Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Yes, They Were Guilty. But of What Exactly? [NYT FINALLY admits Rosenbergs were guilty!]
NY Times ^ | June 15, 2003 | SAM ROBERTS

Posted on 06/15/2003 6:43:14 AM PDT by Pharmboy

click here to read article


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 321-334 next last
To: DPB101
John Reed. Didn't Warren Beatty make a movie about him?

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.

41 posted on 06/15/2003 2:38:06 PM PDT by I_Love_My_Husband
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: liberallarry
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?

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.

42 posted on 06/15/2003 2:39:59 PM PDT by UbIwerks
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies]

To: Pharmboy
Someone on this board (I can't remember who) suggested that the VENONA information should have been made public very early on, possibly during the Rosenberg trial. It might have (a) derailed the Left's efforts to scream that the Rosenbergs (and Hiss, et cetera) were framed, and (b) derailed the more BS-filled endeavours by Joseph McCarthy.
43 posted on 06/15/2003 2:44:08 PM PDT by Poohbah (I must be all here, because I'm not all there!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: liberallarry
Whose system of justice would you prefer?
44 posted on 06/15/2003 2:44:21 PM PDT by MEG33
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies]

To: jshermn
History has revealed pretty much that they were spies, and deserved their fate. So did many others involved in our nuclear program. There was a recent Nova episode on the stuff that Fuches and others did that did unbelievable damage. I believe it was the "Project Verona" episode.

There's this calm, nice looking older guy who worked at the Manhatten project.. His demeanor totally changes when they ask what should've happened to one of the spies (who took off to Russia I believe). He shouts "Shot! They were enemies of the USA, they were military men, and should've been summarily executed!".

It was a real wakeup call to me.. Scary stuff. The feel good crapola about the 'poor' Rosenbergs makes me ill. They were traitors and communists... We still have those around to deal with as well.
45 posted on 06/15/2003 2:45:09 PM PDT by Monty22
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: Monty22
True.
46 posted on 06/15/2003 2:48:34 PM PDT by MEG33
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies]

To: Monty22
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/intercepts.html

I made a few small mistakes in my post, but that's the link to the source I was speaking about.
47 posted on 06/15/2003 2:49:37 PM PDT by Monty22
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies]

To: Monty22
PBS/NOVA..definitely not a right wing hotbed!
48 posted on 06/15/2003 2:54:29 PM PDT by MEG33
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 47 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
Someone on this board (I can't remember who) suggested that the VENONA information should have been made public very early on, possibly during the Rosenberg trial

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.

49 posted on 06/15/2003 2:55:48 PM PDT by DPB101 ("Smearing good people like Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie is . . .unforgivable"---Eleanor Roosevelt)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: UbIwerks
But the Rosenbergs weren't the accused; they were the convicted

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.

50 posted on 06/15/2003 2:58:38 PM PDT by liberallarry
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 42 | View Replies]

To: MEG33
I prefer ours (to the others I know about) - precisely because it recognizes human limitations and tries to correct for them.
51 posted on 06/15/2003 3:02:42 PM PDT by liberallarry
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: I_Love_My_Husband
So...we had a movie glorifying a traitor to the United States. Financed by Warren Beatty and the other Hollywood commies.

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.

52 posted on 06/15/2003 3:05:28 PM PDT by DPB101 ("Smearing good people like Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie is . . .unforgivable"---Eleanor Roosevelt)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 41 | View Replies]

To: Pharmboy; DPB101; I_Love_My_Husband; MEG33; aculeus; Bonaparte; aristeides; dix; Grampa Dave
"They were to be killed more quickly than planned," the playwright Arthur Miller wrote, "to avoid any shadow of bad taste."

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.

53 posted on 06/15/2003 3:09:30 PM PDT by aculeus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: DPB101
My reply was on topic

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.

54 posted on 06/15/2003 3:12:06 PM PDT by liberallarry
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: liberallarry
It's a pity you didn't look at the link I gave earlier Liberallarry because this excerpt from my link has this to say:

"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.

55 posted on 06/15/2003 3:17:54 PM PDT by UbIwerks
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 50 | View Replies]

To: aculeus; I_Love_My_Husband; MEG33
New York Times Sunday Magazine today:

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.

56 posted on 06/15/2003 3:21:42 PM PDT by DPB101 ("Smearing good people like Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie is . . .unforgivable"---Eleanor Roosevelt)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 53 | View Replies]

To: DPB101
Another classic left wing excuse. You must know the answer to your question. Pat Moynihan spoke of it often before his death

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.

57 posted on 06/15/2003 3:24:30 PM PDT by liberallarry
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
The Venona info. was gained only after the breakup of USSR.
When the Venona Papers became public, the left still maintained the innocence of the Rosenbergs in the face of proof to the contrary. You know the left can't face the truth if it disagrees with their agenda.

vaudine
58 posted on 06/15/2003 3:24:33 PM PDT by vaudine
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: liberallarry
Look at Robert Scheer today
This is really off topic.

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.

59 posted on 06/15/2003 3:30:58 PM PDT by DPB101 ("Smearing good people like Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie is . . .unforgivable"---Eleanor Roosevelt)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 54 | View Replies]

To: DPB101
New York Times Sunday Magazine today:

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.

60 posted on 06/15/2003 3:31:44 PM PDT by aculeus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 56 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 321-334 next last

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.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson