The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

“McCarthy Era Lessons for Bush’s America”

Robert Meeropol, Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children

Sunday, April 3, 2005

The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

INTRODUCTION by Rev. John Gibbons

It is a great honor for us to welcome Robert Meeropol to First Parish.  He was invited at the encouragement of our member Merry Kassoy who is a long-time friend of Robby’s as, it turns out, is another of our parishioners, Carol Mitchell. 

Time, as we all know, is a strange thing: it springs forward and it falls back and – while it took Robert and his brother Michael 20 or more years to feel sufficiently safe to publicly and proudly acknowledge that they are the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (as they are also the proud sons of Anne and Abel Meeropol); yet now there are many people – young people especially – who do not know the Rosenberg legacy at all, who do not even recognize the name.  We must not forget the legacy of the Rosenberg’s and we must teach its lessons anew .

Historian Howard Zinn recalls that “the end of World War II brought no peace, but an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and an intense fear of Communism pervading American society.  Abroad it took the form of seeing every revolutionary movement as part of a world Communist conspiracy.  At home there was a near-hysterical search for Communist influence everywhere, leading to loyalty oaths for government employees, secret FBI surveillance of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and congressional inquisitions into the political ideas and affiliations of educators and people in the arts.”

Robert was six years old in 1953 when his parents were executed for the crime – not (as many believe) of espionage or treason – but rather of conspiracy to commit espionage.  It’s a complicated story and Robby has been utterly honest in examining the question of his parents’ actions; but it’s also amply overwhelmingly evident that our government exploited, lied and conspired to frame, smear, discredit and make an example of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. 

This is not an obscure history lesson because it remains true that governments – ours among them – conspire against dissidents: they have done so in the past and they do so now also.  Make no mistake:  our government does not want any truth made public that runs counter to its official line. 

For thirty years Robert has been a progressive activist, author and speaker. In the 1970's he and his brother, Michael, successfully sued the FBI and CIA to force the release of 300,000 previously secret documents about their parents. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, has taught anthropology, graduated law school in 1985, and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.

In 1990, after leaving private practice, Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children and now serves as its Executive Director. The RFC provides for the educational and emotional needs of both targeted activist youth and children in this country whose parents have been harassed, injured, jailed, lost jobs or died in the course of their progressive activities. In the past thirteen years the RFC has built an endowment of over $1.8 million, awarded grants totaling $1.8 million; and gained 10,000 supporters nationwide.

Thank you for getting up early this morning and driving here from your home in western Massachusetts.  It is a privilege and a pleasure to welcome Robert Meeropol to our free pulpit.

Guest speaker, Robert Meeropol:

First what may be a small administrative matter – my talk is not going to be very personal but I have a book that I will be signing during coffee hour and then during the talk-back I want to make sure that people realize that I’m not avoiding the personal. So if people are interested in asking those questions please feel free to do so.  I always like that introduction where it talks about for 30 years I’ve been a speaker.  Given my age actually I was a very verbal child and I’ve been speaking for more than 30 years.  But it did remind me that this entire week as I’ve been thinking about coming here this little memory kept on nibbling at the back of my head the way memories more and more do with alarming frequency these days, and it just got confirmed before, that I spoke here in this very hall 30 years ago.  So I’m bracketing my speaking career here and I’m delighted to be back.  And I want to thank Merry and Rafe and John for that wonderful introduction and I’m glad to be joining you this morning.

 I feel a sense of urgency as we’re beginning to plunge deeper into Bush’s second term here because in too many ways 2005 reminds me of 1953.  This is particularly so when it comes to legal matters such as capital punishment, the question of civil liberties, and I want to address this in two ways this morning.  Specifically looking at my parents’ case as what I call a capital conspiracy case.  And I don’t have to explain conspiracy because it was just done so well for me.  And more generally, my looking at the political climate of today and in 1953.  And on one personal note, I believe that my brother and I are the only people in American history to have had both their parents executed.  And I’ve been speaking out against capital punishment also as the only attorney in the United States with that heritage and it seems to me that there has been a great capital punishment debate going on in this country at least for the last decade and I don’t mean the debate has been a particularly elevated discourse when I say great debate I mean there’s just been a lot of noise about it.  But most of that debate has really been focused on murder cases and of course as you know my parents’ case was not only not a treason or an espionage case it was not even a murder case either.  And in the climate of the summer of 2001 you might view my parents’ case as sort of an anomalous capital case as primarily of historical or academic interest.  But that really changed on September 11, 2001 along with a lot of other things.

Now, some of you may be familiar with the name Zacharius Moussaoui - the supposed 20^th hijacker - the person who the government claims would have been involved in the plot to blow up/fly the planes into the building or would have been on those planes but he was in jail on an unrelated immigration charge and so he couldn’t participate.  And he is charged with conspiracy to commit terrorist murder and may yet face the death penalty.  And who knows about what’s going to happen to the remaining detainees in Guantanamo and the people who have disappeared all over the world and who the government labels “enemy combatants”.  All of these cases are similar in many ways to my parents’ case and all of a sudden my parents’ type of case has become vitally important in a contemporary way.

So let’s take a look at how my parents came to be executed even though they were only convicted of conspiracy.  And I want to just say one more word about conspiracy.  What does conspiracy mean from a legal perspective?  It’s very simple.  Two or more people got together and planned to do something and took one act in furtherance of their plan.  In other words it’s planning a crime.  And to this day people have a hard time believing that we actually executed two people who were only convicted of planning to do something.  So let’s look back.  My father Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July of 1950 a few weeks after the Korean War began and he was executed along with my mother Ethyl on June 19, 1953 a few weeks before it ended.  So my parents’ case was bracketed by the Korean War.  And it’s been feeling a lot to a lot us older folks like the McCarthy period recently and when I talk about the McCarthy period I mean the period in the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s in the United States.

And I could give you a sort of dry historical summary of what that time was like but I think I prefer to just give you a couple of examples to give you a flavor of the time.  I know a lot of times people like to talk about not being partisans and I can’t claim to be a non-partisan person.  I’m actually quite a partisan but my partisanship extends to beyond politics also to sports and I’ve been thinking a lot about baseball recently – no I shouldn’t keep my hat on here – but the baseball theme has gotten to me. When I was growing up there was no such thing as inter-league play on the ball field.  The only time national league teams played American league teams were at the world series.  With one exception, and that was during spring training and during spring training in the early 1950’s the Cincinnati Reds played an exhibition baseball game against the New York Yankees.  And the headline read –small headline on the sports pages read the next day -“Reds beat Yanks 5-2”. This caused an uproar.  Dozens of people wrote into the Cincinnati Reds front office saying “it’s not good for Reds to beat Yanks, even on the sports pages.  Don’t you know our boys are dying in Korea and anyway, what kind of a baseball team are you to call yourself the Reds? Well, Cincinnati didn’t think it was funny.  They hurriedly called a press conference at which their general manager announced that they were officially changing their name to the Cincinnati Red Legs, which is their official name to this day.  Of course, everybody calls them the Reds anyway.  You know, that is the kind of thing that went on, but there were also serious things.  The base commander at our big military base in the Philippines posted the following notice on the central base bulletin board - it read “The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are not to be posted on this base – they are controversial”.  And those of you who survived the 50’s may recall that it wasn’t good to do controversial things then maybe not today either.

It was in this atmosphere my parents were on trial for their lives, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage.  They were convicted at a trial presided over by Judge Irving R. Kaufman, sentenced to death in April of 1951.  Their attorneys worked for over two years to overturn the verdict.  They failed, they appealed to the Supreme Court a total of nine times, the Supreme Court refused to review the record in the case nine times.  They appealed for executive clemency first to President Truman and then to Eisenhower –they were turned down both times.  Now because the charge against them was conspiracy, there was no need for the government to produce any tangible evidence that anybody had stolen anything or given it to anybody – in fact no such evidence was presented. And the words “atomic bomb” never even appear in my parents’ indictment.  But as is often the case with conspiracy cases, the key government witnesses were charged with the same conspiracy and received more favorable treatment in return for their testimony.

There were three principal government witnesses – David and Ruth Greenglass, my mother’s younger brother and his wife.  They testified that Julius Rosenberg with Ethyl’s help recruited David into an atomic spy ring in 1944.  You see David was an army sergeant, a machinist, somebody building the bomb, putting the parts of it together at Los Alamos in New Mexico where the bomb was being fabricated.  And David swore, and Ruth swore as well, that David gave a set of sketches and a hand-written description of the bomb to Julius Rosenberg at the Rosenberg apartment in New York City in January of 1945 when they were back in New York on leave from the army.  And, they also testified that Ethyl was present at these meetings and typed up David’s hand-written notes so they could be more legible.  In return for this cooperation, Ruth Greenglass, who swore that she helped steal what the prosecution called “the most important scientific secret ever known to mankind” was never even indicted, and got to stay home and take care of their two children.  David Greenglass also testified that another set of sketches was given to the third chief prosecution witness, a man by the name of Harry Gold.  Gold said that when he went to the Greenglass apartment to get this material in Albuquerque, he used the code phrase, “I come from Julius”.  That’s the way he identified himself to David, and David agreed. And it wasn’t until my brother and I forced the release of hundreds of thousands of previously secret documents, that we discovered that when Gold and Greenglass initially agreed to cooperate with the FBI, they told their stories for the first time, and as often is the case, the stories they told for the first time were different from the stories they told at trial.  And it was in these stories when Greenglass said that Gold had actually introduced himself as “Dave from Pittsburgh”.  Gold on the other hand during his first confession said that he introduced himself to Greenglass as “Ben from Brooklyn”. Now, my brother and I wondered how did Dave or Ben become Julius and sure enough there’s a third file. Months later, the FBI brings them together with the prosecutors to quote “iron out this discrepancy” and it was at that meeting where they both suddenly remembered the name Julius in the signal.

 Now my parents, who took the stand in their own defense, denied all, but under cross-examination they were repeatedly asked about their political affiliations, their membership in the Communist party, and they took the 5^th amendment.  And during that period, the McCarthy period, anybody who took the 5^th amendment and refused to testify was presumed to be a communist, and actually they were members of the Communist party, and at that time all members of the communist party were presumed to be spies of the Soviet Union.  So, they were kind of in between a rock and a hard place.  Now, Judge Kaufman’s sentencing speech made the political context of the case startlingly clear. I’ll read you a small portion of it.  He said, “I consider your crimes worse than murder.  I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused in my opinion, the communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000, and who knows how many millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”  In other words, even the judge is mentioning another charge, treason.  And even the judge is blaming them for the Korean War.

 Now despite what the judge said about putting the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted into the hands of the Soviets, no scientist actually testified at my parents’ trial.  In fact, the well-known scientists, people like Harold Urey, J. Robert Oppenheimer and others, were traveling around the country saying there’s no such thing as the secret of the atomic bomb.  As one scientist said years later, “it’s an industry, not a recipe”.  And none of the atomic scientists viewed the sketches that accompanied the notes that my mother supposedly typed up for David Greenglass until years later.  And when they did, when those sketches were made public, we obtained affidavits from people working on the case, from scientists, and I’ll just quote you from one professor who’s still a professor emeritus at Brandeis, actually the director of the division where David Greenglass worked at Los Alamos, Henry Linschitz, lives not too far from here.  He submitted an affidavit in which he said “the Greenglass material was too incomplete, ambiguous and even incorrect to be of any service or value to the Russians in shortening the time required to develop their nuclear bombs”.  And just in case, so you don’t take my word for it, I actually have a blow-up here of Exhibit 8 from my parents’ trial.  I don’t know how well you can see – this is the greatest secret known to mankind according to the U.S. government.  At the bottom here is a cross-section of the atomic…it says, “Cross-section, A-bomb, not-to-scale.”  I will have this with me upstairs if people want to look at it more closely.  And it wasn’t until December 2001 that David Greenglass broke his silence and on the 60 Minutes II program said that he lied when he swore he remembered that Ethyl was present and did the typing.  He said that a government prosecutor pressured him into making that statement.

Now, of course I’ve only sketched out a few things about my parents’ trial – there’s no time to do more than that now.  But I want to talk about the lessons for today – both general and specific.  Specifically, there are several chilling parallels between my parents’ case and the anti-terrorism cases today, even though politically, my parents, who were secular Jewish communists, couldn’t be more further apart than from Islamic fundamentalists who may face the same kind of charge.  But if you look at it more structurally, in my parents’ case the federal government linked the thing the public feared the most, the atomic bomb, to the people the public was being taught to fear the most, communists.  And all this took place during the Korean War. American soldiers were dying at the rate of 1000 per month, and that war went on for 36 months.  Now look at what’s happening.  We have prosecutors again taking the thing the public is being taught to fear the most, weapons of mass destruction, and linking that to the people the public is being taught to fear the most, Islamic fundamentalists, and of course our current administration has figured out a way to keep us in a perpetual state of war.  More than 1500 soldiers have been killed since we’ve invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.  In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1950’s made it very difficult to save my parents’ lives.  The same atmosphere makes it very difficult to deal with the cases of today – or a similar atmosphere.  You know will we kill co-conspirators because the perpetrators are already dead?  The mass murderers who flew the planes into the buildings, well, they’re all dead.  So are we going to take revenge out on peripheral figures?  I mean if you look at Zacharius Moussaoui’s case, what’s the government saying?  They’re not saying we want to kill this guy for something he did, they’re actually saying they want to execute someone not for what they did, but what they would have done if they could have done it.  That strikes me as more than a bit perverse. 

Now we haven’t seen quite the wave of capital conspiracy cases across the United States that I expected.  Unfortunately, this has happened because things are even worse than I feared.  Hundreds of people, even thousands were detained in this country in the wake of September 11.  Hundreds remain detained in legal limbo in Guantanamo.  Who knows how many more are detained in secret places across the world maintained by the CIA.  Referring to Guantanamo, the Supreme Court finally decided in the important decision prosecuted by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, talking about the Rassoul case, where the Bush administration constantly argued that the courts had no jurisdiction to review what was going on in Guantanamo because it was outside of our borders.  The Supreme Court finally ruled that we do have jurisdiction and that these people are entitled to some due process of law.  So in response to that, what has the Bush administration done? It has set up these tribunals to determine the status of the detainees.

The problem is and the purpose of these little commissions or whatever they call them is to determine whether these people are indeed enemy combatants.  The problem is that the government’s already said is the reason they’re there is that they’re enemy combatants.  So they’re trying to determine something they’ve already determined and it’s not surprising that with the exception of a few they’re finding that all of these people really are enemy combatants. And what has happened now that some of them have found attorneys and are beginning to appeal to the courts as the Supreme Court in Rassoul said they had the right to do, the government below is arguing yes, the Supreme Court ruled that they have a right to file a piece of paper asking that their determination be considered, but since this is outside the US jurisdiction, the court then has to immediately dismiss their case, because the court rules don’t apply.

Now, this kind of Kafkaesque wheel spinning has resulted in another round of cases which will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, but it means that the status of the detainees and what’s happening to them there has not changed at all.  And now of course our chief Attorney General is Gonzales, the author of the famous or infamous torture memos, so we know that things are not going to improve now that Ashcroft is gone.  And, you know, one of the things about having an Attorney General who authors torture memos and having a policy that seems to condone torture, we can now say that we not only have a Commander-in-Chief in Washington we also have a torturer-in-chief. And what is the administration trying to do with all this?  It’s trying to do an end run around our judicial system.  What the President of the United States is doing or is trying to do is to place himself above all laws.  Why does he want to do that?  Well, I’d submit because this President and his group want no less than to run the world.  Well the problem with trying to run the world with a small group of people is any effort to do that is going to be both expensive and bloody and we can’t let a little thing like domestic dissent undermine their plans.  And that’s where the more general lessons come in.  You know it was just six weeks and one day after September 11 that Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law.  It was presented to Congress just a week or 10 days earlier. It’s 342 pages of complex and far-reaching legislation that passed without almost any debate.  And my first thought when they presented this only a little over a month after September 11, was how did they throw this together so quickly?  The answer is simple – they didn’t.  It was a wish list of an administration that was already hostile to civil liberties to begin with.  The minute they had an excuse, they trotted it out and they rammed it through.  And they didn’t have to start from scratch, because they already had all the discredited laws of the McCarthy period to provide them with a ready-made blueprint.  In fact when you sit down and start reading the law (and I can’t claim that I’ve read it all) you will discover that there are entire paragraphs where if you’re familiar with the 1950’s laws, it looks like they yanked out the words either “communist” or “subversive”, and plugged in the word “terrorist” instead, and then added some stuff about computers to modernize it all, and there you had it, the Patriot Act.  And it’s not just the words of the act that remind us of that period.  You know when a few democrats began to object on civil libertarian grounds, the administration responded that they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  And that’s exactly what the civil libertarians were told when they raised questions of civil liberties during the McCarthy period. 

You know, in the McCarthy period, as was mentioned in the introduction, people were hauled before something called the House Un-American Activities Committee, and asked to swear that they were not now nor had they ever had been members of the communist party.  Communists, or even accused communists were presumed to be guilty, and those who opposed the Korean War, or opposed my parents’ execution, were presumed to be communists or communist sympathizers.  And the press today feeds on the fear and doesn’t criticize because they’re afraid too.  You know, shortly after 9/11, I started touring the country and giving talks about capital conspiracy cases, which I feared were going to come back.  And shortly after 9/11 I did an interview on NPR radio arguing an anti-death penalty position for those charged with conspiracy to commit terror.   The first question the interviewer asked me was, “you’re not supporting these terrorists are you?” And that sort of made my hair stand on end (or what there was of it) because when people took a stand against my parents’ execution 50 years ago, that’s the first question they were asked – “you’re not supporting these communists are you?”  And just like the 1950’s we have a similar right-wing Supreme Court that at least in most cases is going to do the Executive’s bidding.

So what do we do about this new McCarthy period? Well we’re repeatedly told to give up freedom in order to increase our security, in order to protect ourselves.  It’s a balance – freedom/security – you have to lose a little of one in order to gain a little bit of the other.  Don’t fall for the freedom vs. security trap.  Attack the assumption.  Where is proof that giving up freedom will increase our security? History teaches us that we’ll be less free, but no more secure.  In fact, we’ll end up living in fear of our own security forces.  You know the CIA and other intelligence agencies who failed to warn us about September 11 - for whatever reason - that also reached false conclusions about weapons of mass destruction – for whatever reason – I think we can be pretty certain that it wasn’t because they didn’t have enough power.  They had lots of power.  It wasn’t because they didn’t have enough money.  They had lots of money.  You know one of the things that always amazes me about intelligence agencies and the military in general is that whenever they screw up, they ask Congress for more money and more power, and they get it.  You know, I wish that would happen with education and welfare. You know can you imagine – “we’re not doing as good a job educating our kids as we could, but you know give us some more money and some more power, and we will.” Never seems to work that way.  Too bad.  Maybe if these agencies spent less time harassing environmentalists, or people protesting against multi-national corporate tyranny, or the imprisonment of two million of our fellow citizens.  You know the United States today has 25% of the world prison population that it imprisons?  The land of the free - there are 8 million people imprisoned in the world, and two million of them are within our borders.  Maybe if they didn’t work so hard to try to execute dozens each year…maybe if they didn’t do all these things, they would have had the focus and they would have been able to warn us.

In conclusion, we can’t let our government expand the scope of the death penalty and make war on civil liberties in the name of making war on terrorism.  We can’t let Bush and others destroy freedom and the rule of law in the name of protecting it.  And we fool no one but ourselves when we cover up systematic policies that condone torture and foster human rights abuses.  We don’t need the blind obedience of those who claim to support our troops while supporting policies that are more likely to send them to their graves.  We also need to get a better grasp of what the phrase “my country right or wrong” means in a democracy.  In a democracy, you vote your approval when you think it’s right, and in a democracy it is your duty to dissent and set it right when it’s wrong.  There is nothing more patriotic than to fight to protect our constitutional rights.  Thank you.