An Analysis of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, 1951-1953*
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Victoria University Eprints Repository “Never Losing Faith”: an analysis of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, 1951-1953* PHILLIP DEERY** Introduction Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested by the FBI in July-August 1950, put on trial in March 1951, and received the death sentence in April 1951. Their electrocution two years later, on 19 June 1953, was without precedent in peacetime American history. Although the actual charge, under the Espionage Act of 1917, was conspiracy to commit espionage, the widely held view, then and now, was that the Rosenbergs – or at least Julius – were “atom bomb spies” who provided the Kremlin with the secret of the bomb and thereby committed, in J. Edgar Hoover’s striking phrase, “the crime of the century”. Defenders of the Rosenbergs maintained that their sentences resulted from a flagrant miscarriage of justice and their deaths constituted legal murder. The widespread shock and outrage, and the elevation of this event into a cause célèbre of the Cold War, was due, in no small measure, to the efforts of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case (hereafter, Rosenberg Committee), formed on 10 October 1951. This article examines that committee: its genesis, its myriad activities, the sources of its support, the extent of communist domination, and the vexed issue of anti- Semitism. It will not revisit the well-trodden historiographical ground concerning the extent of the Rosenbergs’ guilt, the judicial irregularities of their trial, the protracted appeals processes, the hostile political environment in which the committee’s campaign was fought, or the international response.
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