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."
A somewhat useful idea totally corrupted government by becoming the sole purpose, in many ways, of government. Take money from people and pretend to do them a favor by giving some of it back now and then.
The kibbutzim of the Zionists?
Bolshevikism combined with an ethnic/religious twist. I don't care if any religious group form such communes and keeps to itself. When they get into politics, I worry. A pity Israel did it. Had they embraced liberty from the start, they would probably not be in the mess they are today. The country could have been the jewel of the mideast. So, no thanks.
Fabian socialism . . .?
The ultimate useful idiots. Admirers of Mao and every other communist con man who comes down the path. Gramscian termites who undermine everything good, decent and honest. Anti-Christian bigots.
Modern trade unions?
Public employee unions are the result. And they dominate unions today. Economic fascism. Government unions buying up Wall street. Government employees lobbying for more government.
Universal health care?
I would rather sit under a tree and drink myself to death.
Social Security ?
Ponzi scheme. Despicable kids washing dishes are paying for the meals of those who eat at four star restaurants.
Child labor laws?
Well you got one right.
Environmental preservation?
The left's way of stealing private property. Fascistic. The best way to preserve the environment is to create wealth.
What is the deal here? Your screen name seems appropiate. I thought this forum wasn't designed--as I have done above and you do a lot it appears--to debate the merits of liberalism. Thought we were here to get liberals out of the body politic.
The kibbutziks built Israel with blood and sweat - a lot more than just good intentions
Social Security doesn't have to be a Ponzi scheme
Trade unions are an attempt to get employers to share the wealth. That only works under favorable conditions. Otherwise they become guilds, mafias, or unworkeable (if employers are forced to compete against others employing non-union labor)
and so on.
Socially, righties are for the status quo, lefties for change. I don't see how you can devalue either in any general way.
It could be made into a chain letter, like medicare.
Probably. I am not what one would normally call a moral relativist - but I'm not a moral absolutist either.
When I look at the opponents of no-growth, slow-growth, or sustainable growth I don't see a bunch of doddering old farts.
Maybe all of American capitalism, or all of capitalism, or all modern social systems are just elaborate Ponzi schemes. Maybe the Luddites were right.
I was responding to a very specific question...asking me to name Left-wing ideas with merit. You appear offended by that - so I'll honor your desire not continue in this direction.
As to my more general responses Jim Robinson continues to take my money, no-one has asked me to leave, and many have been as happy to debate me as I have been to debate them.
Just saw this post. Sorry. They worked on it because they thought Hitler was working on it and they couldn't allow him to get it first. Read Einstein's 1940 letter to Roosevelt...or Feynman's autobiography.
But they never liked it, they always had second thoughts, and their fears and doubts intensified when its use was proposed after Hitler was defeated.
Einstein may have been a brilliant scientist; he wasn't a brilliant anything else.
Your " exemplars " are more tarnished than you know. Just give it up, or go over to DU.
False.
It's a close call. Stalin's creatures certainly thought they were. But they were right about the bomb's dangers, right about the need for international control, right about the arms race, and - most important - right that the secret couldn't be kept.
Dr. Szilard wasn't all that " brilliant " about a lot of things. He had, many years prior to the Manhattam project, figured out the rudiments of A-Bomb. He wrote it all down and then did nothing much with it. Much of his life, both scientific and other, was like that. He was a sacastic man, had a biting sense of " humor ", and, from boyhood, had a wish to save the world. He was also something of an eccentric and NO, he did NOT really understand politics, the Russians, nor have a " clearer and better view of the world than you and I ". You only assume this to be a fact.
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