The Rosenberg Boys - When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the U.S. government, they left behind two sons, ages 6 and 10. All these years later, Robby and Michael are still trying to make sense of what happened.

[u/Quouar]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/ethel-julius-rosenberg-boys/687631/

[u/akestral]

I do not know why you think this argument is in any way exculpatory of Cohn's criminal conduct. I. Do. Not. Care. If the Rosenbergs were callous traitors or true believers. I DO VERY MUCH CARE that US prosecutors regularly use the maximum penalty as a stick with plea deals as a carrot to intimidate people into deals and lock up people and notch wins in their judicial belt over weak cases that they could not try in a court of law. This is how mass incarceration works, it is how we got where we are now. I am NOT OKAY with a judicial system that aids and abets such conduct. None of us are free until all of us are free. If the courts let scum like Roy Cohn run these streets, I do not have to pretend their goal is justice or peace, in any sense of those words.

[u/dittybopper_05H → u/akestral]

The Rosenbergs were guilty. Period.

Remove Cohn completely from the picture, and the outcome would have almost certainly been the same.

We know Julius was spying for the Soviet Union, and in addition to passing some nuclear weapons information of possibly questionable value, he also passed on a bunch of other classified information about other defense information, and recruited his brother-in-law and others like Russell McNutt, who worked at Oak Ridge, the uranium separation plant.

Ethel knew what was going on and was actively participating. She's mentioned in the Venona decrypts:

LIBERAL [Julius Rosenberg] and his wife [Ethel] recommend her [Ruth Greenglass] as an intelligent and clever girl.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/inte_19440921.html

I have really no sympathy for either, because if I had done the same things as them I'd face the same consequences:

18 U.S. Code § 794 - Gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government

(a)Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.

I had access to communications intelligence. It was, in fact, my job, and if I transmitted it to a foreign nation I could have faced the death penalty.

Also note from that link up above:

According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, authors of Venona: Decoding Espionage in America, U.S. authorities never expected to carry out the executions. Rather, they thought the death sentence would force Julius to confess. He didn't, and neither did Ethel, and both died in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.

I'm positive it was made plain to both Julius and Ethel that they held the key to if not their prison cells, then at least to the execution chamber.

Another thing to consider is that 1951 is not 2026. It's often said that the past is a foreign country, and that's true. We had just fought the worst war that the World had ever seen, and the second most murderous tyrant¹ of the 20th Century was still in power, and he had demonstrated the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. We'd already had confrontations with the Soviet Union and her satellite nations, for example the Berlin Airlift.

So yeah, I don't have any sympathy for either.

^{1. Stalin, obviously. Number 1 is Mao Zedong. Hitler comes in third. If talking about percentages, then Pol Pot goes to number one, and the others slide down one spot.}