Secret Honor

courage of their convictions: Robert (left) and Michael (right) visit their father, Julius Rosenberg, in prison.

The Rosenbergs' children haven't just survived their legacy. They're proud of it.

by Sam Adams

When someone asks what he does for a living, Robert Meeropol has more reason than most to feel uneasy. He's an attorney who runs a small nonprofit, he says, and if pressed explains that they provide support for the children of progressive activists targeted by the government. At this point, you imagine most questioners might wander off in search of a fresh drink, but a few push on: How did you get interested in that? At that point, Meeropol says wryly, "It's no longer light conversation." As Meeropol tells the story, condensed from innumerable experiences, you can practically hear the room fall silent as he tells his hapless inquisitor that he knows a thing or two about losing your parents to the state, because his parents were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Robert and his brother Michael, who will appear at the Free Library on June 7 as part of the First Person Festival, were 6 and 10 years old when their parents were put to death in June 1953, convicted at the height of the Red Scare of stealing atom bomb secrets for the Soviet Union. By conventional standards, their lives were ruined: Julius and Ethel, whose crimes Judge Irving Kaufman called "worse than murder," were widely reviled; Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, yielded to government pressure to testified against his sister (giving evidence he admitted in 2001 was false); and the children's grandparents were unwilling (Ethel's) or unable (Julius') to take them in. Yet to talk to them now, you'd never know that their family tree contains one of the darkest episodes in American history.

It's not just that Robert and Michael have developed successful careers — Robert as the founder of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, Michael as an economist and author — but that they, and for that matter their children, have never wavered from their left-wing roots. Among Michael's books is Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution; Robert's daughter Rachel is a fellow at New York's Center for Constitutional Rights who has vigorously protested the detentions at Guantanamo Bay; and Michael's daughter Ivy is a filmmaker whose documentary Heir to an Execution, also part of the First Person event, examines the personal and political consequences of the Rosenbergs' deaths 50 years after the fact.

Although Robert and Michael grew up out of the spotlight, thanks to their adoption by songwriter/activist Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, they took hold of the Rosenberg legacy in the early 1970s, and have been its public guardians ever since, co-authoring the book We Are Your Sons in 1975. "My brother and I were brought up to be proud of our parents," says Michael. "That's pretty easy. That comes from the family. There was some uncertainty when we decided to come out in public, but after a few years of experience, we realized it changed our lives in terms of our public activities, but it didn't change our abilities to do our jobs, to interact with friends and families, and we're very happy to say it didn't harm our children as they went through school."

Through the years, Michael and Robert believed what their parents had always told them: that they were innocent of the charge of spying for the Russians. But in 1995, the FBI released the Venona intercepts, Soviet communiques which seemed to provide convincing evidence that Julius was the operative, code-named Antenna and Liberal, who had provided industrial plans to the Soviet Union. Robert points out that the coded documents had been through many successive translations, the last after he and his brother had filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act and it was clear they would be made public. But, he says, even if the government's interpretation is correct and the documents are genuine, it proves that Julius and Ethel were innocent of the crimes for which they were executed. The Venona documents connect Antenna/Liberal to industrial, not atomic, espionage, and refer to Ethel without a code name, suggesting that she was at most guilty of knowing about Julius' activities but not actively involved in them.

"Nowadays, the arguments are it's irrelevant what the trial was, that there was prejudice, perjury, that they might not have been guilty as charged, because we know that Julius was a spy, and they liked Stalin at a time when Stalin was murdering all these people," Michael says. But even taken as read, the Venona documents indicate that the FBI knew the Rosenbergs were innocent as charged and allowed them to be executed anyway.

On a personal level, Venona presented Michael and Robert with a new dilemma: If Julius was guilty and Ethel was not, how could she allow herself to be executed? The answer for both sons is that the consequences of cooperation were unacceptable. "If Venona's true, she would have to turn on Julius, and even then I'm not sure that saves her life," Michael says. "And of course, if they're both innocent, she has to make up a bunch of names. In either case, she has to put other people in her position. I think she really believed that would be a terrible legacy to leave to Robbie and me."

"There was no middle ground," Robert says. "They could resist and be Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, or cooperate and be David and Ruth Greenglass. I think they would have seen it as a betrayal of each other, a betrayal of who they were."

It's important to remember, Michael says, that Julius and Ethel did not intend to martyr themselves: "They really believed they would get clemency, and in the end it took the most extraordinary machinations to prevent them." But Robert has no regrets for his parents' decision. "As a child, it might have been easier had they decided to quote-unquote cooperate," he says. "But as a 58-year-old, I'd much rather be the child of Julius and Ethel than David and Ruth. There's no doubt in my mind about that."

These days, both brothers say they're "agnostic" about their parent's guilt. ""I say what David says, which is when people ask what I think, I say, "I think I don't know,'" says Michael. As an economist specializing in history, he says he has often found "there are some questions we just don't have enough information to answer. Not that there isn't a right answer, but we just don't have the information."

For Robert, who struggled to settle on a career before founding the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990, his life is proof that "you can take a horrendous experience, one that as a child no one can imagine anything good coming out of it, and do something good with it." He draws a direct parallel with this country in the post-9/11 era: "If something good can come of my childhood, then something good can come of all of this. I don't for a minute believe we're not capable. I don't believe in inevitabilities, but whether or not it's possible, it's that struggle which gives meaning to someone's life."

Legacy of an Execution, a discussion with Robert and Michael Meeropol, followed by a screening of Heir to an Execution, Tue., June 7, 7 p.m., $12, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-569-9700.

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