Posted on 09/21/2003 8:06:51 AM PDT by 07055
Here we are, a half-century on since the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs are truly historical figures now, but for a small fraction of the population their fate still has the power to generate yesterday's heat. Were the Rosenbergs framed? Did they do anything? If they did do anything, was it anything much?
Robert Meeropol, the younger son of the Rosenbergs, has lived his life close to home -- that is, among people who believed his parents were innocents, martyrs to a government bent not on catching Soviet spies but on crushing political dissent. Given the evidence that has come pouring out in recent years, it is little wonder if ''An Execution in the Family,'' Meeropol's touchingly sincere memoir, reflects less the journey of his title than a lifetime of struggle to keep the same foothold on ever more slippery ground.
For much of his youth few people knew Meeropol's identity as a Rosenberg. He and his brother, Michael, took the name of Anne and Abel Meeropol, who loved the boys dearly, and who officially, if in no other way, dropped out of the Communist Party in order to adopt them. Robert remained ignorant of the particulars of the famous case until the publication in 1965 of an influential book -- ''Invitation to an Inquest,'' by Walter and Miriam Schneir -- that attacked the evidence brought against the Rosenbergs at trial as an immense government conspiracy. Thus fortified, Meeropol went on to read other material then available, and ''my emotional belief in my parents' innocence became an intellectual certainty.''
In 1973, with encouragement and financial contributions from supporters, the brothers organized the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case, using the Freedom of Information Act to sue for the release of F.B.I. files. When the first batch of files was made public in 1975, and the initial material seemed to support the guilty verdict, the Meeropols remained undaunted: ''Michael and I had considered and rejected the possibility that our quest might reveal information that would point to our father's guilt.'' The sons had agreed beforehand that for every bit of damning material ''there had to be an innocent explanation.''
Indeed, there was enough in the released material to gladden their hearts. The trial judge, Irving Kaufman, far from being impartial, had had ex parte communications with the Justice Department and with the prosecution. And in what the Meeropols considered a smoking gun, the files show that the F.B.I. tampered with the two most important witnesses -- Harry Gold and David Greenglass -- in an effort to reconcile discrepancies in their testimony.
Of course Meeropol had a life apart from the case. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he had been active in the New Left, he married and had two children, he graduated from law school and was involved in more immediate political causes. But the Rosenberg case remained central to his life and, in time, he became troubled. Yes, the judge had been hand in hand with the prosecution; yes, doubts had been raised about some of the evidence; yes, the execution of his parents had been a terrible miscarriage of justice. But none of this proved their innocence. Even his lawyer, a passionate partisan of the Rosenberg cause, told him, ''I never say they were innocent. . . . I always talk about the trial and the evidence. Let others draw conclusions.''
Could it be, Meeropol wondered, that his parents were guilty of something? In his early 40's he experienced a long period of paralyzing anxiety. He attributes this condition to dislike of his job at a business law firm. But in fact, he tells us, he did not recover until the day he saw an exhibition of artwork that had been inspired by the Rosenberg case. He was struck, then, by a saving thought: Whatever Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have done, they were heroes. With their very lives at stake, they had refused to give in to government pressure to confess and to implicate others. They had stood by their beliefs. They had resisted.
Not long after he arrived at that formulation, the pieces of Meeropol's life came together. He established the Rosenberg Fund for Children, with a mission to ''meet the needs of children in this country who were suffering,'' as he and his brother had suffered, ''because of the targeting of their progressive activist parents.''
But history moved on. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, former K.G.B. agents began to talk, in particular Alexander Feklisov, who had been Julius Rosenberg's K.G.B. contact, and to whom Rosenberg had supplied classified military and industrial information. What did Meeropol make of that? Why should Feklisov be believed, he wondered; K.G.B. agents were hardly ''paragons of honesty.'' Then, in 1995, the Venona transcripts -- the decryptions of Soviet intelligence telegrams from the 1940's and 50's -- were released. The decrypted material told much of the story of an extensive military and industrial spy ring run by Julius Rosenberg, with Ethel's knowledge if not her participation; and the material confirmed the testimony of Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, about his recruitment by Julius to pass on to Harry Gold, a courier for the Soviets, whatever he could pick up about the atomic bomb from his work at Los Alamos.
Meeropol now had to deal with damaging information from a variety of sources (including old friends of the Rosenbergs). But such is the power of a fixed idea that Meeropol believed it was still possible that all of this evidence was ''no more than the clever creation of mirror images based on the known record.'' Finally, however, he was forced to reflect that innocence wasn't everything: ''Whatever actions'' his parents ''took sprang from their love of humanity, not from a particular allegiance to the Soviet Union. . . . I believe,'' he writes, ''that my parents acted patriotically even if Venona is accurate.''
Meeropol is a faithful son. Had his parents ever confessed they too might have spoken of love and patriotism for the benefit of all humanity, whatever that lofty and empty language means. But Meeropol, whose adoptive parents ''always criticized U.S. policy and agreed with the policies of the Soviet Union,'' really should know better than to say that the Rosenbergs, who were indisputably Communists, had no particular allegiance to the Soviet Union. What they resisted was saying so.
Dorothy Gallagher is the author of a biography of the anarchist Carlo Tresca, and most recently of a memoir, ''How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories.''
So what if "love of humanity" meant the deaths of millions of individual people.
Join either the Dean or Clark/Hillary Presidential campaigns as consultants.
The guy takes you to so-called "red-diaper" summer camps. Even identifies a commie school in New York, which he attended. His old classmate, Mary Travers (Peter Paul and Mary). His meeting Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan), and the entire cast of the anti-American left.
The thing most fascinating about this book is how many outright communists there were and are in US society. More importantly, how the press shields them by trying to make Joseph McCarthy misinformed, evil, and off the mark.
Hell, McCarthy and others missed the great majority of these traitors. And many of them are running free today.
Until Venona hammered the last nail into the Rosenberg coffin the Meeropole brothers were cynically used as propaganda tools by the Communist Left. Even with absolute proof, this amazing propaganda machine -- propped up by major media like the N.Y. Times -- have tried to wring as much sympathy as possible for the Communist cause. Even this article, which ever so slowly gets to the hard facts, emphasizes "humanitarian" aspects of Communism (ask gulag survivors or relatives of the Terror vicims about that!)
All the Rosenbergs ever had to do to save their lives was confess. They chose execution, leaving two small surviving sons. That's an example of Communist "humanitarianism."
Worse than that, they're running our schools, our universities, the media and the Democrat Party.
(BTW, this documentary was clearly a Brit made show, why is it that American networks routinely remove the British narration of such shows and dub in an American one? Shouldn't the audience be made aware of the origin of these shows, to better judge their point of view?)
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