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. They’ve contended with painful revelations—most notably that, despite the Rosenbergs’ repeated insistence to the contrary, their father was in fact a Soviet spy—and impossible questions. Why, for example, didn’t Ethel cooperate with the government and come home to her sons?
When I raised the subject with Robby and Michael, they readily agreed that Ethel could have saved herself, had she wanted to. “She did have names,” Robby said. “In fact, if she’d given the names of Sarant and Barr”—Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, members of the spy ring who had already defected to the Soviet Union—“nothing would have happened.”
“So should she have?” I asked.
Both brothers replied immediately and emphatically. “Oh no,” Michael said. “I don’t see why,” Robby added. Making any choice other than the one she ultimately made, they argued, would have left Ethel with a permanent sense of guilt over turning on her husband and reversing her steadfast commitment to “see this thing through”—the battle she’d been waging, and the story of innocence she’d been telling her sons and the world for three years.
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