Posted on 06/19/2007 11:09:54 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
June 19, 1953 : Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951, are put to death in the electric chair. The execution marked the dramatic finale of the most controversial espionage case of the Cold War.
Julius was arrested in July 1950, and Ethel in August of that same year, on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage. Specifically, they were accused of heading a spy ring that passed top-secret information concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs vigorously protested their innocence, but after a brief trial in March 1951 they were convicted. On April 5, 1951, a judge sentenced them to death. The pair was taken to Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, to await execution.
During the next two years, the couple became the subject of both national and international debate. Many people believed that the Rosenbergs were the victims of a surge of hysterical anticommunist feeling in the United States, and protested that the death sentence handed down was cruel and unusual punishment. Most Americans, however, believed that the Rosenbergs had been dealt with justly.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke for many Americans when he issued a statement declining to invoke executive clemency for the pair. He stated, "I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done."
Julius Rosenberg was the first to be executed, at about 8 p.m. on June 19, 1953. Just a few minutes after his body was removed from the chamber containing the electric chair, Ethel Rosenberg was led in and strapped to the chair. She was pronounced dead at 8:16 p.m. Both refused to admit any wrongdoing and proclaimed their innocence right up to the time of their deaths. Two sons, Michael and Robert, survived them.
I say the whole Rosenberg clan should be treated in a way consistant with their chosen political philosophy.
Nuff said.
The Rosenbergs were involved in espionage for the USSR well before the A-bomb theft. And Ethel apparently recruited her sister’s husband, David Greenglass, when he was assigned to Los Alamos as an Army machinist. She also appears to have helped in typing reports to the russians.
Not to excuse the 'bergs, both of whom deserved to be executed, but our intelligence services (a) knew there was no way an operation the size of Los Alamos would not be compromised, (b) expected the Soviets to have a bomb sometimes after we demonstrated its feasibility over Japan.
The key to having the bomb were top level physicists, many of whom were Jewish. Since after the Holocaust, the two remaining largest populations of Jews were in the US & USSR, guess who had the bombs first?
A memory from the good old days when traitors were executed. Such things are done away in the post-treason age.
I only liked one of his songs anyways...
That was the fall-back position of the revisionists after it became obvious that Julius was guilty. However, there is evidence, as others have posted, that she recruited her brother (not brother-in-law), David Greenglass, into the spy ring and that she typed all of Julius’ reports to his Soviet contact. In his autobiography, Roy Cohn stated his belief that Ethel, not Julius, was the mastermind of the operation; she was older, smarter, and a more committed ideologue than Julius.
I was going by a book I read as a history text in the eighties, which at the time was supposed to be the definitive work. If there’s been more recent information, I defer to it.
I remember the night before their execution going to Broadway and 86th Street in Manhattan with my father to buy a newspaper. There was a very, very large protest to save the Rosenbergs going on. A man approached my father with a petition to sign and my Dad rolled it up and shoved it in the guy’s face along with a punch. The man did nothing and said nothing. I think he knew not to mess with my Dad who as a very patriotic American and a vet. I was only about six years old at the time, but later when I grew up I did read about the Rosenbergs. I think they did it for money.
There is no evidence of that. The Rosenbergs were True Believers in the communist ideology who also thought that the Soviet Union was the only serious obstacle to world hegemony by Nazi Germany and, later, the capitalist USA.
Although I was with my grandparents in Tampa at the time I lived in Okeechobee, FL, a small cow town at the north end of the lake by the same name. The courthouse had been built in the 30’s and had open halls that my friends and I used as play space whenever we chose. There was a display of local history pictures in one of the halls and it had a couple of pictures of people being publicly hanged in front of the courthouse. My friends and I were VERY affected by knowing that right out there on the front lawn men had died by hanging. We would avoid the area at night for fear of ghosts. A lot goes on in the mind of 12-year-old boys, especially back in those days!
Thanks for the story. I really enjoy hearing first-person accounts of events that I remember!
he definately looks it.
They’d be successfully running for political office these days.
Too bad J.Fred Muggs is gone, his knowledge and commentary on current events would make him a candidate to replace Rosie on "The View".
Notice to "The View"!
In my previous post, I assumed J. Fred Muggs had died, but now I can't find any notice of his death, only this:
"As of January 23, 2004, the fifty-two-year-old Muggs and his "live-in girlfriend" Phoebe B. Beebe (who also made appearance on the Garroway show) are still alive in Citrus Park, Florida in the care of Gerald Preis. In 2004, Joe Hagan of the New York Observer reached Gerald Preis, 60, at his home where Preis said that Muggs "has a little gray, mostly in his beard."
Yes, what we remember from when we were very young can affect our later lives. I was frightend by my father and we we got home I told my mother what happened and my father explained and my mother said “Good”!
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