[jboot]

When I was in school clar back in the seventies the Rosenbergs were already saints. I grew up within a short walk from the Rosenberg pumpkin patch and my teachers gushed praise and worship over their "local heroes" as if they were Jesus and Mary His Mother.

These same sh*twit teachers used to protest against nuclear arms, too. The irony was intense.

[Fiji Hill]

It was in 1994 that I submitted my article on the Rosenbergs. I based much of it on Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton's authoritative The Rosenberg Story: A Search for the Truth (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983) and a couple of memoirs: Richard Lamphere's The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story by Robert Lamphere and Tom Shachtman (New York: Random House, 1986) and the newly-published memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov: Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994).

However, my article was rejected in favor of one which portrayed the Rosenbergs as victims of "McCarthyism," anti-Communist hysteria and government overreach. Its sources included The Rosenberg Story by Virginia Gardner (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1954). Virginia Gardner, a journalist, was a long-time Communist Party activist, and Masses and Mainstream, which published it, was described by Howard Fast, a Communist at the time, as "a magazine of the Left."

The timing for the publication of a pro-Rosenberg article couldn't have been worse. Months, or perhaps weeks, after the textbook was issued, the government released the Venona files, which Richard Lamphere had mentioned in his memoir, and which provided overwhelming evidence that the Rosenbergs were spies. The evidence mounted in succeeding years as KGB files were made public. In 2001, Aleksandr Feklisov, the Rosenbergs' Soviet case officer, even published his own memoir: The Man Behind the Rosenbergs : By the KGB Spymaster Who was the case officer of Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Helped Resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Enigma, 2001).

So the case against the Rosenbergs is, for all practical purposes, closed.