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."
Bertrand Russell WAS a FABIAN SOCIALIST ! That's a fact. He condemned the Bolshis as JEWS. Yes, he was also a HUGE anti-Semite. He was later a COMMUNIST sympathizer, at the very least.
Russell was NOT all that " influential "; except with the lefty anti-war/anti-Nuke ( but ONLY when it came to England & the USA; NOT as far as the USSR went ! ) crowd. This is yet another topic, which you know almost NO facts about; facts, with which you can not quibble about. You're just dead wrong ... again.
You have claimed that you come here to " debate ", so that you may learn. Try LEARNING the truth, when it is posted and staring you in the face, for a change.
As long as we're on this side of the line, do some Chambers too. :-)
Joseph McCarthy : Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator
by Arthur Herman (Author)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"Today [Joseph McCarthy] exists in most people's imagination almost solely as an established icon of evil," writes biographer Arthur Herman. His very name has become an epithet: McCarthyism. Yet Herman believes it's time to reexamine the legacy, and in a brave, eponymously titled biography, he argues persuasively that "McCarthy was making a good point badly." Communism represented "a massive and intractable security problem" for the United States during the 1940s and 1950s; furthermore, "Democratic administrations had been unconscionably lax in dealing with an internal Communist threat." Herman doesn't mean to excuse McCarthy's recklessness--only to offer a balanced portrait of the man and his times. Joseph McCarthy simply couldn't have been written before the late 1990s--partly because the subject still stirs fiery passions, but also because Herman makes use of archival material that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His reassessment will no doubt be met with scorn by many leftists: "McCarthy was always a more important figure to American liberals than to conservatives. The nightmarish image of his heavy, swarthy, sweaty features haunted the imaginations of thousands of anti-anti-Communists throughout the fifties and sixties." Herman usefully points out that McCarthy actually had nothing to do with many aspects of the anti-Communist activities commonly grouped together under the label of McCarthyism, including the House Un-American Activities Committee, probes into Hollywood politics, and university blacklisting. (He also humanizes his subject: Did you know McCarthy was "a minor figure in the Kennedy circle," even dating two of the Kennedy daughters and becoming godfather to Bobby and Ethel's first child?) In the end, Herman offers an outstanding, cool-headed, and much-needed reappraisal of a poorly understood man. --John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Given recent revelations from Soviet-era archives and new thinking about the Cold War, this biography was probably inevitable. Readers can therefore be thankful that Herman, a historian at George Mason University, has given us an occasionally strained but generally fair study of McCarthy rather than a one-sided defense or assault on him. The book will surely be controversial and subject to attack from all sides, for its author insists that we must hold McCarthy's enemies and victims to the same standards to which we hold him. McCarthy himself was as much a phenomenon as McCarthyism. He rocketed from local Wisconsin office directly into the Senate, where he was quickly marginalized by the defenders of that institution's decorum, which he then scorned and attacked. Depicted by Herman as a reckless, uninformed, publicity-seeking, hard-drinking, mocking man, McCarthy doesn't easily evoke sympathy. But Herman successfully situates the anticommunist zealot in his place and time and among his opponents and supporters better than anyone before him and (by conjecturing cautiously, for example, that he suffered from hypomania) helps us understand, if not honor, his methods and their consequences. In arguing that McCarthy was "always a more important figure to American liberals than to conservatives," Herman opens new avenues for understanding American liberalism, as well as McCarthy's own Republican Party, in the 20th century. Unfortunately, he fails to provide a full picture of the manAhusband (of Jean Kerr, critically important to McCarthy's career), father, sometime bon vivant. Nevertheless, Herman's book is an important contribution. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The principal victim of McCarthyism, according to Herman (George Mason Univ., Washington, DC), was Joe McCarthy himself. A body of recent scholarship has sought to recast what usually has been viewed as a hysteria instead as a period when Communist subversion was an authentic threat. Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History) attempts an ambitious job indeed: the historical rehabilitation of the Wisconsin senator whose name became an ism. For all his recklessness, this book's McCarthy was essentially correct that Soviet operatives and fellow travelers had a free pass into the government. And for every brutality committed by McCarthy, Herman has one to cite on the part of opponents in politics or the press, who finally did in a man weakened by alcoholism and by the roguery of aide Roy Cohn. Provocative and well written, the book is really an extended argument, with Herman as interested in skinning liberals as he is in McCarthy's story. It might be an opposite bookend to the classic anti-McCarthy work by Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (LJ 6/15/59). Thomas C. Reeves's The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (LJ 4/1/82) remains a more reliable biography than either. Optional for public and academic libraries.ARobert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Alonzo L. Hamby
[Arthur Herman] argues that McCarthy was an unfairly maligned patriot who ultimately became a victim of the immense conspiracy he was attempting to expose.
From Kirkus Reviews
A combative corrective to the view of McCarthy as red-baiting demagogue that finds the true villains in the liberal establishment and the mainstream media. Using archival materials from the former USSR and declassified US materials, Herman (History/George Mason Univ.) offers evidence validating McCarthy's anti-Communist pursuits: Alger Hiss, the US Army, pro-Communist federal employees. Most satisfying are his Senate scenes, which have the page-turning life of an Allan Drury novel. But overriding these virtues is the tortuous string of narrow characterizations that make much of the book read like a radio talk-show transcript. FDR envoy to Russia Harry Hopkins is a ``Communist dupe, J. Robert Oppenheimer ``a conscious Soviet asset, General Douglas MacArthur's insubordination to President Truman ``a daring experiment.'' Predictably, those most responsible for unseating McCarthy are the most radically revised targets. Rather than acting as a moral barometer, Army counsel Joseph Welch is a crafty Eastern Establishment regular mainly interested in how he appeared on TV. Edward R. Murrow is no beacon of truth but an opportunist whose manipulative McCarthy interviews are central to ``the modern media's exalted self-image.'' One of the few events escaping revision is McCarthy's physical attack on adversarial columnist Drew Pearson: The knee in the groin and flattening slap are registered with disapproval. Herman's own rhetorical punches point to his reductionist definition of the McCarthy eraa battle pitting atheist commie liberals against churchgoing moral conservatives. This limits the author's credibility and discounts human complexity. To his credit, Herman provides a more distanced view than Richard Rovere did in his benchmark 1959 biography; yet Herman's relentless politicizing deprives McCarthy of the dignity of a fallen man. A well-researched but hectoring book that fails to redeem McCarthy and antagonizes readers through its reductionist views of the American people. Librarians, prepare for opinion-blackened margins; readers, argue and runto more balanced historians. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Richard Gid Powers author of Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism A fresh and original (as well as thoroughly researched and intellectually rigorous) new look at the life and times of Joe McCarthy, one that will challenge the conventional wisdom of both right and left.
Book Description
Was Joe McCarthy a bellicose, shameless witch-hunter who whipped up hysteria, ruined the reputation of innocents, and unleashed a destructive carnival of smears and guilt-by-association accusations? Were McCarthy and McCarthyism the worst things to happen to American politics in the postwar era?
Or was McCarthy just a well-intentioned politician who seized a legitimate issue with the fervor of a true believer?
Perhaps something in between. For the first time, here is a biography of Joe McCarthy that cuts through the clichés and misconceptions surrounding this central figure of the "red scare" of the fifties, and reexamines his life and legacy in the, light of newly declassified archival sources from the FBI, the National Security Agency, the U.S. Congress, the Pentagon, and the former Soviet Union. After more than four decades, here is the untold story of America's most hated political figure, shorn of the rhetoric and stereotypes of the past.
Joseph McCarthy explains how this farm boy from Wisconsin sprang up from a newly confident postwar America, and how he embodied the hopes and anxieties of a generation caught in the toils of the Cold War. It shows how McCarthy used the explosive issue of Communist spying in the thirties and forties to challenge the Washington political establishment and catapult himself into the headlines. Above all, it gives us a picture of the red scare far different from and more accurate than the one typically portrayed in the news media and the movies.
We now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was amazingly extensive -- reaching to the highest levels of the White House and the top-secret Manhattan Project. Herman has the facts to show in detail which of McCarthy's famous anti-Communist investigations were on target (such as the notorious cases of Owen Lattimore and Irving Peress, the Army's "pink dentist") and which were not (including the case that led to McCarthy's final break with Whittaker Chambers). When McCarthy accused two American employees of the United Nations of being Communists, he was widely criticized -- but he was right. When McCarthy called Owen Lattimore "Moscow's top spy," he was again assailed -- but we now know Lattimore was a witting aid to Soviet espionage networks. McCarthy often overreached himself. But McCarthy was often right.
In Joseph McCarthy, Arthur Herman reveals the human drama of a fascinating, troubled, and self-destructive man who was often more right than wrong, and yet in the end did more harm than good.
Synopsis
A re-interpretation of one of the most hated figures in American history shows that many of McCarthy's general suspicions about security risks and communist infiltration did have a basis in truth.
When I was a bitty girl, my mother made me watch the Army-McCarthy hearings with her. She was anews/ political junkie, whom the KGB could have used ... yes, she thoroughly brainwashed me. LOL
I didn't exactly understand what was going on, but my family were rabid anti-Commies and I learned a lot, as a child. Playing catchup is hard, but you have FR and some of the FREEPERS to help you along. :-)
If you start a McC ping list, add my nic. :-)
The left today is scared to death of John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge and say that Ash is like McCarthy. I *wish*...
Wow -- spying for Russia against the U.S. was own special way of making a contribution. What a dad!
But what satisfaction can they ever have knowing deep-down that their parents gave their lives up to a false God working against the correct side?
This is the exact opposite of what those who worked on the project have told me.
http://www.me.utexas.edu/%7Euer/manhattan/debates.html
Arguments Against The Use Of The Bomb
The second major challenge that occurred was due to the scientists that produced the bombs were now against its use. Many scientists argued to the end that the bomb should not be used for ethical reasons. They also warned of an arms race that would develop after the end of WWII. The different opinions were given in The Franck Report on June 11, 1945 which includes Glen Seaborg (who is a Nobel Laureate and the only living man named after an element) and Leonard Szilard. Politicians did not listen. Byrnes makes the decision to have scientists pursue the invention of the more powerful hydrogen bomb. In Stimson's letter and memo to the President on September 11, 1945, Stimson admits that "feverish activity on the part of the Soviet toward the development of this bomb in what will in effect be a secret armament race of a rather desperate character. There is evidence to indicate that such activity may have already commenced" [Stoff, 1991]. The Cold War started in this fashion because the scientists were right about the consequences of not trusting the Russians.
The major struggle took place in the form of the Franck Report that urged President Truman not to use the bomb without a demonstration where Japanese observers could see first hand the power of the bomb. This would allow the Japanese the opportunity to surrender without the using the bomb on their island. The Franck Report was chaired by J. Franck, G. T. Seaborg, L. Szilard, and others. Unfortunately, the project was now out of scientific hands and now it was a military issue. During an interview, Seaborg said that a possible reason why the US did not demonstrate the bomb was because there would not be enough uranium or plutonium to produce another bomb. Szilard, along with Albert Einstein, was responsible for starting the project. Einstein even said, "I made one great mistake in my life - when I signed that letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made, but there was some justification - the danger that the Germans would make them" [Kraus, 1996]. Szilard, along with 69 other scientist from the project's Metallurgic Laboratory (MetLab), wrote a letter protesting the use of the bomb to President Truman. Unfortunately, the letter was no use; President Truman would continue to support the bombings. Szilard and others continued to protest its use but never succeeded. In 1962, Szilard established the Council for a Livable World, a Washington lobby group involved in nuclear arms control and foreign policies. He was also involved in establishing the civilian control of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946.
Not all scientists were against the use of the bomb. In a report by A. H. Compton, E. O. Lawrence, J. R. Oppenheimer, and E. Fermi titled "Recommendations on the immediate use of nuclear weapons", Oppenheimer wrote for the panel, "we can purpose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use" [Stoff, 1991]. Many scientists felt that the US was not attacking Japan, but it was defending itself from a country who attacked the US first, remember Pearl Harbor. However, many of these scientists did oppose the use of the second bomb so quickly. They felt the US should have waited longer for Japan to surrender.
Figure 8: Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of his advocacy for nuclear weapons control [Manhattan, 1997]
After the war and the end of the project, Oppenheimer began to regret the discovery of nuclear weapons because his main rival, Edward Teller, began working on the Hydrogen Bomb. The Hydrogen Bomb used the principle of fusion, which made it even more powerful than the fission bombs. Oppenheimer's regrets are seen throughout the Manhattan Project. After the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer turned to a technician and said in a sober voice, "I have become Death; the destroyer of worlds." Another colleague turned towards Oppenheimer and said, "Now we're all sons of bitches." By 1946, the Atomic Energy Commission was established under civilian control and Oppenheimer was chairman of the General Advisory Committee. This committee gave more than technical advice, it had a lot of influence over decisions [Kraus, 1996]. Oppenheimer was very out spoken about the United Nations gaining more control over nuclear development. This controversy caused many people interested in military policy to fear Oppenheimer. In 1952, Oppenheimer faced the Gray Board hearings were he was accused of being sympathetic to the communists. Oppenheimer's hearing occurred during the Joseph McCarthy era when everyone feared communists, so Oppenheimer lost his security clearance [Kraus, 1996]. Figure 8 shows a section of a letter to the Atomic Energy Commission about Oppenheimer's security clearance revocation.
Neils Bohr became an advocate for the peaceful use of this new found power. In 1950, Bohr published a letter to the United Nations in which he pleaded for a world without nuclear weapons. He dedicated the remainder of his life to speaking against the negative uses of nuclear research [Kraus, 1996].
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.
