Authors: Jim Newton
Julius worked as a civilian employee of the Army Signal Corps, and David, then an Army sergeant, by chance secured a position with the atomic weapons lab at Los Alamos. The two men got those positions despite their Communist histories, in part by lying or evading government questions. For Julius, the lies caught up with him on March 26, 1945; government agents discovered his former membership in the Communist Party—and his lies to cover up that fact—and he was let go. David, meanwhile, continued his work at Los Alamos, an all-but-open Communist assigned to the most secret project of the war. He was hardly awed by those responsibilities. On the day that scientists exploded their bomb on the New Mexico plain, Greenglass slept in.
After the war, the two men tried their luck at running a small machine shop, but that, too, was a disappointment. They resumed their modest lives, giving no hint that they shared a terrifying secret.
Then, in 1950, a spy ring that had infiltrated Los Alamos began to unravel with the arrest, confession, and conviction of Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré who had worked on the Manhattan Project and now acknowledged sharing secrets with Soviet contacts. Authorities identified Greenglass as one of those associates, and he in turn fingered his brother-in-law. The evidence against Julius was strong. Questioned by the prosecutor Roy Cohn, Greenglass described Julius’s efforts to recruit him and other scientists to supply information to the Soviet Union. He admitted that he had personally given Rosenberg drawings and other classified material. By contrast, the case against Ethel was notably weak; Greenglass said his sister had typed up notes of secret information in his presence, but that testimony was uncorroborated. FBI agents knew the case against Ethel was less compelling, but prosecutors pursued it to gain leverage over Julius, hoping he would confess and cooperate if Ethel faced prison. Neither she nor he gave in. “She called our bluff,” William Rogers, then the deputy attorney general, said many years later.
The couple went to trial in early 1951, with the Korean War blazing and in a disquieting atmosphere of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. On March 29, 1951, Julius and Ethel were convicted of violating the Espionage Act. One week later, Judge Irving Kaufman, ignoring the vastly different strengths of their cases, imposed identical sentences. His remarks at sentencing serve as a stark testament to the fear that espionage and subversion created in Cold War America:
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.
For his crimes, Greenglass was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served ten. A co-defendant, Morton Sobell, who had been a classmate of Julius’s at City College, was sentenced to thirty years; he was freed in 1969. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were condemned to die.
By the time Eisenhower was inaugurated, the Rosenbergs had been tried, convicted, and sentenced. Their appeals, however, continued, and as their executions drew closer, their supporters stepped up the intensity of their efforts to have the sentences commuted or overturned. From its earliest weeks, the new administration was immediately confronted with the question of whether to grant clemency to Julius and Ethel. Eisenhower raised the issue with his cabinet on February 13, 1953. He argued that there were no substantial issues raised by the trial record and no obvious national interest served by sparing their lives. He emphasized the seriousness of their crimes and worried that granting pardons to either or both would undermine the work of the Justice Department. Ike said he was denying their pardon applications but refusing to shut the door on their appeals. There was still time before their scheduled execution date, and “if anyone … believes by keeping them alive we can serve [the] interests of the country, we’ll reverse.”
Over the next four months, the White House was deluged with letters and telegrams, pleading for pardon, commutation, or execution. The pope asked for clemency. The Rosenberg children wrote begging the president to spare their parents. The foreign press overwhelmingly viewed them with sympathy; the opposition to their execution in France was so fierce that the ambassador there cabled his deep concern for the long-term effects on U.S.-French relations if the executions were carried out.
Still, Eisenhower and his top advisers never wavered from a central conclusion: they believed, without exception, that both Julius and Ethel were guilty of a heinous offense against the United States that had jeopardized lives and national security. They did not distinguish between their relative guilt. Indeed, Ike believed, if anything, that Ethel was the more significant traitor. He blanched at executing a woman but did not hesitate. “It is the woman who is [the] strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one,” Eisenhower wrote to his son, John. “She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring.”
On the same day that Ike wrote that note to his son, Ethel wrote to Eisenhower. Until then, she had refrained from appealing to him directly, inhibited, she said, by “a certain innate shyness, an embarrassment almost.” With the hour of her death fast approaching, she abandoned her reserve. Written on Sing Sing stationery, her appeal was both cloying and angry. Ethel asserted her innocence and that of her husband but focused most intently on their sentences. To impose the death penalty, she argued, was an act of vengeance, not justice. “As Commander-in-Chief of the European theatre, you had ample opportunity to witness the wanton and hideous tortures that such a policy of vengeance has wreaked upon vast multitudes of guiltless victims. Today, while these ghastly mass butchers, these obscene racists, are graciously receiving the benefits of mercy and in many instances being reinstated in public office, the great democratic United States is proposing the savage destruction of a small, unoffending Jewish family, whose guilt is seriously doubted throughout the length and breadth of the civilized world.” Eisenhower did not respond. The following day, Brownell once again recommended that he deny the Rosenbergs’ final petition.
The Rosenbergs made one last appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and, to the amazement of many observers, this time appeared to find purchase. William O. Douglas, the Court’s cantankerous and iconoclastic liberal, agreed that there was a constitutional question raised by the death sentence (the Rosenbergs had been sentenced by Kaufman under the Espionage Act of 1917, but a subsequent statute, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, required that a jury impose such a sentence. Since the Rosenbergs were indicted for violating the Espionage Act but tried after the enactment of the Atomic Energy Act, Douglas concluded that there was a question of whether the sentence had been properly imposed). He issued a stay just as the Court was concluding its term, then promptly left town to begin his annual summer vacation. Brownell, furious at the prospect of a long delay—Dulles described it as a “hell of a mess”—urged Chief Justice Fred Vinson to reconvene the Court. Vinson did. Over Douglas’s protests, the justices vacated the stay.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953. Before they were walked to the death chamber, a rabbi conveyed a message to each of them from Brownell: if they would supply names of co-conspirators, their executions would be stayed. Julius silently refused. Ethel replied: “No, I have no names to give. I am innocent.” Julius was executed at 8:04 p.m.; Ethel survived the first jolt of electricity at 8:11 p.m. and was killed by two subsequent bursts, dying at 8:16 p.m. The Sabbath had begun at 8:13 p.m. The Dulles brothers and Brownell, scheduled to spend that evening at a Senators’ game, decided it would be unseemly to be seen enjoying themselves while the Rosenbergs were put to death. They canceled those plans, and gathered instead for a quiet, private dinner.
Brownell and Eisenhower never had second thoughts about the executions; Brownell died believing that there was no “lingering doubt” about their guilt. Only half a century later would David Greenglass admit that he did not know whether his sister typed the notes, as he alleged on the stand; once freed from prison, he acknowledged that it could well have been his wife, not his sister. Long-withheld grand jury testimony reinforced Ethel’s innocence. Today, history’s verdict is far sounder than Justice’s was in 1953: Julius Rosenberg was a spy, a fact confirmed by Soviet intelligence cables and archives (his code name was Liberal, often shortened to Libi); Ethel was merely the wife of Julius, aware of his activities but not a participant. She died because her brother used her to deflect attention away from his wife and because the Justice Department was willing to sacrifice her in order to put pressure on her husband. By the time that verdict was rendered, however, she was long dead, her boys orphaned. They were six and ten when their parents were put to death.
Both the Rosenberg prosecution and Kaufman’s sentence were influenced by the Korean War, which framed the charges as threats to American servicemen. The Rosenbergs almost lived long enough to see it end. Through the spring and summer, the administration, led by John Foster Dulles, blended threat and blandishment to try to end hostilities. The very nature of the conflict—a conventional war fought underneath the American nuclear umbrella—defied the essential assumption of nuclear deterrence. On February 9, Mark Clark, then the commanding general of the UN forces in Korea and the man who first recommended Ike to General Marshall, warned of a “strong possibility that any enemy offensive will be covered by large scale air action.” He asked for permission to launch strikes against air bases in Manchuria. Two days later, the National Security Council considered Clark’s warning, and Eisenhower raised the existential question of the conflict: UN and Communist forces were deadlocked, so should nuclear weapons be deployed?
Omar Bradley, now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, advised against letting America’s allies know that the United States was considering escalating the conflict, and Dulles grudgingly observed that the Soviets had succeeded in convincing the world that atomic weapons belonged “in a special category.” It annoyed Ike to be boxed in by Soviet propaganda. If the Allies objected to dropping atomic bombs, he complained, they could cough up a few more divisions in order to drive out the Communist forces.
In March, Ike again raised the use of nuclear weapons with the reservation that their use be determined by military judgments as to their effectiveness against military targets. A meeting of the Joint Chiefs that same week made clear that the administration had “no unshakeable policy barrier to the use of atomic weapons”; rather, it was studying the diplomatic implications and military utility in the Korean terrain. At the end of that month, Eisenhower reiterated his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger. It would, he said, be “worth the cost” if it secured a substantial victory and captured the “waist of Korea,” dividing that country to the West’s strategic advantage.
As the UN, led by the United States, negotiated for an armistice—complicated by how to return prisoners of war held by each side, including the thorny issue of what to do with captured North Korean and Chinese soldiers who wanted to remain in South Korea—President Rhee proved a singularly unhelpful ally. He strenuously pressed for Korean unification under his rule and thwarted attempts at a peace that would leave the nation divided. When Chinese and North Korean officials proposed resuming peace talks in the spring, Rhee angrily threatened to expel American troops unless they were willing to fight on. If a peace agreement was reached that allowed Chinese troops to remain in Korea, Rhee informed Eisenhower, “we have to ask all the friendly nations whose armed forces are now fighting in Korea and who do not desire to join with us in our determination to defeat aggressive communism and drive up to the Yalu River, to withdraw from Korea.”
Ike reined in his temper, reiterated the United States’ “common cause with the Korean people,” and reminded Rhee that UN forces had repelled the invasion and restored South Korea roughly to its prewar borders, though he conceded that he was “deeply disturbed” by Rhee’s threat. Talks resumed, and exchanges of prisoners began, an important step toward an armistice. Then, in July, Rhee secretly authorized the release of twenty-five thousand North Korean prisoners; South Korea described it as a mass escape, but it was abundantly clear—and eventually admitted—that Rhee had set the prisoners free in order to undermine the negotiations. Livid, Eisenhower now threatened to abandon Rhee to fight the Chinese alone. “Unless you are prepared immediately and unequivocally to accept the authority of the UN Command to conduct the present hostilities and bring them to a close, it will be necessary to effect another arrangement,” Eisenhower advised his Korean counterpart. John Eisenhower was blunter: “I guess Syngman Rhee pretty well scuttled the truce.”
If Rhee did not succeed, it was not for lack of trying. He never gave up his dream of uniting the country under his rule, and his periodic demands of American support were a recurring theme throughout the 1950s. In the meantime, Eisenhower’s anger had the desired effect. Rhee backed down, and negotiations went forward.
In addressing enemies, Eisenhower was no less firm. Administration officials quietly informed India’s government, then acting as an intermediary to China, that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons to bring the Korean War to an end. Although it is difficult to know how seriously Mao regarded that threat, Eisenhower believed it had rattled his adversary. Asked years later by Sherman Adams what had motivated China to negotiate a truce, Ike answered without hesitation. “Danger of an atomic war,” he said.