On Tues., Jan. 23, Robert Meeropol, the youngest son of convicted espionage agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, proclaimed his parents' innocence in a lecture at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.
The Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair on June 19, 1953, after what then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called, "The trial of the century." The Rosenbergs, who were suspected to be Communist sympathizers during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, were tried for allegedly transmitting the secrets of the United States' Manhattan Project - the scientific effort that produced the atomic bomb - to the Soviet Union.
Throughout the speech, Meeropol outlined the prosecution's case and systematically discredited its evidence by citing FBI and other government documents that were not available at the time of the original trial. These highly controversial documents, many of which exonerate his parents, were reluctantly released by the U.S. government during the 1970s when Meeropol and his older brother sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act of 1966.
The Rosenbergs were implicated as the heads of the espionage attempts by David and Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and sister-in-law. The Greenglasses were compelled to involve the Rosenbergs in order to be granted clemency in the trial. Meeropol said, "Our government executed two people based primarily on the oral statements of people who would themselves be found guilty if they didn't testify."
According to Meeropol, the most decisive hard evidence of the case, and in retrospect the most ridiculous, were sketches of the atomic bomb. The sketches were drawn by Greenglass, who was a machinist at the Los Alamos laboratories, and were allegedly passed on to Julius Rosenberg. After presenting a photocopy of one of the sketches, Meeropol called it a "baby drawing. It doesn't tell you anything."
Shortly after the Rosenbergs' execution, leading atomic scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer also dismissed the sketches as having "no scientific value" and stressed that the sketches contained no secrets to America's atomic bomb effort.
Meeropol, who believes his parents were framed by the FBI and other government agencies, calls his parents' case "a pillar of Cold War ideology." He indicted the FBI and CIA as anachronistic remnants of the Cold War, asking, "Do they need their power now that the Cold War is over?" Meeropol, who believes his parents were victims of the McCarthy era and Cold War ideology, further decried secretive government agencies by claiming that, "in freedom's name, they deny our freedom."
On a final note, Meeropol said, "Let's make sure that something like my parents' case never happens again."
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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