After the first atomic fireball flashed in the Alamogordo desert in July 1945, Manhattan Project scientists vainly warned gloating officials that this awesome weapon was destined to be a short-lived American monopoly. They knew Soviet science soon would duplicate this terrible feat–with or without the help of cloak-and-dagger antics. But, as the confession of physicist Klaus Fuchs attested, espionage played a role in hastening the Soviet project toward success in September 1949. Amid a cold war hysteria (aggravated by a very hot and bloody 1950-1953 Korean war), federal authorities in 1950 pounced upon and prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in a trial that ranks in notoriety with the Sacco and Vanzetti case and the less lethal Chicago Seven courtroom carnival.
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The prosecution’s case against the Rosenbergs and codefendent Morton Sobell depended almost entirely upon the testimony of Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, a mechanic (not a mechanical engineer) at Los Alamos who claimed the Rosenbergs induced him to copy atomic-bomb diagrams to relay to Stalin. At the whirlwind three-week trial, Manhattan Project scientist Harold Urey deemed Greenglass an extremely dubious (because dim-witted) conduit of complex atomic secrets. The evidence was not conclusive. It later came to light that Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves had shrugged off the Rosenbergs’ alleged crime, if true, as of quite minor aid to the Soviets. Still, the Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced to death. Though Ethel certainly could have saved her life by confessing, the Rosenbergs insisted they were innocent through June 19, 1953, the day they were strapped into the electric chair. Ethel was electrocuted twice, just to be on the safe side. After all, she was, as President Eisenhower wrote, a “strong and recalcitrant character.”
The earlier works (oil paintings, lithographs, posters) include Picasso’s two portraits of the Rosenbergs (sold to raise defense funds), Fernand Leger’s Liberte, Paix, Solidarite, and Arnold Mesches’s quartet of bleak revelations (and consolation, The Kiss), which highlight but hardly exhaust the grim beauties of art forged in the heat of those scoundrel times.
