Typescript Copy of Letter, Ethel Rosenberg to President Dwight D. Eisenhower

354 Hunter St., Ossining, N. Y. June 16, 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower White House, Washington, D. C. Dear Mr. President, At various intervals during the two long and bitter years I have spent in the Death House at Sing Sing, I have had the impulse to address myself to the President of the United States. Always, in the end, a certain innate shyness, an embarrassment almost, comparable to that which the ordinary person feels in the presence of the great and the famous, provailed upon me not to do so. Since then, however, the moving plea of Mrs. William Oatis on behalf of her husband has lent me inspiration. She had not been ashamed to bare her heart to the head of a foreign state; would it really be such a presumption for a citizen to ask for redress of grievance and to expect as much consideration as Mrs. Oatis received at the hands of strangers? Of Czechoslovakia I know very little, of her President less than that. But my own land is a part of me, I should be homesick for her anywhere else in the world. And Dwight D. Eisenhower was "Liberator" to millions before he was ever "President. " It does not seem reasonable to me, then, that a letter concerning itself with condemned wife as well as condemned husband, should not merit this particular President's sober attention. True, to date, you have not seen fit to spare our lives. Be that as it may, it is my humble belief that the burdens of your office and the exigencies of the times have allowed of no genuine opportunity, as yet, for your more personal consideration. It is chiefly the death sentence I would entreat you to ponder. I would entreat you to ask yourself whether that sentence does not serve the ends of "force and violence' rather than an enlightened justice. Even granting the assumption that the con- victions had been properly procured (and there now exists incontro- vertible evidence to the contrary), the steadfast denial of guilt, extending over a protracted period of solitary confinement and enforced separation from our loved ones, makes of the death penalty an act of vengeance. As Commander-in-Chief of the European theatre, you had ample opportunity to witness the wanton and hideous tortures that such a policy of vengeance had wreaked upon vast multitudes of guiltless victims. Today, while these ghastly mass but chers, these obscene