Few trials in American history can match that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for its sensationalism. The young couple were arrested in 1950 for atomic espionage. Less than a year earlier, the Soviet Union had unexpectedly tested its first nuclear bomb, a mere four years after the U.S. atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong had just declared the People’s Republic of China. Cold War hysteria was at its peak. The couple were quickly convicted, sentenced to death and, after two years of international protest and a series of failed appeals, executed in June 1953. They remain the only individuals put to death for peacetime espionage in American history and most everyone agrees neither should have been killed.
To the very end, the Rosenbergs protested their innocence. Though they took the Fifth regarding their Communist Party affiliation, they insisted that they were being persecuted for their radical political views. In left and liberal circles, how one stood on the Rosenberg case became not just a proxy for one’s views on Communism and the Soviet Union but also, like the Dreyfus case in France a half-century earlier, instantly defined who one was.
