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AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Massachusetts Congressmember Jim McGovern, who’s also part of a last-ditch appeal for President Biden to posthumously exonerate Ethel Rosenberg, who, along with her husband Julius Rosenberg, was charged with sharing nuclear secrets, conspiring to give them to the Soviet Union. They were executed June 19th, 1953. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover accused the couple of committing the crime of the century. This is a clip of the newscast after the Rosenbergs’ execution.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Someone had passed America’s atomic bomb secrets to Russia. This was an undisputed fact that the whole world knew. The federal government had laid the crime at the doorstep of two native New Yorkers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But to the end, they both protested their innocence of the theft. In April of 1951, the federal court of Judge Irving R. Kaufman found the pair guilty as charged and sentenced them to death in the electric chair to pay for their crime of treason.
AMY GOODMAN: But Congressmember McGovern and others are citing a newly released classified document that shows the National Security Agency knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy and that the government executed her anyway.
Congressmember Jim McGovern is with us now to discuss this, along with Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. He was 6 years old at the time of their execution. He’s author of the autobiography An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey. He’s also founder and executive director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Robert in this call for the exoneration of your mother, Ethel.
ROBERT MEEROPOL: Thank you for having me, Amy. I really —
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain —
ROBERT MEEROPOL: — appreciate it. I —
AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what this memo shows and how important this is to you.
ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, we, my brother and I, and with now the help of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which is run by — now by my daughter, Jennifer Meeropol, we have been trying for 50 years, using the Freedom of Information Act, to get the government’s own material out, and we’ve collected bits and pieces along the way. And we’ve shown that the only evidence against Ethel presented at the trial was perjured testimony. We’ve shown that prosecutorial documents illustrate that even the government said the case against Ethel was weak. And when the Soviet code was broken and the materials were released in 1995, we discovered that all of the KGB agents were given code names, but my mother was not given a code name.
So, we had all this material, and it convinced us that we could separate my mother from my father, because the same materials showed that while he wasn’t engaged in atomic espionage, he was engaged in espionage during World War II. And that — so we separated the two cases, and we began to look at my mother’s case separately.
And we didn’t find — we had a lot of evidence that showed that she was framed and that she wasn’t guilty, but we didn’t have the smoking gun. My brother and I used to joke, during the 1970s and ’80s, we can’t wait to get the FBI file where J. Edgar Hoover says “Nice frame-up, guys.” But we never got that. However, this last summer, the National Security Agency, after 74 years, released a memo in which the chief decrypter, the person in charge of the whole project, a legendary figure named Meredith Gardner, concluded, just after my mother’s arrest, that she was not a spy. This is a smoking gun. This is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And that is why we’re calling on President Biden, before he leaves office, to exonerate my mother by declaring her conviction and execution wrongful.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the role of Roy Cohn, one of the lawyers who prosecuted your parents, and his side meetings with the judge, Irving Kaufman? Roy Cohn, of course, who — well, Donald Trump, the president-elect, trained at his knee.
ROBERT MEEROPOL: Yeah, it’s really — here, we’re asking Biden, in some way, to — in exonerating my mother, to basically stick a needle in Roy Trump’s — I mean, in Roy Cohn’s eye, because Roy Cohn was one of the engineers of my mother’s execution. He was an assistant prosecutor. He was the one who got David and Ruth Greenglass to change their story to implicate my mother. That’s one of the amazing things about having all these files. It’s not what we claim; it’s what the government has. You know, this is not our opinion. And that makes it so much more powerful.
So, when you put it all together — you know, you mentioned Judge Irving Kaufman. He concluded, in sentencing my mother to death, that she was, quote, “a full-fledged partner in this crime.” And now we find out that both the KGB and the NSA didn’t consider her a spy. And yet she gets executed as a master atomic spy.
So, that’s why we’re asking President Biden to take this action. It is one more indication of what’s wrong with the federal death penalty, or all death penalty cases. And so, in doing that, we are asking people to sign a petition. I will give you the website address of that petition. It’s a very easy website. It’s www.rfc.org/ethel. You go to that page, you sign the petition. You can also send a very short letter to the U.S. pardon agency asking them to basically ask President Biden, before he leaves office, to declare my mother’s execution and conviction wrongful. You could call it a pardon. You could call it an exoneration. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, we’re doing whatever we can to add pressure to this, because we only have like 12 days.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Jim McGovern, why have you signed on to this effort? Why do you think it’s good for the United States?
REP. JIM McGOVERN: Well, I’ve gotten to know Robert and his family over the years. But I was a history major in college. And quite frankly, I believe that we have to get history right. And as Robert pointed out, the U.S. government knew, a week after Ethel’s arrest, that she was not engaged in espionage, and yet they killed her. And it is important that we be voices for truth in this country. And that’s why this is so incredibly important. You know, we have appealed to President Biden. We — I, along with the ranking member on intelligence, Jim Himes — supported Robert’s attempt to get the NSA document declassified, which I think is a smoking gun. And so, it’s time for the U.S. government to do the right thing. I know sometimes we look back on history, and some of the things our government has done are uncomfortable to reckon with. But you know what? It is important that we get this right. And so, I would urge everybody to go to that webpage, to send communications to the White House, to anybody associated with President Biden, and get them to grant Ethel Rosenberg a pardon, an exoneration or a presidential apology. It is the right thing to do.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank Robby Meeropol for joining us, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, joining us from Northampton, Massachusetts.
