Robert, left, and Michael Rosenberg in June 1953.
Posted on 06/15/2003 6:43:14 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Robert, left, and Michael Rosenberg in June 1953.
Fifty years ago Thursday, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Their execution, originally set for 11 p.m. on Friday, June 19, 1953, was rescheduled for 8 p.m. to avoid conflict with the Jewish sabbath.
"They were to be killed more quickly than planned," the playwright Arthur Miller wrote, "to avoid any shadow of bad taste."
A shadow lingers.
"I grew up believing Ethel and Julius were completely innocent," Robert Meeropol, who was 6 years old in 1953, says of the Rosenbergs, his parents. "By the time I completed law school in 1985, however, I realized that the evidence we had amassed did not actually prove my parents' innocence but rather only demonstrated that they had been framed."
After digesting newly released American decryptions of Soviet cables a decade later, Mr. Meeropol came to a revised conclusion. "While the transcriptions seemed inconclusive, they forced me to accept the possibility that my father had participated in an illegal and covert effort to help the Soviet Union defeat the Nazis," he writes in his new memoir, "An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey" (St. Martin's Press).
Of course, the Rosenbergs weren't executed for helping the Soviets defeat the Nazis, but as atom spies for helping Stalin end America's brief nuclear monopoly. They weren't charged with treason (the Russians were technically an ally in the mid-1940's) or even with actual spying. Rather, they were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage — including enlisting Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, through his wife, Ruth, to steal atomic secrets from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory where he was stationed as an Army machinist during World War II. Mr. Greenglass's chief contribution was to corroborate what the Soviets had already gleaned from other spies, which by 1949 enabled them to replicate the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. (He confessed, testified against his sister and brother-in-law and was imprisoned for 10 years; Ruth testified, too, and was spared prosecution.)
As leverage against Julius, Ethel was also indicted on what, in retrospect, appears to have been flimsy evidence. The government didn't have to prove that anything of value was delivered to the Soviets, only that the participants acted to advance their goal.
"When you're dealing with a conspiracy, you don't have to be the kingpin, you have to participate," says James Kilsheimer, who helped prosecute the Rosenbergs. "You can't be partially guilty any more than you can be partially pregnant."
But to justify the death penalty, which was invoked to press the Rosenbergs to confess and implicate others, the government left the impression that the couple had handed America's mightiest weapon to the Soviets and precipitated the Korean War.
Records of the grand jury that voted the indictment remain sealed. But we now know the Soviet cables decoded before the trial provided no hard evidence of Ethel's complicity. And Mr. Greenglass has recently admitted that he lied about the most incriminating evidence against his sister. The government's strategy backfired. Ethel wouldn't budge. The Rosenbergs refused to confess and were convicted.
"She called our bluff," William P. Rogers, the deputy attorney general at the time, said shortly before he died in 2001.
"They had the key to the death chamber in their hands," Mr. Kilsheimer says. "They never used it."
Whatever military and technical secrets Julius delivered to the Russians — and it now seems all but certain that, as a committed Communist, he did provide information — the Rosenbergs proved more valuable as martyrs than as spies.
"The Soviets did win the propaganda war," said Robert J. Lamphere, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The war isn't over. David Greenglass is 81; Ruth Greenglass is 79. They live under a pseudonym because their surname has become synonymous with betrayal of kin and country. "Perhaps," Mr. Meeropol says, "this is David and Ruth's final punishment."
On Thursday, Mr. Meeropol, who is 56, and his brother Michael, who is 60, (they took their adoptive parents' name) will attend a program at City Center in Manhattan to "commemorate the Rosenbergs' resistance" and benefit the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which Robert runs.
Michael Meeropol is chairman of the economics department at Western New England College. Would any evidence ever convince him that his father was a spy? "If Soviet documents were verified as historically accurate, I'd certainly believe that," he replied.
Then what? How would he explain his father's behavior? "I would have to do some thinking about my parents being involved in dangerous things, but I can't judge people from the 1940's," he said. "He's not in the Army. He has bad eyesight. He can't make the contribution that others were making. I could argue that this was a way of doing it."
To this day, plenty of people would argue that he's wrong.
Sam Roberts, the deputy editor of the Week in Review, is the author of "The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case."
Going for the maximum penalty and then offering a lesser penalty if the defendents cooperate is not an attempt to "extort" nor is it a violation of the Bill of Rights. It is exactly what the prosecution should have done in order to uphold its sworn duty to protect and preserve the constitution. We were under attack. The Rosenbergs were part of that attack. The government had an obligation to mitigate the damage they caused. Offering a plea deal in order to unravel the extent of the attack on America fulfilled that obligation and it did not violate anyones civil rights.
You, or anyone else, can say all day long (as you have) that offering plea bargins such as the Rosenbergs recieved violates the constitution. Doing so has been the MO of the extreme left since Willi Muzenberg made a cause out of Sacco and Vanzetti. But that doesn't make it true. There isn't a court in the land which has ever agreed with you (or if one did, it was overturned--the same deal the Rosenbergs got could and would be offered today).
What bothers me is anti-intellectualism...and I think it arises from imprecise thinking. A formal education is over-rated - it is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement.
We have to correct that by recognizing that a good education can be obtained in many, informal ways. One can be an intellectual, a thinker, a doer, without graduating from a major university.
Correcting it by devaluing intelligence, education, and intellectual achievement is no correction at all.
I agree with your assessment of Bush, by the way. It's disturbing that a person who mangles the language can have those qualities but reality is indeed strange.
My own field of credentials is in Special Education. Bush has a specific speech impediment known as cluttering, similar to, but not the same as stuttering. It has nothing to do with education or intellect. I find it interesting that democrats who have such a finely tuned regard for the handicapped also have no qualms about making fun of them.
First I heard about it. Hats off to him for risking public service with such a handicap.
If you are a constitutional lawyer I'll give special weight to your opinions. Otherwise I think it's an open question as to whether or not threatening a person (or - even worse - his or her wife or husband) with death unless he confesses violates the Fifth.
Here it is
I've alread conceded that the New York Times may have misrepresented the situation and that the Fifth may not apply because of public danger ("...except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger"), so don't bring that up.
The House Un-American Activities Committee later routinely attempted to circumvent possible problems with the Fifth by offering immunity in order to compel testimony - which pretty much supports my interpretation.
The Fifth Amendment, Self-Incrimination, and Gun Registration
After reading it I don't care whether or not you're a constitutional lawyer. The courts can rule any way they want to - and later courts can change those rulings. It happens all the time.
Mispronunciation or slurrring of speech sounds or deleting non-stressed syllables in longer words (e.g., "ferchly" for "fortunately").
Sounds like my Bush.
Make of it what you will.
From SELF INCRIMINATION
This debate is nonsense. Buh...bye...
At the highest levels the government made a cost-benefit analysis and decided a trial of Oppenheimer would have been counter-productive - a Pyrrhic victory.
Considerable effort had been expended to assemble a team of the world's best scientists. What value a conviction if that team were destroyed?
Read Feyman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman!" to get a feel for the quality of people involved and the atmosphere they worked in. They could not have been replaced and they would not have tolerated a repressive, suspicious environment. It's also clear that most of them were scientists to the bone - with politics a distant second, third, or last.
I also seriously question whether the government was smart enough to catch such people if they chose to spy...and I think the government also thought seriously about that. They tried with Linus Pauling and ended up looking like fools.
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