Absolve The Rosenbergs - Who Cares If They Were Traitors?
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (06/18/04)
IT IS A PARADOX, indeed: in the week following the death of the greatest American president of the twentieth century—the man who defied decades of hard liberal orthodoxy and won the Cold War—HBO debuted another leftist “documentary,” this one trying to exonerate the reputations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The film really didn’t try to prove the innocence of the Rosenbergs, as much as it attempted to depict them as ill fated victims of so-called “McCarthyism.” The problem with this thesis is that the Rosenbergs weren’t victims; they were hardcore Soviet agents who blatantly spied on their country in the name of what Lady Margaret Thatcher called the “dark corridors” of Communism.
In 1950 the FBI arrested Julius, an electrical engineer, and his wife Ethel, a homemaker. They were indicted for conspiracy to transmit classified military information to the Soviet Union. The government charged that in 1944 and 1945 the Rosenbergs persuaded Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who worked at the Los Alamos atomic weapons project, to give them and a third person, Harry Gold, classified information about the atom bomb. They were found guilty, and sentenced to death by electrocution.
Liberals, foreshadowing their current conduct in the War on Terror, were livid. Mass protests were held, angry letters were written, and hundreds of teary young Communists fumed at what they saw as the injustice of it all.
The Left is still mad. John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, writing for the Society of American Historians, claim that evidence in the Rosenberg case is “suspect,” and that the trial was “patently unfair.”
The American Bar Association recently staged a mock trial of the Rosenbergs in which they found them not guilty. One of the participants, Harry Reasoner, complained that the atomic duo “were not permitted adequate defense to show the insignificance of the material they were accused of giving to the Russians.” (Note: Anytime you’re arguing that the secrets of the atomic bomb are insignificant, you’re making a terribly poor argument. Leave the discussion as soon as possible.)
Maybe in June 1953, when Julius and Ethel were finally killed, liberals had a point. Maybe. But in 1995 the government declassified the Venona cables, which proved definitively that Julius and Ethel were part of a sophisticated network of Communist traitors.
And if the Venona messages weren’t enough, Aleksander Feklisov, the former KGB colonel, really sealed the deal. While Venona was comprised of documents decoded by American cryptanalysts, no messages from the KGB itself proved the Rosenbergs’ guilt. But then Feklisov, who personally handled the Rosenberg case, admitted that he recruited Julius to spy for the U.S.S.R. in 1943. Feklisov and Julius had fifty meetings, and Julius gave Feklisov valuable military information. Further, Feklisov said that Ethel knew about her husband’s spying. (Incidentally and hilariously, the KGB’s codename for Julius was “Liberal.”)
The evidence does not end here. In 1990 Nikita Khrushchev published his memoirs in which he praised the Rosenbergs for their "very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb."
Additionally, during the Rosenbergs’ trial, the defense—that is, the people who were trying to keep the Rosenbergs’ Red flesh off the electric chair—asked the media to leave the courtroom while David Greenglass, the guy who had allegedly fed Julius and Ethel the secret information, detailed to the court what he had shared with the accused. If Greenglass hadn’t broken the law, and if, therefore, the Rosenbergs hadn’t, why would reporters have to leave?
To liberals, none of this matters. Even after Venona, Miriam Schneir wrote in The Nation magazine that only Julius’s “probable guilt” had been proved. In the late 1990s, the couple’s sons, who were featured in HBO’s documentary, suggested that the CIA and NSA had entered their parents’ names on the classified documents years after their execution, and that the Venona cables were probably fake.
The Rosenbergs were unquestionably guilty. They were accomplices in one of the most evil regimes in world history. But while most Americans are mourning the loss of Ronald Reagan, the man who finally had the courage to promote victory in Europe rather than pusillanimous appeasement, liberals are grieving for traitors.
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