Reading the Rosenbergs: the discourse of Cold War

Abstract

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish couple from New York City, were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. The conspiracy of which the two were allegedly part was one, during wartime, to transfer military and atomic information to the Soviets. This thesis examines the contemporary media response to the story of prosecution aired before the trial in 1951 and throughout the period of appeal. Special emphasis is given to the influential reading of the Rosenbergs made by the newly regenerate cold war liberals. The analysis of those contemporary responses, and the developing controversy in the secondary sources amplifying the narrative of the case, combine to provide a deconstructive critique of the controversy. The emphasis, therefore, is upon the virtual, rather than the evidential, basis of the case. The Rosenberg case is a particularly useful entry point for a discussion of cold war discourse, the conspiracy - by its very nature as 'secret', eradicating the evidence of its own existence -- is a site of aporia wherein all that is 'actual' and 'true' breaks down, and, palimpsest like, provides the space to be over-written. The Rosenberg case is also an excellent focus for the critique of anti-Communist discourse, part of the umbrella discourse of cold war. Cold war discourse, adumbrating the 'minor' discourses of individualism, masculinism and assimilation, provided the conditions for the construction of a self-policing society, and governable subjects in the (policed) and self-policing individual. The execution of the Rosenbergs demonstrated. spectacularly, the material power of that discourse of governability. The comtemporary and continuing rhetorical execution of that couple demonstrates the power of the narrative of accusation authorised and amplified by the discourse of cold war. This exploration of this complex and mystifying discourse of cold war includes a discussion of the rhetorical and institutional basis of anti-Communism, the regenerate anti-Communism of the liberal intellectuals espousing an ethos of maturity, the positioning of the 'Rosenberg controversy by their accusers as proof of a virile, postwar American democratic justice, the masculinist action of cold war discourse, and, finally, the limits of that discourse, and its implications for the continuing historiography of the cold war.