Father Was a Spy, Sons Conclude With Regret
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: September 16, 2008
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.”
he 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.”
