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."
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 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.
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 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.
It's easy to forget that Bertrand Russell was one of the first to see and write about the essential tyranny and falsehood of the Soviet system (1920), or that Einstein chose to come to this country in 1933, the moment Hitler attained power.
It's wrong to assume their criticisms of American society implied a love for Soviet Communism.
McCarthy's "Witches" by William Norman Grigg
Witchhunt? The high-profile cases cited by McCarthy — Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup — all ended with the senator’s charges being validated.
‘‘I was a representative of the Young Communist League and the Communist party of the United States [at] the meetings of the executive committee of the Communist International, Young Communist International, Moscow," pronounced Paul Crouch during his September 15, 1953 testimony before a closed session of Senator McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee. Crouch’s testimony, contained in the 4,232 pages of recently unsealed transcripts, offered details of a resumé the witness had compiled during 17 years of diligent service to the Soviet Union.
"I was a student and lecturer at the Frunze Military Academy and an honorary officer of the Red Army," continued Crouch. "I was the head of the Communist party’s National Department for Infiltration of the Armed Forces in the United States, national editorial director of the Young Communist League, member of the editorial staff of the Daily Worker, district organizer for the Communist party in Virginia, New York and South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah, member of the district bureau of the Communist party in the Alabama district and the California district, Alameda County organizer, 1941."
Predictably, Crouch’s detailed account of his Communist activities received no attention in media accounts of the recently unsealed transcripts. Nor were media outlets willing to report Crouch’s testimony regarding nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key figures in the U.S. government’s top-secret Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. Asked by Senator McCarthy, "Is there any doubt in your mind that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist party?" Crouch replied: "No, sir, none whatever. I met him in a closed meeting of the Communist party in a house which was subsequently found to have been his residence at the time...."
Three years prior to his testimony before McCarthy’s subcommittee, Crouch and his wife (who had also been a member of the Communist Party) had similarly testified regarding Oppenheimer before the California Legislature’s Committee on Un-American Activities. But any further inquiry about Oppenheimer’s activities was stymied when the scientist received a prominent endorsement from a popular young Golden State congressman with impressive anti-Communist credentials: Richard M. Nixon.
In his testimony at McCarthy’s closed-door hearings, Crouch described another occasion when powerful figures in the U.S. government came to Oppenhemier’s aid. During Oppenheimer’s perjury trial, two Justice Department attorneys forbade Crouch to testify that he and his wife had attended Communist Party meetings at Oppenheimer’s home. As a result, Crouch related, the jury "found him not guilty due to lack of sufficient identifying witnesses who had been in closed meetings with him, that is, witnesses who could testify to that effect."
On November 7, 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter from William L. Borden, former executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, containing a litany of detailed allegations leading to Borden’s "exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance, thereby becoming a "martyr" to the scourge of "McCarthyism." But like others given that exalted title, Oppenheimer was guilty as charged.
In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov, former head of the KGB’s Administration for Special Tasks, published his memoirs: Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness. In that position, Sudoplatov stated, he was "responsible for sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders." In Special Tasks, Sudoplatov disclosed that he had headed "the Soviet espionage effort to obtain the secrets of the atomic bomb from America and Great Britain. I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard … and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us." Further confirmation of Oppenheimer’s role as a Soviet spy was provided with the release of the "Venona" transcripts in 1995.
Rogues’ Gallery
Senator McCarthy first became aware of extensive Communist penetration of the State Department in 1949, when three men brought to his office a detailed FBI report on the problem. The report had been made available to the State Department in 1947. However, the State Department, under Secretary George C. Marshall, ignored the evidence and actually accelerated efforts to dismantle its security staff. A secret memo sent to Marshall by a Senate Appropriations subcommittee protested what it described as "a condition that developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of [State Department official] Dean Acheson. It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions."
Many of these figures had been brought into the State Department when it was merged in 1945 with several wartime agencies riddled with Communists and Communist-front members. Assurances from President Harry S. Truman that efforts would be taken to cull Communists from sensitive positions proved empty.
In 1949, Acheson — who had been a paid attorney for the Soviet Union prior to FDR’s decision to grant the regime diplomatic recognition in 1933 — became secretary of state. In that position he continued his efforts to protect Communists and Soviet agents, most notoriously his good friend, the arch-traitor Alger Hiss.
A year later, in his March 9th speech before a group of Republican Women in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator McCarthy made public his knowledge of Communist infiltration of the State Department. He subsequently discussed in public the names of nine of these people, including Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup. A Senate committee created by Democrat Senator Millard Tydings, supposedly to investigate McCarthy’s charges, became instead an effort to vilify and demonize McCarthy. After 31 days of hearings, the Tydings subcommittee labeled McCarthy’s accusations a "fraud" and a "hoax" and gave a blanket clearance to the State Department. But the facts were on McCarthy’s side.
The high-profile cases cited by McCarthy — Lattimore, Service, and Jessup — all ended with the senator’s charges being validated. Lattimore. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee later investigated Lattimore, declaring in 1952 that "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy." John Stewart Service, after being cleared by the State Department’s Loyalty and Security Board six times, was finally ousted from the department in December 1951 after the Civil Service Loyalty Review Board found that there was "reasonable doubt" as to his loyalty. In Jessup’s case, the uncontested record showed that he had belonged to at least five Communist fronts, had close ties to many Communists, and was an influential member of the Institute for Pacific Relations, which the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee would describe two years later as "a vehicle used by Communists to orientate [sic] American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives."
Of the 110 names McCarthy gave to the Tydings subcommittee, 62 were at the time employed by the State Department. Though the subcommittee cleared them all, within one year a State Department Loyalty Board instigated proceedings against 49 of the 62, and by the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy’s list had either resigned from their government posts or been dismissed.
(Adopted by Council -- 23 April 1994
The elected Council of the American Physical Society expresses its profound dismay at undocumented allegations in the "memoirs" of former Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov claiming that some of the most eminent scientists of this century were engaged in passing atomic secrets to agents of the Soviet Union. The charges are made by a man who has characterized himself as a master of deception and deceit. None of the scientists named are alive to refute these sensational claims; however, surviving colleagues point to serious discrepancies in the published account.
The cloud of suspicion created by these allegations is injurious to the trust that must exist between the public and the scientific community and painful to the families and colleagues of these great scientists. We therefore call on the United States government to undertake a prompt and thorough investigation to determine whether these claims have any basis in fact.
Furthermore, Sudoplatov never claims, as some of his detractors seem to believe, that these stellar physicists were actual Soviet spies. Indeed, he is careful to stress that this was not the case: Oppenheimer and the others 'were best approached as friends, not as agents.
Sudoplatov was instantly accused of inventing these stories. So first it must he said that his claims, true or false, had been presented by him to the Soviet authorities in July 1982 and were clearly what he, and Soviet intelligence, believed to be the facts; that is, they were not invented for sensationalist reasons.
As to whether they were true, and how true, we must begin by discriminating among the "sources." There are several reasons for believing that if Moscow thought Fermi was in any sense knowingly letting information reach them, they were probably wrong. They may have been misled (as I have pointed out elsewhere) by exaggerated claims on the part of their agent on the spot; or, another cause of confusion, because Fermi and Oppenheimer at one point shared the same code name in Soviet files. That Fermi may have spoken indiscreetly on some occasion to his old pupil and colleague Pontecorvo is, on the other hand, far from implausible.
As to Oppenheimer, it is impossible to understand how anyone who has read the original American investigations which led to his losing his security clearance can doubt that he maintained very close and inappropriate connections with those whose allegiance was to the USSR, and that he let unauthorized people see secret material. One's feeling is, nevertheless, not so much that he favored the Soviet Union as that he
{p. xvi} felt himself, and his decisions, to be above, and superior to, any government. That these decisions amounted to leaking the facts certainly followed.
But the argument that, in effect, good scientists cannot behave as Sudoplatov claims is absurd. Some of the scientists on the atomic project - Fuchs, Nunn, May - were certainly spies, while Pontecorvo's Stalinism is presumably undisputed. Other scientists have had awful political records. Nobel Prize physicist Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark were crude Nazis; Joseph Needham assisted the Maoist germ-warfare hoax. Nor is it perhaps irrelevant to note that when the anthropologist Mark Zborowski was arrested as a Soviet spy, the anthropological community here was loud in its - as it turned out - wholly misplaced defense of him.
But if we want to understand the period, we find first that it was one of huge pro-Soviet euphoria, and that almost all these scientists in any case held strongly, and argued to their governments, that world peace would be served by sharing the secrets with Stalin. It would hardly be surprising if, at some point, in some cases, their moral commitment to peace overcame their accepted duty to the government employing them. Thus everyone concerned acted in what they believed to be the best interests of humanity. Their fault was not moral but intellectual. They were wrong and their governments were right
No " double standard " in use by me, at all. I know what I'm talking about. If you did, even though we disagreed, it would be a valid debate. This isn't; you can to a duel unarmed and are claiming " victor's rights ". That's patently ridiculous and in spades.
You come here to learn ... then shut up and learn. Without your innane posts, this thread WOULD have been more cogent .
If " liberal " codswallop was EVER apparent, it's you last paragraph. LOL
Nobody forces you or anybody else to reply to my posts or to read more than one of them if you find my views to be worthless...a point so obvious that I would think it would force you to re-examine your high opinion of yourself.
Another tidbit ... in 1952, Edward Teller told teh FBI that Oppenheimer was a " fellow travellor ", J.Edgar Hoover got told this, in a letter by William L. Borden, former executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Hoover told Eisenhower, who had a " blank wall " erected between Oppenheimer and the AEC secrets and the AEC pulled Oppenheimer's clearance on Dec. 23,1953.Yet, in 1954, after more hearings, Oppenheimer was " cleared " of being disloyal to America ; but, his clearance was still withdrawn.
Bertrand Russel was a staunch SOCIALIST/MARXIST to his dying day.Like so many of that ilk, he thought that HE could make that system work, if only given the chance. Wanna try again ... talking about things you don't know much about ? LOL
Not only was Einstein a Jew, but the Nazis were going afyer Commies, as well as Jews and others. Anyone, with sense and opportunity, was leaving Germany, when Einstein did.
No. Openheimer recommended using the Bomb on Japan. He was head of the Scientific Panel which advised the Interim Committee to use the atomic bomb on Japan.
Pauling, Feynman, and Gell-man were among my professors during my undergraduate years. One of Feyman's best students, H.T. Yura, was my closest friend.
You really are an unbelievable idiot.
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