The Freedom to Look Back

"I CONSIDER your crime worse than murder." Judge Irving Kaufman declared when he sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in 1951 for conspiring to spy for the Soviet Union. And two years later in June. 1953, the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair in Sing-Sing prison. But that was not to be the end of the debate over the Rosenbergs. Questions linger today about not only the verdict but also the nature of the trial, the justice of the death sentence, even the significance of the information (on the construction and composition of the atomic bomb) which the Rosenbergs allegedly were engaged in transferring to the Russians.

This year, the 30th anniversary of the execution, was predictably marked by a flurry of retrospective books, articles, and essays. Seen from this distance, the trial seems to have serious implications for our democratic ideals and for our foreign relations with the Russians. Walter and Miriam Schneir's Invitation to an Inquest, a revised edition with new evidence suggesting the Rosenbergs' innocence, and Ron Radosh and Joyce Milton's The Rosenberg File, arguing their guilt, have drawn particular attention. In addition, this month in New York City's Town Hall, these two couples will debate the issue anew.

But ironically this year also celebrates an increasing effort by the Reagan administration to "classify" more and more documents previously accessible to the public under the Freedom of Information Act of 1974. In the past three years the Administration, under the pretense of national security, has unabashedly tightened control over both the availability of government documents to the public--by changing the criteria for classification--and over the type and amount of foreign information which is allowed to enter the country. They have categorized more films as "political propaganda" and prevented foreign speakers--visitors like the widow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and Reverend Ian Paisley and Owen Carron, spokesmen for respectively the radical Protestant and Roman Catholic groups in Northern Ireland--with anti-American views from accepting invitations to speak at American universities. And The New York Times reported several weeks ago on yet one more infringement of rights--legally requiring a lifetime "prepublication review" of all manuscripts written by government officials in order to guard against leaks or inadvertent exposure of national security secrets.

Even setting aside the blatant disregard in all these moves for basic constitutional, first amendment rights, the coincidence of this hightening with the revival of interest in the Rosenberg case crystallizes a bitter irony. Much of the evidence for the Schneirs' new chapter and for the Radosh and Milion work--as well as for articles in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine and others--would never have come to light if not for the release, after a legal battle lasting eight years, of more than 160,000 pages of previously classified FBI documents concerning the Rosenbergs. These contain information on the arrest trial and statements made by witnesses examined in private by FBI agents, and the trial itself.

THIRTY YEARS LATER, indications that Judge Kaufman on occasion consulted with the prosecution or evidence that prosecution witnesses changed their stories innumerable times--a fact largely ignored by the FBI--will not bring the Rosenbergs back to life nor even provide a definitive interpretation of what happened. Historical revisionism can still allow two different parties, like the Schneirs and Radosh and Milton, to come to completely different conclusions about the justice of the verdict. But the arguments and discussions already generated by these disclosures are a perfect example of the need for a strong open information policy.

In 1951, the case made against the Rosenbergs implicitly pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, as the outright enemy from which any and all secrets must be prudently guarded. It is easy to forget that the trial took place only after America and Russia were wartime allies--so that it was in the Rosenberg case itself that many of the seeds of the Cold War were sown.

Today, icier relations with our Communist counterparts have motivated much of the rampant classification of documents and the sly, almost unnoticed creation of Executive Orders eroding freedom of information--such as one signed by President Regan on April 2, 1983, which said government officials were no longer required to consider the public's right to know when classifying documents. (of course, such tightening measures and obvious suspicion then contribute to worsening relations.) In the end, even if most agree that the Rosenbergs were convicted on questionable grounds, the release of information on the issue brings some insight--a value in itself--to what was otherwise a blot on the country's upholding of human rights ideals. National security is a consideration, but so are individual freedoms; and it would be a sad paradox to deny freedoms at home to secure ourselves against a government whose very repressiveness is what we strive to combat.