PARTISAN REVIEW
47
Fiedler refuses even to entertain the possibility that Hiss or
the Rosenbergs might not have all that much to confess. 'Twere to
consider too curiously to consider so. To consider it would shatter
his faith in American institutions: "One would have to believe the
judges and public officials of the United States to be not merely
the Fascists the Rosenbergs called them, but monsters, insensate
beasts." But the record, even the record available when Fiedler
wrote, provides abundant evidence for the most extreme judg–
ment. There is no more horrifying document of Cold War hysteria
than Judge Kaufman's notorious remarks as he sentenced the
couple to death. Full of inflamed rhetoric about the deadly
struggle with Communism, the "challenge to our very existence,"
he accused them of "devoting themselves to the Russian ideology
of denial of God, denial of the sanctity of the individual and
aggression against free men everywhere instead of serving the cause
of liberty and freedom."
I consider your crime worse than murder. ... I believe your conduct in
putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best
scientists predkted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused,
in my opinion, the Communist aggression
in
Korea, with the resultant
casualties exceeding fifty thousand and who knows but that millions
more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by
your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the
disadvantage of our country.
Never mind that scientists then and since have labeled the A-bomb
charge simplistic nonsense. All the frustrations of postwar foreign
policy, all our fantasies of an enemy within to which this nation of
immigrants has proved especially vulnerable, demanded a scape–
goat. President Eisenhower went even further in his last-minute
refusal of clemency: "I can only say that, by immeasurably
increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have
condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people."s Who
can establish innocence for what has not yet happened? Who dare
ask mercy for the destruction of the world?
What these judges and public officials do so grossly, what
5. I take these quotations from Walter and Miriam Schneir's excellent brief on the case,
Invitation to an Inquest
(1965).
