Secret Agents

When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage.
The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Had they in fact passed atomic secrets on to the Russians, secrets so vital that they enabled the Soviet Union to build its own atomic bomb? Or were they set up by a government eager for scapegoats in an era of conspiracy politics? American Jews and the American Left, as public opinion, were deeply divided by the case, which came to stand in many minds for the paranoia of the Cold War. Feminism, civil rights, the death penalty, due process, homosexuality--these issues were all crucial to Rosenberg case and the McCarthy era.
Examining the broad issues as well as telling details, from the "Jell-O" box evidence in the Rosenberg case to the development of television and the atomic bomb, "Secret Agents" connects "that" time and "this" time, demonstrating that an awareness of history in high culture and popular culture, literature, politics and the arts has never been more important -- or more contested -- than it is now.
"Secret Agents" presents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol. "Secret Agents" gives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget.
Contributors: Joyce Antler, Marie Ashe, Michael Cadden, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Thomas