How the Rosenbergs bracketed my college career
When I was a freshman at Rutgers, I attended a conference with Michael Meeropol, son of convicted spies Julies and Ethel Rosenberg, where he pressed for their innocence. Being a freshman, I thought (at the time) there was some validity to his statements and, maybe, the Rosenbergs were blameless victims of the Red Scare.
And then in my senior year, Nikita Khrushchev's posthumous memoir was published where he lauded the Rosenbergs for helping the Soviet cause by stealing nuclear secrets. This led to a spirited discussion in "American Culture in the 1950s" - my last gut class before graduation.
Anyway, via Betsy's Page, there's word that 91-year-old Rosenberg co-defendant Morton Sobell has finally admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet agents. "Case closed" writes Ronald Radosh in the LA Times and even the Meeropols cannot keep up the facade anymore.
2 comments:
This is news? There was a PBS show (NOVA?) several years ago which examined KGB files. Both Ethyl and Julius were spies. Ethyl recruited Julius. Ethyl passed the info on. This info halted the bandwagon to clear Ethyl and comfimed the guill of both.
Jerry Martin
"If I had known — if we had known that at the time — if President Eisenhower had known it, he might have taken a different view with regard to her [Ethel Rosenberg]. In other words, tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.”
--Richard Nixon on Rosenberg witnesses changing their grand jury testimony for the trial, 1983
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