Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy

by Anne Sebba

Ethel’s tragedy was also America’s tragedy, illuminating how US culture and politics had been shaped by the country’s rapid descent after World War Two from military euphoria to Cold War paranoia.

But even in 1950 it should have been impossible to argue that Ethel, merely by agreeing with Julius’s political ideals and refusing to abandon him, was legally complicit. She was not.

The attraction between Ethel and Julius seems to have been powerful and immediate. According to friends, from the moment they met Julius practically never left her side.

So when David Greenglass was sent to work at Los Alamos around this time, Julius, although he had no particular knowledge about the bomb, felt strongly that the Soviet Union, as a key wartime ally, should benefit from all the information that he believed he could now obtain from David, a mere machinist with no scientific expertise, who was stationed there.

Julius’s wholehearted enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was so sincere that when he was told by Semyonov that “America, in spite of its commitments, was hiding its latest technical innovations from its ally who needed them very badly, Rosenberg was quick to volunteer.”

Behind the scenes, the authorities knew that actual evidence of Ethel’s “espionage” was nonexistent, while without a confession by Julius the evidence against him too might not be enough to convince a jury he was guilty and send him to the electric chair. But the charges against them both were the same. A month before the trial, on February 8, the government lawyer, Myles Lane, had told a closed-door meeting of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy: “The case is not strong against Mrs. Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she be convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence.”

To declare that the Rosenbergs put the A-bomb in the hands of the Russians was a grotesque exaggeration, as all experts and many of the public knew.

Five minutes later, after five massive charges of electricity, Ethel Rosenberg was finally pronounced dead. Neither the government nor the FBI had wanted it to end this way. They wanted names of other spies, not the brutal death of young parents. But as William Rogers, deputy attorney general, commented, “She called our bluff.”59

Bob Lamphere felt so strongly that he wrote a blunt memo to Hoover, “stating that the facts of the case were clear; at the very least the wife did not deserve her sentence. She should not be executed.”18 Lamphere’s memo prompted Hoover to write to Irving Kaufman, who refused to change his mind.

In 2001 he finally broke his silence to appear on a CBS 60 Minutes documentary, heavily disguised, to talk about the case. David finally admitted that he had lied in court about having seen Ethel type up his spying notes on her portable Remington typewriter before sending them to Moscow. Aged seventy-nine, Greenglass said that his 1951 trial testimony was based on the recollection of his wife Ruth, rather than his own firsthand knowledge.

David admitted to Roberts that he had been a spy and, crucially, that his wife Ruth had helped him with his notes, not Ethel. He also suggested that Ruth had been the crux of the whole plan to accuse Ethel of typing and that it was she who had made him change his testimony.

The dramatic contrast between David’s grand jury testimony and what he ultimately said at the trial led legal scholars with no ax to grind to state that the final release of documentation revealed prosecutorial misbehavior of an unforgivable kind since the chief prosecutors, Saypol and Cohn, were guilty either of “having suborned false testimony, or presenting testimony they had reason to know was false.”

It was not for nothing that the prosecution leaders and the judge (the same in both trials) were conspicuously Jewish, as of course were the defendants … But the Jewish establishment, perhaps fearing that an association with Jewish radicalism would revive latent anti-Semitism in the country, expediently avoided asking questions about the overzealous prosecution, never demurred about the use of tainted evidence from problem witnesses, and never voiced doubts about the judges’ obvious bias or the prejudicial atmosphere generated by the FBI and exploited by the media blitz.

My own conclusion is that ultimately Ethel saw her death as inevitable. She could not confess to something that she had not done and so, in a topsy-turvy world where logic and rationalism no longer played a role, she believed she was dying for truth and justice and for her personal legacy. For one brief moment in time, hysteria overtook common sense and, in order to appear strong in the face of a credible Communist threat, the American government allowed this profoundly moral woman to be executed, and in the most brutally incompetent manner.