Lori Clune. Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World.
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/122.4.1254a
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoIn December 2016, President Barack Obama received an appeal from Robert and Michael Meeropol, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in June 1953 by the U.S. government after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. The Meeropols (who took the name of the couple who later adopted them) asked Obama to exonerate their mother, Ethel, who they believe was wrongly convicted after her brother, David Greenglass, testified against the couple. Although the brothers conceded that their father was a spy, they disputed the charge that he turned over atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Obama did not respond to their request. In Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World, Lori Clune also accepts Julius’s guilt and Ethel’s likely innocence, based upon the release in the 1990s of transcripts from the Venona counterintelligence project and documents from the former USSR. After a brief reexamination of the case against the couple, Clune correctly points out that, guilty or not, the Rosenbergs were not arrested in a vacuum. Indeed, the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and spied for the Soviets, led to the discovery of Julius’s spy ring. The FBI arrested the couple shortly after North Korea invaded South Korea, and less than a year after the Soviets successfully tested their own nuclear weapon. In justifying the death sentence, Judge Irving Robert Kaufman specifically cited the invasion and the Soviet nuclear test. World events and actual arrests had created a justifiable fear, on a bipartisan basis, that American democracy was under assault.
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