Ethel Rosenberg.
It didn’t take any courage for outgoing President Joe Biden, in the last few weeks of his White House residency, to pardon his son Hunter, who had already been sentenced to two years in federal prison for conviction on the minor charge of falsifying information on a gun purchase application document and was awaiting sentencing on his guilty pleas to charges of failure to file years of income taxes. All were charges that the president correctly viewed as a political hit designed to punish him as president for the numerous federal cases brought by his Department of Justice against President Trump.
Even if the court’s reversal of a reasonable plea bargain Hunter’s attorneys had negotiated with prosecutors that would have kept him out of jail, and the unusually stiff penalty for someone who had been addicted to opioids and had demonstrably cleaned himself up were unfair, Biden allowed his son to go through the hell of a trial, conviction and sentencing to prison because he didn’t want the inevitable controversy over the pardoning of his own son to damage his chances in a re-election campaign he hoped to win. It was only when his political career was over, with Trump’s winning the White House, did he announce the sweeping pardon of his son.
HIs action, however, is still more courageous than what President Obama did, whiffing on a chance once elected to a second term in 2012, to correct a major injustice — the conviction and execution of supposed “atomic spy” Ethel Rosenberg, wife of Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg.
Even after Obama had reached the apex of political success as a two-term president, no longer having to think about getting re-elected, he ignored the evidence presented to him by Ethel’s two orphaned sons Michael and Robert Meeropol that their mother had not been involved in the spying. He also ignored the admission by Ethel’s brother-in-law David Greenglass that he had lied under oath about her playing a role in his atomic spying, and despite the clear evidence in decrypted Soviet wartime spy cables that she was not working as a spy for the NKVD, Obama declined to reverse the fatal wrong done to her.
The Meeropol brothers and their children and myriad supporters have been campaigning for years to have the federal government correct the miscarriage of justice that in those years of anti-Communist hysteria manufactured after World War II to support the creation of a massive US military-industrial complex a global US empire led to their both becoming the last spies to be executed in the United States.
The trial was fraught with errors and with both prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, with the judge, Irving R. Kaufman , actually lobbying to get the case and then sentencing both of them to death even though the prosecution was not asking for execution, at least in Ethel’s case. Even FBI Director J Edgar Hoover reportedly opposed her execution, fearing that orphaning the two Rosenberg children, aged 10 and 6, would generate too much sympathy for the Rosenbergs, who were his big claim to fame as the “scourge of Communist subversion.”
Their case also occurred in an environment of heightened anti-semitism.
From the beginning it was clear from intercepted Soviet spy cables decrypted by the Signal Intelligence Service, precursor to the National Security Agency, that Julius Rosenberg was running a successful spy ring that was passing military secrets to the USSR, most significantly details of a proximity fuse that enabled shells and bombs and cannon and anti-aircraft ammunition to detonate before contact, causing wider damage. But until his brother-in-law Greenglass, a soldier in the same engineering unit of the Army that was performing security duties for the Manhattan Project, had conveniently been transferred Oak Ridge to the very group of soldiers that were guarding Los Alamos, the atomic bomb design lab, Julius was not engaged in atomic spying.
He did at that point arrange for Ethel’s sister Ruth, David Greenglass’s wife, to be taken on as a spy and for her to move to Santa Fe NM to serve as her husband’s courier. While he didn’t come up with much — basically a crude (and flawed) hand drawing of the plutonium bomb’s interior, and one of the metal ‘lenses” used to focus a conventional explosive onto the subcritical plutonium sphere to cause it to go critical — it was enough to allow the prosecution to link Julius to spying on the atomic bomb. But in fact neither Julius nor Ethel was ever charged with atomic spying.
Perhaps because the needed evidence had been purloined, not obtained through a court-ordered wiretap, or perhaps the FBI didn’t want the Soviets to learn that their entire wartime spy cable traffic between the US and Moscow had been captured and that their secret code had been cracked. Nonetheless, prosecutors let the media know that the Rosenbergs were atomic spies, making them a focus of popular enmity from the time of their arrest in mid-1950 through their trial in 1951 and to their back-to-back same day execution in 1953. Indeed, they were publicly accused of “giving the Soviets the secret to the atomic bomb.”
That was beyond a gross exaggeration of what Julius and David Greenglass had provided. In fact it was a lie. There was no “secret” to the uranium bomb used on Hiroshima. Russian and German scientists knew how to make one as well as did the British and the American ones, even before the war. The problem was to refine out enough of the scarce fissionable isotope U-235 from the far more prevalent and non-fissionable U-238 to produce even a small atom bomb. As for the plutonium bomb, the one used in the Trinity test, and on Nagasaki, and then tested successfully by the Soviets four years later on Aug. 29, 1949, the only real “secret” to making it was a complex, difficult-to-construct implosion system of perfectly timed conventional explosives packed in a sphere around a small plutonium core which, if triggered simultaneously within microseconds, would produce the desired massive fission explosion. That information, the government knew at the time of the Rosenberg trial, had been provided by two other Soviet spies — the German/British physicist Klaus Fuchs, and the teenage American physicist Theodore Hall. (Note: Hall’s amazing story, and discovery of the reason why he was never caught, charged and executed instead of the Rosenbergs, is the subject of my book, “Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World,” Prometheus Books, 2024).
Over the years more and more information has come to light making it clear that Julius Rosenberg shouldn’t have been executed (for one thing, Russia was an ally during the war, not an enemy, and was not at war with the US even through the late 1940s), and that Ethel was not a spy at all, though she did know about her husband’s spying. For example, testimony given at trial that was used to tie her to the spying— that she had allegedly typed David Greenglass’s hand-written notes about the information he had obtained about the bomb to deliver to NKVD headquarters — was perjured. In later years, once he was out of prison, Greeenglass admitted publicly that prosecutors had concocted that fiction and that he had agreed to testify to it onlyto protect his wife from arrest as a spy (while in the process dooming her sister Ethel). The proof that this was confession was not itself a lie is that release of grand jury testimony by Greenglass shows he never mentioned the alleged typing job by Ethel.
Most recently, the NSA released a previously classified memo revealing that the US government knew long before the Rosenberg’s 1953 trial that Ethel was not a spy. The memo, obtained by the Meeropol brothers through the Freedom of Information Act, was dated August 22, 1950, shortly after Ethel’s arrest, and was handwritten by Meredith Gardner. He was then chief analyst of the precursor of the NSA and the man who cracked the Soviet wartime spy code. HIs memo was made available to FBI Director Hoover. In it, Garedner concluded from reviewing the Soviet intelligence reports he had decrypted that Ethel was not a spy and specifically that “she knew about her husband’s work but due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.”
Hoover apparently did not share the information from Gardner with either Presidents Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower, who each had the power to pardon her.
So, as Joe Biden is so wont to say, “Here’s he deal”:
In the few remaining weeks of his lame-duck presidency, Biden should do the right thing and posthumously exonerate, not just pardon, Ethel Rosenberg and while he cannot undo her or Julius’s governmnent -sanctioned slayings by electrocution, he should apologize fulsomely to their two sons and their progeny for that gross miscarriage of justice by the US government and its law enforcement agencies and courts.
The Meeropols are calling on people to appeal to Biden and Attorney General Merrick Gardner to do the right thing and exonerate their mother. To do that, go to the petition at The Rosenberg Fund for Children.
While your’re doing that, tell Biden he should also consider much wider action, commuting the sentences of all elders languishing in federal prisons for crimes they will no longer commit and for which they have long since paid the price, and especially for any federal prisoners facing death sentences. The example of the wrongful execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg stands as reason enough to ensure that nobody else is wrongfully executed by the federal government. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 40 federal prisoners are currently being held in federal prisons awaiting execution once their appeals have run out. They should all have their sentences commuted, at a minimum, and if their times on death row, waiting for their demise have been long, and their records in confinement good, they should be freed immediately on humanitarian grounds.
As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Biden was responsible for passage of the “tough on crime” Bill Clinton-era legislation that since 1995 has made it much harder to challenge death penalty convictions, Biden has a debt to repay to all those convicted since that year.
He only has seven weeks left to atone for and reverse as much of his prior actions as possible. If he does nothing, it’s a certainty that most of those 40 doomed men will be executed by the incoming President Trump (unless of course any of them has a rich patron willing to pony up some cash to the new president to buy a pardon).
It’s a certainty to that a chance to make right a historic wrong in the conviction and execution of Ethel Rosenberg as a spy will have been lost for at least another four years, as there is zero chance that President Trump would do it.
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