It takes some daring to revisit the Rosenberg case, still an ideological lightning rod more than six decades after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It would seem, too, that there would be little to add, given the massive documentation that we now have on the case in the works of Ronald Radosh, Joyce Milton, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. The guilt of Julius Rosenberg has been conclusively established and so has the accomplicity of his wife Ethel. So what more is there to say? Plenty, as this important new study by Lori Clune shows.

Clune reexamines the case as a “pivotal and transnational Cold War event” (xii). Her interest lies first in uncovering perceptions of the case outside the US and second in interrogating attempts by the US government to manage its impact on the US image abroad. The book is based almost exclusively on long-missing State Department Name Files, discovered by Clune; that is, on reports by US embassy officials abroad on the foreign reactions. Clune has done a great service to all students of the Cold War in collating this data.

Material from the Name Files is featured in very great detail, although rather monotonously and tediously, with little analysis or contextualizing. One after another, Clune recounts details of the street protests held in “more than 48 countries” (162) to protest the Rosenbergs’ treatment. As exhaustive are her summaries of the petition campaigns by the Committee to Secure Justice to the Rosenbergs and its counterparts in other countries, and of the calls for clemency that issued from US embassy officials interested in placating foreign critics.

Clune carefully tracks State Department efforts to manage foreign impressions of the case. She concludes that these were inept and ultimately a dismal failure. “The world” (68) – no less – continued to believe in the Rosenbergs’ innocence and came to regard the US government as a violator of basic democratic and human rights norms, hardly better than the Soviet Union, because of what it did to them. Many pro-clemency advocates abroad were driven by a principled opposition to capital punishment, others by fear that the Soviets would propagandize the couple's execution to their benefit. In any case, the US lost the propaganda war and its Cold War effort was seriously hurt.

Unfortunately, Clune's myopic concentration on her single set of new sources seemingly blinds her to some crucial lines of interrogation. Not once does she question the representativeness of the Name File reports or query the motives, backgrounds or agendas of the embassy staffers who compiled them. Are we really to believe that foreign opinion was as uniformly favourable to the Rosenbergs as these staffers suggested? Was there really no one in the rest of the world – apart from the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, Clune's only example – who fully supported the US government's narration of the case? There were plenty such people, conservatives and liberals alike, but they simply don't figure in this account.

Repeatedly, Clune rather belabours her claim, based on US and foreign commentaries alike, that anti-Semitism was prominently involved in the case. Never mind that both the trial judge and the prosecutor were Jewish: they were just bending over backwards to prove their own patriotism to the anti-Semites. Incredibly, too, she marshals the Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, an advocate of clemency, as an example of the “anti-Communist Christian” (73), oblivious to this man's many Communist front memberships and long career of pro-Communist apologetics. The other “respected anti-Communist religious leader” (73) featured is the Rev. A. J. Muste, founder of the Trotskyist Workers Party.

Finally, in the Conclusion – one that is curiously focussed on US debates only – Clune forgets her initial promise of nuance and of moving beyond issues of guilt, dispenses with scholarly objectivity, and tells us what we should really think. “Cold war terror and paranoia” (167) and “anti-Communist hysteria” (160), she now tells us, “drove the United States to prosecute the couple” in a “morally repugnant travesty of justice” (167) that culminated in a “cruel, unjust act of a terrified nation for which the U.S. government can and should apologize.” Not only that, but Julius Rosenberg was just a “military intelligence Robin Hood taking from the wealthy capitalists and giving to the poor Communists” (164).

For those capable of ignoring such partisan editorializing, this book offers valuable, if incomplete, data on foreign perceptions of the Rosenberg case. For those unable to, it remains a marred account of the transnational dimensions of a key Cold War episode that needed to be told.