How Ethel Rosenberg Offered Her Own Life as a Sacrifice

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/anne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html

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ETHEL ROSENBERG

An American TragedyBy Anne Sebba

Few trials in American history can match that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for its sensationalism. The young couple were arrested in 1950 for atomic espionage. Less than a year earlier, the Soviet Union had unexpectedly tested its first nuclear bomb, a mere four years after the U.S. atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong had just declared the People’s Republic of China. Cold War hysteria was at its peak. The couple were quickly convicted, sentenced to death and, after two years of international protest and a series of failed appeals, executed in June 1953. They remain the only individuals put to death for peacetime espionage in American history and most everyone agrees neither should have been killed.

To the very end, the Rosenbergs protested their innocence. Though they took the Fifth regarding their Communist Party affiliation, they insisted that they were being persecuted for their radical political views. In left and liberal circles, how one stood on the Rosenberg case became not just a proxy for one’s views on Communism and the Soviet Union but also, like the Dreyfus case in France a half-century earlier, instantly defined who one was.

There was high family drama as well. Ethel’s own younger brother David Greenglass admitted to spying at Los Alamos for the Russians. Julius, he testified in court, was his handler; Ethel, Julius’s accomplice.

And then there was the other “family” affair. The Rosenbergs were Jewish. So were both the defense and prosecution teams (featuring a young Roy Cohn in a debut supporting role), as was the judge, Irving Kaufman. Many saw the proceedings as playing out a particularly Jewish American drama, with both prosecution and judge intent on proving their loyalty to America and ridding Jews of any Communist taint through their fierce prosecution of the couple.

Over time, research by scholars and the release of once-classified documents, first in America and then in the former Soviet Union, have proved that Julius was, in fact, guilty of running an espionage network intent on stealing the secrets of the Manhattan Project among other defense programs, though he did not provide the most significant information that led to the Soviet bomb.

Regarding Ethel, the case has always been muddied by two significant facts. Her brother’s key testimony against her — that she typed some of the documents he provided to Julius — was a lie, as he later admitted, meant to deflect attention from his own wife’s involvement. Even more damningly, Ethel was mercilessly used as a pawn by the government to force Julius to confess. This has led some, including her two sons, to continue to insist on Ethel’s innocence and seek her exoneration. But the Soviet archives provide strong evidence that while Ethel was never a formal agent, she not only knew of Julius’s work but aided him at times, including in the recruitment of her brother and sister-in-law.

Anne Sebba’s new book, “Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy,” comes in the wake of the public release of the last of the grand jury testimony in the case, that of David Greenglass, after his death in 2014. But while that testimony reaffirms that David lied on the stand, it adds nothing substantive to the record. On the question of Ethel’s guilt, Sebba, who has written many biographies of famous women, waffles and confuses, declaring at the beginning that Ethel was not “legally complicit,” only later to write that she was, in fact, “complicit to a conspiracy,” but then asks: “Was that a crime?” She also points to the relevance of the Rosenberg case in demonstrating how widespread fear of foreign enemies can lead to government abuses, though she stops short of directly tying the case to recent events.

In the end, the book is a plea for Ethel the woman, an attempt to understand who she really was, to free her from the confines of the stock political figure she inevitably became. Because of the dour demeanor she publicly showed, many viewed her not just as an accomplice but also as the calculating mastermind behind the espionage. This was far off the mark. Less so was the portrait of her as a kind of political fanatic. According to one woman who met her in prison, Ethel “followed the party line uncritically, unquestionably and aggressively.”

But she was more than this. Sebba gives us a portrait of Ethel as a smart, ambitious and thoughtful woman, one with a beautiful singing voice and dreams of a career in music and theater. She was also emotionally fragile, wounded by a mother who denied her talents, and always placed her brothers before her. Ironically, the only one of her three brothers to whom she was close was David, her future betrayer, on whom she doted. As a mother herself, she sought out therapy, worried that she, too, would not be a good enough parent.

But as biography the book falls short. The information to really fill out her story, to add depth and richness to her early internal struggles, is lacking. Sebba wants us to see Ethel as an extraordinary woman, but instead we feel her ordinariness. The book’s strongest chapters are the later ones, among them one on Ethel’s years in prison, which she spent in almost complete isolation with no support from her family and only occasional visits from her sons, who were 10 and 6 when their parents were executed. She was, somehow, granted the right to visits from her psychiatrist, who became her only real outside lifeline and to whom, in the midst of her emotional turmoil, she began to write passionate letters.

Equally interesting is Sebba’s meditation on Ethel in the context of American culture. Here Ethel becomes a stand-in for a generation of ambitious women who willingly sacrificed their own careers to their sometimes less talented husbands.

And yet what partly doomed Ethel was her perceived lack of femininity. Her refusal to court the press or the public and her stony-faced stoicism throughout the trial were taken as signs of her coldness, even masculinity. No one understood that this was, at least in part, her only protection against the onslaught she felt to her fragile being. President Eisenhower, to whom she appealed for clemency, worried about sending a young mother to the electric chair, but then absolved himself because “in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one.” Is there a more revealing example of the straitjacket of postwar femininity than this outrageous comment, which helped to seal Ethel Rosenberg’s fate?

Sebba sees Ethel as the one actor in the drama who did not betray anyone, who insisted on protecting her husband even to the point of her own death. The only thing that apparently would have saved her was a confession from Julius, which he, with her full support, refused to make, or her own willingness to implicate her husband and others. Yet she refused to say anything to save herself to the very end, even in the moments after Julius’s execution. Was it because of an inner defiance and stubborn rigidity? A misguided idealism and belief in the Soviet cause that amounted to a kind of moral confusion, a refusal to see espionage as a crime, particularly for a country that had once been a wartime ally? Or perhaps it was far more personal, a link to her husband that she saw as inviolable, a belief that her fate was inextricably tied to Julius’s.

“A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion for these unctuous saviors, these odious swine [who] are actually proposing to erect a terrifying sepulcher in which I shall live without living and die without dying,” she wrote of the prospect of surviving without Julius.

The choices made by this outwardly strong, cold and “masculine” woman became in effect a form of suttee. Ethel, who had been subordinated to her brothers as a child, now willingly immolated herself as a sign of ultimate devotion to Julius (and perhaps to Stalin), even if it meant leaving her two young sons behind.