The Rosenberg Affair is an affair that will not go away.By the nineteen nineties, and the demise of the Soviet Union, the communist threat

was completely forgotten by all in America other than some die-hards on the far right, who

continued to see "Reds under the bed" in the most unlikely of situations. Fear of communism

was dropped from mainstream politics in the USA, being replaced by a fear of socialism that is

portrayed by American conservatives as representing the antithesis of American values. Thus

in the runup to the 2020 presidential elections, the popular candidate for the Democratic party

nomination, Bernie Sanders, lost out to Joe Biden in part because Sanders was repeatedy

branded as a socialist..... with Donald Trump going one step further, telling Fox News "I think

he's a communist.At the time the American press, full of a manic fear and hatred of communists and anything that could be considered "leftist" fully supported the verdict. Only one major paper. the National Guardian, saw anything wrong in the trial, anything excessive in the verdict. The Rosenbergs were sentenced principally on the word of Ethel Rosenberg's brother David, an employee at the Atomic Research Center at Los Alamos, who admitted having handed the Russians plans of US atomic weapons; he accused Julius Rosenberg of having recruited him. But what was all the hassle about? David's A-bomb plans, handed to the Russians, were no more than a poor caricature", in the words of the bomb's inventor.and after much research, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton concluded that Julius Rosenberg in fact was guilty of spying, though there was no proof of anything in Ethel's case; Ethel's only mistake was to have loved her husband, and to have sympathized with his views, neither of which is a crime, let alone a crime punishable by the death sentence in a country where freedom of speech and opinion are guaranteed by the Constitution.The Legacy of McCarthyism

As for McCarthyism, following the death of Senator McCarthy the movement rapidly

declined in popularity and indeed in credibility, and by the sixties the period was looked back

on by many Americans with embarrassment, an age of witch-hunts against mostly innocent

people..Historians now tend to agree that Ethel Rosenberg was wrongly convicted, and in the 2020s Ethel Rosenberg's grandchildren are still campaigning for their grandmother to be granted a presidential pardon.Thirty years later, two American historians published a book on the Rosenberg Affair.