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."
From IMDB
Reds (1981)
Writing has been the only escape of Louise Bryant until she goes to a lecture one night in 1912 and is mesmerized by a radical journalist, John Reed. She leaves her husband and goes to Greenwich Village with Reed where she keeps writing, covering the 1913 Armory Show of post-impressionist paintings from Europe. Reed is so wrapped up in changing the world that Louise leaves him for awhile and stays with a playwright, Eugene O'Neill. She returns to Reed. He goes to Russia and covers the 1917 Revolution. She never forgets Reed. the only American to be buried next to the Kremlin wall.
Summary written by Dale O'Connor {daleoc@interaccess.com}
This movie tells the true story of John Reed, a radical American journalist around the time of World War I. He soon meets Louise Bryant, a respectable married woman, who dumps her husband for Reed and becomes an important feminist and radical in her own right. After involvement with labor and political disputes in the US, they go to Russia in time for the October Revolution in 1917, when the Communists siezed power. Inspired, they return to the US, hoping to lead a similar revolution. A particularly fascinating aspect of the movie is the inclusion of interviews with "witnesses", the real-life surviving participants in the events of the movie.
Summary written by Reid Gagle
So...we had a movie glorifying a traitor to the United States. Financed by Warren Beatty and the other Hollywood commies. Like I said, we need Senator McCarthy again. He was right.
But the Rosenbergs weren't the accused; they were the convicted. So was Bruno Richard Hauptman.
If Julius Rosenberg hadn't marched lockstep with the dictum that American Communist spies are never to admit guilt (in Great Britain they were told to do just the opposite), he and Ethel might still be alive today.
See the link in #38. Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested we should have done that. Toward the end of his life he seemed to realize what over 50 years of liberal lies had done to his party and to America.
I'm no expert. My information comes from casual reading. Here's the way I read this article;
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... 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... The government's strategy backfired. Ethel wouldn't budge. The Rosenbergs refused to confess and were convicted.
In other words, they were threatened with death before trial in order to try to force a confession.
Maybe they didn't know...lol
Seriously, I assumed John Reed was paid something but didn't know he received over a million bucks from Lenin in 1920. What a haul that was then! The equivalent of $10 million today. Notice how the money was passed in gems and artifacts. Lenin and Trotsky looted the Russian Church. In one letter, Lenin spoke of hundreds of billions in gold rubles they could steal from the Orthodox church. Armand Hammer fenced the swag in NYC.
Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer both attended this pro-Stalin pep rally:
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
To give her due credit Mary McCarthy also attended Sidney Hook's contra-conference.
The topic is the guilt of the Rosenbergs and the details of their trial and conviction. I guess you can say Willi Munzenberg has relevance. Pretty tenuous though. Every major, and many minor, governments spy on as many of their allies, enemies, competitors and possible competitors as they can.
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.
Wrong. Politics continued right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that it became much more dangerous to voice anti-American sentiment of any kind and those who felt or thought that way went underground.
Look at Robert Scheer today
This is really off topic.
"But here we arrive at the supreme irony of the entire case, which is that the U.S. government did not want to execute either of the Rosenbergs. What it wanted, instead, were the facts about their espionage activities. Had Julius and Ethel been willing to talk, Eisenhower was fully prepared to commute their sentence to life imprisonment. Even that would never have been served to term, for under federal law, as the President himself pointed out, "if they do not go to the chair, they will be released in fifteen years."
This option was available to the couple virtually to the very moment the executioner threw the switch. Roberts reminds us that, from a command post in Sing Sing, the FBI maintained open phone lines to director J. Edgar Hoover's office in Washington. Agents were also armed with an elaborate legal protocol that would have justified the Bureau's recommendation of a last-minute reprieve. Specific questions had been drafted, two stenographers were standing by, and several suspected members of the Rosenberg spy ring had been placed under surveillance to prevent them from fleeing the country if word leaked out that the Rosenbergs were cooperating. Yet even when, moments after her husband's execution, the prison's Jewish chaplain begged Ethel to save herself, her only comment was, "I have no names to give. I'm innocent." In effect, the Rosenbergs played a game of chicken with the U.S. government, one that both sides lost. The government was never able to pin down all the facts about Soviet atomic and scientific espionage, and several key members of the Rosenberg ring were able to escape to safe haven behind the Iron Curtain. Moreover, the execution of the Rosenbergs provided the Communist camp with a massive propaganda windfall; Roberts exaggerates only slightly in writing that "by martyring themselves, they contributed considerably more to the cause of world Communism than they ever had as spies."
As for the price paid by the Rosenbergs, they willingly chose not only to die themselves but to commit their two boys, ages six and ten at the time, to orphanhood. Indeed, contemplating what the Rosenbergs did or hoped or tried to do in the years before their apprehension, one cannot help wondering about the disposition of parents who would engage in dangerous and highly illegal work that inevitably exposed their children to the prospect of their own physical disappearance, not to mention the stigma that would be attached thereafter to their name and family."(end of excerpt)
The New York Times now has a deserved reputation for partisanship, incompetence and deceit. They would not want to give enough factual details of the Rosenberg incident, because they want to emotionally sway people and it looks liked it worked in your case.
A sympathetic interview with Jules Feiffer about his newest play which just opened at the Lincoln Center. His opus relates the trouble a family of dedicated communists had in Brooklyn during the McCarthy era. Some nice slaps at George W. Bush in the interview.
Anyone think it is worth posting, please do. My browser won't allow me to copy it.
I presume this means that definite evidence of the Rosenbergs' guilt now exists. I don't deny that might be the case. I'm not expert. I took this article at face value
"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)...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...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...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 article goes on to say
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...
But it doesn't say what that information was or how valuable it proved to be.
So I don't know the answer to my question...and I don't know which of Mr. Moynihan's observations you're referring to. I'd like to, though, because he was a man of integrity.
Yeah...let's forget about liberals from John Reed to Robert Scheer supporting genocidal maniacs. Let's just talk about how the Rosenbergs were railroaded.
Geeezzz...
You say threatening the Rosenbergs with the death penalty was like the "Inquisition".
The government knew they had committed treason. No doubt about it. If the government know that about a Nazi agent in the USA in 1942, would you still consider it to have been wrong to use threats of the death penalty to make the rat rat out out his fellow rats?
What about Al Qaeda? If the government has someone who planned 9/11 or the Cole bombing, is it fair to threaten the death penalty to get them to roll over on those plotting more attacks?
Or don't you believe Soviet Communism was not as big a threat as Al Qaeda and Nazism?
Soviet communists murdered more than Al Qaeda and Nazi Germany combined you know.
Playing With History
A sympathetic interview with Jules Feiffer about his newest play which just opened at the Lincoln Center. His opus relates the trouble a family of dedicated communists had in Brooklyn during the McCarthy era. Some nice slaps at George W. Bush in the interview.
Anyone think it is worth posting, please do. My browser won't allow me to copy it.
The opening pages of today's Magazine were infuriating. The anti-Republican letters, this article and a suck-up photo of Castro and his Venezuelan sycophant/imitator.
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