American History Hit - American Traitors: The Rosenbergs

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

This week we’re stepping heart of Cold War America with the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Accused of espionage and executed at the height of anti-communist paranoia, their trial gripped the nation due to the controversy, family betrayal, and questions of justice that still echo today. Join host Don Wildman and historian Professor Lori Clune as they unravel the secrets, the courtroom drama, and the enduring legacy of a case that changed history forever.You can find out more about Professor Clune's work here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hi there, it's your host, Don Wilden, just jumping in to say that this episode includes a description of execution. So if you're not up to that today, please feel free to check out some of our many other episodes in our back catalog.

Thanks. We are back in court, full of dread and doom. A heavy weight sits in our stomachs. The last time here, the attorneys delivered their final arguments. Then the jury delivered its verdict. And that verdict was guilty. Well, we've beaten the odds. Of the 40 treason cases charged since this nation's founding, only 13 have ended in conviction.

Lucky us. Now we wait to be sentenced. The possibilities are limited and run the gamut. We will be barred from holding public office without question. We may be fined, no less than $10,000. We may be imprisoned, a minimum of five years. And then there is the final option. One exercised only three times in American history.

William Bruce Mumford hanged in 1862 and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953. Hello and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. There's a lot of grim history wrapped up in the Cold War. Over the past three years on this series, we've covered a lot of it. From the Berlin airlift to the Korean War, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the arms race right into the 70s, there are those of us who can vividly recall how dark and uncertain that era felt in America. Most of the tensions centered on foreign adversaries, distant enemies threatening us in far-flung places.

But what made the Cold War particularly terrifying was the creeping suspicion that the danger wasn't just out there. It was here among us. a fear that American citizens themselves were secretly working to undermine the homeland. Of course, that's what fueled the McCarthy hearings, which tore through careers and reputations in a public frenzy of accusation. But even before McCarthy, there was one case that set the tone for Cold War paranoia that shook the American consciousness and polarized the nation like few others before or since. It's the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of spying for the Soviet Union and ultimately,

executed for treason. That was such a defining moment of the early Cold War. What were they accused of doing? Were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really guilty of espionage? Was the government's case as strong as it claimed? Enough to warrant their execution? Or could it have been prevented? How much was the Rosenberg trial a showcase for rising anti-communist fervor seizing the country? Today we revisit this controversial case, the charges, the trial, the execution, and the decades long debate over guilt, innocence, and the meaning of justice in a nation gripped by fear. All in the company of Dr. Lori Clune, professor of history at Cal State University Fresno. She publishes on propaganda, communism, and the 1950s.

She is the author of Executing the Rosenbergs, Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War world. Greetings, Dr. Clune. Laurie, nice to meet you. It's so nice to meet you. Great to be here. Let's get some context for what will be a huge and notorious event in. America. The Cold War, as I have just described, has hit its stride. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, Marshall Plan, 1948. This is all meant to contain the spread of international communism. I mean, we're early days in the domino theory. How much does it seem like the world is on fire to Americans? Does everybody feel this way at that time? I think that's a really good way of putting it.

And it's what I always stress with my students, because it's hard to imagine the level of fear and this case doesn't make sense without that layer of pervasive fear. I mean, if we think about it, the threat and spread of communism did not feel academic. It felt quite real. We've got the Soviets testing their first atomic bomb in August of 1949 earlier than folks thought, probably only a couple of years earlier, but still, it wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when, but that prompted fallout shelters and ducking covers. And then just a couple of months later, China becomes the largest communist country on the planet. Within six months, we're into the Korean war, right, a hot spot that really parallels the Rosenberg case quite clearly. And the idea

that nuclear war, I mean, we look back now and say, well, it didn't happen. But no one knew that in 1949 and 1950. So this fear of not just a bomb or two, a global apocalypse was a horrifyingly real threat. So you weave in that fear, that paranoia. You put in folks like Nixon in Hewack and McCarthy in the Senate, and they find a few spies.

And so then folks are just off the rails because that fear is so powerful. The cultural context of this is everything, a backdrop of real fear and confusion. That was a big thing. Here we'd come out of World War II where we were the good guys and we'd won and everything was cut and dry of like, good, we solved this problem, we got rid of Hitler. You know, the fascists are dead. All of a sudden, this very confusing scenario arises where our former ally is now our enemy,

and then they had the bomb, which is incredible. Okay, so that's a major part of this. August 149, the Soviet Union successfully tests its first atomic bomb, which accelerates weapons production and more powerful bomb designs. All of this happens in the context of, as you mentioned, the Chinese, that revolution against the nationalists, all of this headline news is going on and watch out, communists are coming to get us. That sets the table for the entire subject of our conversation today.

Context, the backdrop of all of this communist news is fundamental to this conversation. The event that we're going to talk about today happens in the midst of an extreme kind of news and paranoia that we really can't conceive of today. I mean, we get hit by a lot in the news, you know, 24-hour news cycle and all the rest of that. But my parents described to me what it was like in the 50s, and it wasn't happy days. It was not Beach Boy Summers. It was like, oh my God, the world is going to end and we're feeling it. So it's really important to put yourself in that mindset to understand how this event that we're going to talk about happens. Okay, so August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tests its first atomic bomb.

This accelerates weapons production. It really starts the whole idea of an arms race in nuclear warfare. At that point, the FBI goes on the hunt to find out how. how the Soviets got this technology so quickly. How did this happen? We were the only nuclear power. We thought we were going to run the show for a long time in that regard. And suddenly, our former ally now enemy has their own and a very powerful version of that. So how do they get this information becomes a huge investigation? About what time does that investigation start? So we're looking at, because the Soviets dropped their bomb August of 1949.

So pretty quickly, the sense of like, how did this happen? Some of it is, you know, knowledge obtained, right? Then there had been scientists sharing information, quite honestly, in surprising ways to us, I think, at this point. But the most helpful was when Klaus Fuchs was arrested in February of 1950. Yeah. Because he is a physicist. So the information he passes on, and he passes on everything he can get his hands on, and it's

crucial information that probably saves the Soviets a year or so. And that's really about the amount of time. So if Klaus Fuchs is the key, he's British, he's arrested, he's sentenced to 14 years, ultimately he's released and sent over to Germany. But he names his courier, Harry Gold. And in a big mistake, Harry Gold was a courier for other people as well, which is a problem because once they pressure Harry Gold, he says, well, I actually was a courier as well for a machinist in Los Alamos, an army guy whose name was David Greenglass. Sure. We're talking about the Manhattan Project here, and that's important to explain.

when Albert Einstein warns FDR that the Germans' possible capacity of building a so-called nuclear bomb, the Americans unleash this entire huge effort called the Manhattan Project, and that lands us in the middle of New Mexico with Los Alamos. And all these scientists now famously, Oppenheimer, the movie, and all the rest, are out there in the middle of nowhere, basically imagining and researching how to build this bomb, which they do. In the course of that highly secretive operation, the American, Americans thought this was all happening under a cloak of secrecy. Little did they know, there were numerous or at least four different spies operating independently

within that community, as I understand it. And Klaus Fuchs was the most prominent of them eventually, but they were all answering to a guy named Harry Gold, who was camped out in a hotel room in Santa Fe. I mean, it was as obvious as that. It's crazy when you go into this stuff. And so these scientists who were working for their contacts were literally getting into car and driving down to Santa Fe and meeting with this guy and saying this is what we were doing. All that was going on. It's just hard to believe they didn't know it, but they didn't. They didn't. I know, you look back and go, how could you possibly not know? I mean, this seems like such an isolated community. Everybody's watching the comings and goings. Like, how do they not see this? There's evidence that they're tracking

people, but maybe it's the wrong people. I think they trusted Klaus Fuchs so much. He babysat for their children. So I think that was a completely surprise for them. They were doing security checks, but they were security checks that, you know, nothing like what we would look at today. At some point, the trail leads to two people named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Let's talk about these two people and how they were connected. They marry in 1939. Let's get the background on them personally. Both active members of the Communist Party. Tell me about these two people. Right. So Ethel was born back in 1915. She had worked in a variety. of secretarial jobs. At one point, she even worked for the census in D.C., but she's from a

Lower East Side of New York. She is from a Jewish immigrant family, and she joins the Communist Party through an interaction with a labor organization, where she sees that workers are not being treated well. And I think none of this makes sense, unless we put it in the context of the Great Depression. They're both she and then Julius, born a few years later, but they meet, they go to the same high school, but they don't actually meet there. They meet later through the Communist Party. They both are in New York City seeing the devastation of unemployment and in some cases starvation and breadlines in New York City during the Great Depression. And they say, there's got to be a better way as the communists are questioning. Maybe capitalism isn't the answer.

They believe the hype that there's full employment in the Soviet Union, which we now know is not exactly actually correct. And so they meet through the Communist Party. Julius had gone to college, City College of New York. He had a bachelor's degree in science in electrical engineering. He worked at Emerson Radio Corporation. He worked with the Army Signal Corps until they fired him when they found out he was a member of the Communist Party. He then starts a small business with his brother. in law. And that doesn't go well. They're not terribly good at it for a variety of reasons.

I don't know. Communists, not good business people. There might be something there. I don't know. And so he, once the war begins, certainly. I mean, they're married in 1939, which is a really interesting point, right? By this point, World War II, rise of fascism, Hitler, all this. And they both look to the Soviet Union as the strongest force against the war. the rise of fascism. So it's not just, though it is a great deal, I think, to do with supporting communism. It's also, as Jewish Americans, these are the people who are going to support us, right? They see the rise of anti-Semitism, even in the United States, as we know, throughout the 1930s, especially, and so they're concerned. And so they marry, they have two children, one in

1943, one in 1947, and Ethel, because these boys are a little challenging, and they will acknowledge that, she stays home with them. He working with the company with David, his brother-in-law, it's not going great. He then goes to the Soviet embassy and says, I'd like to spy for you. Wow. So this moment always confuses me. How in the world would people make that choice? I mean, he's working for, he's a civilian engineer. He's working. He's working for. He's a civilian engineer. He's for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the war, right, at a place called Fort Monmouth, where they research guided missiles, radar, communications. So he's in the midst of all this military technology. So he has useful stuff. But the choice to become a spy, especially not under duress,

which it sounds like he wasn't, is a very strange thing, right? He didn't need the money necessarily, or did he? No. In fact, so, you know, the FBI tracks like why people spy, right? for a variety of reasons. And for him it was ideological. Yeah, right. He believed, and again, we can disagree with this or we can think this is naive, but this is truly what he thought, that any military information that the United States have should be shared with the Soviets because, of course, by 1941, the Soviets are

our allies in fighting Nazi Germany. All right. And then Japan. So in his mind, this information needs to go to our allies. if the government isn't doing it, I'll do it myself. Now, we know that that's a step beyond legally, but that's truly what he believed. And ultimately feeling that the world was a safer place if they could more quickly defeat fascism and share military technology to make sure the world after the war was safer for his children and his grandchildren. I have in my notes that

he was recruited by the Soviets. Is it the same thing, him going there and volunteering versus recruitment? Yeah, I think when he first shows up, they're like, who's this crazy guy? And then they follow up when they realize he does have access to some pretty important military, military technology. At that point, the couple ceases their open activities with the Communist Party. They go a bit underground, I suppose. They cancel their daily worker subscription, probably at the behest of their handlers, I would imagine. Let's not announce ourselves to the world here. And Julius is discharged by the army in 1945. He had lied about his membership to the Communist Party, correct?

Yes. Hard to imagine how intense was Cold War anti-communism. We really have to keep reminding ourselves of that which we have grown so inured to at this point. Like it's not, you know, it's still in the news these days, but we just have no idea how present it was in that time. Okay, so let me imagine this. At the end of the war, Julius has spent... a couple of years spying for the Soviets from his place. But of course, we talked a lot about Los Alamos.

Where's the connection to the atomic secrets happening? Is that through his brother or his brother-in-law, right? Yeah. So David Greenglass was a machinist at Los Alamos. And he had access to some information, pretty negligible, frankly, especially when you compare it to someone like Klaus Fuchs as a trained businessman. But Julius said, you know, whatever you've got, give to me, I'll pass it on. It might be helpful.

I think it's confusing, and I certainly had struggled with this, how much did espionage help with the development of the atomic bomb by the Soviets? To a certain extent, a decent amount. And yet, sometimes they would get information and say, oh, this is what the Americans are doing. We better go in this direction. That might have pulled them off of a track that would have been even more fruitful for them. So it's not as linear and neat as we would like to think. And certainly what David was able

to pass on was, again, not of a huge value. Yeah. I mean, when you get into this, you find out that actually the Russians have been spying when it was in the, before it became an American effort, when it was a British effort to create this nuclear bomb. I mean, that's what comes over to America. They are already spying on this process back in England. So Klaus Fuchs and all that is, is part of that whole connection. So that's what's going to become a big part of this conversation in the aftermath of how much of the Rosenbergs really affect this change for the Soviets, or were they just part of a whole world that was already going on. Anyway, before we talk about the arrest, Lori, I want to explain how big this spy ring is we're talking about here. Obviously,

eventually, it'll be Julius and Ethel, the married couple. But beyond that, we have Ethel's brother, who is David Greenglass, right? He is working at Los Alamos. Who else is in their circle? So because Harry Gold was a courier for Klaus Fuchs, when they question him, he says, I also passed on information from David Greenglass. David Greenglass was Ethel's brother. So Julius's brother-in-law. He said to Julius, I will never talk. I will never plead guilty. And within a few hours hanging out with the FBI, he changes his. June, pleads guilty, and names Julius. And at that point, crucially says, my sister Ethel was not involved. David Greenglass's wife, Ruth, is an important part of this because she is a connection and actually

does carry some information as well. But ultimately, Julius's benefit to the Soviet Union is not necessarily the information he himself provides, though he does provide the technology for the proximity fuse, which was used to shoot down Gary Powers in May of 1960. So it's not that it's negligible from him. There is some military technology that he can pass on. But crucially, he is recruiting and managing aspiring of about a dozen folks. And many of those folks then go, a few of those folks, then go on and create Silicon Valley in the Soviet Union, if you will.

So what the, by arresting him, by getting to choose. Julius, and that's what they use David Greenglass for. Sure, David's a spy, fine. But Julius can name a dozen other people and bring down one of the larger spy rings. Right. And so the key becomes, how do we get Julius to talk? And so David Greenglass figures prominently in all of this, obviously. They basically flip him, right?

He's arrested, and then he has to eventually flip and we'll testify again. them in trials, literally. And they do this, by the way, they flip David by threatening to arrest his wife. Right. And David Greenglass is a spy. He's got a codename. His wife Ruth is a spy. She's got a code name. Julius obviously has several codenames because he's been a spy and a recruiter and runs this spying. The person in this who doesn't have a codename is Ethel. Lori, I want to talk about their arrest. This happens in 1950, am I right? Yes. July of 1950 is when Julius is arrest. And it involves something called the Venona messages, which is basically an encrypted code, right? Yes. So there's a good part and a bad part about Venona. They call them the Venona transcripts. That was the code name. It was the fact that it was the result of the fact that the Americans were able to break the Soviet code in 1940s.

and they wanted to be able to look at diplomatic cables that the Soviets were writing. In part, they were looking to see if they had ever made overtures to the Soviets. I mean, they were checking all kinds of things. So actually, those diplomatic cables that they have access to once they break the code are, they go back to 1939. But this is incredibly secret operation. They do not want the Soviets to know that they've broken this code because they're still looking at the cables. So even Harry Truman, President Truman, didn't know about this.

The CIA didn't know about it until into the 1950s, which is astonishing. And then Venona is publicly released after the traditional Cold War in 1995. So Klaus Fuchs, as we mentioned, British-born atomic scientist, he's the spy, arrested for giving nuclear secrets from the U.S. and Britain to the Soviet Union, February in 1950. Okay. He confesses, as you've explained. Harry Gold, the courier, who turns out to be the middleman, he's caught up in Fuchs's trial. He is arrested May 23, 1950. He confesses. Finally, Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg are arrested June and July, 1950, Ethel in August. And at that point, they've got everybody in and Greenglass turns on his sister. That's where we're at, at the end of the summer of 1950. When we come back, we're going to talk about the Rosenberg trial. It's the summer of

1950, the hottest days of the Cold War in America. And Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are arrested as kingpins of a World War II Soviet espionage ring operating within the United States. Along with their associates, they are imprisoned, and now must face trials, evidence, and punishment. But how strong was the government's case against the Rosenberg's. What role did family betrayal play? And just how fair was the judicial process, which would lead two American citizens to the electric chair? Lori, what are the charges against them?

So the big one is conspiracy to commit espionage during wartime. And this is under the Espionage Act of 1917, which is an act that has incredibly long legs because it's still around today. Any information affecting national defense doesn't matter if it's going to an ally or an enemy under the espionage. It's so interesting that part of this problem because we're talking about spying on behalf of your ally. And that's a very complicated thing here. It turns out to be real cut and dry later on because the Russians are our enemies and everybody's scared of them. But during World War II,

there are our best friends, or at least we're really important allies. So it's weird that somebody would be punished for helping your ally win the war. But that's what's going on. Right. Well, it's complicated, right, because the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, and we can unpack conspiracy, if you'd like, goes from June of 1944 to June of 1950. And during that time, the Soviets are our allies in World War II. And then when World War II is over, we are not in a declared war. So technically, they're never officially our enemy, but certainly by June of 1950, Americans would argue the opposite. Yeah, right.

It's a lawyer's dream all the nuance of this argument. They go to trial March 6, 1951. Are they tried together or separately? Well, and I would argue this is a real challenge here because today we would never do it like this. They are tried together. And they are tried together because treating them as the Rosenberg's together aids the government's case.

if we tease them apart, as I think historians need to do to get to something closer to the truth, everything was about knowing that Ethel was not a spy, but using her as a lever. That's exactly the word that Jay Edgar Hoover used. Use her as a lever to get Julius to talk. So they arrest him, right? That's July of 1950. He doesn't talk for almost a month. Nothing. I mean, he's never going to talk. But he doesn't talk during that month where they're really pressuring. And they're like, we're going to arrest your wife. And he's like, not talking, not talking. They arrest Ethel, still not talking. She's not talking. Now they're like, this is crap. I mean, we thought he would crack because his wife is now in prison with him. Okay, let's charge them with conspiracy to commit espionage and make it charge against both of them. And the sentence for that is either 30 years up to 30 years.

or death. Yeah. And they really hope, government officials hope this is going to pressure him. And they say he, they, he or both the Rosenbergs, for that matter, gave the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets, which there is no actual thing, right? But they focus on the atomic stuff because they don't want to use the Venona transcripts in the trial because they don't want to make those public. Interesting. And the only way they can get the atomic stuff is on the testimony of David Greenglass. Yes.

And so they pressure David that they're going to arrest his wife. And he famously, at the beginning, says Ethel had nothing to do with it. She wasn't involved. Eight days before the trial, they say, no, really, we're arresting your wife today if you don't talk. And he breaks, changes his story and says, Ethel typed reports. Yes. which he admitted in 2001 that he lied. Wow.

This is what I mentioned before about family betrayal, which is a big part of this story. So you have, just to be clear, if people get this, Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, she was Ethel Greenglass, where she married Julius, he was a machinist out at Los Alamos. He's involved in the Manhattan Project directly.

He basically throws his sister under the bus in the course of this, right? That's the story here. and he does this to save his own skin and his own wife, right? Yes, and he even, I mean, he explains it a bit in 2001 in an interview on 60 Minutes, where he says, you know, in my generation, your wife is more important than your sister. Yeah, pretty harsh. Right. It's my wife, you know, it's our children.

And he did not, at least at that point in that interview, have any regrets. I have four sisters. They would not be happy. Right. That would not ride. Well, there was a whole dynamic. of Ethel was seven years older and he was the youngest and really spoiled. And I mean, there's a whole family dynamic that I'm sure psychologists have a field day with. But yeah.

David Greenglass. So he changes testimony just days before the trial. Yes. The prosecutor on this case is Roy Cohn, the famous Roy Cohn, who then becomes Joe McCarthy's sidekick. What was their approach to this? So it's Roy Cohn at, by the way, the age of 24. Wow. And he's an assistant U.S. attorney. He's one of the youngest. He's one of five assistants working with prosecutor Irving Sapel. But he makes such a name for himself because he's so open in the months and years after this case that he was the one that basically got her convicted and executed. And he was quite proud of that accomplishment.

What the prosecutors did, because, again, they couldn't use Venona in the courtroom, they had to use David Greenglass's testimony to loop in not just what Julius was doing, but also get him to say that Ethel was involved as well, which is what they did. the defense team is, by all accounts, a bit in over their head, a bit incompetent, Mani Block and his father, Alexander. And it was in part because it was really hard to get good lawyers to go into court and stand up for admitted communists in 1951 because under the Smith Act trials, those lawyers were put in prison for contempt. So lots of lawyers didn't want to have anything to do with this. So I think the blocks took this case on, but again, made some missteps during the trial, perhaps not, didn't serve Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as well as folks would hope.

So explain how this is going. Are they being tried together as a couple or are there more to their more defendants? So it's Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a couple and then a co-defendant Morton Sobel who was not involved in the atomic espionage, but because of testimony they were at least able to get him on conspiracy to commit some sort of espionage. He gets 30 years in prison. He's paroled after 18. And in 2008, he admits that he and Julius were indeed spies. But the trial is, the main focus is on Julius and Ethel. And you're right. They are intertwined in this case.

How dramatic. Tell me about the jury. The jury is 11 men, one woman, one African-American gentleman, and no one who was Jewish, which seemed surprising because this was New York City, and because the judge was Jewish, the defense attorneys were Jewish. The prosecutors were mostly Jewish. And of course, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobel were Jewish. So what it appeared to be is that folks, it kind of speaks to this bifurcation in the Jewish American community, frankly.

So there were many, obviously, Jewish folks living in New York City who said, I don't want to be on this trial. Right. Either they supported the Rosenbergs and knew that that would be prejudicial, or they said, I am opposed to what they did. these were, as they would have said at the time, the bad Jews, and we're going to disassociate, which is kind of what Judge Kaufman says. These are the ones, he's like, I want to be on this case. I am not afraid to impose the death penalty. These are the Jews that are making other Jews look bad.

They are found guilty, March 29, 1951. And on April 5th, a week later or so, they are sentenced to death. Gold gets 30 years. Greenglass gets 15 years. Sobel gets 30 years, five of those in Arn Alcatraz, and thus begins the appeals process, which happens after every conviction, but never mind death convictions. And that's going to last two years. Two years is going to be important here because this is when the traction for the public begins

and the whole questioning of this thing and sort of everybody dividing into camps over this deal. Explain what happens in April 1951 when now everyone's aware of the consequences of what has taken place. Yeah, it's so fascinating because the jury convicts them, says they are guilty. But it's Judge Kaufman who has to sentence them. And he's debating what to do. And he actually calls Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn says, you know, this is your baby, but you got to do it. In fact, his line is, Roy Cone said,

Ethel alone was the ringleader who led Julius around by a leash. She's older. she's the one with the brains. And Judge Kaufman decides, okay, we're going to impose the death sentence. Again, still hoping they will talk. And I think it's important to understand that at any point they could have talked when he decides to impose the death sentence.

Judge Kaufman says, I want their sons who are young little ones. They'll be six and ten when they're executed. have them visit the prison. I want the looming death sentence to continue to be pressure on them because the hope is that they will talk. That's the reason why they bring the sons to remind them. If you don't talk, these children will lose their parents, right? This is what's at risk here. They allow them to see each other occasionally.

They write to each other. There's communication in part, again, because they just want them to talk. no one in the government is excited, well, maybe Roy Cohn, but no one really in the government is excited about the possibility of executing a young mother. As best as we can tell, Julius doesn't talk. And I think there's slightly different reasons for both of them, quite honestly, if Ethel talks, she's got to name her husband, right? And that destroys her family. If Julius talks, and I think they both understood this, that if they named other, spies in their spy ring who they were friends with, whatever they were going through. They didn't

want other families to go through the same thing. Einstein speaks out about this. The Pope speaks out about this. Clemency is denied by Truman and Eisenhower, despite the sons. It's all this stuff is in the news all over the place. So technically, Truman never has the opportunity to deny clemency. He kicks it down the road and decides that Eisenhower should deal with it. So Eisenhower, the The president's options are pardon and release, which is really never going to happen, commute their sentence to 30 years, which many folks thought was a good idea because in that time, maybe they'd talk. Yeah, right. Or allow the judge's ruling to stand. And Eisenhower twice rejects executive clemency and doesn't want to override the court system.

And he decides to let the judge's ruling stand. And he does this, and we know this from letters, especially the letters he wrote to his son, John. where he says Julius is the slave, Ethel is the master, she's a red spider, she's a bad mother who's willing to abandon her children, she's the leader of the spy ring, and if Eisenhower says, I commute Ethel's sentence, then the Soviets will only recruit among women. So that would make him, he thought, look weak. But you're right.

I mean, tons of folks come out against this quite famously, Pablo Picasso, and Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt. They all write to Eisenhower. It's when the Pope comes out that it makes life very difficult for Eisenhower because, again, this is the Cold War. You're trying to bring all the religions together to fight atheistic communism. And Pope Pius, the 12th, comes out in January of 1953 and says, yeah, communism bad, but killing people worse.

And he condemns those executions. That means the protests that were picking up steam in places like London and Paris are now going to spread rapidly around the world through Catholic regions, especially in Latin America. Wow. Ethel will be the only second woman to be executed by the United States, by federal authorities, after Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for her role in the Lincoln assassination. I mean, that's how rare it is for the government to execute. Sheet a woman. Yes, and they'll be the first civilians executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. And I always think it's fascinating to think about what we did with folks prior to this.

So you look at someone like Tokyo Rose, right, who in 1949 got 10 years, she was released after six, and then Ford pardoned her in 1977. Axis Sally. These are both people who were convicted of treason during World War II. Axis Sally arrested again 1949 served 12 years and the cases against them were so much stronger this one just doesn't quite fit

June 19th 1953 is the fateful day when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining New York I can't imagine a more dramatic event given everything that has happened over the last several years

and the stakes involved on so many levels Can you describe that day and what happened, how we went through it? Sure. The machinations that are going on behind the scenes are really fascinating. We know that there are issues with the Supreme Court and there's a stay of execution that's then overturned and all very dramatic last minute things by the defense attorneys as well, where they even tried under the wrong hate, you know, the wrong act, they argue

with the last minute. Like, it's just a blurry of legal activity. but when it's determined that they will be executed on Friday, the realization that the regular time, regularly scheduled executions occurred at Sing Sing in Old Sparky at 11 p.m. And that would be during the Sabbath. And so the defense attorney says you cannot execute a Jewish couple during the Sabbath, thinking that that's going to give him a couple of more days.

And instead, Judge Kaufman says, okay, the fine, then we'll execute them at 8 p.m. instead. So it's this in much more rushed activity. They have not a proper last meal. They have a very quick last meal of hard-boiled eggs, macaroni salad, and tea. It's a busy activity, very clustered running to get the electrician in in time because he wasn't even there. and they decide to execute Julius first because if if they went Ethel first and then Julius confessed, they would have killed a mother.

So they said, all right, we're going to do Julius first. So they strap him in at 804, five leather straps, 2,000 volts of electricity, a leather face mask. He does a jolt then two more joltz and two minutes later he's declared dead

at 8.06 p.m. They bring Ethel in and they say to her you know, Julius is gone. Can you name anyone to save yourself for your children? And she apparently said I have no names to give. I'm prepared to die. Wow.

They put her in the chair that they've just cleaned up. up from where her husband has been killed. And they strap her in and they give her the same amount of electricity. But the problem is she's about five feet tall and he's five foot nine. And the chair is not as good a fit for her. And so after the same amount of electricity, they check her, the stethoscope, they see, she's still alive.

They're horrified. They have to restrap her. They give her more jolts. At that point, a bit of a bloom of smoke comes out from the top of her head, by all accounts, a horrifying situation. And what we now refer to as a botched execution. And they are both declared dead now at 816, which is after sunset, which is technically during the Sabbath. Oh, God, that's shocking. And it happened on the Sabbath anyway.

Yes. The trials have concluded the execution's complete. The bodies are in the ground. But the story is far from over. Decades later, there is new evidence and old secrets revealed. Now, those questions become echoes. Was this justice? Or just a Cold War tragedy?

This is American History hit, Part 3, the Rosenberg case. Lori, Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution reads, Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or confession in an open court. So did these crimes fit the definition of treason? I would say no.

No, they did not. And the problem is that it's complicated, right? Because we know it's conspiracy to commit espionage, right? Which is not espionage. It's conspiracy, right? We're going to conspire, work together to plan to spy. That's not treason. And yet, when Judge Kaufman sentences them,

not only does he blame Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for causing the Korean War, he says millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. By saying treason there, he has planted the seed that they were charged under the Espionage Act, but perhaps executed due to treason. And even the FBI website gets this wrong. The NSA, the National Security Agency, had a publication that claimed they were executed for treason. And historians have redone this.

So it's not unusual for there to be a complication in your head that, oh, it must have been treasoned. Technically, it was not. Instead, as you've told us before, they were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, much lower burden of proof. And this is because the Soviets were our allies back in those. We've gone over all of this, but that's what we're dealing with in the aftermath are the continuing questions of, wait a minute.

You know, there are so many double standards here compared to other cases and all the rest of that. How could you actually go ahead and kill these people? Or certainly the wife who was not the kingpin that she was described to be by the judge, never mind all the question marks as to, you know, the justification of it all. Amazing. Today they're remembered as martyrs by many. Why do you think? I mean, what qualifies them as such looking back? The Soviet Union during the appeals process is remarkably quiet about the Rosenberg case. After the execution, they say, yep, they helped us. They were one of ours. There were martyrs

to the global communist cause. There are streets named after them in Cuba. There are streets probably named after them in Eastern European countries. They become a cause-seleb for the communist because now that they're dead, they can claim them as one of their own. And they actually, even Khrushchev,

talks about them and makes up things about how much they contributed to the bomb effort. So that's part of that legacy. And I think a legacy that we have to complicate, right? that's not necessarily that straightforward. Yeah. Well, the funeral eulogy is given by W.B. Du Bois, I mean, African-American intellectual, the famous scholar, he says they died because they would not lie.

Boyce also ends up arranging the children's adoption. Where did they end up? I'm curious about the children. Yeah, they turn out great. The boys, Michael and Robert, they were six and ten when their parents were killed. They were adopted by a lovely couple, the Mirapoles, Abel Maripoles. Abel Maripole. The dad actually was the author of the song, the anti-lynching song, Strange Fruit. So they were, by all accounts, loving and liberal and creative and provided a really stable environment for the sons to grow up in, where they took the Maripole's name. And according to Michael and Robert, they didn't even tell friends until they were well into their adulthood.

They just set that aside and had a relatively normal upbringing. So in the end, Julius was certainly guilty. I mean, this is proven out by what we've talked about, the Venona. But what is he guilty of? Exactly. Right. Did he hand the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets? No.

Did he run a medium-sized firing that provided some crucial military technology? Yes. Absolutely. Is that an execution offense? Or do you just keep him in prison and hope he, names the other people to bring this whole spiring to Justin. Many people talk about this as being kind of the Dreyfus affair of the United States, the famous anti-Semitic trial that happened in Paris back in early 20th century. There's a lot of themes in this case that speak to that. And of course,

it comes out in Angels in America and all kinds of things later on about how much Roy Cohn is involved in this and his own themes, which are so deep. It's incredible how, Plex the story gets after the fact, never mind before. Yeah. There's a long legacy of complications. It's in the 1970s. The FBI finally releases documents that prove that Julius was a spy, but likely Ethel was not. We get more documents released. As late as 2024, we get a NSA document that says, quote, Ethel knew about her husband's work, but the due to ill health, she did not engage. in the work herself. And that was, I mean, just last year.

So that was very late in the process to say she was not an active spy. She was used as a lever. As the FBI agent said, we didn't want them to die. We wanted them to talk. Right, exactly. She called our bluff. Right. The collapse of the Soviet Union also sheds a lot of light on this.

Documents come out to the fact that they were working with the Soviets. Julius had a handler who wrote a book about the fact, you know, in his own memoir. He records Julius as saying, if I can do anything to help, you can count on me. Supplied 600 to 1,000 pages. All these things come out later on. It's an incredibly dark chapter of American history. You've written a book on this subject now. Have we closed the book on this, or is it still something to be considered in understanding, you know, ourselves as a nation, I suppose, as naive as that sounds.

but I mean, how we process this stuff even as a death penalty issue. It's fascinating. Never mind, you know, what is conspiracy to commit treason, you know, espionage? I think as a historian, I have to say that there's so much to learn from it. I am constantly surprised either how little my students know about it or how incorrect the knowledge is that they have. So for me, it only be every time I open a textbook and it says treason, I write to the author and say that's wrong, you know, trying to get the record straight.

That's what historians do, right? And we want to get this straight. This took a journey that I did not anticipate. I didn't know that there was a global protest movement that encompassed 48 countries and 84 cities around the world. I didn't realize what a propaganda battle we lost here. And that's fascinating because Eisenhower's known for being the propaganda guy. So that part of it was super interesting. I think getting, looping back to the idea of traitor, if you look at what Julius Rosenberg did, he would have handed the bomb to the Soviets if he had it. He would have handed anything. He believed that would make the world a better place. He believed he was helping an ally. He believed he was supporting global communism. He believed he was working as an anti-fascist.

We generally don't like civilians to make those decisions, right? Well, also, if he'd If he'd explain that to anybody, you know, in court, it would have made a big difference. But in 1951 would have because everything was so anti-communist that they would have been just like, you know, communism bad. Like just there's, you know, he's a fool to support the Soviets, you know. But was the death penalty stated because of their stonewalling or was it going to happen anyway is the big question? I mean, hard to know. Lori, it's an incredibly difficult story that, you know, probably its complexities is one of the reasons that has been sort of subsumed into our culture, you know. You can't deal with it.

It's so much to think about. So people just prefer to leave it behind. But here we are. Lori Clune is a professor of history at Cal State University of Fresno. She publishes across the board on propaganda, communism, and the 1950s, and is the author of executing the Rosenberg's death and diplomacy in a Cold War world. What's new on your horizon, Lori? Should people look you up anywhere? They can always find me through the Fresno State

History Department website. We're always doing pretty amazing things. I am blessed to be an incredible department with remarkable folks and doing some stuff on game history right now, changing a little bit. Interesting. Well, I hope to meet with you again sometime soon

and really appreciate your time. Thank you for the opportunity. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, Two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.