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."
I followed your link in #38. The implication is that this is the work of Moynihan...but in fact it is an appendix, not written by him.
Here is the Chairman's Foreward
He says some things about Cuban policy which I think you'd strongly disagree with...
In any case there's a great deal of information only peripherally related to the Rosenbergs.
Not that the left exists anymore. This is an essentially conservative country that had a left-wing fling in the 30's, during the New Deal, because everyone was broke.
You're acting as if the 60's never happened.
The 60's were more of a revolution in terms of clothing, music and language. You were allowed to curse. You just weren't allowed to redistribute wealth.
That strikes me as simplistic. The civil rights movement was about more than jeans, cursing and Joni Mitchell. It brought real social gains.
Yes, it made enormous gains, and then it ended up being a fashion statement. Look at the clothes kids wear today -- the baggy pants, the baseball caps worn backward, the hip-hop look. This has been going on since the 60's, when white kids picked up black language -- ''I groove on that! Too much! Tell it like it is!'' -- while reserving their inalienable right to white flight.
There has been much defection from the old left since Sept. 11 among writers like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens.
I found it quite a shock.
You may be the last unreconstituted leftist.
No. Fortunately, there are several million last leftists.
America had the VENONA information in the late 1940s--it was based on codebreaking efforts.
Its existence was only disclosed in the 1980s, and the actual decrypts were released only after the collapse of the USSR.
VENONA, due to the nature of the cryptographic break, was only going to be of very limited use--we shouldn't have worried about letting it go public in the 1940s.
Come on. Be rational (It's hard enough to understand what's going on in this crazy world). I said I had no problem with the conviction or the penalty...and Robert Scheer's present day opinions obviously had no bearing whatsoever on the Rosenberg case (when he was about 10 years old).
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?
The Inquisitors knew they were dealing with heretics didn't they? No doubt about it.
But you do raise a serious point. How serious and immediate does a threat have to be in order to abandon Constitutional safeguards in the interests of national self-preservation? Since there are always threats one can make the argument that safeguards should always be abandoned.
VENONA and the Rosenbergs. Too long for me to read now...but for those who are interested forming their own opinions....
Sobell on "Venona and the Rosenbergs"
I'm never going to get to the bottom of this. It's too difficult and too much that's written about it is ideological propaganda.
What is clear is that we were spying on the Russians at least as much as they were spying on us. Why not? The WWII alliance was a marriage of convenience, that's all. Everyone knew the pre-war antagonism would resume as soon as Hitler was gone. Everyone except the idiots. Remind you of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute perhaps?
Not at all. Although I can see how you would think so. I think spying should be punished. I have no problem with severe punishment. I just think surprise and outrage are out of place and not believable. The enemy has weapons and uses them? Incredible. We have the same weapons and use them? Even more incredible.
I found it interesting that Sobell still claims innocence. I also found it impossible to follow his reasoning. I'd have to do an incredible amount of research - which I'm not prepared to do.
My view is that the Rosenbergs were a small piece of the Cold War. Many spies were operating. If the Rosenbergs were guilty they got what they deserved. If they weren't they got what someone else deserved - because there were many, many spies trying to do what they were accused of doing. Since the basic science was known to everyone the Soviets were going to succeed...sooner rather than later. They were good enough. They put Sputnik in orbit before us. I've read in many places that the really difficult thing was to prove that such a bomb was possible. Had the Nazis known it they would not have given up when they did and might have beat us to it.
Btw...Feiffer is Dick Morris' cousin. So was Roy Cohen. Now there is a family which worked both sides of the street and the middle.
Based on the article I thought we ignored the protections of the Fifth Amendment and I questioned whether the situation justified that. That's not the same thing.
You know way more about Sobell's argument than I do - and I don't intend to do the research necessary to upgrade my understanding - so I'll leave this to others.
IQ has nothing to do with character or the ability to contribute to political thought. Look at Noam Chomsky.
I see things a little differently. Intellectuals often exagerate their abilities - particularly in the arenas of social and economic organization where no one really knows what's going on. That certainly doesn't mean dumb people could do better.
I roomed next door to Robert Meeropol in college. His identity was certaintly among the best kept secrets on campus. I had no idea until I say his picture on the book, "We Are Your Children," many years later. One of the prices paid was allowing their children to grow up believing their parents were innocent.
I don't know how you are defining dumb, but emotional intelligence is more important than IQ. A lot of brilliant political leaders and writers are psychopaths like Hitler and Stalin, or boderline autistic like Chomsky. People who cannot accept the grit and chaos of ordinary life are extremely dangerous, and should never be voted into office or allowed to assume power through force.
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