Traitor, communist, mother: Who was convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg?

“Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy" by Anne Sebba; St. Martin's Press (320 pages, $28.99)

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The right called her a traitor. The left called her a martyr.

Neither word quite captured the complicated truth of Ethel Rosenberg. More than 50 years after her execution, she remains impossible to reduce to a label.

Anne Sebba’s book, “Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy,” is aptly titled. Rosenberg’s life was thoroughly American and classically tragic.

Born in 1915 on the Lower East Side, she was the only daughter of Barney and Tessie Greenglass. Barney, a mild-mannered man, made a poor living fixing sewing machines. His forceful wife raised the children, doting on the youngest, David.

“A bitter woman whose affection, such as it was, all went to the boys in the family,” one neighbor recalled.

Ethel and her mother clashed constantly. A standout student at Seward Park High School, Ethel loved books and music. That failed to impress Tessie, who never learned to read in any language and considered the arts a waste of time.

Ethel was just as scornful of her mother’s life. Her greatest ambition, she told a friend, was “never having to live like her mother, going around with a big shopping bag, searching for bargains, trading with the pushcart men.”

After graduation, Ethel took a job as a shipping clerk. She dreamed of a career as a classical singer and even performed with the prestigious Schola Cantorum. Then the union at her company went on strike, and her life took a sharp turn – to the left.

Suddenly this “timid little girl,” as someone remembered her, became a firebrand. She rallied other workers. She marched on the picket line. When trucks tried to make deliveries, she lay down in the street, daring them to drive over her.

She had become radicalized.

Soon, Ethel was singing at union meetings and socialist fundraisers. She was preparing for a performance at the 1936 New Year’s Eve gala of the International Seamen’s Union when a tall, dark stranger introduced himself.

He explained that his name was Julius Rosenberg, and he had seen her around their Lower East Side neighborhood. Rosenberg asked to walk her home after the show.

Their union began that night and ended 17 years later in Sing Sing.

“I have loved her ever since that night,” Rosenberg explained when the couple’s lives began to unravel. “And always, when I hear her sing, it is like the first time, and I know that they can never part us – nothing will.”

They married in 1939 after Julius received his engineering degree from City College. They eventually rented an apartment in the East Village. Julius landed a job with the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

One day, government investigators stopped by to question Julius. They said they had proof Ethel once signed a Communist Party petition.

His wife was merely gullible, Julius insisted. “I know that she is no communist.”

Julius certainly was, though, And in 1942, a friend introduced him to a Soviet secret agent. The Soviet Union and America were allies, the spy noted. Shouldn’t the Americans be sharing their latest weapon research? Couldn’t an engineer like Julius obtain some blueprints? And recruit helpers?

Yes, Julius could.

By 1944, he had eight other spies working with him. He had also dissembled, sneaked home, reassembled, and delivered to his contact, Alexander Feklisov, a “short-range proximity fuse detonator” crucial for targeting aircraft. Feklisov rewarded Julius with several Christmas presents, including a watch and a crocodile handbag for Ethel.

But Julius had one more gift for the Soviets. Ethel’s brother, David, had just been assigned to work at a top-secret base in Los Alamos. He couldn’t leave easily, but his wife, Ruth, could visit and act as a courier. The plot to steal America’s atomic bomb secrets came together.

The espionage lasted for several years.

Then, in 1946, Feklisov was called back to Moscow. He had never given Julius more than $25 in cash for expenses but now pressed $1,000 on him for “unforeseen emergencies.” In 1949, the Soviets tested its first nuclear bomb.

By now, authorities had begun to sniff around David and Ruth. Julius urged them to flee, but Ruth was pregnant, and the couple refused. The following year, a former Los Alamos scientist was arrested on charges of espionage. He gave up another conspirator, an American chemist. That led the FBI to David, who began to talk.

Then the FBI came for Julius.

After his arrest, Ethel calmly invited reporters into the couple’s apartment. Cutting up a chicken for dinner, pointing out well-thumbed issues of Parents magazine, she insisted she was just another housewife, a mother to two small boys. The government was making “crazy charges.”

“Neither my husband nor I have ever been communists,” she swore. “We don’t know any communists.”

Their family turned on them. Ethel’s mother, predictably, took David’s side, blaming her daughter for everything. Ruth told authorities Ethel was a wild-eyed communist who dominated her husband and had led David astray. And David began cooperating with the government.

In the end, David received a reduced sentence. His wife was never charged. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went on trial for espionage. Actual evidence against Ethel was scant, so a young attorney, Roy Cohn, persuaded David to change his grand jury testimony; it was Ethel, he swore, not Ruth, who typed up the spy ring’s reports.

The Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced to death.

This was what the government had hoped for. Certainly, no parent – particularly as proudly devoted a mother as Ethel Rosenberg – would willingly leave their two small children orphaned. Now the Justice Department had leverage to force the Rosenbergs to name names. Now they could make a deal.

Except the Rosenbergs refused.

“We will not help to purify the foul record of a fraudulent conviction and a barbaric sentence,” read their joint statement. “We will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness and to yield up to tyranny our rights as free Americans.”

The government was shocked. Executing the husband was one thing, but even J. Edgar Hoover recognized the dreadful publicity of sending a mother to the electric chair. They had gambled Ethel Rosenberg would rather do anything — admit her guilt, inform on friends, abandon her cause — than go to her death.

Except, admitted deputy attorney general William Rogers, “She called our bluff.”

At 8 p.m. on June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg was led into the death chamber at Sing Sing. Three jolts of electricity coursed through his body. He was pronounced dead, and his corpse was removed. Then his wife walked in. She held her head high, having sworn “to die with honor and dignity.” Electricity jolted her body three times.

She was removed from the chair and examined. Her heart, amazingly, was still beating. She was strapped back in for two more jolts of electricity. Her head began to smoke. Finally, 4 ½ minutes after the first charge, she was pronounced dead, too.

To many, Sebba writes, the Rosenberg story is one of betrayal: Julius betrayed his country by stealing secrets. David betrayed his sister by lying to protect his wife. Roy Cohn betrayed his oath as an attorney by suborning perjury.

“Only Ethel betrayed no one,” Sebba writes. “Thus sealing her own fate.”