might well have led to Joseph Francel's $150 flipping of the switch on Ethel? Read Chapter 36, The Final Confession. It's only 12 pages.