The truth about the Rosenbergs

There was a startling story that cropped up last week. Martin Sobel, a co-defendant with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who is now 91, admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg were indeed spying for the Soviet Union. As Ronald Radosh, a historian who has written much about Soviet spying in the United States during the Cold War, explains why it is important to us today to acknowledge that Julius Rosenberg was really a spy.

With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple's trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

To this day, this received wisdom permeates our educational system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple were innocent or that the trial was "controversial," or they "excuse what [the Rosenbergs] did by saying, 'It wasn't that bad. What they provided wasn't important.' "

Indeed, Columbia University professor Eric Foner once wrote that the Rosenbergs were prosecuted out of a "determined effort to root out dissent," part of a broader pattern of "shattered careers and suppressed civil liberties." In other words, it was part of the postwar McCarthyite "witch hunt."

But, in fact, Schweikart is right, and Foner is wrong. The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and not minor ones either. Not only did they try their best to give the Soviets top atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, they succeeded in handing over top military data on sonar and on radar that was used by the Russians to shoot down American planes in the Korean and Vietnam wars. That's long been known, and Sobell confirmed it again last week.

I can testify to that is how the story of the Rosenbergs is covered in history textbooks. They are part of the narrative about the Red Scare in the 1950s so that the point is to demonstrate American paranoia during the Cold War, which is certainly a topic to be explored, but not part of the story about what the Soviet Union was actually doing at the time.

As Radosh also discusses in his column the government's hands are not clean in the way they conducted the investigation and trial. And Ethel Rosenberg, while she seemed to have known what her husband was doing, should not have been executed for treason. That is part of the story also. But Sobel's admission today should now be part of the historical narrative of that era.