William A. Reuben

William A. Reuben (November 26, 1914 – May 31, 2004) was an American investigative journalist and author, best known for writing about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg atomic espionage case and the Alger Hiss perjury trials.

Background Reuben was born in Cleveland, Ohio in November 1914. He studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and then at the Graduate Faculty of English at Columbia University. During World War II, he saw combat as a lieutenant with the 45th Infantry Division in Europe, and received three Purple Hearts.

Career Reuben began his journalism career in the late 1930s. He wrote for the Condé Nast publications Vogue and House and Garden. He was also a staff member of Judge and Scribner's magazines.

Reuben served briefly as national publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union. Reuben then researched and wrote about Mark Fein, a wealthy New Yorker convicted in 1964 of murdering his bookie. In subsequent years, when he wasn't working on the Alger Hiss case, Reuben was a freelance investigative journalist, contributing articles to The Nation and other publications. As one example, he wrote in 1987 about the reported abuse, involving behavior modification experiments, of U.S. female prison inmates.

Rosenberg case In summer of 1951, Reuben began researching what he came to regard as a political frame-up in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. His first article, "The Rosenberg Conviction: Is This the Dreyfus Case of Cold War America?", appeared on August 15, 1951, in the National Guardian. In response, readers sent in small donations to help fund what they assumed was a committee to free the Rosenbergs. As Reuben later noted, no such committee existed at the time; he and his friends formed one in October 1951 in his Manhattan apartment. He used the collected donations to publish a pamphlet, To Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, which contained the Rosenberg trial record along with his seven National Guardian articles. He became Provisional Chairman of the Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, which was established to bring wider attention to what he claimed were the wrongful convictions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and of Morton Sobell. Reuben replied in a Letter to the Editor:

At the time of his death, Reuben was finishing a manuscript about the Hiss case, on which he had worked off and on for almost half a century.

In a tribute to Reuben, The Nation magazine editors called him "a walking encyclopedia on the Rosenberg and Hiss cases, raising loud challenges on behalf of the defendants, whom he regarded as wrongly convicted." They jokingly added, "When not defending underdogs, Reuben could be found at the racetrack, where he frequently played the favorite."

Death Reuben died of natural causes on May 31, 2004, in New York City, at the age of 89. The Atom Spy Hoax (1955) The Honorable Mr. Nixon and the Alger Hiss case (1956) The Mark Fein Case (1967) Footnote on an Historic Case: In Re Alger Hiss, No. 78 Civ. 3433 (1983)