Volume 30, Number 12 · July 21, 1983
Were the Rosenbergs Framed?
By Joyce Milton, Ronald Radosh
Invitation to an Inquest
by Walter Schneir, by Miriam Schneir
Pantheon, 522 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman in 1951 and were executed on June 19, 1953. The Rosenbergs were accused of conspiring to spy for a wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and not for the nation's enemies. Judge Kaufman, nevertheless, justified killing them on the grounds that their crime was uniquely repugnant. The Rosenbergs, he charged, were not only responsible for putting the atomic bomb into the hands of the Russians, but their treachery had 'already caused the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000.'[1] The Rosenbergs maintained that they were wholly innocent and went to their deaths supported by the knowledge that their case had produced a worldwide outcry of protest.
Review, 4365 words
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