His parents were executed for treason at the height of the Cold War. Now, during a new age of fear, Robert Meeropol wants to ensure history doesn't repeat itself.
by Claire Schneider
In An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey, author Robert Meeropol describes a childhood riddled by fear. As the youngest son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as "atomic spies" by the United States government in 1953, Meeropol was rejected by other members of his family, kicked out of elementary school for being a Rosenberg and shuttled between orphanages before finally experiencing stability as the adopted son of Abel and Anne Meeropol.
Although Meeropol gives fascinating insight on his parent's case, he hopes people will see the book's value beyond the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs.
"My parent's case was a starting point for much of what I have done in my life," Meeropol says. "The book is really a personal memoir and I hope that it has value and interest to people on that level."
Meeropol's life certainly is fascinating. He spent the first 18 years of his life with Abel Meeropol, a songwriter who wrote the lyrics to the classic anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," popularized by Billy Holiday, and Anne Meeropol, a theatre director. As a young adult, he followed his parent's left-wing footsteps, becoming an organizer in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and living in a commune. He eventually became an anthropology professor and earned a law degree. Now he is a leader in the anti-capital punishment movement and runs a foundation supporting the children of targeted activists in the United States.
Meeropol has named the foundation the Rosenberg Fund for Children in memory of his parents.
Meeropol was not always ready to embrace his identity. After remaining anonymous for the first 30 years of his life, Meeropol and his older brother Michael decided to go public with their parentage in 1974 in response to the unauthorized publication of their parent's prison correspondence by trial lawyer Luis Nitzer.
"In many of the letters, there were long references to my brother and I and yet he pulled all the references out," Meeropol says. "We felt that he did this in order to prove his thesis which was, yes, they loved each other, but they loved communism more than their children and they were martyrs.
"We felt he mischaracterized them in a way that slandered our parents," Meeropol continues. "We felt that, ultimately, if we remained silent, we would be putting a stamp of approval on what he had written."
Robert and Michael Meeropol went on to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the United States government in 1975. They successfully forced the release of more than 300,000 previously secret documents in their parent's case.
From these documents, they learned of a conspiracy to obstruct justice between the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the attorney general of the United States during the last week of their parent's lives. They learned of more general and far-reaching levels of bias by the trial judge, Irving Kaufman. And they learned that Harry Gold and David Greenglass, two of the government's chief witnesses, were brought together by the government before the trial to iron out discrepancies in their stories.
Greenglass was Ethel Rosenberg's brother. He was not able to immediately implicate Julius Rosenberg and only did so after an FBI agent suggested that the code word was "I come from Julius." In the 1975 PBS documentary, The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the same FBI agent admits to coining the phrase.
"Ultimately, I've come to the realization that my parents could have followed two courses: Julius and Ethel's course or David and Ruth Greenglass'. When I was 10 or 15, I wouldn't have wanted them to be Julius and Ethel, but at the age of 56, I can tell you I would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg than David and
Ruth Greenglass. I wonder about their children and grandchildren, and I'm not sure the grandchildren even know who his grandparents are. The children are in their 50s and have lived their entire lives in the closet."
Subsequent to the release of documents on their parent's case, the government paid Michael and Robert Meeropol approximately $200,000 for "substantially prevailing." While their parent's names still had not been cleared, Michael and Robert decided to put the case to rest.
"There was this increasing sense that I had to get on with my life," Meeropol says. "I had to be my own person, not someone's son my whole life."
"But it was also was this sense of diminishing returns," he continues. "In the mid 1970s we found a very receptive audience, perhaps the most receptive audience we would have found in the entire century. But by the time it got to 1980 with Reagan, the tide had really turned. It became harder to show its current relevance. In fact, my parent's case seems a lot more relevant today than it did 10 or 15 years ago."
The timing of the book's release is not coincidental, Meeropol says. He realized the subject would draw more national attention on the fiftieth anniversary of his parent's death and because of the possibility of treason trials post-Sept. 11th.
"National security has been a smokescreen to cover up government misconduct for a very long time," Meeropol says. "My parent's were not executed for committing espionage, they were executed for 'conspiracy to commit espionage.' The court only had to prove that they had taken at least one act to further their plan. That can still happen today."
Meeropol sees similarities between his parent's case and the case of Zacharias Moussaui, the alleged 20th 9-11 hijacker.
"Politically, it's hard to imagine two people further apart than my parents, secular Jews and an Islamic fundamentalist, but structurally the cases bear similarities," Meeropol says. "In my parent's case, the government linked the thing the public feared the most, the atomic bomb, with the people they feared the most: the communists, and this all took place during war time (the Korean War). In the Zacharias Moussaui case, they are linking the thing that people fear the most, which are terrorist attacks with the people they fear the most: Islamic fundamentalists and again, we're at war.
"It's that convergence that leads, in both cases, to a conspiracy charge that carries the death penalty," Meeropol continues.
"It puts people like me in a very difficult position because here I am advocating for this person who hates me, who would kill me if he could. Well, that's one of the differences between him and me."
Robert Meeropol
When: Monday, Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Lawrence Family JCC, Jacobs Family Campus, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla
$16. For more information, call (858) 362-1348.
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