ABSTRACT

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. 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.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Secret Agents

part One|116 pages

Secrets

chapter 1|12 pages

Jell-O

chapter 3|16 pages

TV, the Bomb, and the Body

Other Cold War Secrets

chapter 4|12 pages

The Secret about Secrets

chapter 6|16 pages

The Trial of J. Edgar Hoover

chapter 7|13 pages

Strange Angel

The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn

chapter 8|18 pages

Flash Back, Flash Forward

The Fifties, the Nineties, and the Transformed Politics of Remote Control

part Two|107 pages

Agents

chapter 9|16 pages

Before the Rosenbergs

Espionage Scenarios in the Early Cold War

chapter 10|12 pages

Helplessness and Heartlessness

Irving Howe, James Bond, and the Rosenbergs

chapter 12|12 pages

The Rosenberg Letters

chapter 13|14 pages

The Suffering Body

Ethel Rosenberg in the Hands of the Writers

chapter 14|18 pages

A Bond of Sisterhood

Ethel Rosenberg, Molly Goldberg, and Radical Jewish Women of the 1950s

part Three|67 pages

Testimonies

chapter 16|17 pages

Rosenberg Realities

chapter 17|3 pages

Some Remarks about Trials

chapter 18|7 pages

Jews and McCarthyism

A View from the Bronx

chapter 19|9 pages

Contrasting Fates of Repression

A Comment on Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee

chapter 20|15 pages

Arbitrary Convictions?

The Rosenberg Case, the Death Penalty, and Democratic Culture

chapter 21|9 pages

The Work of the State