Secret Agents

Marjorie Garber is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University; she and Rebecca Walkowitz are also co-editors of Media Spectacles (Routledge 1993).

"Secret Agents succeeds in conveying a sense of moral engagement with its subject matter. This book also reanimates issues that conveniently dropped out of sight because, as a society, we are uncomfortable dealing with ambiguity in the historical record...Walkowitz and Garber should be both congratulated and widley read, for assembling a collection that leaves readers less comfortable for having spent time with this book." -- Boston Book Review,Dec.1995"a remarkably cogent account." -- Boston Book Review"the writers demonstrate with ferocious eloquence." -- Boston Book Review"The authors have assembled an extraordinary panoply of personal testimony, political polemic, social commentary, legal observation and scientific history. Secret Agents is, moreover, an intellectual kaleidoscope of the conduct of public affairs during the '50s." -- The Boston BookReview

• Introduction; One: Secrets; 1: Jell-O; 2: The Rosenbergs and the Crimes of a Century; 3: TV, the Bomb, and the Body; 4: The Secret about Secrets; 5: Censorship of American Uranium Mine Epidemiology in the 1950s; 6: The Trial of J. Edgar Hoover; 7: Strange Angel; 8: Flash Back, Flash Forward; Two: Agents; 9: Before the Rosenbergs; 10: Helplessness and Heartlessness; 11: The Rosenberg Case and the New York Intellectuals; 12: The Rosenberg Letters; 13: The Suffering Body; 14: A Bond of Sisterhood; 15: The Bell Jar and the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg; Three: Testimonies; 16: Rosenberg Realities; 17: Some Remarks about Trials; 18: Jews and McCarthyism; 19: Contrasting Fates of Repression; 20: Arbitrary Convictions?; 21: The Work of the State