Executing the Rosenbergs: A Transnational History

ISBN-10: 1124508473
ISBN-13: 9781124508474
Language: English
Published: 2010
Author: Lori Clune

Description

In the summer of 1950, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg in his New York City apartment and officially charged him with conspiracy to commit espionage. He was specifically accused of passing - through his brother-in-law - the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. A few weeks later Julius' wife, Ethel, was also charged. Convicted and sentenced to death, the young Communist Party members were plunged into a whirlwind of appeals, protests, and propaganda. Charged at the height of cold war anti-Communist hysteria, the three-year appeals process culminated in President Eisenhower twice denying clemency, and the couple's electrocution on June 19, 1953. Their grisly executions did little to silence protest; as martyrs their case became legend and cast an even brighter spotlight on their two orphaned young sons. Questions surrounding the case continue to spark interest to this day. During the cold war, the U.S. government created images to sell the American side of the conflict. Since the Rosenberg case was part of this global battle of images, the history of the case needs to be global in scope. Whether they were actually innocent or not, once the courts ruled, the Rosenberg case was in the hands of the president to (a) accept or deny clemency, and (b) project an image of the couple's guilt to achieve a global propaganda success in the early cold war. This project uses over nine hundred newly discovered State Department documents to explore global perspectives on the case. While the Truman administration initiated the charges against the Rosenbergs, officials were just beginning to grasp the significance of the case overseas when Eisenhower took office. New information reveals a president out of touch with the international aspects of the psychological cold war. These new documents allow the history of the Rosenberg case to be told as the pivotal and transnational cold war event that it was.