I thought that last Thursday’s televised
bear-baiting event, amusingly misnamed a “debate,” in which numerous Republican
candidates took softball swings at hardball questions thrown in their direction
by uncooperative Fox journalists, would have at least one bright aspect: it
would give me an easy week, blogwise, as it has given most of the political
commentators of the nation. But then on
Monday there appeared in the Times an
op-ed essay by Michael and Robert Meeropol, entitled “Exonerate Our Mother, Ethel Rosenberg”. So the Rosenberg case
has trumped Trump in my mind. I wrote a
little essay about it a year ago, when the death of David Greenglass was
announced, but it continues to worry my mind, as it probably worries others of my
generation.
Ethel Rosenberg may no longer
command much “name recognition”, but she played a significant role in the
history of mid-century America, and especially of the Cold War and of
McCarthyism. On June 19, 1953, she and
her husband Julius, having been convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet
Union, were executed by electrocution at Sing Sing prison. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel’s brother David
Greenglass were accused of giving “the secret of the atomic bomb” to Russian
espionage agents. Ethel Rosenberg, and
others, were believed to be conspirators.
The Rosenbergs left two young children—Michael (b. 1943) and Robert (b.
1947) who were later adopted by the singer-songwriter Abel Meeropol, whose name
they adopted.
The guiltlessness of the Rosenbergs
was an article of faith among American Communists, of whom there were still a
surprising number in 1950, and among some other segments of the American
Left. The Meeropol brothers spent many
years of their adult lives loudly proclaiming their parents’ innocence and,
thus, the injustice of their deaths.
Only fairly recently, with the publication of once-secret Russian
espionage intercepts and the actual public confession of one of Julius’s
still-living fellow spies, did they come to acknowledge that their father was
in fact a spy. They now focus their
efforts at righting ancient wrongs on the case of their mother.
Should Ethel Rosenberg be
“exonerated”? I certainly wish she had
not been executed. The trauma inflicted
upon the Rosenberg children in these circumstances probably cannot be easily
imagined. I have furthermore come to
oppose capital punishment on general principle.
There never was a single “secret” of the atomic bomb, though
Greenglass’s crude sketch of an implosion lens might have been a big help to Russian bomb engineers. The evidence suggests that the vigor of the
government’s prosecution of Ethel was intended to put pressure on Julius and
encourage him to confess. According to
the Meeropol brothers, that evidence “demonstrates conclusively that our mother
was prosecuted primarily for refusing to turn on our father.” If I had been grading their essay in a
writing course, I would have written in the margin here: “Take greater care
with your adverbs.” Conclusion is
frequently in the mind of the concluder, and the fact that Ethel may have been primarily prosecuted in attempt to force
a confession from Julius does not mean that she was not rightly prosecuted as a
collaborator in espionage, as I continue to believe she was.
That Ethel Rosenberg’s execution
was a possible judicial blunder I can accept.
The prosecutors’ strategy was probably maladroit. But I cannot accept the argument—or rather
the simple assertion—that Ethel was an innocent person knowingly framed by
malevolent government prosecutors. Some “evidence”
on which the Meeropols make such an insinuation approaches the ridiculous. Since the Soviet intercepts do not assign to
her a code name as they did to her husband (“Liberal”), she could not have been
involved! On the other hand there may
well have been an injustice of omission if not of commission. Ethel’s brother and sister-in-law, David and
Ruth Greenglass, were as gung-ho Communists as the Rosenbergs themselves, and
considerably more naive. Ruth Greenglass, very likely an active conspirator, or at least a wannabe, was never charged.
When a few years back I almost
accidentally, and certainly naively, began writing my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos,
I was unaware of what a bear-garden the field of American Communist history
was. Essentially I found an arena in
which the political battles of the 1930s are refought with vituperation and
footnotes, though more of the former than the latter. As I got deeper into my book I was forced to
confront and try to explain the fact that a significant number of idealistic American
intellectuals--and in France and some other European countries a huge number--had been either actual members
of the Communist Party or pretty vigorous fellow travelers. All Western Communist parties of the time were
slavishly indentured to Stalin’s Russia, and by 1950 inquiring minds knew, or
should have known, a great deal about the appalling realities of the Soviet regime. Hence an American Communist of that period
had the rather stark choice of being a fool or a knave.
Most were in the former category, true
believers for whom the realities of actual Communist power in practice were
nothing more than lies and capitalist propaganda. The syndrome is eloquently analyzed in literally dozens of autobiographies of ex-Communists, but I especially recommend Arthur Koestler. The conspiracy in which Julius Rosenberg undoubtedly
played a central role and his wife probably
played a minor one was of a different sort.
It was knavishly criminal, treasonous, and dangerous. The Meeropols’ current argument is that Ethel
was convicted of participation in it on the basis of perjured evidence by her
brother David Greenglass and his wife Ruth, the motive of their lies being the
protection of Ruth. In this scenario
David lied to save his guilty wife, while Julius merely refused to tell the truth to
save his innocent wife. Such a scenario would
provide an interesting gloss on Julius’ character but not, in my opinion,
grounds for the “exoneration” of Ethel.
