[CTRL] Katherine the Great

[Kris Millegan]

-Cavet Lector-   <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>  -Cui Bono-

an excerpt from:
Katherine the Great - Katherine Graham and the Washington Post
Deborah Davis(C)1979, 1987
Zenith Edition
National Press, Inc.
7508 Wisconsin Avenue
Besthesda, Maryland 20814
301-657-1616
ISBN 0-915765-43-8
-----

A biography is considered complete if it merely
accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person
may well have as many as one thousand.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

Introduction

This portrait of Katharine Graham appears for the second time in the spring
of 1987, after being out of print for nearly eight years. It is both a
biography and an inquiry into the nature of her power, which has been a clear
factor in American politics since 1974, when an investigation financed by her
newspaper, the Washington Post, and directed by her editor, Benjamin Bradlee,
brought about Richard Nixon's resignation as president of the United States.
This book was originally published in late 1979 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich;
the company's chairman and president, William Jovanovich, personally reviewed
the controversial sections, was aware of my confidential sources, and
nominated the book for an American Book Award. Six weeks after its release,
he then withdrew the book from bookstores and ordered all remaining copies
shredded; corporate documents that became available during my subsequent
lawsuit against him showed that 20,000 copies had been "processed and
converted into waste paper."

Mr. Jovanovich had wanted very much to publish this study of Mrs. Graham's
life, which embodies the relationship of media power to political power, and
said when he was bidding for the unfinished manuscript that he did not feel
constrained by her opposition to such a work. His explanation for destroying
the book, which became the conventional wisdom about what went wrong, was
that she and her executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee, had complained about
"inaccuracies," causing him to "lose confidence in the author."

When I sued for breach of contract, he said in a motion to dismiss that there
had been no breach since by industry standards the book had in fact been
published, meaning printed and bound. My attorney, Richard Bellman, however,
made the heretical argument that publishing "in its true sense" commits a
publisher to "placing and keeping an author's work before the public." The
court agreed, and allowed my case, and others like it, to go forward. This
second edition, somewhat expanded, emerges after the publisher admitted he
knew of no specific misstatements and had no reason to think anyone was going
to sue for libel; and settled my contract and damage to reputation claims out
of court. Before this edition went to press, Mrs. Graham and Mr. Bradlee were
asked to notify the new publisher of any changes they would like to have made
in the text. They responded by reiterating their general disapproval of the
book, and declined the request.

The "inaccuracies" concerned material about the involvement of journalists
and news executives with the CIA in the early 1950s, a practice in which, I
had written, both Mr. Bradlee and Katharine Graham's late husband, Philip,
the Post's former publisher, had participated. Mrs. Graham, who has been
unable to come to terms with many aspects of her husband's behavior--he was a
manic depressive who committed suicide in 1963--told Mr. Jovanovich,
according to company documents, that "the whole theme of the book is so
fanciful it defies serious discussion," that the idea of her husband having
cooperated with the Agency was based on the author's "CIA fantasies."

Associations of that kind had been common during the early Cold War era, and
were hardly secret before Katharine the Great was produced. They were
investigated by the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the Church
Committee) in 1976, and explored further in a lengthy article by Carl
Bernstein, whose interviews with CIA officials and Committee

staff confirmed that "brand name" journalists at CBS, Time, Inc., etc., had wo
rked with the CIA during the Cold War as a matter of course, as an expression
of patriotism. Bernstein reported ("The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone,
October 20, 1977) that Agency officials at that time thought of Philip Graham
as "somebody you could get help from," meaning he helped arrange journalistic
cover for agents. Bernstein said, too, that Mrs. Graham had been shielded
from any knowledge of her husband's involvement, and that she had called CIA
director William Colby in 1973, after having been in control of the newspaper
for ten years, with the demand to be told whether any Post employees were on
the CIA payroll. Colby had said no in reference to salaried employees but had
refused to discuss the question of stringers.

Mr. Jovanovich is a highly literate man who has considerable regard for
information as the essence both of citizenship and of state power (he is the
publisher of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell); and he knew from my records
how Philip Graham's alliances, his need for acceptance and longing for
influence, shaped the character of the newspaper that his widow inherited.
Yet Mr. Jovanovich had not considered, as I had not, that Mrs. Graham might
be deeply disturbed by my account of her husband's illness and its effect on
his political behavior, since the illness had brought much pain to their
family. It was perhaps for that reason that he did not question the
imprecision of Mrs. Graham's complaints, but responded with compassion to her
unhappiness. "I cannot tell you how pained I am by the circumstances which
have caused you, quite unnecessarily, distress and concern," he wrote her
after disavowing the book. "If we should ever meet again, I would like to
tell you some of my thoughts on what I have come to recognize as a kind of
'editorial blackmail,' in which persons say that if you reject a work . . .
you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.... It has been a
bitter lesson for me, but even so, my feelings in this matter are not to be
compared to your own." Mrs. Graham had written him a few days earlier, "I was
puzzled that such a book could have been published by a firm as distinguished
as yours." After receiving his letter she wrote again, "I was full of
admiration anyway for what you did and for the way you did it. Now I am all
the more so."

The conceptual center of this book is the question: could Katharine Graham
and Benjamin Bradlee have been in the position to end the presidency of
Richard Nixon by chance, or was that ability the result of something
deeply-rooted and systematic? In researching the content of her power, I
found that Katharine Graham's husband and Mr. Bradlee both had been part of
an elite who worked with strategic information during the war, and then used
their skills in propaganda or intelligence to create and reenforce[sic]
peacetime definitions of patriotism. Their careers in this way coincided with
the formation of the modern news industry; and it was not simply their access
to the instruments of mass communication, but also their style of political
thinking, their identification with the values of the state, which gave them
and others of their background a disproportionate influence on American
political aesthetics. These issues, and their relation to Katharine Graham's
ultimate authority against Nixon, are discussed in the book in detail.

Benjamin Bradlee as a young journalist was at the very heart of the
government's effort to order political thinking after the war. He spent forty
months handling classified cables and codes on a naval destroyer, then three
years at the Washington Post under Philip Graham, who as a "liberal
anti-Communist" supported the search for traitors in government. In 1951, Mr.
Bradlee went, with Philip Graham's assistance, to the American embassy in
Paris, where as a press attache he became part of a covert State Department
operation that was integral to America's foreign policy at the beginning of
the peace: the production of propaganda against Communism. One purpose of the
operation was to cast doubt on the patriotism of western European Communists,
many of whom had fought in the resistance and were therefore trusted figures
in post-war politics. They were discredited as instruments of Stalin. The
propaganda was disseminated throughout Europe mainly in the form of newspaper
stories appearing under the bylines of pro-American foreign journalists.

In the original edition, Mr. Bradlee was described as a State Department
appointee who while at the embassy produced CIA material only occasionally,
before returning permanently to journalism. Those few lines, and other
references to his past, Mr. Bradlee denied vehemently. Within days of the
book's release, several weeks before Mrs. Graham's first letter to Mr.
Jovanovich, he directed his own letter to the book's editor in which he said,
"Miss Davis is lying," "I never produced CIA material," and "what I can do is
to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little
group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth." There followed
damaging articles in two respected publications which portrayed the author of
Katharine the Great as unprofessional and mentally unstable. As debate about
the book increased, Mr. Bradlee continued to maintain that he had been
wronged, and told reporters covering the story for newspapers and magazines
that "it is a murderous, murderous observation, her thesis is bullshit and
murderous."

There are still gaps in my understanding of why the book was destroyed, but
from corporate documents and the testimony of people who worked for him,
there emerged the sense that Mr. Jovanovich was unsettled by the intensity
and personal nature of the criticism, and came to doubt his own judgment.
Afterward, Mr. Bradlee asked him for an essay for "our brain section,
Outlook," on the experience, which included his having been accused of
censorship by several writers' organizations. "Something you wrote to
Katharine (and which she graciously showed me) struck a chord . . . you
talked about a kind of editorial blackmail, where people charged you with vari
ous heinous crimes if you insisted on certain standards." Mr. Jovanovich
agreed to write the piece, but it was never published.

The book had been out of print for several years before I came into
possession of a set of documents which explained the character of Mr.
Bradlee's reaction. Those records, pertaining to his time at the embassy, and
consisting of classified messages and an "Operations Memorandum" written by
him, indicate that he had been deeply involved in a State Department/CIA
campaign against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The campaign was designed to
persuade Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved
to be put to death; the Americans believed that the image of two "atom spies"
betraying their country to the Soviets would help stop the spread of
Communism in Europe. The documents show that Mr. Bradlee went to the
Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of "the head of the CIA in
Paris," as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he
composed his "Operations Memorandum" on the case, which was the basis of all
propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists. The campaign was a
failure; it created an anti-American backlash, since few who had lived
through the nightmare of fascism wished to see any more people killed for an
ideology. Some Rosenberg documents and an essay on Benjamin Bradlee's role in
the campaign make up the Appendix to this new edition.
pp vii--xii
=====

Appendix

The CIA's Propaganda Campaign
Against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg:
An Historical Notation

Justice Department documents made available through the Freedom of
Information Act reveal that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the subjects of a
massive overseas propaganda campaign in 1952 and 1953, and the Washington
Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee was a central figure in that campaign
when he worked as a press attache at the American embassy in Paris. This
covert struggle, conducted under authority of the Marshall Plan and managed
by the CIA and embassy officials, was meant to help secure America's moral
and strategic foothold in post-war Europe. The European Communists, who had
given heavily to the resistance and who were now struggling for political
leadership, were saying that the Rosenberg case was evidence of an American
"fascism." The American propagandists tried to counter that claim by holding
out the Rosenbergs as proof that Communists could not be trusted to be loyal
to their own governments. Officials at the embassy sent anti-Rosenberg
material to news organizations not only in France, a critical center for
Marshall Plan programs, but also to other parts of western Europe, and to
eastern Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, to about forty
countries on four continents.

In The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, the authors write,
"There could be no question that the rise in pro-Rosenberg sentiment, both in
the United States and overseas, was the result of a tremendous outpouring of
support from Communist intellectuals, publications, and trained organizers" (
The Rosenberg File, p. 348). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of
passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during and after the Second World
War. They were tried and convicted during the McCarthy era, and became the
first American civilians ever to be sentenced to death for espionage. The
propaganda campaign was designed to convince our European allies,
particularly the French, that the Rosenbergs were guilty and deserved their
death sentence. The authors' discussion of the propaganda battle, also based
in part on the Justice Department documents, reproduces the attitudes of the
Paris embassy personnel at the beginning of the campaign in late 1952, which
the diplomats considered a counterpropaganda effort: the preoccupation with
Communist front organizations, the inability to conceive of any support for
the Rosenbergs as being other than Communist in origin or cynical and
opportunistic in intent.

There was in the early 1950s, and in that well-respected book there still
seems to be, a lack of understanding on the part of Americans that, for
Europeans who had lived through the nightmare of Hitler, the idea that
McCarthyism could be the onset of fascism in the United States was very real
and quite terrifying, as Hannah Arendt said at the time. For many of those
war survivors, the longing to save the Rosenbergs was unrelated to Communism,
anti-Communism, or any other ideology, but was a kind of reparation for what
they had failed to do for the Jews in Europe.

The documents that form the basis of this essay offer a view of American
propagandists working out of the embassy in Paris, trying to contain the
Communist threat with language, a vision, a sense of mission. They pertain to
the five-month period in Paris, December 1952 to April 1953, when Benjamin
Bradlee was involved in the Rosenberg struggle. They tell of Bradlee's visit
to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York to gather propaganda material; of
the Paris embassy's use of that material to try to put into place a kind of a
Communist archetype, the Communist as monster (one document describes them as
needing "bloody sacrifices"); and of the backlash that the campaign
engendered. The Communist archetype would eventually become the natural way
of seeing, for many Americans, and would help to shape political conditions
both domestically and in Europe. But so soon after the war with Hitler, as
Bradlee and other embassy officials discovered, what mattered to the French
was not losing another life to a political abstraction, an ideology.

The following section consists of explanatory comments on original cables,
letters and memoranda from that period, some of which are reproduced in this
Appendix.

The earliest document in the series, dated December 13, 1952, is a memorandum
on U.S. government stationery from an assistant prosecutor on the Rosenberg
case, a Mr. Maran, to assistant U.S. attorney Myles Lane. In that memorandum,
Maran describes a conversation that he had that morning with Benjamin
Bradlee, who had arrived in New York after flying all night from Paris; the
memo conveys the sense that neither he nor Lane had been expecting Bradlee's
visit, and that they were rather confused about how to respond to him. "On
December 13, 1952," Maran tells Lane, "a Mr. Benjamin Bradlee called and
informed me the' he was a Press Attache with the American Embassy in Paris.
[Bradlee is identified in the Paris embassy list for 1952 as "assistant
attache''!.... he advised me that he was a former Federal Court Reporter for
the Washington Post and that he was sent here to look at the Rosenberg file
in order to answer the Communist propoganda [sic] about the Rosenberg case in
the Paris newspapers.

"He advised me," Maran says, "that it was an urgent matter and that he had to
return to Paris Monday night. He further advised that he was sent here by
Robert Thayer, who is head of the C.I.A. in Paris...." [Robert Thayer is
identified in the Paris embassy lists for 1952, 1953, and 1954, simply as
"attache."]

Maran also tells Lane that "After conferring with you I advised Mr. Bradley
[sic] that before we could allow him to examine the file in the Rosenberg
case, we would have to get clearance from the Department of Justice in
Washington.

"He stated that he was supposed to have been met by a representative of the
C.I.A. at the airport but missed connections."

Maran reports that Bradlee told him "He has been trying to get in touch with
[deputy director of Central Intelligence] Allen Dulles but has been unable to
do so. I advised him to call the State Department in Washington."

"Mr. Bradley [sic] advised me that he would probably call you first to find
out if he could look at the matters in the file which were public record, and
if not would follow my suggestion about calling the C.I.A. or the State
Department in Washington."

A hand-written note by Myles Lane on the bottom of that memorandum, also
dated December 13, indicates that Bradlee "displayed his credentials" and was
allowed to see the official public record of the trial later the same day.
"Mr. Maran brought it up," says the notation. "Mr. Bradlee worked on the
record from 2:30-6:30." There is nothing in the documents to indicate that he
persuaded the prosecutors to let him see any non-public information or that
he did any additional research. Ronald Radosh remarked to this writer about
the prosecutors' unwillingness to compromise their legal records, "it was
shocking that Bradlee came all the way from France and nobody gave him any
help. Clearly they didn't care about the propaganda campaign in France."

On returning to Paris, Bradlee wrote a lengthy Operations Memorandum entitled
"Analysis of the Rosenberg Case," which was delivered to James Clement Dunn,
the American ambassador to France. Dunn informed Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, in a "priority" cable dated December 20, 1952, that Bradlee's
"Analysis based on thorough study of all court records and contains following:

"1. Legal history from indictment to present appellate status;
2. The governments case with complete summaries of testimony of 20 government
witnesses;
3. The defendants case with summaries of testimony of the four defense
witnesses;
4. The governments rebuttal with summaries of testimony of the three
government rebuttal witnesses;
5. The conduct of the trial containing five sections on how judge was chosen,
how jury was selected; defense statements about fairness of trial [Judge
Irving R.] Kaufmans charge to jury and appellate procedures;
6. The verdict containing an analysis of adequacy of evidence;
7. The sentences containing Kaufmans sentencing opinion on Rosenbergs Sobell
and Greenglass plus appellate court comment on sentence and;
8. The Rosenberg case and the Communist Party containing answers to the most
common Communist charges re the Rosenberg case."

It is beyond the scope of this piece to analyze Bradlee's Memorandum in
detail, but two aspects of it are particularly worth mentioning. First,
Bradlee implies that the Supreme Court reviewed the case when in fact it did
not. He says in the section on appellate procedures that ". . . the case went
to the Supreme Court. That Court ruled that since no question of law was
involved, they would not consider the case and denied certiorari...."

While it is true that the Supreme Court would not hear the case, Bradlee must
have known that the denial of certiorari meant, by definition, that the Court
intended not to rule on any questions in the case, legal or otherwise. For
Bradlee to have worded his report, targeted for foreign journalists, to sound
as if the Court had actually said the case involved no legal problems, was
potentially very misleading to foreign audiences.

The second aspect of his analysis that deserves comment is his handling of
the issue of anti-Semitism. In the section of Bradlee's Memorandum that gives
"answers to the most common Communist charges re the Rosenberg case," he
attempts to refute the charge being made in France by Communists "and others"
that "anti-semitism play[ed] an indirect role in the Rosenberg case, and
especially in the sentence." In reference to this charge, he represents the
idea that there might be anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States as a
fabrication of the European Communists. He ignores the fact that Jews in the
United States had believed anti-Semitism to be a factor in the Rosenberg
trial since 1950-- and that, as in Europe, the behavior of some of the Jewish
leadership was less than admirable. The American Jewish Committee, for
example, quickly dissociated itself from the Rosenbergs as a way to prove to
the McCarthyist government that the Jewish community in America was
mainstream, patriotic and anti-Communist. (See The Rosenberg File, p. 352-6).

Rather than acknowledge such authentic fears and integrate them into his
analysis, Bradlee says in his Memorandum that "The religion of the jurors did
not become an issue until after the Prague trials"--a reference to the
execution of eight Jewish Communist party leaders in Czechoslovakia in
December 1952. The Prague trials were useful to anti-Communists because they
disabused some Jewish Communists in the West of the idea that Communism could
be a refuge from anti-Semitism. But except for Bradlee's effort to use them
propagandistically, those trials were essentially irrelevant to any facet of
the trial of the Rosenbergs.

Along with bringing up the Prague trials, Bradlee lists the Rosenberg jurors
by name and says "it is impossible to determine whether any of [them] were
members of the Jewish faith." And finally, "It is difficult to see how
anti-semitism can be attributed to a Jewish judge and a Jewish prosecutor."
To Europeans anxious about the long-term political effects of McCarthyism,
this tone of denial, so reminiscent of the era they had just lived through,
proved to be less than reassuring.

Bradlee has since come to understand that "the real issue in France was
clemency," not the Rosenbergs' innocence or guilt, as he recently told both
Ronald Radosh (The Rosenberg File, p. 374) and the Washington correspondent
for Le Monde. But in Paris in the early 1950s, his Operations Memorandum was
the foundation of the "Embassy's efforts to counteract Communist propaganda
about Rosenbergs," as Secretary of State Acheson was informed in a cable
labeled "confidential security information" on January 6, 1953. The Communist
propaganda was precisely that the Rosenbergs should be granted clemency.

In the January 6 cable, written by Deputy Chief of Mission Theodore C.
Achilles, Acheson is told that "After personal letters or approaches to
editors, Embassy's analysis of case has been used as a basis for articles and
editorials in FIGARO, PARISIEN-LIBERE, and AURORE, three largest morning
papers. Three-part series now appearing in FRANC-TIREUR under byline of
foreign editor.... Long article appeared in EVIDENCES, monthly published by
French branch of American Jewish Committee and circulated among 5,000 Jewish
intellectuals. More than 500 reprints of EVIDENCES piece circulated by AJC to
others."

The initial effect of the propaganda was dramatic, Achilles reports. "Rush of
anti-Communist analyses of Rosenberg case prompted both AP and UP to file
500-word
stories, with latter, under Bureau Chief [later ambassador to Chile] Ed
Korry's by-line, saying 'unusually strenuous and successful offensive' has
produced results 'almost unique in US counter-propaganda efforts.'"

The wire service reports, which went out to hundreds of newspapers, indicate
that the propaganda campaign was an open secret, in spite of the classified
cables. Achilles seems pleased with the publicity, but as subsequent cables
show, the exposure created a backlash that the Americans could not easily
control.

Achilles concedes, in the January 6 cable, that there are still some problems
with pro-Rosenberg sentiment in France, but he expects the American effort to
overcome them. He says that the "Communists have increased their campaign
daily;" however, "After approaches made to LE MONDE [which the Americans
considered neutral], second editorial . . . at least said Rosenbergs got
legally fair trial, and 'no one was in a position to say they were innocent.'
But LE MONDE article generally stuck to line that conviction made possible by
climate of hysteria in US....

"CE SOIR last night," Achilles goes on, "carried giant picture of Rosenberg
children, covering most of top half of page one. HUMANITE has similar lay-out
this morning...." But, he assures the secretary of state, the
counter-propaganda effort has legitimated the American government's position:
"All . . . stories [based on Bradlee's material] have emphasized that careful
study shows Rosenbergs fairly convicted and guilty as charged."

After distributing Bradlee's Analysis within France, the embassy in Paris
also sent copies to forty other American embassies and missions in western
Europe, eastern Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, for
dissemination in the host countries. Ambassador Dunn had notified Dean
Acheson in the December 20 cable about English language copies of the
Rosenberg study being sent that day to Rome,
Madrid, Lisbon, Casablanca, Tunis, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Trie
ste, Belgrade, The Hague, Brussels, Saigon, Algiers, London, and Bonn.

Bonn, still under control of the Allied military commanders, was the most
important center for Marshall Plan activity next to Paris. The secretary of
state himself followed up delivery of the Rosenberg material to Bonn three
days later, on December 23, with a "confidential" personal cable to John J.
McCloy, the high commissioner, telling him that "If further INFO desired
suggest you contact Bradlee, AMEMBASSY Paris, who is fully briefed and has
complete documentation."

Four days later, according to an "unclassified" December 29 cable from
Achilles to Acheson, French translations of Bradlee's Operations Memorandum
went to Saigon, Brussels, Cairo, Berne, Algiers, Casablanca, Beirut, and
Tangiers.

And seven days after that, according to another "unclassified" cable, dated
January 5, 1953, English language copies were also delivered to American
embassies and missions in Cairo, Tel Aviv, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos
Aires, Caracas, Havana, New Delhi, Karachi (in Pakistan), Rangoon (Burma),
Colombo (Ceylon), Taipei, Wellington (New Zealand), Sydney, Tehran, Ankara
(Turkey), Istanbul, Hong Kong, Capetown, Sao Paulo, and Beirut.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remained in Sing Sing prison while this propaganda
fight was enacted, waiting to be executed. But as their deaths, scheduled for
the week of January 12, became imminent, the propagandists at the Paris
embassy lost much of their initial self-assurance and grew increasingly
worried that the very success of the propaganda effort might have made the
Rosenbergs' plight too public, and that the American position in Europe would
suffer if the death sentences were carried out. The pro-American factions in
France had been warning that they were less concerned with what more the
embassy could put out about the couple's guilt than with how l'affaire
Rosenberg would play into the hands of the Communists.

By the second week in January it became equally clear to the Americans
themselves that their propaganda had not eliminated the problem, but on the
contrary, seemed to have raised the stakes and to have heightened tensions.
Negative reaction among the moderates that had been merely mentioned in
passing in the glowing embassy report of January 6 came to dominate the cable
traffic in the following few days. Those high level messages, coming out of
Paris as the Rosenbergs drafted an appeal for executive clemency to the not
yet inaugurated President Eisenhower, show confusion and frustration among
the men responsible for maintaining the image of American morality during
this critical early Cold War battle of nerves:

Deputy Chief of Mission Achilles to Secretary of State Acheson, January 8
(cable labeled "restricted security information"): "We were informed by
telephone at noon today that we will receive during course of afternoon [the]
following resolution . . .:

"'The Directing Committee of the [pro-American] Socialist Party without
taking a position on the basic issue involved . . ., in view of . . . the reas
onable doubt which exists regarding guilt of Rosenberg couple, urgently
requests President Truman to remit the death sentence . . . in order to avoid
the irreparable'.... We pointed out without avail that . . . [their use of
the phrase] 'reasonable doubt' [was a direct challenge to the American
position]."

"We have subsequently learned," Achilles says, "that above resolution was
devised to replace lengthy two page document which would have given rise to
comment and unfortunate discussion.

"[A socialist official] has written Ambassador letter to effect that . . .
execution will produce a barrage of Commie anti-American propaganda to which
non-Commie elements may be receptive."

Achilles to Acheson, January 9 ("restricted security information"): "This
morning . . . pro-government Figaro . . . makes sober page-one plea for
clemency in these words:

"Campaign by US for execution is necessary to discourage all those who might
be tempted to spy for USSR . . . but wherever there are militant Communists,
there are men who would not (rpt not) be restrained by fear of death. They
are fantastic; they do not (rpt not) fear running risk of bloody sacrifices.

"The most important point is that they need these sacrifices. United States
Government cannot tolerate retreating before Communist Campaign which has
become the campaign of intimidation. But this is not . . . campaign to force
Truman into granting clemency.... This is campaign to force him to refuse
clemency.... by presenting in advance this clemency, if it were given, as
capitulation."

In the January 9 cable, Achilles seems to share the fear of the French
moderates that the situation has deteriorated to the point that the
Communists will gain public support either if the Rosenbergs are executed or
if they are not; that clemency would give the Communists the moral victory of
having saved the Rosenbergs, but that execution would hand them the even
greater strategic advantage of showing the United States to be, as they were
claiming, "fascist."

Achilles suggests to Acheson that perhaps the moderates are correct in
thinking execution is what the Communists really want, and comes down on the
side of sparing the Rosenbergs' lives. After quoting Figaro, Achilles goes on
to paraphrase other stories that support his growing fear that "execution of
the Rosenbergs would be much better weapon for Communists than clemency.
Because execution would be welcomed and used by Communists with cold
satisfaction. Because Communism needs martyrs. Don't (rpt don't) play their
game. Don't (rpt don't) give them these martyrs."

Achilles then goes on, in the same cable, to tell Acheson about an article in
the "Communist [ newspaper]CESOIR describing horrors of death by
electrocution," and about an editorial in the usually pro-American Socialist
Populaire entitled "One Witness, No Witness." That article was severely
critical of the fact that the Rosenbergs "were convicted on testimony of only
one witness." Achilles explains that "this is illegal in France."

Deputy Chief Achilles also implies in the January 9 cable that there is
growing resentment in France of the American propaganda effort itself, which
is coming to be seen by Communists, anti-Communists, and moderates as an
effort to influence internal French affairs. The editorial writer for
Socialist Populaire, Achilles tells Acheson, has complained in print about
being "'submerged' by United States documents."

And, Achilles notes, This morning Communist HUMANITE [ran a] three column
headline [that read] 'in the face of size of Rosenberg Campaign, American
Embassy in Paris sent diplomat to Washington to ask advice."' The article
under the headline identified the diplomat who had carried out that mission
as press attache Benjamin Bradlee.

The Humanite story caused some strain between those handling the Rosenberg
campaign in Paris and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
which was ironic since cooperation between the FBI and the CIA had been
considerable on matters pertaining to the Rosenberg case, as other
declassified Rosenberg documents now indicate. But with Bradlee's trip, some
territorial line had apparently been crossed, or Hoover was simply angry that
the CIA propaganda had provoked so strong a backlash. In any case, the
Humanite story became the subject of a memo on embassy letterhead marked
"secret" that was sent by air courier to J. Edgar Hoover from the "Legal
Attache, Paris" on January 16,1953.

(The embassy lists for the years 1952 and 1953 do not identify anyone by the
title "legal attache," nor do the lists indicate that such a position
existed. A state department historian says, "there was not such a position as
a general rule, that term has no meaning to me, unless someone might have
been there representing the U.S. Attorney General to the Ministry of France.")

Although the documents indicate that Bradlee went only to New York, not to
Washington, the author of the January 16 secret memo tells Hoover that
Bradlee's trip never took place at all, and denies the embassy's by then
rather well-known role in the savage war of words in western Europe. He says
the story of Bradlee's trip to the United States is itself Communist
propaganda.

In the secret memo of January 16, the legal attache tells J. Edgar Hoover
that "The [Humanite] article...stated that the American Embassy is Paris had
recently sent BENJAMIN BRADLEE, Press Attache, on a quick trip to the United
States to secure material to combat the 'immense protest' against 'the crime
being prepared by American fascism.' The article indicated that BRADLEE'S
trip had been followed by a continuous flow of material from the Embassy to
the newspapers tending to show that the condemnation of the ROSENBERGS was
legitimate."

"The article went on to point out, however," the legal attache continues,
"that aroused French opinion will not be appeased by such tactics and went on
to list and describe the multitude of signed petitions which have
'spontaneously' been made in France in protest against the unjust
condemnation of the ROSENBERGS.

"The Press Attache of the U.S. Embassy did not make the trip reported in
L'HUMANITE's article," the legal attache concludes.

"This information is being brought to the Bureau's attention as a specific
example of the Communist campaign with regard to this case which has been
receiving front page attention in Humanite for well over a month."

There are no documents available to this writer that would explain why the
Rosenberg debate in Europe fell off so abruptly after January 16, just as it
was becoming most intense. One can assume that the FBI strongly advised the
State Department that its efforts were not helping, but rather hurting, the
Justice Department's cause.

With the curtailing of the propaganda effort, anti-American sentiment in
France began to subside in the spring of 1953, to the benefit of more
positive Marshall Plan programs. That April, however, some files stolen from
the office of David Greenglass' attorney, O. John Rogge, which tended to show
that the Rosenbergs had been framed, became the basis of a new series of
stories in the leftist and Communist press in France. At the same time, there
were stories that the console table had been found in which Julius Rosenberg
had supposedly hidden microfilm, and that it contained no secret compartment.

On April 22, Benjamin Bradlee wrote to assistant U.S. attorney James
Kilsheimer asking for information to combat those newest stories, according
to another document from the declassified Rosenberg files. (Bradlee is now
identified in the embassy list for 1953 as "assistant attache USIE." USIE,
The United States Information and Educational Exchange, was the embassy's
official propaganda arm). Kilsheimer and another young attorney, Roy Cohn,
have replaced Myles Lane as chief assistants to prosecutor Irving Saypol, and
Bradlee tells Kilsheimer, "I think the State Department has already contacted
you about our latest problems here with the Rosenberg case. The Department
has informed me that you would like a copy of the alleged Greenglass
statement and I am enclosing a story which appeared in the Communist paper
Humanite on April 20."

Bradlee goes on to say, "I think you will remember how urgently we needed
information when I saw you in December. The results of that visit were most
effective counter-propaganda. For the same reason and with the same urgency,
we need the answer to this.

"I don't know if the State Department told you about French press reports
here concerning the console table. The Communists here are claiming that two
reporters from a periodical called the 'National Guardian' have discovered
this table and that it does not have a well in the center which Greenglass
said Rosenberg used in connection with micro films. We also urgently need the
answer to that.

"I don't care how we get the information," Bradlee tells Kilsheimer, "whether
by personal letter from you or, from you through the State Department, but I
am taking the liberty of writing you directly in the hope that things can be
speeded up."

Whatever the immediate results of Bradlee's overture, by the following month
it had become apparent to everyone involved, including the new ambassador to
France, Douglas Dillon, that the damage done by the propaganda, not to
mention by the case itself, was not going to be reversed by putting out still
more "information" to persuade the French of the Rosenbergs' guilt. The State
Department began to fear that the Rosenberg case was doing irreparable harm
to the American position in western Europe.

As Radosh and Milton report (The Rosenberg File, p. 374-75), in contradiction
of their thesis about Communist fronts and trained organizers, Dillon sent an
"eyes-only" cable to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on May 15, 1953,
which said "the fact of the matter is that even those who accept the guilt of
the Rosenbergs are overwhelmingly of the opinion that the death sentence is
unjustifiable....We should not (repeat not) deceive ourselves by thinking
that this sentiment is due principally to Communist propaganda or that people
who take this position are unconscious dupes of Communists. [The] fact is that
 the great majority of French people of all political leanings feel that
death sentence is completely unjustified from a moral standpoint and is due
only to the political climate peculiar to the United States now (repeat now)
and at the time the trial took place."

The Rosenbergs were electrocuted in June 1953, and by the end of the year
Benjamin Bradlee had left the embassy and returned to journalism, as chief
European correspondent for Newsweek. Bradlee went back to reporting, a friend
said, because he could no longer stomach "lying for the government.' Bradlee
himself said (Conversations with Kennedy, p. 35) that he did so because of
his belief in "the people's right to know." He was expelled from France in
1957, during the French-Algerian war, for making contact with the Algerian
rebels; and at Newsweek's Washington bureau, he helped Philip Graham to buy
the magazine in 1961. Four years later, some months after Graham had
committed suicide, his widow, the new publisher of the Washington Post, hired
Bradlee to be executive editor of her newspaper. At their interview,
Katharine Graham asked him how he planned to cover the Vietnam war. Bradlee
said he didn't know, but that he'd hire no "son-of-a-bitch" reporter who was
not a patriot.

*Note to the reader: Shortly before this book went to press, Mr. Bradlee was
asked to comment on his role in the Rosenberg campaign. My letter to him, and
his response, are reproduced here. The reader may notice a discrepancy
between Bradlee's title in the Rosenberg essay, "assistant attache USIE,"
which was taken from the embassy list, and his claim that he worked for the
USIA, the United States Information Agency. [he USIE, an arm of the
Department of State, was organized immediately after the war to promote
"informational an] cultural activities" in foreign countries. It was
superceded by USIA on August 1, 1953. With the creation of USIA, such
activities were officially separated from the State Department.

More importantly, the reader will notice, Bradlee in his letter denies ever
having "worked for" the CIA. This has been a source of misunderstanding
between Bradlee and the author ever since the book was first published. This
book says only that he was an officially appointed press attache at the
American embassy in Paris, an employee of the State Department, who produced
propaganda about the Rosenbergs on behalf of or in cooperation with the CIA.
The documents clearly demonstrate that relationship. Yet he continues to
misinterpret this discussion, which has serious implications for the
development of the Cold War; as an accusation that he was a CIA agent. No
such accusation is intended. The reality of that time, as I have tried to
show, was that there was a loose intermingling of informational and cultural
functions, particularly overseas, and that embassy personnel and CIA
personnel, as well as a number of important journalists and news managers
(William F. Buckley, Joseph Alsop, Henry Luce, Barry Gingham, Sr., to name a
few) often worked together for mutually felt patriotic and anti-Communist
objectives.

pp.283-305
-----

Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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