The Rosenbergs: case closed

the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

That “narrative” (as our lit-crit profs say) is now thoroughly discredited. It is, to speak plainly, false. But will that fact penetrate the collective epidermis of the Left? For decades, the Left protested Alger Hiss’s innocence. When that became embarrassingly untenable, they switched tactics: he was innocent though guilty. The response in the Rosenberg case will likely take a page from the Clintons: Let’s move on. All that was long ago. Who cares about the Cold War now anyway?

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 Number 2, on page 1Copyright © 2022 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.comhttps://newcriterion.com/issues/2008/10/the-rosenbergs-case-closed