Still Defiant

In Washington last week, pickets with signs--"Commute the death sentences of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg"--kept up a 24-hr.-a-day demonstration near the White House. In New York the Daily Worker filled its pages with shrill protests that "the Rosenbergs must live." Throughout Europe, Communists and fellow travelers pointed to the Rosenbergs as martyrs to "reactionary hysteria" in the U.S.

Aided by the passage of time, the steady drumfire of Communist propaganda had done much to becloud the facts of the Rosenberg case. In the summer of 1950, the FBI had arrested Julius Rosenberg, a sallow, bespectacled engineer, on the charge that he had acted as paymaster and talent scout for a spy ring which, during and after World War II, delivered to Russia U.S. military secrets of supreme importance. His wife Ethel was accused of aiding him.

"Russia Is Our Ally." Chief witness against the Rosenbergs was Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, once an Army machinist at Los Alamos' Manhattan Project. In 1944, said David, his wife Ruth told him that the Rosenbergs wanted him to give them whatever information he could discover about the atom bomb, because "Russia is our ally and as such, deserves this information . . ." Greenglass testified that he repeatedly turned over top-secret data to the Rosenbergs.

Most important of the items which he admitted giving them was a sketch of the Nagasaki-type atom bomb, and a twelve-page report on how it worked.

David Greenglass, whose confession got his prison sentence down to 15 years, was backed up by the testimony of his wife Ruth. Convicted Spy Harry Gold told the court that, in May 1945, a Russian agent named Yakovlev had ordered him to go to Albuquerque to pick up some atom-bomb diagrams from Greenglass.

The phrase with which Gold identified himself to Greenglass: "Julius sent me." Another key witness. Max Elitcher, testified that Rosenberg had urged him to steal secret information from the Navy Ordnance Bureau.

"Murder Is Dwarfed." Throughout the trial, the Rosenbergs insisted they were innocent, but the jury quickly found them guilty of espionage in wartime, a crime punishable by death. Presiding was Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who told the Rosenbergs, when he sentenced them: "Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed." Although the judge, the prosecutor and the chief Government witnesses were Jews, the Communists shrieked that the Rosenbergs were convicted because of anti-Semitic bias. The Reds, as usual, succeeded in mobilizing some non-Reds to help. Atomic Chemist Harold Urey wrote to Judge Kaufman that he "found the testimony of the Rosenbergs more believable than that of the Greenglasses."

"Justice, Not Mercy." The Rosenbergs lost three appeals to the U.S. circuit court of appeals and two to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week they exhausted one of the few legal maneuvers remaining--an appeal to Judge Kaufman to reduce their sentences from death to imprisonment. Said the judge: "I have seen nothing ... to cause me to change the sentence . . . The defendants, still defiant, assert that they seek justice, not mercy. What they seek, they have attained."

The Rosenbergs were scheduled to die on Jan. 14. Early this week Judge Kaufman announced that their execution would be postponed if they appealed to the President for mercy.

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