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."
Very dramatic. However, all's they had to do was confess...but they didn't. They made a decision together to be martyrs. They didn't have to be. In the process their sons suffered for their selfishness/stubbornness/committment to a faux phony idealistic cause called Communism.
That's something I never heard before. Can you back it up?
Of course, they may have been summoned under some other pretext. But to go thousands of miles to their deaths, knowingly and willingly? I find that rather hard to believe.
-ccm
Request to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. SenateNot much different than what the left is saying today about the convictions of Mumia Abu Jamal,Jonathan Pollard, Leonard Peltier and Lori Berenson.TO INVESTIGATE THE CONDUCT OF THE
U. S. ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE
IN THE ROSENBERG-SOBELL CASESubmitted by:
THE NATIONAL ROSENBERG-SOBELL COMMITTEE
1050 Sixth Avenue
New York City 18, N. Y.INTRODUCTION
The functions of the Attorney General's office, including the offices of the various United States attorneys and their assistants, as well as the various bureaus in the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are to carry out the laws of our nation. These officials are charged with the responsibility not only of prosecuting those persons accused of crimes but also of protecting impartially the constitutional and legal rights of all citizens . . . continued
The government used Inquisition tactics. Why do you suppose we have a Fifth Amendment? Maybe they were guilty, maybe not. But you cannot use their confession...or lack of...as proof. It's criminal and primitive to do so.
In any case it was certain that the secret of the atomic bomb could not be kept after it's existance was revealed. Not a single scientist thought it could be. Technology of all kinds spreads like wildfire in the modern world.
Oh please. That is the Willi Munzenberg defense. They got their due process and then some. American troops were being slaughtered in Korea by the regime the Rosenbergs loved--a regime which had murdered more than the Nazis ever did. And they wanted America to become just like that regime. The proximity fuse Julius hand delivered to the KGB as a "Christmas present" killed American soldiers.
They were lucky they were not taken before a military court and shot or dragged out of prison by mobs and lynched.
So it is OK to give secrets to enemies of America if they would get them someday anyways?
My gosh.
Btw...it wasn't that easy to make the bomb. Had the Soviets not had the bomb when they did, had the Rosenbergs, Ted Hall and others not helped them get the bomb, Stalin would not have given North Korea the OK to invade the south. Times would have been bought. American lives saved.
The same type offer was made to Bruno Richard Hauptman about the kidnap and death of the Lindbergh baby. It's obviously been done in American justice for some time.
1)It has nothing to do with the thread
2)The Nazis had similar anti-intellectual sentiments
3)You can't seriously believe intellectuals are dumber than the general public
4)Many others besides intellectuals were enamoured of despots; Father Coughlin and his followers, British aristocrats, Charles Lindberg, Winston Churchill (before '37), Neville Chamberlain, most of the Republican isolationists...the list is very long
It's still done. Suspected drug dealers routinely face a version of it (with less serious consequences). If the accused is guilty it can be very effective. But if he's innocent...?
Do you really have so much confidence in our system of justice? In any system of human justice? What was the purpose of the Fifth amendment if not to prevent government from using its overwhelming power to extort confessions?
On this point you may be right. I don't know enough of the history of the period to be sure.
But on general principals
1)Stalin had no more control of the North Korean invasion of the South than he did of VietNamese resistance to the French. He reacted to rather than instigated it
2)We could have used the atomic bomb in Korea had we so chosen. We had many, the Russians very few. We chose not to for other reasons (If I remember correctly, we were ready to use the bomb in '54 against the VietNamese. It was the French rather than Eisenhower who declined).
If that's true why wasn't he tried for murder?
Nonsense? It is a review of the book Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, by Stephen Koch. With whom do you disagree? Koch or the reviewer, Mark Y. Herring?
Herring also reviewedStalin's apologist : Walter Duranty, the New York Times man in Moscow, by S.J. Taylor. I thought that book quite good. Is there something about Herring or these two books I should know but don't?
My reply was on topic. The Rosenbergs were not alone. There was an entire nest of traitors which worked for the Soviet Union from 1920 until the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. Senate has confirmed this to be true.
REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON PROTECTING AND REDUCING GOVERNMENT SECRECY (1997). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman:
(John) Reed was a Soviet agent. On January 22, 1920, he received from the Comintern gold, jewels, and other valuables worth 1,008,000 rubles for Party work in the United States. (Note: over $1 million US)The United States Government did not know this. It has only just been discovered in Soviet archives . . .The "everybody does it" excuse doesn't work. All those you claim on the right who defended despots ended up fighting both communism and fascism. They same isn't true on the left. Many on the left defended Hitler when he was allied with Stalin and only became pro-war after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. There are literally hundreds of prominent left wingers one can name who aided and abetted the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. Look at Robert Scheer today. A man who thought Kim Il Sung was a hero of the people now is a national columnist.Tom Wicker saw no moral difference, he said, between Pol Pot and Lon Nol. Noam Chomsky, a denyer of the Cambodian Holocaust, gets crowd wherever he goes. Ed Anser and Mike Farrell, supporters of Soviet client states in Central America, are icons of the left. Barbara Lee, who sat on a committee created by the Communist Party USA, is a member of congress.For the next seven decades the United States Government would be the object of a sustained Soviet campaign of infiltration and subversion. There would be, as with Great Britain, a measure of success among elites, but in the pattern now already seen, an ethnic factor would be the most prominent.
In the beginning, most American Communists would be Russians. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was organized at Moscow’s behest in 1921, merging Reed’s Communist Labor Party with the Communist Party of America, organized by a former socialist, Midwesterner Charles Emil Ruthenberg. The membership was not large and was overwhelmingly foreign-born . . .more
Another classic left wing excuse. You must know the answer to your question. Pat Moynihan spoke of it often before his death.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.