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I watched the Nova report on the "Rosenbergs" with a strange mix of nausea and fascination. Since the guilt of the Rosenbergs (as defined by statute) has been proven beyond any doubt what is left for their defenders? That bigger fish got away? That they were morally and intellectually superior human beings and therefore not bound by the laws of a government established by slave-holding White males? (This is known in law as the Kathleen Soliah defense.) Nova did manage to avoid the assertion that the information was not of value to the Soviets. (It was, though not critical.)

They even let slip that Ethel Rosenberg importuned her sister-in-law to pressure her own brother, David Greenglass, into supplying information to the Soviets, which sort of shreds the loyal wife defense. (Actually, many believe that Ethel was the instigator, pressuring her henpecked husband into becoming an agent.) She was convicted of typing the information supplied by her brother, a fact that the Nova report inexplicably overlooked. They seem to claim that because the Soviets never actually named Ethel Rosenberg as an "agent" in any of their cable traffic or in the Moscow archives, she is not guilty of espionage. But she is identified as Julius' wife (she did not have a code name, he was code named LIBERAL) and in context it is pretty clear that she was an active participant, and so recognized by Moscow.

I'm baffled about the point of the report. Essentially, the thesis is that Joe McCarthy was correct, but he had no right to be, mostly because he was the wrong sort of person. Apparently the report started out as a report on the Venona decrypts (I'm speculating). The Venona decrypts are interesting, the result of persistence and intellectual rigor on the part of the Americans (the bad guys) and procedural sloppiness and endemic laziness on the part of the Soviets (the good guys in our drama). In PBS-land that dog won't hunt.

Airing Ethel Rosenberg's son's claim that his mother was "murdered in cold blood by this government" is unspeakably callous. He in not a disinterested party and is hardly in a position to be objective. His mother's life might have been spared if she, or her husband, had named other Soviet agents. Some find her behavior heroic. But if she loved her son, won't she have been more concerned about assuring that he had a home to grow up in and less in the progress of international communism? The future will work itself out, without the exertions of any one of us, but our children need us uniquely to ensure their future. As parents, the Rosenbergs were failures. Sacrificing your children to some messianic ego trip is no more noble than sacrificing them to drugs or alcohol. But don't tell her son that.

Your post is just priceless -- send it to PBS! Send it as a letter to the New York Times! All you did was just nail every single argument, and expose to the world what PBS tried to conceal -- the moral barrenness of the ideological Left.

And remember, boys and girls -- the German Nazis were a Left party, too, and don't ever let anyone tell you differently!

And FWIW, I used PBS's public-feedback link to send them a stiffly worded note about, okay, if McCarthy was right -- what about it, guys? You going to climb down any on the subject of Joseph McCarthy?

I had the exact same reaction you had.

"They seem to claim that because the Soviets never actually named Ethel Rosenberg as an "agent" in any of their cable traffic or in the Moscow archives, she is not guilty of espionage. But she is identified as Julius' wife (she did not have a code name, he was code named LIBERAL) and in context it is pretty clear that she was an active participant, and so recognized by Moscow."

She was a spy, and they show she was complicit, but then they try to be sympathetic to her, like the FBI went too far and claim her life might have been spared "if the venona files were public". Nonsense. She deserved it.

The real problem is that others deserved it more (Ted Hall) and got away.

Their bashing of McCarthy was incongruous, non-factual and irrelevent. How do they know McCarthy would have publicized Venona secrets? McCarthy kept his own hearings secret until the other side demanded they be public.