Posted on 06/17/2003 11:50:51 AM PDT by DPB101
OSSINING, N.Y. (AP)--Pete Seeger was in New York City's Union Square in 1953 along with 5,000 other supporters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as the hour of the couple's execution drew near.
``We were waiting and hoping Eisenhower would give a last-minute reprieve,'' says Seeger, now 84.
``We learned that wouldn't happen, and then a great sigh, a great wail went up from the crowd when the time came and we knew they'd been executed.''
On the 50th anniversary of the execution Thursday, Seeger, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte and other show business activists will appear at a benefit for the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which assists children of people imprisoned, attacked or fired for taking a public stand.
Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs' younger son, who runs the fund, calls it his ``constructive revenge.''
The execution of the Rosenbergs in the electric chair at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, ended one of the most sensational cases of the McCarthy era. It was the first execution of civilians for espionage in U.S. history.
The Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950, accused of relaying to the Soviet Union secrets of the atomic bomb. They allegedly recruited Mrs. Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass, who worked at the site of the first atom bomb test in New Mexico. Greenglass became a star witness against the Rosenbergs, testifying that he saw his sister transcribing his spy notes on a typewriter.
The judge who passed sentence, Irving Kaufman, told the Rosenbergs their actions had led to the Korean War and all its casualties, and added: ``Millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.''
There were appeals, stays of execution and pleas for mercy from Pope Pius XII and Albert Einstein.
Morton Sobell, who was convicted with the Rosenbergs but spared the death penalty, was at Alcatraz when a guard told him they had been put to death.
``My emotions had already been hardened by the prison life,'' says Sobell, 86, who served 18 years.
``But the guard was kindhearted about it and even my fellow inmates knew it was like someone from my family had been killed.''
Meeropol, who was 6 at the time and was known then as Robbie Rosenberg, recalls: ``We were watching a ball game on television when trailers started coming across the screen about the scheduled execution. The adults sent us outside to play so we wouldn't see the news accounts and we played catch until it was too dark to see the ball. My parents had been killed right around sunset.''
A year and a half ago, Greenglass announced that he lied about the typewriter--and some other matters--to save himself and his wife.
While decoded Soviet messages released in recent years appear to show that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy, supporters say nothing he contributed to the Soviets--and certainly nothing his wife did--warranted the electric chair.
Meeropol's memoir, ``An Execution in the Family'' is being published on the anniversary. In it, he recounts his vague memories of Rosenberg family life; his and his brother's adoption by Abel and Anne Meeropol; his own studies of his parents' case, which opened him to the possibility they may have been spies; and his difficulty in understanding why parents of small children would engage in such risk.
But Meeropol is also suspicious that recently released evidence may be government ``disinformation.''
``What a horror story it would be for me to accept it and then later find out that I've spread their propaganda for them,'' he says. ``I couldn't live with myself.''
``My bottom line, instead, is that the United States government executed two people for doing something they knew those people didn't do.''
On the Net:
Rosenberg Fund for Children: http://www.rfc.org
Maybe he just couldn't stand the onslaught of facts any longer and gave up. :-)
They didn't dim in Yankee Stadium that night. I was there. It was only after the game ended (10 or 11 innings if I remember correctly), as we were coming out of the stadium, that we saw the swarm of newspaper vendors yelling Extra-Extra with the news that the executions had taken place.
Yes. I was from NE PA at the time, and folks there for the most part were happy to see these traitors get their due punishment. My father had driven us to the game. He was pretty happy about the events that night. He worked for Mr. Hoover, and had been in the Manhattan office until being transferred to PA a few years earlier.
HISSKGB summed up nicely the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the general public at the time.
You are right, and it nearly cost us big time, as in 1962 the Soviets were prepared to land several large thermonuke warheads on the continental U.S.
Here's the story:
They opened a chain of import stores and named it ...
(Drumroll)
...Traitor Jews
My Jewish wife swatted me when I told her that. :)
Obviously they were export outlets.
:-)
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