Friday, May 27, 2005

Martyrs or Morons?

A little while ago I saw Ivy Meeropol's documentary Heir to an Execution, which was about her grandparents, the Rosenbergs. At the time I saw it, I didn't know much about the Rosenbergs and had no opinion on their guilt or innocence, though I was leaning towards the idea that they were scapegoated, framed, ratted out, or something similiar. After seeing the doc, I concluded (as most people do) that David Greenglass was a cowardly bastard and a hypocrite for snitching on his sister and her husband.
While studying the case a bit, I find I have increasingly less respect or sympathy for the Rosenbergs, and a lot more for David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth. Yes, they were "snitches" or "turncoats" or whatever other insult you want to throw at them, but the bald fact is that David Greenglass
  1. Admitted his own guilt first, refusing to implicate his sister in any other activities besides typing up some espionage-related notes for her husband Julius
  2. Told the truth about his deeds as a communist spy, both on the stand and off
  3. Accepted the fact that he had broken laws, and was willing to face up to the consequences of his actions

At the time David Greenglass gave his confession to the FBI (Feb 1950), he didn't seem to grasp the gravity of his situation. He was only 23 years old when he became a "spy", and he appeared to think that it was all water under the bridge five years after the fact. He certainly could not have guessed that his sister - who had a tangential role, if any, in her husband's activities - would be condemned to death alongside her husband. Greenglass made a full confession and cooperated with the FBI and prosecutors even though they didn't promise him anything, and for all he knew, he and his wife would be the scapegoats for the whole affair. He was arrested a full month before Julius Rosenberg and didn't know what was going to happen. What if the Rosenbergs had been arrested before David Greenglass? Would they have snitched on him? No one knows.

David admitted that he had been a communist and that he had passed on secure information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. But the Rosenbergs, who were deeply committed to the communist cause for years and worked actively on behalf of the Soviet Union (and had just as much to lose as the Greenglasses), had the chutzpah to deny everything! Julius Rosenberg: No, I am not a communist. I didn't even know what an atom bomb was until two of them were dropped on Japan. I never asked my brother-in-law to spy. The Rosenbergs lied, big-time. They were cowardly. They didn't stand behind their convictions. So why are we still using David Greenglass as the scapegoat and calling him a traitor?

To my mind, the Rosenbergs can never be martyrs to communism or any other cause because they lied shamelessly in an attempt to save themselves from a punishment they knew was long overdue. The Rosenbergs didn't offer themselves up as David Greenglass and other spies of the early Cold War did; they were fully prepared to flee to the Soviet Union, leaving others to clean up their mess. Greenglass took the stand and told everything he knew while the Rosenbergs took the stand and perjured themselves like crazy, acting as if the whole thing was a figment of Greenglass's imagination or part of some elaborate revenge scheme.

1 comment:

tshsmom said...

Once again, it was the children that suffered.