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*I have four interviews total. The rest will be posted as I gather consent from my interviewees.
Interview with Robert Meeropol, younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; founder/Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children (www.rfc.org)
June 11, 2010
Yesterday morning, I interviewed the FBI historian, and he said that “there is no doubt that the Rosenbergs betrayed their country.” Do you have something to say to that?
Well, from my parents’ perspectives….my beliefs are based on information that has trickled out much later……my father was involved with a group of young people who were trying to help the Soviet Union. They passed industrial military information. It was during WWII, and during a war, all industry is militarized. So if someone goes into a former automobile factory that is now making tanks, and takes pictures, they are committing espionage. This is the kind of thing that Julius did – he passed nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Also, Ethel may have known about his activities, and probably approved, but she definitely wasn’t involved with any of them. This is an important distinction to draw.
Did they betray their country? It wasn’t a betrayal of country. The trial was at the height of the Cold War….Do we know for certain that they were innocent? No.
There was a brilliant physicist by the name of Theodore Alvenhal who graduated Harvard at the age of 17 and was recruited to work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He did a political analysis after WWII, and concluded that the United States was holding an atomic monopoly that was very bad for the world. So, he did what he could to provide the Soviet Union with atomic information. He was definitely a spy and he was never caught.
If the enemy is fascism, and McCarthyism, and oppression, you aren’t betraying the people, you’re helping the people.
In the song my adoptive father, Abel Meeropol, wrote, “The House I Live In”, he says that “America is the people”.
What constitutes loyalty, what constitutes treason, what constitutes betrayal are very important questions to discuss.
Would you have preferred your parents to have cooperated with the FBI to spare their own lives?
No, absolutely not. It is very possible that if they had cooperated, then neither of them would have been killed. It might have made my childhood easier, but it would have been a poisoned atmosphere to grow up in. It all comes down to whether they should have resisted, and have been themselves, or should have said that they were guilty and lied and implicated other people, and would have been David and Ruth Greenglass. If they had done that, Julius would have gotten a sentence like David’s, and Ethel would have been released to take care of me and my brother.
Looking back on it, would I rather have been the child of David and Ruth Greenglass? I would much rather have been the child of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I am proud of the actions they took.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I would put my children in that kind of jeopardy myself. But my parents were in different circumstances, and in their political climate, their actions made sense.
In his sentencing, Judge Kaufman said that because of what your parents did, the Soviet Union was more aggressive in North Korea, and more people died than otherwise. Do you agree with this?
Well, that statement is based on the idea that they “stole the secret of the atomic bomb”. If you look at the Greenglass sketch of the “key principal” of the atomic bomb, it isn’t clear if he really drew it, or if he drew it for the government….either way, it is clear that the sketch is not the secret of the atomic bomb. When it was released in the 60’s, scientists analyzed it and said that there is no way that the Soviet Union could have developed the atomic bomb off of it. It was an amateur, rudimentary sketch that contained very little information.
How does our legal system need to be changed to prevent this from happening to anyone else?
The legal system has rules (well, prior to September 11), that, if they were followed, would prevent that from happening to anyone. There would be nothing to critique. The problem is that the law functions within the larger political context. In the 50’s, everyone was told that there was an international communist conspiracy out to destroy us. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights took a back seat to National Security. All kinds of things happened that would have been denounced as illegal in any other political context – for example, Kaufman being is a secret communication with the prosecution. The trial was a frame-up; they were executed for a crime they didn’t commit. If you go forward to the Bush era, the same kinds of things were happening: “enhanced interrogation” (torture), Guantanamo, and the rules aren’t enforced and judges see it as their role to protect the American security.
The law enforcement needs to develop a greater respect for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, assumption of innocence until proven guilty. These need to have real substance over the immediate demands of political context.
Interview with Dave Alman, president of the NCRRC and author of a book about the Rosenbergs
May 28, 2010
What is your affiliation with the NCRRC?
I am currently its president.
How did you first learn about the Rosenberg case?
My wife and I lived in Knickerbocker Village in lower Manhattan. We read in the NY Times of their arrest, and learned they lived in another section of Knickerbocker Village. Then my wife recalled spending several minutes with Ethel Rosenberg some months earlier when both of them were introduced in a local park to which they had taken their children.
What do you hope to gain by re-opening the Rosenberg case?
We believe, on the basis of many hundreds of Department of Justice, FBI and other documents, that the prosecution knowingly used perjured testimony and a deceitful witness list to persuade the jury to return guilty verdicts. Moreover, the Justice Department substituted an oral indictment for treason on behalf of an enemy, for the formal indictment that accused the defendants of espionage on behalf of an ally.
What, in your opinion, was done wrong with the original case?
The substitution in the courtroom of the formal indictment with the oral indictment for treason, a crime for which there was no proof whatsoever. The U.S. never went to war against the Soviet Union and, in fact, from 1941-1945, the Soviet Union was our chief military ally against the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy). There is no such crime as committing treason on behalf of an ally.
Do you believe Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent? Why or why not?
My wife and initially believed that, because they were communists, they were guilty. Later, on studying the trial record, and comparing the testimony of the government witnesses with their pre-trial statements to the government, we became convinced that although Julius Rosenberg may have been guilty of non-atomic espionage, there was no tangible or credible evidence of his having passed atomic information to the Soviet Union. As for his wife Ethel, the evidence against her, we learned from government documents, was non-existent, and her indictment was purely for the purpose of compelling a false confession of atomic espionage from her husband. She was known to be innocent by the government when she was executed.
Did the recent statement made by Morton Sobell in 2008 change the answer to the previous question? Change any of your opinions about the Rosenberg case?
No, his admission confirmed our suspicions, based on government documents, that the government inflated the crime by using suborned perjury to persuade the jury that the defendants had passed atomic information to the Soviet Union.
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