How I Escaped the Crackpot Allure of the American Communist Movement

I’m honored that my essay in Mosaic, “The Death of Morton Sobell and the End of the Rosenberg Affair,” attracted responses from Harvey Klehr and Ruth R. Wisse: two pre-eminent scholars whom I hold in the highest esteem. In what follows I hope to enhance and amplify their comments with, where warranted, some personal reminiscences by one who, fascinated by the phenomenon of American Communism from an early age, made it a particular point to befriend Sobell in the early 1980s.

Harvey Klehr sums up the legacy of the convicted spy Morton Sobell in these pithy words: “to a significantly greater degree than other Jews who had become Communists or Communist sympathizers, [he] betrayed at once his country and his people.” In doing so, moreover, Sobell “lied to his family, his friends, and his supporters.” I would add: also to himself.

To be sure, all Communists—and certainly all Communist spies—lied about their intentions; that was to be expected. “Always deny,” Sobell told his girlfriend Juliet. Even in the final active years of American Communism, before the USSR collapsed and Soviet money ran out, Communists still denied they were Communists, and anyone who had the audacity to call them Communists was denounced as a McCarthyite, a fascist, an anti-Semite, a warmonger. Instead, they were “progressives” who wanted only peace, bread, and roses. These last words were those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Sobell’s co-defendants in the 1951 atomic-bomb spy trial.