The Rosenberg file: what do we really know about the Rosenbergs and the case against them? - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - 40th anniversary of convicted spies' electrocution

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Jacob Cohen

Coerced confession was the game from first to last. Ronald Radosh, whose book (with Joyce Milton) The Rosenberg File remains the supreme treatment of the entire case, has argued that Ethel's arrest, more than a month after her husband's, was a coldblooded effort to pressure Julius into confessing and informing. Julius was totally devoted to Ethel; now their children were threatened with abandonment. The FBI knew it had virtually no case against Ethel and may (Radosh is cautious in his accusation) have persuaded the Greenglasses to expand on her role--to lie, in other words. I see no evidence of this, but if they did embellish on Ethel's role, the Greenglasses must have done so reluctantly, because, as Radosh points out, Ethel's participation, even in their final version, is quite modest. Allegedly, she had typed some materials and had urged Ruth on in letters and conversations; she had been there, beside her beloved husband, believing in what he believed in, and must have known. That's the sum of it. There was far more on Ruth Greenglass than this, and she was never indicted. Notwithstanding all this, if the arrest of Ethel was meant to break Julius, it didn't.

Threat of Execution

SO THEY moved to the threat of execution. The press had been speculating about the death penalty from the moment of Julius's arrest, in July 1950, just after the beginnings of the Korean War, and some of that speculation spoke openly of using the threatened execution as a lever to obtain confessions and accusations. Prospective jurors who opposed capital punishment had been dismissed, and both prosecution and defense attorneys made clear to the jury that the Espionage Act of 1917, under which the Rosenbergs had been indicted, empowered the judge to invoke the death sentence. Interviewed after the trial, the jurors indicated they knew the stakes, and had not flinched from their confident verdict.

The very presentation of the case in court seems to have been predicated on the need to obtain a death sentence to coerce cooperation. As we have seen, the government had an opportunity to indict Rosenberg for wide-ranging spy activities over a period of at least seven years. However, concentrating on activities after 1946 might have made it necessary to indict them under less draconian legislation which in 1946 superseded the Espionage Act. The case presented in court concentrated almost entirely on the events of 1944-45, the atomic spying. But even under the Espionage Act, in order to guarantee the death sentence it would be necessary to prove that important atomic secrets had been lost. Interestingly, the prosecutors met secretly with members of the Atomic Energy Commission and with congressmen on the committee which supervised that agency seeking permission to declassify atomic matters likely to be discussed in the forthcoming trial.

In those meetings AEC and Congress were privately told that the prosecution would seek the death sentence, that proof that Rosenberg had disclosed important secrets was important to that end, and that the death sentence was necessary to obtain expected confessions. As Radosh discovered, there was even the concession in those conversations that the case against Ethel was very weak. Indeed the prosecutor worried privately that news of these improper conversations would leak someday and provide a pretext for a legal challenge to the sentence. The usefulness of the death penalty was also widely discussed within the FBI, and at first J. Edgar Hoover opposed executing Ethel, presciently fearing adverse public reaction. Clearly, then, the strategy of tormenting the Rosenbergs into cooperation was widely approved at many levels of government.