[Pen-l] Rosenbergs

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

[I've never known enough about the case to say anything about the
guilt or innocence of the Rosenbergs, but I think it's true that
"whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians
was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and
judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to
place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death
penalty." (quoted from below.)]

September 17, 2008 / New York TIMES
Father Was a Spy, Sons Conclude With Regret
By SAM ROBERTS

They were the most famous orphans of the cold war, only 6 and 10 years
old in 1953 when their parents were executed at Sing Sing for
delivering atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Then they were
whisked from an unwanted limelight to urban anonymity and eventually
to suburban obscurity.

Adopting their foster parents' surname, they staked their own claim to
radical campus politics in the 1960s. Then in 1973, they emerged to
reclaim their identities as the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
determined to vindicate their parents.

Now, confronted with the surprising confession last week of Morton
Sobell, Julius Rosenberg's City College classmate and co-defendant,
the brothers have admitted to a painful conclusion: that their father
was a spy.

"I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol said after
several conversations with Mr. Sobell over the weekend.

Their conclusions, in separate interviews, amount to a milestone in
America's culture wars and the culmination of the brothers' own
emotional and intellectual odyssey.

It began in July 1950, when F.B.I. agents arrested Julius Rosenberg in
the family's Lower East Side apartment, thrusting the boys onto a
global stage as bit players in their parents' appeals, in the
government's efforts to extract their parents' cooperation, and in
Soviet propaganda campaigns to cast the Rosenbergs as martyrs.

Their journey became public again nearly a generation later when the
brothers proclaimed that their parents were framed to feed cold war
hysteria and compensate for America's counterespionage lapses. Amid
the Watergate-era revelations of criminal conspiracies and cover-ups,
they began a legal battle to release all the government records in the
case.

While they were vested in a single outcome, they insisted all along
that they would follow the facts, wherever they led.

"We believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent,"
Michael Meeropol said on Sunday. "But I remember saying to myself in
late 1975, maybe a little later, that whatever happens, it doesn't
change me. We really meant it, that the truth is more important than
our political position."

This is how they still see things: whatever atomic bomb information
their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the
case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their
mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her
husband; and neither deserved the death penalty.

But after digesting Mr. Sobell's confession, in an interview last week
with The New York Times, that he and Julius stole nonatomic military
and industrial secrets, the Meeropols have now concluded that
continuing to claim that their father was innocent of an espionage
conspiracy was no longer defensible.

"I had considered that a real possibility for some time," Robert
Meeropol said, "and this tips the balance."

Today, both brothers are grandfathers. Michael, 65, is a professor and
chairman of the economics department at Western New England College in
Springfield, Mass. Robert, 61, is a lawyer and runs the Rosenberg Fund
for Children, which advocates on behalf of young people whose parents
have suffered because of their progressive politics. Both live in
western Massachusetts.

Robert's daughter Rachel is a lawyer with the Center for
Constitutional Rights. In 2004, Michael's daughter, Ivy, produced a
documentary about the case, "Heir to an Execution." In that film,
Michael recalled the other day, he said he was "perfectly happy to
live with the ambiguity" about the case. But that ambiguity, as far as
his father is concerned, ended last week with Mr. Sobell's confession
and left Mr. Meeropol philosophical but, presumably, less happy.

"It's different," he said.

Ethel Rosenberg was arrested in August 1950. The boys were shuttled to
shelters and from one home to another after their grandmother, Ethel's
mother, said she could no longer care for them. After their parents
were executed, they were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. He was a
Bronx schoolteacher and lyricist, who, under a pen name, wrote
"Strange Fruit" and "The House I Live In."

The brothers became talismans for a lost cause. They would literally
be embraced by Rosenberg defenders, dwindling in number but unflagging
in their faith, as touchstones of an era when the world was
reflexively defined as black or white (or red). If you believed the
Rosenbergs were not guilty, you were considered a fellow traveler. If
you believed the government, you were viewed as a McCarthyite.

First, the brothers sued Louis Nizer, a lawyer, for unauthorized use
of their parents' death-house letters in his book about the case. They
fought protracted legal battles to release F.B.I. files and were
buoyed when those raw investigative records and interrogations
disgorged a minefield of inconsistencies.

They knew, and acknowledged, that their parents were committed
Communists, but discovered, as Robert Meeropol once said, that "it's
much harder to prove someone innocent than to prove them guilty."

For more than three decades, that path to proof twisted and turned
precariously. As the new revelations shrank the brothers' defensive
perimeter, the Meeropols seemed to be tiptoeing toward the posture
they expressed this week. Meanwhile, they raised their families and
wrote a book, "We Are Your Sons." Robert, after editing the Socialist
Review in California, returned to Springfield and enrolled in law
school. Their attendance at periodic commemorations of the case and of
their parents' execution became less obligatory.

In the 1990s, the government released decrypted wartime Soviet cables
that further implicated their father. Then their uncle, David
Greenglass, who was an Army machinist at Los Alamos, N.M., where the
atomic bomb was made, and was recruited by Julius Rosenberg as a spy,
admitted that he fabricated the most damning testimony against their
mother, but insisted that Julius was guilty of the formal charge,
conspiracy to commit espionage.

Five years ago, in a memoir, "An Execution in the Family," Robert
Meeropol recalled the criticism that his parents had engaged in
high-risk activities that could orphan their children, but he said
their decisions deserved to be judged in the context of their time.

"I became more careful about my political activities when I became a
parent," he wrote. "This may be because I knew from painful experience
the terrible toll activist parents' decisions can take on their
children, and I did not wish my childhood nightmare visited on my
children."

The boys visited Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y., on Thursday, June
18, 1953, their parents' 14th wedding anniversary. Michael interrupted
the death-house decorum by wailing: "One more day to live." The
following day, their parents wrote: "Always remember that we were
innocent and could not wrong our conscience."

Do the brothers feel betrayed by their parents' protestations of
innocence? Did they, themselves, betray other supporters of the cause
by seeking vindication?

"I don't feel that way," Robert said. "I can understand that they
didn't do the thing they were being killed for. The grand jury
testimony taught me more about my parents' social circle. It's a
description of a whole bunch of 20-somethings, people who came out of
the Depression, not only survived but went to the top of their class
and they thought they could change the world. They were going to do
what they could to make their mark. Until it all came crashing down.

"What Julius was asked to do was send his best friends to jail, and he
could not do that. My parents would have to have made a bigger
betrayal to avoid betraying me, and frankly I don't consider myself
that important."

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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