Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The infamous Cold War espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has taken a new turn. Their son, Robert Meeropol, after years of denial, has finally admitted “his father deserved to have been convicted of the legal charges that led to his parents’ execution. ‘Yes, he was guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage,’ ” Meeropol told New York Times reporter, Sam Roberts.

That must have come as a body blow to the Times, which has long been a leader in the leftist campaign to exonerate the Rosenbergs and, as late as 2003, fifty years after their executions, was still editorializing, ”The Rosenbergs case still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria.”

There may have been a degree of hysteria at the time when American schoolkids hid under their desks to shield themselves from The Bomb, a thermonuclear explosion compliments of the U.S.S.R., and their parents read newspapers detailing the Russian threat but there was no injustice in the case of the Rosenbergs and their accomplice, Morton Sobell.

Like Julius and Ethel, Sobell also pled not guilty. However, he got away with a sentence of 30 years and served less than 18 at Alcatraz and other federal prisons. Forty-two years after his release, he admitted his own and Julius Rosenberg’s guilt, also to Sam Roberts. Asked whether he were a spy who fed American nuclear secrets to Uncle Joe Stalin, the aged Sobell tried to mitigate his crimes and replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it as that in those terms.”

If there were any injustice in the Rosenberg-Sobell trials it lay in the fact Sobell, and Ethel Rosenberg’s brother and another accomplice, David Greenglass, didn’t also fry in Sing Sing’s Old Sparky, its electric chair. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4119)