Just as his reporting career was burgeoning, a former colleague from New Hampshire contacted Bradlee in 1951 and asked if he wanted to join the U.S. Embassy in Paris as a press attache. One of his first assignments was trying to represent the U.S. position in the Rosenberg case, after the American government convicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for leaking nuclear information to the Soviet Union. The conviction and subsequent execution of the Rosenbergs deeply angered the French public and sometimes violent riots broke out and the embassy was stoned.