Ronald Radosh, writing history and then forgetting it

Way back in 1983, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published a monument of Cold War scholarship, The Rosenberg File, arguing that while Julius Rosenberg was a very active and successful spy for the Soviet Union, whose conviction though not execution for espionage was well merited, the arrest, indictment, trial, conviction, sentencing, and ultimate execution of his wife was a continuing legal and moral travesty, contrived, not as a consequence of Ethel’s guilt but rather solely as a means of forcing Julius to tell what he knew about Soviet espionage in the U.S. When the Rosenbergs called the government’s bluff, the government cruelly called theirs.

In The Rosenberg File, the authors demonstrate the extent of Julius Rosenberg’s guilt, but they also repeatedly emphasize the thinness of the case against Ethel, whose conviction turned largely on some very convenient testimony from her brother David Greenglass and his wife Ruth, claiming that Ethel had typed up some handwritten documents containing information on the design of the atomic bombs being constructed in Los Alamos in World War II. The authors tell us that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover urged President Eisenhower to commute Ethel’s sentence to life imprisonment but that Ike refused and that when Supreme Court Justice William Douglas granted a stay of execution, expecting that the stay would delay the executions for weeks if not months, Attorney General Herbert Brownell and Chief Justice Carl Vinson “rammed” through a special hearing the next day that overturned the stay.¹ Up until the moment of his execution, FBI agents were standing by with a list of questions they wanted to ask Julius, including the question “How much did your wife know of your activities?” Ethel Rosenberg was executed in an attempt to force her husband to tell the FBI whether or not she was innocent.

In demonstrating, well beyond a reasonable doubt, Julius Rosenberg’s guilt, the authors called down upon their heads an ocean of obloquy from the outraged Left, deprived of one of its most sacred martyrs. While Milton, in subsequent books, chose to write about less controversial folks, like Charlie Chaplin and the Lindberghs,² Radosh has been happily returning blow for blow ever since.

Radosh has every right to resent the continuing campaigns to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, as ever new waves of new lefties, as well as aging generations of now old new lefties, struggle to find new excuses for Rosenberg’s crimes. But fighting monsters can tend to make one, well, a little testy. The Rosenberg File was reissued in 1995, with a few added pages noting that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, and the release of the Verona transcripts, there is even more evidence confirming Julius Rosenberg’s role as a Soviet spy. Text added to the book acknowledges the questionableness of the “typing” testimony offered by David and Ruth,³ but points out that Ethel certainly did send the Greenglasses a letter telling them that would be receiving a visit from a “family friend,” said friend being actually a courier for the KGB. So then Ethel did deserve to die? The point is not explored. More to the point, the extensive pro-Ethel, and anti-prosecution text of the original book was left to stand unrevised.

In 2016, one can forgive Radosh for being more than a little testy that yet another wave of revision is proceeding, which he correctly denounces in a Weekly Standard “podcast” here and in a recent book review here. But in the course of the book review, Radosh can summon no more indignation over the Rosenbergs’ deaths than to say that their execution was “ill-advised”.⁴ Ronnie, you had it right the first time.