Essay On The Rosenberg Case

The Rosenberg Case

On June 19, 1953, there came an end to what would become known as “the trial of the century”. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted for being Soviet spies and leaking crucial information about the creation of atomic weapons to the Soviet Union. They were sentenced to death and executed by use of the electric chair, leaving behind two orphaned children. However, they have never admitted to committing this crime and their involvement in the leaking of the so-called Manhattan Project was never thoroughly proved. Their execution came to be known as one of the main events characteristic of the Cold War environment in the United States of the 1950s, which was influenced by the phenomenon of McCarthyism. This essay will examine the Rosenberg Case up close. It will first look at the course of their trial. Then it will take a step back and describe the Cold War environment in which the trial took place, which was being dominated by anti-communist sentiment, the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy. In combining these two sections, this essay will seek to explain how the Rosenberg Case neglected American values of freedom and tolerance, and how this neatly fitted the environment of the Cold War.

To illustrate the ideas this essay proposes, it will first give a clear and factual overview of the Rosenberg Case. It all began even before the Rosenbergs came into the picture, namely with the arrest and confession of soviet spy Klaus Fuchs in 1950. This namely led to the investigation of his courier, Harry Gold, and then David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother. Greenglass cooperated and named Julius Rosenberg as a fellow spy, claiming that he provided Julius with documents from the Los Alamos lab where atomic bombs were fab...

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...defensible.

The Rosenberg Case is still a controversial topic today. With the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American values such as liberty and tolerance were relegated into the background. With ambiguous evidence, their sentence is viewed as neither legally nor historically defensible. It is the product of the era that the trial took place in, which was ruled by Cold War sentiment, Red Scare and McCarthyism. The case sparked a lot of debate and protest abroad, but the Rosenbergs were nevertheless executed. It remains and will ever remain ambiguous if they were actually Soviet spies, to what extent the information they might have leaked would have been of use to the Soviet Union, and if their executions were justified. But in the McCarthy-era, their executions functioned perfectly for fueling the Red Scare and strengthening the Cold War environment.