Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Evelyn Strickman, the social worker, coaxed a similar story from Lee. He was apparently less guarded with her, since his belligerency is more exposed in her evaluation. “He…felt his mother ‘never gave a damn’ for him,” she reported. “…Although his brothers were not as detached as his mother was, he experienced rejection from them too, and they always pushed him away when he tried to accompany them. They never met any of his needs. He said he had to be ‘my own father’ because there was never anyone there for him.” He felt, he told her, “almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.” After he “agreed to answer questions if he wanted to, rejecting those which upset him,” he “acknowledged fantasies about being powerful, and sometimes hurting or killing people.” He claimed these fantasies never involved his mother, but he “refused to elaborate” on them. (Strickman also interviewed Marguerite and found her to be a total narcissist: “I honestly don’t think that she sees him as a person at all but simply as an extension of herself.”)

At this crucial time of transition in Lee’s life, when he was undergoing the form of dramatic self-change that Athens calls belligerency, which includes “ponder[ing] the nature of humanity and more particularly whether or not civility exists other than in fictional accounts of social life provided in books and by schools and churches,” New York City was in turmoil over the impending executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, one of the darkest dramas of modern American political life. The Rosenbergs were scheduled to be executed on June 19, 1953, and supporters of clemency for the young Communist parents were passing out literature, holding public rallies and collecting signatures on petitions to President Dwight Eisenhower. Six years later, when Lee defected to the Soviet Union, he credited the Rosenberg events with alerting him to communism. “I’m a Marxist,” he told journalist Aline Mosby. “…I became interested about the age of fifteen [sic]. From an ideological viewpoint. An old lady handed me a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs.…I looked at that paper and I still remember it for some reason, I don’t know why.” He remembered it because it catalyzed a crucial conversion.

Lee’s exposure to the Rosenberg auto-da-fé almost certainly extended beyond reading a pamphlet. He had long been interested in world events, and this one was unfolding dramatically before his eyes, up to and through the crescendo of rallies and last-minute appeals and the double execution itself that made orphans of the Rosenbergs’ two young sons. And the martyrs were spies! Lee’s favorite TV program as a child had been I Led Three Lives, about an FBI informant, Herbert Philbrick, who posed as a Communist spy. “In the early 1950s,” Robert Oswald recalls, “Lee watched that show every week without fail. When I left home to join

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