As long as I letting the fur fly today, let me add a few comments about Radosh and the
Rosenbergs. With the promiscuous cross-poster Michael P. around, this e-mail will get
back to Radosh himself, one way or another.
I am waiting for my copy of Radosh's autobiographical tome _Commies_ to appear on my
doorstep, but it is apparent, from various reviews I have read, that one of Radosh's
contentions is that Michael Harrington and other DSA leaders, as well as Irving Howe
and the _Dissent_ editors, were not prepared to support the text he and and Joyce
Milton had written on the Rosenberg case, The Rosenberg File_. As the reviews have
Radosh's account of it, Harrington told him that while he believed _The Rosenberg
File_ was correct, he was not prepared to alienate the former Communists that were
part of DSA.
Now, neither Michael nor Irving are now here to defend themselves against this charge.
But I do have a distinct memory of an incident which sheds some light on it, and which
presents Radosh's account in a different context.
DSOC had a much beloved staff person, Selma Lenihan, who was sick with lung cancer at
the point that it and NAM merged. Fairly early on in DSA's life, in the early 1980s,
she passed away. A memorial was held for her at an Upper West Side funeral home, and
many of us retired, after the ceremony, to a nearby bar for an Irish wake. I do not
remember all that were present [I think that Jack Clark, Joe Schwartz and Bogdan
Denitch were also present, but I wouldn't swear in a court of law on it], but Ron
Radosh and Mike Harrington were certainly part of the circle. A rather heated
discussion ensued on the topic of the Rosenberg book. Radosh was of the view that DSA
should somehow endorse the book's findings. [I must say, paranthetically, that I
believe, along with historians such as Maurice Isserman and the authors of what had
been the classic defense of the Rosenbergs, Walter and Miriam Schneir {Invitation to
An Inquest}, that the Radosh book was correct in its main conclusions: t!
ha!
t Julius Rosenberg was guilty of
minor espionage, that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent and that Judge Irving Kaufman had
engaged in unethical conduct at their trial.] What Radosh did not understand then was
that democratic political organizations had no business deciding scholarly questions
of historical interpretation, philosophy, etc., that it was
Leninist/Trotskyist/Stalinist organizations which believed that the party was the
arbitrer of truth, and should pronounce on such questions. The argument that one
should not have to agree with him on the Rosenbergs to be a member of the DSA has
apparently been translated, in his memoirs, into an argument that it was more
important to mollify old ex-reds than stand up for the truth. It is a self-serving
account, and not one, if I may say so yself, that accords with what Michael Harrington
was saying.
When I read of Radosh's memoirs, I immediately thought of this event, and of how I
came away convinced that if there was not already a phrase "an anti-Stalinist
Stalinist," we would have had to make on up to describe Radosh's insistence that DSA
take a stand on the Rosenberg Trial.
Leo Casey
