excuses, excuses

Writing in the L.A. Times last week, Ronald Radosh said that it’s about time for the left to own up to the fact that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged and that it’s time for the right to own up to the miscarriage of justice in the case of Ethel.

The left has consistently defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups. Because a demagogue like Sen. Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as “reds” (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent. People like Hiss (a former State Department official who was accused of spying) cleverly hid their true espionage work by gaining sympathy as just another victim of a smear attack.

But now, with Sobell’s confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished.

In the 1990s, when it was more than clear that the Rosenbergs had been real Soviet spies — not simply a pair of idealistic left-wingers working innocently for peace with the Russians — one of the Rosenberg’s sons, Michael, expressed the view that the reason his parents stayed firm and did not cooperate with the government was because they wanted to keep the government from creating “a massive spy show trial,” thereby earning “the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression.”

Today, he and his brother Robert run a fund giving grants to the children of those they deem “political prisoners,” such as convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Ironically, if there was any government that staged show trials for political ends, it was the government for which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives, that of the former Soviet Union.

This week, the Meeropols made it clear to the New York Times that they still believe the information their father passed to the Russians was not terribly significant, that the judge and the prosecutors in their parents’ case were guilty of misconduct, and that neither Julius nor Ethel should have been given the death penalty for their crimes.

On the subject of their mother, the Meeropols have a point. In another development last week, a federal court judge in New York released previously sealed grand jury testimony of key witnesses in the case, including that of Ruth Greenglass, Julius’ sister-in-law. It turns out that a key part of her testimony for the prosecution — that Ethel had typed up notes for her husband to hand to the Soviets — was most likely concocted.

That doesn’t mean that Ethel was innocent — indeed, the preponderance of the evidence suggests she was not. But what is clear is that in seeking to get the defendants to confess to Soviet espionage, the prosecutors overstepped bounds and enhanced testimony to guarantee a conviction. Americans should have no problem acknowledging when such judicial transgressions take place, and in concluding that the execution of Ethel was a miscarriage of justice.

Nevertheless, after Sobell’s confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.

Nothing doing!, say those pillars of the old left E. L. Doctorow and Howard Zinn, who claim that the Rosenbergs’ guilt or innocence doesn’t matter:

“I never was going along saying I know that they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact that they turned out to be spies,” said Howard Zinn, the left-wing history professor. “To me it didn’t matter whether they were guilty or not. The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.”

E. L. Doctorow, whose novel “The Book of Daniel” was largely sympathetic to the accused couple even as it indicted the larger society, also said that a larger question superseded whether they spied: “It was what happened to them, as if a society turned its magnifying lens on these people until they caught fire and were burned alive.”

This is the kind of thing that gives the left a bad name, of course—first of all with me, and I am, as I never tire of repeating, of the left. But this quote from the same article really takes the cake [e.a.]:

Many who took up the execution of the Rosenbergs as a grievance are reluctant to let go of it. Mr. Sobell, in fact, was rebuffed by his own stepdaughter, Sydney Gurewitz Clemens, an author and teacher. She said his confession “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”

The truth “complicates history”! Lies are so much better! Especially when they’re about committed leftists.

What moral rot.