Posted on 06/18/2003 4:07:04 PM PDT by DPB101
Dear Robert:
It has been fifty years since your parents’ execution, and it is understandable that as the son whom their actions betrayed --along with their country--you should still cling to the idea of their innocence. But in the decades since 1953, we have learned much about your father, Julius Rosenberg, and the contributions he made to the Soviet Union as an active espionage agent. We also know, contrary to what you claim in your new book An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey, that your mother -- Ethel Rosenberg -- was not an innocent housewife as many of those who concede her husband’s guilt maintain.
The Venona cables, which you discuss but never quote, prove conclusively that she was a knowledgeable accessory to your father’s espionage, and that she also recommended others to be recruited to the KGB. In a conspiracy case, that alone is sufficient for a person to be included in an indictment.
But you seem unable to grasp that the case against your parents was part of an effort to break an important Soviet espionage network, one that your father put together. Instead you insist on referring to it as a political trial meant to serve as a warning to the “progressive” Left, to strike fear into their hearts, as you put it in a recent interview, and to prove that “left-wingers were really agents of a foreign power.” As though this were not indeed the truth, at least in the case of active spies.
Why can’t you admit that the Venona decrypts conclusively prove that American Communists were indeed agents of a foreign power?
The same decrypts show that your father put together a network of seven primary sources and two active liaison-couriers, as well as three others who carried out support work. All of these people were recruited, as was your father, from the ranks of the American Communist Party.
Your father stole top secret military data, including the proximity fuse that years later the Soviets used to shoot down Major Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane. Klehr and Haynes refer to the fuse as “one of the most innovative advances of American military technology,” for which Moscow awarded your father a $1,000 bonus in March 1945.
Of course, we also know -- as Joyce Milton and I argued back in 1983 -- that the death sentence for your mother was intended by the prosecution as a “lever” to pressure your father to confess so they could move against his ring. But the government never expected to carry these executions out; indeed, even J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo opposing the execution of your mother.
But as Communist true believers, they refused to confess, preferring martyrdom--making their own children orphans--to telling the truth and saving their lives. Your uncle, David Greenglass, who also sought to stop the execution, put it accurately when he said that your parents “could have cleared themselves.”
I know that you have suffered greatly, and that as you reveal in your memoir, you have struggled to come to terms with what their trial means for our history. You make a start; but you fall far short of accomplishing your goal. You continue to give credence to myths that have long been answered. You insist that Venona is “devastating…to the government’s case,” when in fact, it establishes beyond doubt that your father was a Soviet spy.
You say you now “accept the possibility” that he participated in what you call an “illegal and covert effort to help the Soviet Union defeat the Nazis,” forgetting that as a Communist his ambition was to overthrow the government of the United States, as well. You also denigrate the confirmation of the role your father played, provided by his KGB control Alexander Feklisov--writing him off in two pages as a “disreputable character interested in self-aggrandizement and financial gain.” However, any reader of his book knows that his motivation is only to honor and “to rehabilitate the name of” the Rosenbergs, whom he considers to have been genuine Soviet partisans.
Your contention that your father’s espionage for one of the bloodiest tyrants in history is understandable because he had bad eyesight and could not enter the U.S. Army, is sad, even desperate.
I could understand if, like Feklisov, you argued that your parents were committed Communists who put their ideals into practice by stealing the military secrets of the imperialists to help their Soviet comrades. I would find that a rather poor excuse, but at least one that is honest. But instead, you continue to assert that the agencies that released the new evidence regularly practice “disinformation,” and are thus intent on creating “false leads to show my parents’ guilt.” In this way, instead of exculpating your parents’ crimes against their country, you continue them.
In the end the truth remains that your parents were traitors who betrayed their country and their sons for an illusion. They acted with courage, but for a cause that was corrupt. By recognizing this you would restore their humanity, and perhaps heal the wound you obviously still feel. Instead, you have chosen to continue the charade, pretending that their cause was noble and that they were heroes of an American “resistance.” Resistance to what?
For your own sake, I hope you are mentally prepared for the inevitable day when the KGB’s own archives reveal that your parents were guilty. Get ready, because it’s going to be soon.
Sincerely,
Ron Radosh
Ronald Radosh is the co-author, with Joyce Milton, of the definitive work on the Rosenberg case, "The Rosenberg File" and of "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left" (Encounter Books, 2001). He is also a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
I don't believe, for one second, their intentions are ever good. Nobody is that stupid. It is all about envy, greed and me, me, me. They get in the cult and are stroked by others in the cult. They are told what wonderful humanitarians they are by people as insecure, greedy and grasping as they are. It is an egocentric, materialistic self-perpetuating con which even cons the believers into thinking, on the surface, that they are doing good (when they really know they are not).
Btw...those who officially joined the CPUSA darn well knew it was funded and controled from the Kremlin. They don't have the excuse you use of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were bad...but.....but...
What economic system doesn't rely upon these natural human tendencies?
Adam Smith; The Wealth of Nations; the "invisible hand."
It's always hard for kids to see their parents in a rational way. The important thing, I think, is that most of the rest of us know the essential truth about what happened. The history is pretty clear at this point.
I take that back. I met more than a few who were just crooks and/or sociopaths. They were running a game. To them, it was a source of endless amusement there were so many suckers who would give in to their demands.
Right? LOL.
It was a " game ", a " power trip ", and a way to get unalloied adulation from many, for that group. Hoffman and his compadres brainwashed many into believing the matra : " DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY ", when he and they were ALL well over ... THIRTY !
What economic system doesn't rely upon these natural human tendencies?
The one developed by Western Civilization. The one which has an ethical basis to it. You want to see what happens when that is taken away, look at Russia when they tried to embrace capitalism. There were no moral restraints on anyone.
Aside from the "invisible hand" there is an invisible moral agreement that one will not take all one can get, that one will stop at a certain point and not abuse the system. The system fails if the vast majority are not honest.
Max Weber outlined it pretty well in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Other societies can, of course, develop free markets. But it was the Christian west which did it best.
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.