Ike's Spies by Stephen E. Ambrose

Author:Stephen E. Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307946614
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T10:00:00+00:00

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* McCarthy was after William Bundy, a member of the CIA’S Board of National Estimates and Dean Acheson’s son-in-law. Bundy, it seemed, had contributed $400 to the Alger Hiss Defense Fund.

Part Two

THE PRESIDENCY

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

President Eisenhower and the Communist Menace

JUNE 19, 1953. Demonstrators march up and down in front of the White House, their signs pleading with the President to grant executive clemency to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who have been sentenced to death for giving atomic secrets to the Russians.

December 2, 1953. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson calls the President on the telephone to inform him that J. Edgar Hoover has just sent him charges that it is “more likely than not that J. Robert Oppenheimer is a Communist spy.”

January 15, 1954. Senator Mike Mansfield introduces a resolution to create a “Joint Congressional Oversight Committee for the American Clandestine Service.”

THE MANNER in which Ike dealt with these three incidents is the measure of how gravely he regarded the Communist threat to the United States, and of the importance he attached to espionage and counterespionage activities. All involved hard decisions that had to be made on the basis of what the President thought was best for the country.

The Rosenberg case was on Eisenhower’s desk when he took office.1 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were members of the Communist Party, U.S.A., and allegedly at the center of a Soviet spy ring. David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, had worked as a machinist on the Manhattan Project, and in January 1945 he supposedly gave the Rosenbergs rough drawings of the detonating device for the atomic bomb (how to set off an atomic bomb had been one of the most vexing problems of the Manhattan Project). Later in 1945, via a courier named Harry Gold, Greenglass gave the Rosenbergs drawings of the bomb itself, along with explanatory notes.

Four years later, the Russians exploded their first atomic device. Shortly thereafter, in England, Klaus Fuchs confessed to espionage for the Soviet Union. He put the finger on Gold, who in turn named Greenglass. In June 1950, Greenglass confessed. He named the Rosenbergs. Greenglass got a fifteen-year sentence, Gold got thirty years, while in England, Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years.

But the Rosenbergs pleaded not guilty. They were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death on the charge of espionage.* They appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court. By January of 1953, when Ike took office, the Rosenbergs’ only hope was executive clemency.

Communists and their fellow travelers, joined by innumerable liberals and such luminaries as Martin Buber, Pope Pius XII, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell, launched a campaign to convince Ike to stay the execution. They charged that the Rosenbergs had been framed, that their death sentence was the result of anti-Semitism and runaway McCarthyism. They staged demonstrations in America and around the world. Humanitarians, meanwhile, objected to the severity of the sentence. Greenglass, Gold, and Fuchs had gotten off with their lives, and even without life imprisonment. In addition, the Rosenbergs had two small boys. Some of Ike’s

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