The story of atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who died in the electric chair in New York's Sing Sing prison 50 years ago today, is a sad but far from simple one, writes Enda O'Doherty.
Though there are those who still assert their innocence of the crime for which they were executed conspiracy to commit espionage there is little doubt that the Rosenbergs were part of a Soviet network engaged in collecting information on America's atom bomb programme. It seems equally clear, however, that the accused were not the big fish they were portrayed as at their trial, that the process itself was seriously flawed and that the death sentences imposed on them were politically motivated and disproportionate to their crime.
The Rosenbergs were children of the Depression, and like many such children they gravitated towards the political left, joining first the Young Communist League and later the party itself. This was a far from unusual choice at the time. New York was a hotbed of left-wing politics, not all of it orthodox communist. The faith was particularly strong among the city's poor Jewish immigrants, most of them of Russian origin.
For a convinced communist like Julius Rosenberg it was self-evident that, if America had the atom bomb, the interests of peace would best be served if the Soviet Union had it too. And so, it seems, he persuaded his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, a soldier working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, to pass sketches and notes of what he saw there to a Soviet courier, Harry Gold.
It now seems clear that the Rosenbergs gave the Russians little information they had not already secured through the activities of British spies Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs. But unlike May and Fuchs they had the misfortune to be caught in an America in the grip of Cold War panic at a time when communist Russia had been joined by Red China, and tens of thousands of US servicemen were dying in far-off Korea. The nation, in a mood of unprecedented fear and insecurity, badly needed a scapegoat and the Rosenbergs were it.
The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was marked by dubious procedures and shameful collusion between the judge, the state and the prosecution team, which included the odious Roy Cohn, later Senator McCarthy's right hand man; there was also, almost certainly, a smidgeon of perjury. The executions, two years later, after appeals for clemency from Albert Einstein and Pope Pius XII were rejected, were greeted with storms of protest in progressive circles in the US and Europe. "America has rabies!" Jean-Paul Sartre fulminated. "We must cut all ties to her or we too will get sick."
There was, of course, much that was selective in this indignation. On the same day the Rosenberg Defence Committee was formed in France, 11 prominent Czech communists were executed by their former friends in Prague. Two days before Julius and Ethel went to the chair at least 20 protesting workers were shot dead in Berlin. "The duty of an intellectual," Sartre pronounced rather grandly, "is to denounce injustice wherever he sees it." Asked why he had then failed to speak out on the Prague trials, he replied that such a protest from him "would have been pure formality".
Just 40 years ago, communism dominated all of eastern Europe and much of Asia, was a significant pole of attraction for Third World intellectuals and peasants and boasted strong parties and allied trade unions in most of western Europe. It also retained a portion of its formerly huge appeal for "progressives" and liberals everywhere, that vast army of bien- pensants who could always be relied on to swell the ranks of its campaigns and whom Lenin called "useful fools". Now, save for a few exotic or savage outposts, all is dust.
There are few who would argue that the collapse of Europe's post-Stalinist regimes was not a good thing, but this is not to say that the system communism was designed (ill-designed) to replace is much more attractive today than it was in industrial Manchester in the 1840s or starving Berlin in 1930. Capitalism, we are told, is the system that delivers the goods, and so to an extent it does, particularly in western Europe. But what goods, of what quality, does it deliver to the slum-dwellers of Calcutta or indeed the malnourished children of the working poor of West Virginia?
Communism is dead and its estranged cousin, social democracy, though worthy and mostly honest, is not exactly brimful of bright ideas. Capitalism meanwhile, a wasteful and chaotic mess of production and consumption sustained by a brazen army of advertisers unworthy of homo sapiens, is without serious political challenge; it is, it would seem, the disease for which there is no cure.
While no sane or wise person laments the final collapse, in 1989, of a system which promised so much yet delivered dross, the world still seems emptier without the idealism and commitment of many who fondly believing there must be something more sacred than money - lived their lives for it including the poor, abused Rosenbergs, who went to their deaths calmly 50 years ago in Sing Sing.