What ought to have been over a long time ago is much closer to actually being over: Rosenberg sons admit father was a spy.

After years of professing their parents’ innocence, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are acknowledging their father was a spy.

The about-face came after their father’s co-defendant, Morton Sobell, admitted for the first time that he and Julius Rosenberg stole nonatomic military and industrial secrets for the Soviet Union.

[...]

The 91-year-old Sobell, who was convicted with the Rosenbergs on espionage charges in 1951 and released from prison in 1969, had maintained his innocence until last week, when he told The New York Times he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II.

“I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Rosenberg son Michael Meeropol told the Times in Wednesday’s editions.

Ronald Radosh wrote the book on this, literally, in 1983 (curiously, the same year that Dylan’s famous/notorious, unpublished, unreleased but widely bootlegged song on the matter was written). He wrote yesterday in the LA Times: Case closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.

It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs’ children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to — and this week, in comments unlike any they’ve made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. “I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.

With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

To this day, this received wisdom permeates our educational system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple were innocent or that the trial was “controversial,” or they “excuse what [the Rosenbergs] did by saying, ‘It wasn’t that bad. What they provided wasn’t important.’ “

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Odds and ends
• A half-baked soufflé
• Pete Seeger repents