Introduction
Friday, June 19, 1953, dawned typically hot and humid in New York, the sort of day later memorably described by the poet Sylvia Plath as sultry. Occasional bursts of sunshine seemed to promise something better, but it was a promise stubbornly unfulfilled. In Washington there was even light rain.
But the weather made little difference to one young couple, who spent the day inside, behind bars, in the condemned cells of the women’s wing at New York’s high-security Sing Sing Prison, at least allowed to communicate with each other from noon until 7:20 p.m. through a wire mesh. It was the day after their fourteenth wedding anniversary, when together they had composed a last will and testament and final instructions to lawyers. “Words fail me when I attempt to tell of the nobility and grandeur of my life’s companion, my sweet and devoted wife,” he told his lawyer in shaky handwriting with frequent crossings-out. “Ours is a great love and a wonderful relationship. It has made my life rich and full.”1
That Friday, their last day of life, they wrote heartbreaking farewell letters to their two sons, Michael, aged ten, and Robby, six, “our pride and most precious fortune.”2 This “sweet and devoted wife” tried to offer her sons advice to guide them through the rest of their lives without parents. “At first, of course, you will grieve bitterly for us, but you will not grieve alone. That is our consolation and it must eventually be yours.”3 She concluded: “Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience.”4 Ethel Rosenberg, thirty-seven, believed deeply that she was not only innocent; she wanted to be morally correct, on the right side of history.
She then left her boys with some carefully chosen literary quotes, penciled on a scrap of prison paper, for them to ponder, including the following: “Geo Eliot said, ‘This is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love another;’” and “Honor means that you are too proud to do wrong—but pride means that you will not own that you have done wrong at all.”5
Julius’s personal effects had been boxed up into three cartons and left with the warden. Ethel owned little more, and the inventory of her meager possessions at the time of her death included deodorant, stockings, and a shoebox of letters from her children. At the time of their arrest the FBI had confiscated most of the couple’s possessions, including all family photographs. She asked their lawyer, Emanuel Hirsch Bloch, to ensure that her children received her Ten Commandments religious medal—a gift from a friend she had made in her first prison—and her wedding ring.
Once the final requests for clemency had been denied, the establishment was in a rush to get on with the executions after almost three years of imprisonment for the couple. The executions had been set for 11 p.m., the usual time at Sing Sing. But Bloch appealed to the trial judge, Irving Kaufman, not to execute the Rosenbergs that evening as it was the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. Both he and Rabbi Koslowe, the thirty-three-year-old Orthodox Jewish chaplain at Sing Sing who had grown close to the Rosenbergs over the last two years, were now fighting for extra hours. Koslowe had spent Friday helping the young couple prepare to die in the electric chair, but nonetheless never gave up hope that he could prolong their lives. “The priority is life, even one minute of life,” he said. “If I can prolong a life by one minute I am duty-bound by Jewish law to do so.”6
But he failed. Judicial officials, insisting they were showing their respect for the Jewish Sabbath, decided to execute them three hours earlier than the schedule called for. This accelerated timetable forced the prison to dispense with the traditional “last meal.” Julius was instead offered an extra pack of cigarettes. Ethel did not smoke.
As the hour approached, heavy details of police and state troopers were brought in to protect Ossining, the town bought in 1685 from the Sint Sinck tribe. Sing Sing prison still stands there today, located on a steep hill of white marble overlooking the Hudson, thirty miles north of New York City. In other circumstances, a most beautiful spot. Two telephone lines were opened between the office of prison warden Wilfred Louis Denno and the White House in Washington. A party of five legal witnesses and three reporters arrived and were told to sit on four rows of benches resembling church pews. There had been a panic to locate the executioner, Joseph Francel, who had thought he would not be needed until 9 p.m. But even that minor crisis proved in the end not too difficult to overcome. Francel arrived well before sundown and was stationed in an alcove to the left of the room.
Having been assured that all the necessary signatures for the rental of the wooden chair with leather straps from the State of New York had been obtained and that voltage tests had just been carried out to his satisfaction, there was one further check required. This was to ensure that, should either of the condemned prisoners decide to make a last-minute confession or name names, the line-of-sight arrangements between FBI agents and the warden were active so that the execution could be immediately stopped. But Ethel and Julius refused to the end to trade secrets or name other names to save their own lives.
The authorities had debated which of the pair to execute first. The warden was in favor of Ethel, believing that Julius would, at the eleventh hour, break down and deliver the longed-for confession. But J. Edgar Hoover, the long-standing FBI director with one eye on public opinion, had all along been against the death penalty for Ethel, and was now especially alive to the criticism that would attach to the FBI if, after she were killed, Julius, the husband and father, repented and his life had to be spared. “Nothing would embarrass the Bureau more than to have the wife and mother of two children die and husband survive. It would … be a public relations nightmare.”7 Anyone with any knowledge of Ethel knew the impossibility of her either repenting or recanting if her husband had been killed; she could never have lived with herself under those circumstances.
And so at 8 p.m. Rabbi Koslowe, in his long black robes and white prayer shawl—intoning the words of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want”—led the thirty-five-year-old Julius Rosenberg from his holding cell, in an area of the prison incongruously referred to as “the dance hall,” into the execution chamber. Julius’s mustache had been shaved off, his glasses removed, and he turned without guidance to sit in the electric chair. A black helmet was placed on his head, black straps fixed around his chest, and electrodes placed on his right leg. The warden signaled to his aides to flick the switch that would send three massive charges of electricity through the man’s body. Minutes later two doctors with stethoscopes declared Julius Rosenberg was dead.
As soon as his body was laid out on a white table, covered with a sheet, and wheeled out, it was Koslowe’s grisly duty to lead Ethel, wearing a state-supplied, sleeveless green-and-white-patterned dress, down the same cement path from her cell. This time Koslowe was reading both the 15th Psalm, “Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle?” and the 31st, “In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust.” Had she looked down Ethel would have noticed the pawprints of a frightened rat, who had evidently encountered the wet cement decades earlier, firmly facing the opposite direction. But instead, knowing that her beloved husband had been killed minutes previously, she entered the execution room with her head high. Although, as she had admitted earlier in private to her lawyer, “she shivered from head to foot”8 when she thought of getting into the electric chair and having an electric current run through her, she had made up her mind, as she promised him, “to die with honor and with dignity.”9
Ethel stopped in front of the chair, started to move toward it, but suddenly turned instead toward the two women who had entered the room with her: the prison matron, Mrs. Helen Evans, a companion of sorts for the last two years, and telephone operator Mrs. Lucy Many. Ethel extended her outstretched arm to the short, white-haired matron, pulling her toward her for a brief embrace. The women quickly kissed before Mrs. Evans, visibly moved, left with Mrs. Many. Mrs. Evans had been appointed an official witness but, after the embrace, she bent her head and rushed from the room, unable to watch.
Ethel then took her place in the chair, allowed the helmet to be put on, the straps and leg contacts to be attached. She closed her eyes as the electrodes were fitted to her head, declining one last look at the sky through the skylight window above. She was ready for the first charge. After three charges went through her body she was lifted down and examined by the doctors, who told the expectant officials that, unimaginably, Ethel’s heart was still beating. She was returned to the chair, the straps reattached, and given a further two jolts, five in all, taking a gruesome four and a half minutes to die. This was evidence, according to some commentators, that she really was the stronger of the pair. As Bob Considine, veteran reporter, announced to the world: three jolts would have been enough for ‘any ordinary person’. More likely she was too small for the equipment or the contacts had been insufficiently moistened.
So closed the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, most reporters wrote in their accounts of the day. But they could not have been more wrong. Ethel Rosenberg was not, I believe, a spy. Nor was she a saint. She was obstinate, determined, prone to self-doubt, and did not make friends easily. She was also a committed Communist, highly intelligent, and fiercely loyal to her beloved husband, who undoubtedly was a Communist spy, passing military secrets to the Soviet Union during World War Two. Ethel’s downfall inevitably raises questions about the extent of her complicity as well as the fallibility of the law. But it is also a tale of betrayal, both of a country and by a family. Ethel was betrayed by her own flesh and flood—by her brother David Greenglass, also at one time a fervent believer in Communist ideals, who worked as a technician at the Los Alamos atomic bomb development site in New Mexico, and by his wife, Ethel’s sister-in-law, Ruth. Unlike Ethel and Julius, Ruth and David, both of whom had been actively involved in espionage, escaped the electric chair. Ruth avoided all punishment. Ethel was also betrayed by her own mother.
This is the first time that Ethel’s ambiguous story has been told in the light of the final piece of testimony from the grand jury—the institution in America that ascertains if there is a case to answer—eventually released after David Greenglass’s death in 2014 at the age of ninety-two. This evidence reinforces the sense of a deeply personal, Shakespearean tragedy. Yet 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. These are epic themes, as many in that terrible execution chamber understood. But perhaps the darkest and most disturbing of all was the willingness of a government to orphan two children when it knew that the trial at which their mother was convicted was riddled with miscarriages of justice. Conspiracy was almost impossible to disprove—of course she had had conversations with her husband and brother. The jury, however, was instructed to consider that Ethel did more than this, that she was a traitor, a quite different charge with horrific consequences. Yet right up until hours before the execution, the government, which in public appeared so certain of Ethel’s guilt, was so unsure that it privately instructed officials to ask Julius: “Was your wife cognizant of your activities?”
* * *
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remain the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only two American civilians executed for espionage-related crimes committed during the Cold War that roughly lasted from 1946 to 1991, and Ethel is the only American woman killed for a crime other than murder in modern times. Today there is widespread recognition that Julius did pass military information to the Soviet Union, yet skepticism that the couple had, according to the phrase used at the time, stolen “the secrets” of the atomic bomb. Much was known about the basic physics involved in making a bomb; the main difficulty was devising practical weapons and the aircraft and missiles to deliver them. There is equally widespread recognition that the three-week trial at which both Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced to death contained multiple miscarriages of justice and that the only “evidence” against Ethel was the perjury of her own brother David. But over and above this, Ethel was also the victim of a government terrified of showing weakness in the face of an unyielding fear of Communism at the height of the Cold War and which knowingly allowed this perjury.
Why is it important today to understand the motivation of a woman who believed in the values of a now largely discredited Communist system in the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s? What drove a child born of immigrant parents from Eastern Europe both to embrace the American Dream that enabled so many immigrants like her to flourish and at the same time seek to improve it? In the 1930s, a belief that the new philosophy of Communism, with all its inherent contradictions, was the route to create a world without poverty, inequality, and racism was common among many intellectuals on New York’s Upper West Side as well as poor workers on the Lower East Side. It was an especially attractive philosophy to Jews who believed that the Bolshevik revolution offered the prospect of a life freed from cruel bondage. In 1933 America had finally recognized the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations with the new state. Just three years later, in 1936, the year Ethel met Julius, many of the same people believed it was morally imperative to support Spain’s democratically elected Popular Front government, which included Communists, against the right-wing military uprising led by General Francisco Franco. The Spanish Civil War became a cause espoused by internationally minded New York liberals who believed strongly that Fascism had to be stopped; some even volunteered to fight in Spain and gave their lives.
During the 1930s, many of the same New Yorkers were informed about Communism in the Soviet Union by reading the naive reports of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, who denied the widespread famine of 1932–33 and later sugarcoated Stalin’s purges. Briefly the idea of a Popular Front in government at home in America was even something that many who had once been fervent Communists now believed offered the best route to defeat the rise of Fascism, not only in Spain but also in Italy and Germany. From 1933 until his death in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat and author of the New Deal, which was intended to steer America out of the Depression and restore prosperity to all Americans, held on to power and in 1941 forged an alliance with Communist Russia. For the remaining four years of World War Two the Soviet Union was not only an ally but a critical bulwark in defeating Hitler.
Yet attitudes changed dramatically in 1945, almost before the war was over. Republicans were desperate to stop what they saw as a partly dynastic Democratic dominance following the death of Roosevelt shortly after the Yalta Conference in February, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had begun dividing up the postwar world. Roosevelt’s vice president, Harry S. Truman, had taken over, and was to remain in office until 1953. Shrewd and well advised, Truman was an unpretentious, plainspoken senator from Missouri who regarded Stalin with great suspicion when they met at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Almost immediately there was a marked change of tone in rhetoric, not simply in America but in Britain too, where the newly elected Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was also alarmed by Stalin’s postwar intentions.
In March 1946, Britain’s Conservative wartime leader, Winston Churchill, made a speech at Truman’s invitation in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that an “Iron Curtain” had fallen across Europe. This imaginary boundary divided the continent into two separate areas of influence, the one Communist and the other democratic. Churchill argued in his speech that strong US-British relations were essential in stopping the spread of Communism and maintaining peace in Europe. A year later, in a dramatic address to a joint session of Congress, Truman declared that the whole world faced a choice: a way of life “based upon the will of the majority” or one “based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority.” This latter regime, he suggested, relied upon “terror and oppression.”
The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, was seized on by the Republican Party, which was desperate to regain power from the Democrats. Truman’s case that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the West, and particularly to the United States, seemed unarguable in the late 1940s, as Eastern Europe and then China fell into Moscow’s orbit. Yet in the hands of unscrupulous Republican politicians such as the young Californian congressman Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, the same threat became the pretext for anti-Communist hysteria at home, centered on alleged conspiracies by “Reds” and “un-American” fellow-travelers. McCarthyism, as it became known, fed on the suspicions of many Americans that they had been dragged into an unwanted war and were now in danger of losing the peace.
Ironically, many former US Communists had shed their illusions about the Soviet Union by the late 1940s, confronted by the hard evidence of Stalinism’s brutality in Eastern Europe.
Should Ethel and Julius also have renounced Communism? Even in a “free” society, surely defined by the ideal that anyone is entitled to hold whatever political beliefs they want, while it is hard to argue sympathetically for anyone engaged in subversion, who betrays their country by giving information to another state, it is at the same time not only possible but, I believe, imperative to project empathy for any individual who finds him- or herself at the mercy of a well-prepared and rehearsed government charge sheet without necessarily agreeing with their political ideals. And this is especially true for Ethel, whose precise motivation and involvement in Julius’s crimes requires deeper exploration than she has been granted during her long post-execution afterlife. Even in death, Ethel has been framed by some merely as an appendage to Julius, the junior partner in “the Rosenbergs,” by others as “the master” who drove her apparently weaker, younger husband—positions taken often according to preexisting political views. In the absence of proof as to exactly what, if indeed anything, Ethel knew, or what she and Julius said to each other in the privacy of their bedroom, and the reliance of their trial on circumstantial evidence at best, it seems to me important to try to understand who was this woman, barely known to the point of obscurity at the moment of her arrest in 1950 yet an international icon some years later? How did that transformation happen? Having left school and all formal education behind when she graduated at fifteen, how did she discover the strength to survive three years in prison, two of them isolated in solitary confinement, to reach a point of unassailable dignity and belief that the cause for which she was prepared to give her life was indeed a worthy one?
Copyright © 2021 by Anne Sebba
