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“DOOMED. In 1952, sympathizers gathered near the prison where the convicted spies awaited execution.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) You could choose to ignore, or somehow explain away, the Hitler-Stalin pact, or be wedded to the original Port Huron Statement instead of the “compromised second draft,” but if you seriously considered yourself fiercely loyal to the far left, you believed that the Rosenbergs were not guilty of espionage. At least you said you did.

For more than 50 years, defending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was an article of faith for most committed American leftists. That the couple was framed — by officials intent on stoking anti-Soviet fervor and embarrassed by counterespionage lapses that allowed Russian moles to infiltrate the government — was at the core of a worldview of Communism, the Korean War and the ensuing cold war, and an enduring cultural divide stoked by McCarthyism.
Now, that unshakeable faith has been rattled seismically. Not for the first time, of course; in the 1990s, secret Soviet cables released by Washington affirmed the spy ring’s existence. But this time, the bedrock under that worldview seemed to transmogrify into clay.
The rattler was Morton Sobell, 91, the case’s only living defendant. He admitted in an interview that he and Julius Rosenberg had indeed spied for the Soviet Union. His admission prompted the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol — self-described magnets for global anguish over their parents’ execution in 1953 — to publicly accept, for the first time, that their father committed espionage. Ronald Radosh, co-author of “The Rosenberg File,” a comprehensive account of the trial, declared that “a pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered.”
“The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies,” he said in an op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times, and “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.”

For the full commentary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Ideas & Trends; A Spy Confesses, and Still Some Weep for the Rosenbergs.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., September 21, 2008): 6.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s sons, Robert, 6, left, and Michael, 10, looking at a 1953 newspaper. They still believe their parents did not deserve to die.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A22) They were the most famous orphans of the cold war, only 6 and 10 years old in 1953 when their parents were executed at Sing Sing for delivering atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Then they were whisked from an unwanted limelight to urban anonymity and eventually to suburban obscurity.

Adopting their foster parents’ surname, they staked their own claim to radical campus politics in the 1960s. Then in 1973, they emerged to reclaim their identities as the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, determined to vindicate their parents.
Now, confronted with the surprising confession last week of Morton Sobell, Julius Rosenberg’s City College classmate and co-defendant, the brothers have admitted to a painful conclusion: that their father was a spy.
“I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol said after several conversations with Mr. Sobell over the weekend.
Their conclusions, in separate interviews, amount to a milestone in America’s culture wars and the culmination of the brothers’ own emotional and intellectual odyssey.
It began in July 1950, when F.B.I. agents arrested Julius Rosenberg in the family’s Lower East Side apartment, thrusting the boys onto a global stage as bit players in their parents’ appeals, in the government’s efforts to extract their parents’ cooperation, and in Soviet propaganda campaigns to cast the Rosenbergs as martyrs.
Their journey became public again nearly a generation later when the brothers proclaimed that their parents were framed to feed cold war hysteria and compensate for America’s counterespionage lapses. Amid the Watergate-era revelations of criminal conspiracies and cover-ups, they began a legal battle to release all the government records in the case.
While they were vested in a single outcome, they insisted all along that they would follow the facts, wherever they led.
“We believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent,” Michael Meeropol said on Sunday. “But I remember saying to myself in late 1975, maybe a little later, that whatever happens, it doesn’t change me. We really meant it, that the truth is more important than our political position.”

For the full story, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Rosenbergs’ Sons Sadly Accept That Father Was a Spy.” The New York Times (Weds., September 17, 2008): A22.
(Note: the online title is the slightly different “Rosenbergs’ Sons Accept Conclusion That Father Was a Spy.”)

“Michael, left, and Robert Meeropol rehearsing in 2003 for a commemoration of the execution in 1953 of their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Morton Sobell, 91, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.” Source for caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The left has long chastised the right, for having wrongly persecuted the Rosenbergs. Score one for the right:

(p. A1) In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.
But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.
And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.
In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Sobell, who lives in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, was asked whether, as an electrical engineer, he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II when they were considered allies of the United States and were bearing the brunt of Nazi brutality. Was he, in fact, a spy?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he replied. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius’s espionage, but did not actively participate. “She knew what he was doing,” he said, “but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

For the full story, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “57 Years Later, Figure in Rosenberg Case Says He Spied for Soviets.” The New York Times (Fri., September 12, 2008): A1 & A14.
(Note: all of the part quoted above, appeared on p. A1.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the slightly different title “For First Time, Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits Spying for Soviets.”)