Why a last-ditch effort to redeem the couples’ name fails so completely.

In March of 1951, a young Jewish couple from New York City, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both secret members of the American Communist Party, were tried in Federal Court for “conspiracy to commit espionage.” The Rosenbergs were accused of having passed secrets pertaining to the atomic bomb from Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who worked in a lab at Los Alamos, to the Soviets. In June of 1953, all legal appeals having been exhausted, the Rosenbergs were executed, becoming the only American civilians executed for espionage by the United States government. Their sentence shocked the world and was immediately seized by communists as a powerful tool in the propaganda war between the United States and the USSR.

As time passed, the Rosenbergs’ defenders convinced many that the couple had been framed. The innocence of the Rosenbergs became a touchstone of the left; attempts to discuss evidence suggesting their guilt were assailed as appeasement of McCarthyism. Walter and Miriam Schneir’s Invitation to an Inquest (1965) was the textbook for this cause, providing a compelling narrative that, to many, proved that the Rosenbergs were innocent. This strain of thought continues in the latest Schneir book, Final Verdict, a posthumous work published earlier this year.

Invitation to an Inquest distorted the historical record to make the case that the Rosenbergs were innocent of any association with Soviet espionage. The book argued that Harry Gold, the courier who received a sketch of part of the atomic bomb from David Greenglass never actually met Greenglass and never traveled to Albequerque in June 1945 for the supposed exchange. The authors’ major “proof” that Gold lied about the meeting was that the Hilton Hotel card offered at the trial by the defense was an FBI forgery, meant to falsely prove Gold was in Albuquerque.

The Schneirs’ claims were challenged by the publication of The Rosenberg File, published in 1983. This book, written in part by one of the co-authors of this piece, argued that, despite clear judicial and legal improprieties in the Rosenbergs’ trial, Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet agent who set up and ran a major espionage network for Stalin. Although Rosenberg defenders attacked the book, its findings were vindicated with the release in 1995 of previously classified cables from Moscow to KGB agents in America. These cables convinced even the most skeptical holdouts that the Rosenbergs had indeed been Soviet agents.

Earlier this year, Mellville House published Final Verdict by the late Walter Schneir, with a foreword by his wife Miriam. In Final Verdict, Schneir accepts Julius’s guilt but argues that the real culprit was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who, on his own, was an enthusiastic Soviet spy. The Schneirs’ revisionist theory asserts that the government gave Greenglass a break for cooperating with the government in their prosecution of the Rosenbergs.