Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin: Rosenbergs Redux
[Ronald Radosh is co-author of The Rosenberg File, an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a writer for Pajamas Media.
Steven Usdin is author of Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. He is Senior Editor at BioCentury.]
In March of 1951, a young Jewish couple from New York City, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both secret members of the American Communist Party, were tried in Federal Court for “conspiracy to commit espionage.” The Rosenbergs were accused of having passed secrets pertaining to the atomic bomb from Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who worked in a lab at Los Alamos, to the Soviets. In June of 1953, all legal appeals having been exhausted, the Rosenbergs were executed, becoming the only American civilians executed for espionage by the United States government. Their sentence shocked the world and was immediately seized by communists as a powerful tool in the propaganda war between the United States and the USSR.
As time passed, the Rosenbergs’ defenders convinced many that the couple had been framed. The innocence of the Rosenbergs became a touchstone of the left; attempts to discuss evidence suggesting their guilt were assailed as appeasement of McCarthyism. Walter and Miriam Schneir’s Invitation to an Inquest (1965) was the textbook for this cause, providing a compelling narrative that, to many, proved that the Rosenbergs were innocent. This strain of thought continues in the latest Schneir book, Final Verdict, a posthumous work published earlier this year....
Writing recently in The Nation, the magazine’s former editor and publisher, Victor Navasky, proclaimed that Final Verdict presented a new view of the Rosenberg case. In making this argument, Navasky shows he has learned little since 1983, when he attacked The Rosenberg File and defended the Schneirs’ Invitation to an Inquest. Now, so many years later, when the intellectual community largely acknowledges the Rosenbergs’ guilt—a 2008 public confession by former Soviet spy Morton Sobell, who was tried along with the Rosenbergs, made continued denial impossible—Navasky has written what is possibly the last-ditch attempt to redeem the Rosenbergs....
This was written and published with the support of:
Harvey Klehr, co-author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, and is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emory University.
John Earl Haynes, co-author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.
Mark Kramer, Director of The Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and Harvard University Senior Fellow, The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and editor of The Journal of Cold War History.
Allen Hornblum, author of The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb.