ABSTRACT
A fundamental ambiguity made virtually inevitable the controversies raised by the Rosenberg case and the general penalties imposed on Communists and their sympathizers after the Second World War. The Rosenbergs had spied for a friendly ally in wartime, but the law under which they were prosecuted and the prescribed punishments were intended to apply to espionage on behalf of a military enemy. McCarthyism was a relatively late fallout from the Cold War in domestic politics, relatively late because that conflict had been going on for three or four years when McCarthy first emerged as the arch Communist-hunter with his famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech in early 1950. It is necessary to distinguish among attitudes towards communism, anti-Communism, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and particular cases of people charged with Soviet sympathies or espionage. Attitudes towards all of these were independently variable though too often retrospectively lumped together as if they always formed a consistent bundle constituting a single point of view.
