A clutch of New Yorkers and others will gather this evening at City Center to mark the 50th anniversary of the execution of the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The executions took place on June 19, 1953, at Ossining. The sentence, the Associated Press writes this week, “ended a sensational Cold War case that still symbolizes the years when McCarthyism held sway and the government’s word was accepted more readily than today. It was the first execution of civilians for espionage in U.S. history and it reverberated into the issues of dissent, anti-Semitism and capital punishment.”

Such figures as Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, and Susan Sarandon will be present this evening to seek to keep alive the myth that it was really America that was guilty in the Rosenberg case. As the years have passed, however, historians have added to the credibility of the con clusion of the court, particularly with respect to the crimes of Julius. There are doubts that his wife, Ethel, was guilty of the charges of which she was convicted. Some believe that her execution — opposed by J. Edgar Hoover — was intended to pressure Julius into disclosing members of the wider cell federal authorities were sure surrounded Julius.

We are happy to leave all that to the historians. But it is well to remember that many proud Jews — including, for example, the editors of the greatest of the Jewish newspapers of the day, the Jewish Daily Forward — understood full well that the communists were a clear and even present danger to America and that communist espionage against the United States was fact and was a part of a war against our country. They harbored no illusions about the Rosenbergs and shed no tears save for the human dimension of the tragedy.

The Associated Press quotes Mr. Seeger as saying that the Rosenberg execution was “as low as we could go” and that “we learn from our mistakes.” And there is no doubt that tonight there will be an effort to ascribe to the Rosenbergs not only a false innocence but even a nobility. But our sense is that this faith is losing its following. And no wonder. America is once again engaged in a vast, twilight struggle against an enemy that is trying to acquire atomic weapons through stealth, that is establishing cells on American soil, and that is trying to impose an alien, illiberal, ideology on the world. It is a time when the Rosenberg case has much to teach.