The corner of State Street and South Street roughly intersect with Correctional Facility Road in Ossining, New York. It’s about an hour drive from New York City. There is nowhere from which to have a clear view of the massive main building of this maximum security state prison where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed exactly 70 years ago from the hour I stand here.

My sign reads: “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg June 19, 1953.” The decades since their executions, with their vagaries of politics and the social order, seem to pass in minutes, as does life itself. About a hundred yards below where I parked my car, the road led sharply up beside the massive concrete wall surrounding the many buildings of the prison with only fleeting glimpses of some of the structures. Huge guard towers dot the top of the massive prison wall.

This day at the edge of the summer solstice must have been a near-perfect reflection of the day on which the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair. The electric chair had to be rented from the state for their executions and Ethel, innocent of the crime of conspiracy to steal the so-called secret of the atomic bomb and hand it over to the Soviet Union, was shocked several times as if in some grotesque mockery of the ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

In a more normal world, Julius may have been found guilty of far lesser offenses that involved transmitting information to the Soviets. But for Ethel and Julius, the facts hardly mattered as they were leftists and Jews and the federal government was intent on getting their pound of flesh no matter the facts of the case. The anti-communist hysteria that was McCarthyism and war made their demands as well. Their co-conspirator, Morton Sobell, was sentenced to prison along with David Greenglass and Harry Gold. Klaus Fuchs was convicted in the United Kingdom. 

Harry Gold seemed like a cartoon character.  His “I come from Julius,” testimony is about as credible as Richard Nixon’s secret plan for peace during the Vietnam War.

Sobell’s admission of guilt, decades later, along with decoded Soviet cables, known by the code-name Venona, seemed to underscore Julius’ spying. He spied for an ally of the US, which was a crime. Ethel was never given a code name by the Soviets, while Julius was called “liberal.” Her crime may have been knowing something of what Julius was doing and that does not call for the death sentence. 

The “pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure… it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved in the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, if any.”  The latter refers to how much time, if any, was saved by any of the espionage associated with the Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb.

There is sheer terror about the gross injustice of murdering people innocent of the crime for which they were charged. The gruesome inhumanity of Ethel’s execution, minutes after Julius’, just before sundown on the Jewish sabbath, is more than the human heart and mind can comprehend. Here are the words of Irving Kaufman, the trial judge who blamed the Rosenbergs for everything from the Korean War to giving away the secret of the atomic bomb:

I consider your crime worse than murder. Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. In committing the act of murder, the criminal kills only his victim. The immediate family is brought to grief and when justice is meted out the chapter is closed. But in your case, I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. 

Federal prosecutors Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn, among others, knew that witnesses had changed their grand jury testimony in this case. The Rosenbergs did not stand a chance with the father and son defense team of Alexander Bloch and Emanuel Bloch, among others. Emanuel Bloch was a staunch leftist and labor lawyer without criminal trial experience. Their defense was up against the wall of the hysteria of  McCarthyism and war. No experienced criminal defense attorney would go near the case.

The Justice Department knew that their case was based on changed grand jury testimony, but even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, an awful character assassin and extreme right-winger, didn’t want the mother of two young boys executed by the government and dreaded the publicity that may have emerged in the hours leading up to this great miscarriage of anything resembling justice if Ethel had been executed first and then Julius would have named names, which is what the government wanted all along. Naming names was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s game and elixir to power, even more so than his love of alcohol. 

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower would not offer any moral or ethical stands during the trial and executions, the latter too uninterested to understand the issues of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union that defeated Nazism. Truman championed a belligerent policy toward the Soviet Union, through incompetence and incompetent advisors. He turned the wartime alliance into confrontation and the Rosenbergs would suffer because of the Cold War standoff. Eisenhower was a political actor in June 1953, and he did not raise any protest to the executions. It seems like his warning about the military-industrial complex did not stand in the way of his refusal to pardon or commute the death sentences of the Rosenbergs. The military spending in casting the Soviet Union as the ultimate evil after that nation lost 20 million people to Nazism during World War II could not be questioned.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were communists, and they were Jewish, two attributes which made them targets for the federal government’s witch hunts. Ethel’s brother David and Julius’ and Ethel’s sister-in-law Ruth Greenglass would change their grand jury testimony. Both Greenglasses did spy, as Julius did, and through fear for their own skin, the Greenglasses created a lethal fairy tale of Ethel typing nuclear secrets that David said he transmitted to Julius in the Rosenbergs’ Knickerbocker apartment complex on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Late in life, David would admit, without emotion, that he lied to save his wife’s skin, but he probably also had his own skin in mind. He served a prison sentence for transmitting information to the Soviets. He was a machinist without a technical education or experience in matters relating to the atomic bomb. He had been a complete failure in technical school. Emanuel Bloch asked him on the witness stand why he constantly grinned while giving his testimony. He said he didn’t realize that he smiled while helping to put his brother-in-law and sister in the electric chair. 

The Greenglasses were joined in a long line of so-called friends and associates of the Rosenbergs who the tenor of the times turned into quislings. It was every man and woman for himself and herself as the noose of McCarthyism and anti-communism tightened its grip across the US.  

Parallels could be drawn between the government’s use of the Espionage Act of 1917 against the Rosenbergs and how whistleblowers are treated today. The electric chair has long since vanished from Sing Sing, but the specter of a maximum security federal prison can mean a living death for those in the sights of the government and its war planning. There are Guantanamo-style prisons in the US waiting for those who dare to uncover its war making.

Only one government has used nuclear weapons against a civilian population and that was the US. The late Daniel Ellsberg, who made the Pentagon Papers dealing with the official lies of the Vietnam War available to the public, noted how our species could stand at the edge of the nuclear precipice for only so long before we meander too close. Daniel Ellsberg had learned, through his work, that the government would during the Eisenhower administration have first strike plans that targeted both the Soviet Union and China and ultimately would kill about 600 million people

Even the New Left, the less sectarian political force and heir to the Old Left, of which the Rosenbergs were members, is infinitesimally small. As I walk down to my car parked at the northwest corner abutting Correctional Facility Road, I have a conversation with a man sitting on the sidewalk in front of his house. The majesty of both the Hudson River, and downriver the impressive new Governor Mario Cuomo Bridge, is breathtaking. The Rosenbergs visited the nearby Catskills along with countless numbers of Jews as a place to seek a respite from the sweltering summers of New York City in a time long ago.

The Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, now seek to have the National Archives and National Security Agency release “thousands of documents” relating to their mother: “We would like to know the full truth about our mother’s case before we die,” the brothers said in a statement (UPI, June 20, 2023).”

The beauty of the warmth and the blue sky and the river, bridge, and surrounding hills have to be viewed against an environmental catastrophe that seems as daunting as war now and the catastrophe to which the human species is heading. The Rosenbergs may have been martyrs to a lost cause. They wanted a better world coming from the poverty of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and had human flaws like most. Julius acted wrongly in communicating secret information to a government he considered friendly, but at most he would have been sentenced to a prison term in a more normal world and political environment. Normalcy did not exist in the anti-communist hysteria and the anti-Semitism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

I could find no organization that would stand along with me at Sing Sing. I had many conversations with passersby, mostly from the surrounding working-class neighborhood. A few people knew the history of the Rosenbergs. A young woman who walked beside me on South Street in Ossining knew the history of the Rosenbergs and commented that she “knew her history.” 

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

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