Media Clippings

True Lies
March 16, 2006 - Robert Leiter, Literary Editor

Recently the Fordham Law School sponsored a discussion on the Rosenberg spy case. As you may recall, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for passing national secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviets back in the 1940s.

The panelists were E.L. Doctorow, whose 1971 novel The Book of Daniel drew inspiration from the case. He was joined by Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America made Ethel Rosenberg and Roy Cohn, one of the prosecutors who helped send her to the electric chair, full-blown characters in his epic play.

The moderator was Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist and law professor, and the event drew 200 people, according to the Jan. 21 New York Times article "Truth, Fiction and the Rosenbergs."

Reporter Adam Liptak worked in early in the story that the Steven Spielberg film "Munich" was discussed during the evening, which was appropriate, since Kushner co-wrote the screenplay, and there's been controversy about its "truth." "Munich," for those whose heads may have been in the sand, deals with the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

There was also talk of James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces, since that, too, has had some trouble with the matter of truth.

Doctorow sidestepped the entire question of his and Kushner's need for allegiance to facts of any sort by saying, "Our justification and our salvation is that people know we're liars. The kind of genre-blurring done by the president of the United States is quite different. He is a storyteller, a fabulist, and presents as truth and facts stuff that is totally fictive."

All this could be dismissed as so much arty literary chatter if there weren't a lot at stake when it comes to the Rosenbergs. New facts have been discovered about the case by reputable academics since Doctorow and Kushner wrote their "fictions." Their works were based on political myths that have since been shattered by these subsequent historical investigations, and yet these two continue, especially in discussions like the one at Fordham, to peddle the same old "myths" - and so in reality do lie. Then people who don't know any better lap it all up because it's oh so politically correct.

Frey may do the literary world harm, but Doctorow and Kushner not only muddy the literary waters but pollute the political climate as well by refusing to admit that the Rosenbergs may not have been sainted innocents (which does not mean they should have been executed). These "fabulists" dismiss the new truths as politically motivated, similar to the lies about Communist spying they say were first propagated by the FBI. What these great literateurs do instead is hide behind obfuscatory language, and then pay allegiance to the coward's decoy - the higher "truth" of art.

Take Kushner's remarks for example. He insisted that he didn't "use historical figures for instruction or verisimilitude. 'There is a power that you access that doesn't have to do with credibility but with a shared understanding,' he said, adding that there was a transgressive thrill to it, too."