Free Republic

DeBlasio’s New York, amirite? No, seriously, this is shameful: Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband for treason in 1953, was honored Monday by the City Council on what would have been her 100th birthday. Three council members joined Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in issuing two proclamations lauding Rosenberg, a Lower East Side resident, for “demonstrating great bravery” in leading a 1935 strike against the National New York Packing and Supply Co., where she worked as a clerk. The proclamations also said she was “wrongfully” executed for helping her husband, Julius, pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union....

Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband for treason in 1953, was honored Monday by the City Council on what would have been her 100th birthday. Three council members joined Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in issuing two proclamations lauding Rosenberg, a Lower East Side resident, for “demonstrating great bravery” in leading a 1935 strike against the National New York Packing and Supply Co., where she worked as a clerk. The proclamations also said she was “wrongfully” executed for helping her husband, Julius, pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. “A lot of hysteria was created around anti-communism and...

Robert Meeropol and his brother Michael are the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed by the US government in June 1953 on trumped-up charges of atomic espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Robert, the younger of the Rosenberg sons, was six years old when his parents were put to death. The Rosenberg sons were adopted and raised by Abel and Anne Meeropol. For their entire adult lives they have campaigned to expose the importance of the Rosenberg case. In the 1970s, they successfully sued the FBI and CIA to force the release of 300,000 previously secret...

The Bard tells us, rightly, that the past is prologue. But until America's greatest military intelligence success -- and failure -- becomes common knowledge Americans will remain intellectual sitting ducks, herded hither and yon, hoping to build a sheltering future on shaky misinformation. I'm talking about the Venona Code intercepts: The 3000 encrypted communications between Soviet spies operating in this country and their masters in Moscow, which American and British code breakers began deciphering in 1946. These KGB messages revealed that the Soviets had agents at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of our government -- and...

It is hard to imagine a sadder group of people than the children of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union. I am thinking of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the son of Alger Hiss, and now Harry Dexter White’s two daughters, who in a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review rebuke a reviewer for referring to their father, a high-ranking Treasury official under Roosevelt and Truman, as a Soviet agent. What a tragedy the end of the Cold War has been for the kids and grandkids of the spies. How do they talk...

By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer PARK CITY, Utah - Few filmmakers examining their family history in a documentary would find themselves in the thick of the Academy Awards (news - web sites) race. When your grandparents are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though, the subject resonates far outside the immediate family. Ivy Meeropol's "Heir to an Execution" chronicles her effort to come to terms with the lives and deaths of her father's parents, executed as traitors in 1953 after being accused of relaying the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. "I grew up with this. It was always...

Julius & Ethel Rosenberg: A Son's Desperate Search for Innocence Discovers Anything But Book Review 'An Execution in the Family': Faithful Son of the Rosenbergs Reviewed By DOROTHY GALLAGHER One Son's Journey By Robert Meeropol. Illustrated. 273 pp. New York: St. Martin's Press. $25.95. Here we are, a half-century on since the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs are truly historical figures now, but for a small fraction of the population their fate still has the power to generate yesterday's heat. Were the Rosenbergs framed? Did they do anything? If they did do anything, was it anything much?...