Echoes of pain for America’s nuclear family
Two orphans of a storm that has raged for 60 years — a man and his daughter — are sharing one of history’s most chilling tales of betrayal, putting a public face on their private anger and grief. Theirs is a dreadful story of double subversion — the sabotage of both country and kin.
As they speak, the audience at the National Archives travels back to summer 1953 as a witness walks out of Sing Sing prison and describes the last living moments of the father’s own dad and mom:
He died quickly. There didn’t seem to be too much life left in him when he entered behind the rabbi ...
She died a lot harder. When it appeared that she had received enough electricity to kill an ordinary person and had received the exact amount that had killed her husband, the doctors went over and pulled down the cheap prison dress — a little, dark green printed job — and placed the stethoscope to her and then looked around, looked at each other rather dumbfounded ...
She was given more electricity — and a ghastly plume of smoke rose from her head and went up against the skylight. After two more of those jolts, Ethel Rosenberg had met her Maker. She’ll have a lot of explaining to do, too.
The Rosenbergs. Dead 61 years and still haunting America’s sleep.
In my head, now, I hear Bob Dylan: “Well, they say they gave the secrets of the atom bomb away; Like no one else could think of it, it wouldn’t be here today — Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel …”
The speakers onstage are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s son Michael Meeropol, 71, and Michael’s 46-year-old daughter, Ivy. It is their first such appearance since the death in July of the man whose testimony condemned Julius as having supplied sketches of the first A-bomb to the Soviets during the Second World War, and fingered Ethel as having typed up the documents in the couple’s Manhattan apartment.
That witness was Ethel’s own kid brother, David Greenglass, himself a Stalinist mole. On the brother’s testimony, in the shadow of the war in Korea and in a national mood of Red-Menace hysteria, the two infamous “Atom Spies” went to the chair. Only two other women have been executed by federal edict in the 225 years of the American republic.
Ethel Rosenberg took the fall because her sibling was lying — in fact, the treasonous stenographer was his own wife, Ruth. The Greenglasses lived long and prospered; Ethel and Julius fried.
“I never cried for my sister,” Greenglass sniffed, half a century later, a free man.
Ivy Meeropol has come to Washington to show a documentary (Heir to an Execution) she produced a decade ago in which she tries to reconcile her legacy with the timorousness of her relatives, and the reminiscences of an amusing cast of aged pinkos who shared Julius and Ethel’s politics but not their voltaic fate.
In the movie, Michael Rosenberg Meeropol, who is a respected economist and academic and radio commentator, fires off a fusillade of four-letter one-liners against the FBI, the courts, and Uncle and Auntie Greenglass.
But Michael’s younger brother David, who was seven when Julius and Ethel met their maker, is less vituperative.
“There was warmth. There was love. There was cuddling,” David remembers of his brief idyll in a tragically nuclear family.
The compassionate fellow traveller who adopted the motherless, fatherless boys and changed their surname was a writer named Abel Meeropol. (In the Bible, the first Abel, like Ethel Rosenberg, was done in by his own brother.) But by the time the elder orphan was studying at the University of Wisconsin, everyone on campus was calling him “Michael You-Know-Who-His-Parents-Are.”
Michael Rosenberg Meeropol spent much of his life maintaining that Julius and Ethel were innocent and that the U.S. government was culpable in “the savage destruction of a small, unoffending Jewish family.”
This stance became untenable in 1995, when declassified Soviet wartime cables made it clear that Julius was funnelling every scrap of material he could get his hands on to the Kremlin.
That the drawings he sent were, “garbled, ambiguous, and highly incomplete — a caricature of the bomb” was immaterial to his intent, and to the judge.
“My father HAD been involved in stuff,” Michael allows onstage.
“Where do you think he ranks on the scale of Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden?” I ask him when the screening is over. (Ellsberg was the defence analyst who leaked 7,000 damning pages of documents about the Vietnam War in 1971. He was put on trial, but the charges were dismissed.)
“Ellsberg never got a jury to make a decision,” Meeropol says. “If Snowden came back to the U.S., he’d be tried under the same Espionage Act of 1917 that they used to convict my parents.
“Everybody says, ‘ Why doesn’t Snowden come back and face the music?’ But we’ve all seen how the government can manipulate when it wants to.”
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?” I tease Ivy, aping Sen. Joe McCarthy. She replies that she used to work on Capitol Hill in the office of a representative from Florida, marking her as a mainstream Democrat, not a Communist, though to the Tea Party crowd, these are one and the same.
“How could you work for the government that killed your grandparents?” someone else in the audience wonders.
“There are 435 members of Congress,” the spies’ descendant answers. “There ARE some good ones.”