Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: You know the truth that can be told. They were sacrificial lands in the marketplace. Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel.
Now that they are gone, you know the truth that can't come out. They were never proven guilty behind a reasonable doubt. Julius and Ethel.
Two years and Ethel.
People felt they were guilty at the time. Some even said there hadn't been any crime. Julius and Hepa, Julius and ever.
People look upon his couple with contempt and doubt, but they love each other right up through the time they check out Julius and Ethel.
Juliet.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Hi, folks. This is the Culture of Protest test.
This is Dick Flatt. You're hearing Bob Dylan singing one of his obscure songs. It's called Ethel and Julius. It's a song about the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both this couple, this mother and father, executed in 1953, allegedly for giving the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union during World War II. My guest today is one of those sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Michael Miropol.
Stay tuned for that.
Welcome, Michael Miropol, to Culture of Protest. It's a great honor and privilege to have you on the program and very excited, not only because of your presence, but because of what we're going to be getting into and what we're going to be talking about. How are you doing?
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Excellent, Dick, and it's a pleasure to be here.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: So you are in some ways a legendary person because your parents are now part of the not only history, but popular culture in many ways, for good or bad.
So we may touch on those matters. But the real heart of this is kind of a case that sheds a lot of light on what America really is and a lot of light on history and so forth. So what was the Rosenberg case? What kind of brief way. Could you summarize this for the young people who were barely, you know, may not know much about it?
[00:02:49] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, it's the period right after World War II when the United States policy of a wartime alliance with the Soviet Union had transformed very dramatically in a very, very short period of time from the end of World War II. One could make the case that between the end of World War II and 1945 and 1948, there was a complete reversal in the public attitude towards the Soviet Union as well as the United States posture. I mean, in 1945 when Soviet armies were advancing on Berlin and American and British and French armies were advancing into Germany to defeat Hitler, and if you remember correctly, the whole point of the end of World War II was to defeat both Hitler and Japan with unconditional Surrender so that the danger from Nazism and Japanese militarism would be banished from the earth forever. And in those years, particularly defeating the German army, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war. They lost 20 million people fighting World War II and their armies liberated all of Eastern Europe and went all the way through to the Elbe river in Germany, which was west of Berlin. So that the Soviets ended up occupying Berlin, turned over three quarters of Berlin to their allied partners for a four power occupation of both Berlin and Germany. Very quickly, for a variety of reasons, it would take us quite a while to go into it. The wartime alliance had been revealed as a marriage of convenience. Neither side trusted the other. And as soon as the war was over, their differences boiled over into what by 1948 could have been World War Three. We were very lucky it wasn't. There was the blockade of Berlin. There was a potential for a war, and the attitude of the United States changed dramatically. And within the United States that involved a political change. And I know this has taken a long time, but it involved a political change to make sure that those people in the United States who were still wedded to the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, which of course included the American Communist Party and their supporters, who may not have been officially members, but they were called fellow travelers. This is the group that had to be demonized. And in that process, my parents ended up being caught up in it because my father had, during World War II, been involved in helping the Soviet Union and the United States government. When they arrested him, they wanted to make sure the public realized that why he did it was because he had an alliance to Communism rather than to the United States. So it was part of the demonization of American Communists as potential traitors.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: So your parents, like mine, were young people in the 1930s, have been attracted to the Communist Party or to adjacent.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Kinds of politics and thought they were in the mainstream by World War II.
And your father was an engineer, correct?
[00:06:08] Speaker C: Julius Roosevelt, yes, he was an electrical engineer, worked for the United States Army Signal Corps. But his basic role was he had all these classmates who were very accomplished, science oriented people and he recruited a bunch of them during World War II, 1941-1942-1943-1944 into 1945 to help the Soviet Union beat the Nazis. And let's remember, this was an ally. He was like the guy, Jonathan Pollard, who had, who, you know, who spied for Israel. Israel was an ally and Pollard spied for Israel.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that particular case. Up of Pollard, because I've thought about this myself, that it's called espionage in the aftermath. But at the time, it might not have even been that clear.
For those people that you just mentioned, they were providing some technical information of various kinds to their Soviet Union, which they admired politically, but which was an ally of the United States against fascism. All right, so you've actually told the story now from the point of view of Michael now, rather than what you might have experienced at the time when you were a child.
So you're out of. Is it fair to say, out of the blue your father and then your mother are arrested?
[00:07:33] Speaker C: Out of the blue. I was seven years old listening to the radio and a bunch of guys come into the apartment and, you know, I thought, oh, these are some of daddy's friends, until he's gone and I hear my mother say, I want a lawyer. And I have listened to enough radio shows to know, whoops, something bad is happening.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: So you, what did you say you were? Nine years old and you're seven. Seven years old in 1950 we're talking about. Right. And how old was your brother Robbie?
[00:08:03] Speaker C: He was only three. He was asleep.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Three. Three. Wow. So your parent. And she was taken away about a month later.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: So for. For about a month, she was a single mother. And my father was in jail and I knew he had pleaded not guilty. And I knew, because I got to listen to the radio news shows, I knew right away that he faced the death penalty, which was very scary to a seven year old.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: I didn't realize. So that was mentioned at the time when?
[00:08:32] Speaker C: In the first night, the night he was arrested.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Okay, I didn't know that. All right. There's a lot of literature people could consult to get the details of what the case was like, what it was all about. One of the dramatic human features of it was that Ethel's brother was a scientist working or a machinist working on the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos at the time or before that. And that's the interconnection that leads to the case.
[00:09:11] Speaker C: The most dramatic thing about the case, of course, is the death penalty. As my brother says in my daughter Ivey's documentary, Heir to an Execution, the reason we're talking about the Rosenberg case today is because of the death penalty. There are other people arrested and jailed for spying as a result of working for the Soviet Union during World War II. Nobody remembers their names. You know, I could mention in a handful of names. I'm sure 99% of the people listening Wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about. But my parents, they're in movies, they're in songs, they're in casual references in TV crime drama because everybody has heard of them. But you know the details. Of course, a lot of people aren't sure. Most important detail is why was there a death sentence? And the answer is. And by the way, Dick, sometimes literature does a great job of talking about reality. In a novel based on the case, a lawyer is explaining to the protagonist that the death penalty was an investigative technique. In other words, it's not an attempt to punish, it's an attempt to coerce a confession so that the defendant rolls on his co conspirators. They knew my father had recruited people and they knew that he was pleading not guilty, refusing to cooperate. So they decided the only way to get him to cooperate was the death penalty. So how do you get a death penalty? You make believe that he had done some outrageously horrendous and successful espionage, namely stealing the secret of the atomic bomb, placing our nation's very survival in jeopardy.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: And causing the Korean War or something.
[00:10:52] Speaker C: That's right. That's what the judge said when he sentenced them to death. Causing the Korean War.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: How did Ethel Rosenberg, your mother, get involved and also sentenced to death? That's one of the most profound parts of the human story here.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: Yes, I think that first of all, when my father was arrested, the main witness against him were David Greenglass and his wife Ruth, my mother's brother and sister in law. And very early on, David Greenglass says, I, you know, my sister had nothing to do with this. I haven't even talked to her about this. And the day my father is arrested, there's a Justice Department official that says there's not even enough evidence to indict Ethel Rosenberg, but she might be useful as a lever against her husband. So a month later, they indict her. And this is August 1950. The trial is going to be in March 1951. As late as February 1950, David Greenglass is still denying that he ever even talked to my mother about this. And the government people, as they talk to each other say the case against Mrs. Rosenberg is not too strong, but she's got to be convicted and given a stiff sentence. One month before the trial, Ruth Greenglass suddenly remembers that my mother typed up all the spy equipment and the infamous Roy Cohn. The same Roy Cohen who's a buddy of Senator McCarthy. The same Roy Cohen who is the mentor of Donald Trump. Years later, he goes to David Greenglass because he's an assistant prosecutor, and he says, your wife just remembered that your sister typed up stuff. Are you going to continue to say your sister had nothing to do with this? Are you going to call your wife a liar? And David Greenglass says no, and he changes his testimony. And so at the trial, both he and his wife testify about my mother doing the typing. And that's the only evidence against her, and that's how she gets convicted. The judge then takes it upon himself, despite the recommendation of J. Edgar Hoover himself not to give my mother the death sentence, he takes it upon himself and gives her the death sentence. And I surmise that whereas the death sentence for my father is a group decision, the judge is a team player when it comes to sentencing my father to death. But in my mother's case, I surmise that he, as a child of immigrant Jews who climbed the success ladder in the United States, he hates what they stand for. He hates the idea that unlike him, who grabbed the American dream and wrote it to the top, they adopted communism. And he is horrified and disgusted and hates them for it. And I think it's a visceral hatred that leads him to include my mother in the death sentence. He could have just as easily sentenced her to 30 years because the whole point was to get my father to talk.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Right. So they are the. The only mother and father in American history sentenced to death, right?
[00:14:00] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I think so. Certainly sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So knowingly, two very young children are. Their parents are being executed and the evidence, at least concerning their mother. We don't know what the judge knew or didn't know, but we have a.
[00:14:19] Speaker C: Feeling that he was getting briefings. There's no question he was getting briefings. It's unclear. It's definitely not the case that he knew what the internal people were saying to themselves, namely that my mother never got a code name, that as far as they were concerned, she did not participate in espionage. That's one of the dramatic things we just got released from the nsa.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Well, I want to get into that in a minute, so let's just finish the historical background. This case was not that embraced as a cause by the left until about a year later there began to be a campaign of people to support them in opposition to their execution and typically proclaiming their innocence. Some people didn't want to proclaim their innocence and just said the execution itself was criminal and shouldn't be done.
But in any case, it was a worldwide campaign, really was. And those of us who were sort of teenagers on the red diaper babies. It's a traumatic major event in all our biographies. Everybody who's got that story, including me and my sister and, you know, many other people remember this as an, you know, we went to rallies, we went to marches around the White House. It was a big mark. And many of us thought, you know, it could be us, could be.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: That's exactly what the argument was until, until we knew, as in, in my case, in my brother's case, I think it wasn't really until 2008, there was this belief that the government was attacking them because they were communists, not because they were guilty. My father was guilty of espionage. And that meant that any leftist was fair game. Anybody could be swept up. And there was a terrible fear when my parents were killed, right before they were killed, they said, we are the first victims of American fascism. And given. And now maybe I'm jumping way ahead, Dick, but given that we are staring down the barrel of the gun of real American fascism today, it's interesting to note that they were wrong. Back in the 1950s, there was space. There was space for the civil rights movement, there was space for the anti war movement. There was an opportunity for a whole bunch of positive things to occur in the 50s and 60s because. And we could go into the details of why that's the case, but because there was no American fascism. But they thought there was. And parents April and Ann Mirapol thought that. And the people who fought to save my parents lives thought that.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Since you mentioned the mirror poles, that's another part of the storyline that we wanted to bring forward in this conversation. What was to become of these two little boys? After the execution and without getting into all the morbid details, it was a very difficult time, I'm sure for both of you, not having a stable framework for living. Some of the family was aversive to being there for you, if I remember right. But this couple, Abel and Ann Mirropolis, decided they would be the adoptive parents of the Rose.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: They offered as early as 1952 to give us a temporary home. But there were friends of the family, Ben and Sonia Bach, who lived in chicken country in New Jersey, and we were staying there. We went to public schools there and we lived with them from June 1953 till the end of December, after my parents were killed, during which time my parents, lawyer Emmanuel Block, had been given testamentary guardianship of Robby and me. And he took his role very seriously. He raised tens of thousands of dollars for our education.
He knocked himself out. In fact, he probably died because he knocked himself out going around the country and Canada giving speeches and raising money. But he also took very seriously the decision of where we should be brought up. And he made the decision to place us with Abel and Ann Mirapol. It was just. It was. I mean, Robby and I, we don't want to be frivolous about it, but we won the lottery. I mean, it was just unbelievable. We were so lucky. And Manny made a great decision. He didn't know them. He relied on a good friend who recommended them or somebody who'd been in the teachers union with both of them, who later we became friendly with ourselves. And it was just a marriage made in heaven. And we were just so lucky and saved our lives, basically. We ended up having relatively easy lives from the moment we joined their family till they passed away and we lost ann when. In 1973, when I was only 30 and dad lived into the 1980s.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: I think I might speak for other people who met you and realized who, you know, your history. I think we all marveled. I know I did. At how great you were, how balance adjusted and okay you were as human beings. And I remember feeling it must be. These mirror poles were great parents for you, as you just. As you just said so. You said they were members of the teachers union, as were my parents, by the way, and they knew the mirror poles. My parents did a bit. But his fame in history is well beyond that. He's the. He's a composer, and he wrote one of the most important songs ever written in this country, namely Strange Fruit, which hopefully we'll hear before this program is over, and. And quite a few other songs as well.
And that's a whole story. There's a. There's documentary film about that, right?
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Yeah, there's. There's. There's so much interesting stuff about it.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:20:15] Speaker C: It's just a guy named Joel Katz did a documentary film about Strange Fruit, which includes a lot of information about dad. There's a very interesting article in the magazine American Music and goes into detail about his career. I mean, the many, many things that he wrote. Poetry, songs, reviews. Amazing. And he was also a high school English teacher, and he believes that one of his students was young James Baldwin.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Okay, let's claim that that's for that. That adds to the richness of this story, to say the least. Okay. And you grew up as Michael and.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Robby Mirpol, and our anonymity was relatively important for our sanity in those early years, particularly.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Right. But I think as we were all members of sds, me and you guys. And so I got to hear the rumor that you guys were members of sds.
And so I knew, but. And some people knew who the miracle was, really were. But eventually you published a sort of memoir, if I remember the chronology. And that was when you came out, so to speak, as the son. As the sons of Julius and Ethel. And you since then have been, let's say, working for the justice for Julius and Ethel. But the situation change, and this is what's maybe less known to people, is that the. Tell us about the revelations of the Soviet archives that changed your understanding of the story.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Up until 1995, we accepted the view that was promulgated by our parents during their fight to save their lives. And I do not fault them for pleading not guilty, because as we learned the incredibly complicated details, my father would have had to say, in effect, plead half guilty.
It's a joke. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant. You'd have to say, this case against me is. Half of it is a lie, but part of it is true. And I'll plead guilty to the part that is true, but you gotta believe me about the other part. And from the government's point of view, they didn't care. They wanted my father to confess and roll on his confederates. And that he wouldn't do. They put all the pressure on him they could, including arresting my mother and threatening her with death.
Now, you know, one could argue, well, why didn't he? In fact, in my daughter's film, my son Gregory says, you know, well, why didn't he just say that I'm guilty, my wife's not guilty, and et cetera, et cetera. And the answer is because it wasn't have been enough. He would have had to put a whole bunch of other people that his friends who he'd gotten involved in this activity. He would have had to put them where he was, and he wouldn't do it. It's as simple as that. He wouldn't rat on his friends.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: They're called the VENONA Files. Why are they called the Venona Files?
[00:23:21] Speaker C: It was a project that was used during World War II to try to decipher encrypted Soviet cables. Basically, what they had is they had a whole bunch of numbers. And the numbers were a code that went to Russian Cyrillic letters. And this brilliant linguist headed a team that ultimately figured out how to decipher a whole bunch of messages. And they learned about a whole bunch of spies, among other things. And the project was released in 1995 and my brother and I, at first, well, we were skeptical. Maybe this is CIA disinformation, maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. And we remained skeptical until 2008 when my father and mother's co defendant Morton Sobel said, yeah, you know, Julie and I were involved in trying to help the Soviet Union. Never tried to hurt the United States, we tried to help the Soviet Union. And immediately that everything came into focus. The story told in Venona turns out to be basically true. And the man who wrote a very interesting book in 1965 arguing that my parents were totally innocent, did his own round of research. And in 2010 he published what I consider the sort of the solution to the case. And it's very complicated. My father was involved. He did recruit David Greenglass, but then he was out of the espionage loop for a couple of years in 1945-1947 for a variety of reasons. And that was when David Greenglass delivered this diagram that the government claimed was the secret of the atom bomb. That becomes the complicated story. My father is in effect not an atomic spy at all. He's just a run of the mill military industrial spy.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: And there were other people at Los Alamos who actually did.
[00:25:14] Speaker C: Two scientists. One is in the movie Oppenheimer, Klaus Fuchs, the German born British scientist. But then there's this young guy, American named Ted hall who's the subject of a documentary and a book by a guy named Dave Lindorf. An outstanding piece of work. I actually had happened to meet head Ted hall before he died in the 1990s because there was a book written about him. And it turned out he and his wife lived in Cambridge, England, around the corner from where we, me and my wife were living when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1964, 1965.
I didn't know he was there. If he did know I was there, he would never have approached me anyway. But you can't make this stuff up, Dick.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Right? I know. Temples are so. By the way, what's the name of the book you mentioned? It's from 2010 called Final Verdict.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: It's by Walter Schneer. S H N E I R. It's called Final Verdict. What really happened in the Rosenberg case. And I think it solves the case.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: And David Greenglass himself admitted that he lied. Right.
[00:26:20] Speaker C: Years after he was released from jail, he goes on 60 minutes and he says, I committed perjury. When I said I saw my wife do the typing. I don't even Know if anybody did the typing.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: So the typing story was a completely.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: Made up complete fabrication.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: So that's pretty stunning right there.
[00:26:38] Speaker C: Yep, right there. So, but most importantly, within those Venona stories, those few messages that were deciphered, there's only two mentions of my mother. She's identified as liberal's wife because Liberal is my father's code name. She never gets a code name. And this description of her says due to delicate health, does not work. And when that stuff came out in 1995, it was ambiguous. What does that mean? Does that mean she doesn't have a job outside the home or does it mean in fact that she doesn't participate in her husband's espionage? Well, just this summer we got a handwritten memo by the chief linguistic crypto, a man named Meredith Gardner. And in this one he elaborates on what was released in 1995. And he says this, these are the, this is the language we've got in, in his handwriting. We just got this thing this summer, Dick. It's unbelievable.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: It was something written or like 1950.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: 1950, 10 days after she was arrested, it says, knows about her husband's work with the Soviets, does not participate in the work where the modifies his espionage work. No ambiguity whatsoever. And this we consider is like a tiny little final piece of the puzzle that makes clear that the United States government knew my mother was not a spy. Period. The end.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: So all that's really important in defining moral dimension of this whole story, which is the government knowing that this woman was the mother of two young children, nevertheless used her as a lever to try to break the case, break your.
[00:28:29] Speaker C: Father and break her, you know, because she could have ran it on him.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Yes, and this is cold blooded.
[00:28:38] Speaker C: Yep. But in 1990, a reporter who had written a lot about the case, he's a man named Sam Roberts of the New York Times, he actually wrote a biography of David Greenglass. He's the reason David Greenglass went on TV to confess to his perjury, because he wanted to sell books. This guy in 1990 interviewed a man whose name might be familiar, William Rogers. William Rogers is probably known as Richard Nixon's Secretary of State who was overshadowed by Henry Kissinger during Nixon's term. But in 1950, William Rogers was a deputy Attorney general. And when he was very old in 1990, this guy, this reporter interviewed him and said to him, well, you got what you wanted in the Rosenberg case. You convicted them, you executed them. The guy says, we didn't want to execute them, we wanted them to talk and so the reporter says, what went wrong? And Roger says, she called our bluff.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: That's a strange way to put it, but okay.
[00:29:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I like the, the thing I like most about it is the word hour. He made it clear that it was a team effort by the United States government and they wanted, they, they, they wanted her to confess and roll on my father. Even after my father had been executed. The rabbi came to her and said, you know, Julius is dead and you're the mother of two young children. You know, confess, give a name, even if it's a fake name. And according to the rabbi's wife, who was interviewed by my daughter in the film, she said, my mother, she, she tells my daughter in the film that my mother said, I have no names. I am innocent and I'm ready. Hell of a story. Hell of a story.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: How do you feel about that?
[00:30:24] Speaker C: My daughter asked me just that question back in 2001 or 2002 when she made the film. And I said, try to imagine what her life would have been like if right then she had rolled on her husband after all those years of standing by him and pleading not guilty, sentenced to maybe 20 years in jail, maybe 15 years in jail, coming out of jail. Robby and I are already adults. What kind of life does she have to do that?
[00:30:52] Speaker B: Do you think that she or that both Julius and Ethel might have thought, well, this way to go gives us a dignity that we would never have in any other way, I think.
[00:31:04] Speaker C: Right. I think that's right. In fact, you use the word dignity.
My parents, in early letters to themselves, when they're both in Sing having been sentenced to death, they are constantly referring to the word dignity, dignified.
It was very important to them. Remember, they were, they're working class people. They, they, their first language was Yiddish. You know, they learned to drive a car. They, you know, they were born, brought up in cold water flats initially. They're now on national and international stage sitting in a courtroom with everybody watching them. And the whole point is dignity. Be calm, don't break down. Don't show them the emotion. Don't show them that they've gotten to you. And in one of the letters, my mother writes to a sister in law. You know how she writes about Manny Block and his father? He said, how can we lose with two such unbelievably dignified men in our corner? And Manny Block in one of his speeches, after my parents are killed and he's raising money for Robbie and me. Manny says, Ethel once said to me, manny, I have nightmares at Night thinking of sitting in the chair and feeling that electricity run through me. But I will die with dignity.
And I think that's extraordinarily important for both of them as working class people who are thrust into center stage, which they never expected to be.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Right. Not in a million years would they have expected.
[00:32:35] Speaker C: Not in a million years. Not in a million years.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Right. Well. So do you have any way of understanding how you felt when you were a child and all this was happening?
[00:32:46] Speaker C: How did that child. They're innocent and this is a terrible, terrible injustice. And, you know, hopefully the American judicial system will work. I mean, it took the most extraordinary machinations at the Supreme Court to kill them. I mean, they had a secret meeting between the Chief justice and the Attorney general in advance of a potential stay of execution to make plans to overturn the stay if it were granted. I mean, this is. They called the court back into special session for a rough, immediate dismissal of it in 1953. I mean, we thought we had another six months.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Wasn't there a horrible moment when they were going to be executed on Shabbos, on Shabbat? And so they advanced the execution rather than.
[00:33:32] Speaker C: The hope was that they would get another weekend and who knows what would have happened because the State Department kept reporting to Eisenhower that this was destroying the United States reputation where it counted in Western Europe, where there was this big fight to try and, you know, keep communism out of Western Europe. It was a tremendous amount of opposition to the death penalty. Everybody from, from right wing Catholics to Communists were opposed to the death penalty. And so a weekend might have made a difference. And Manny Block says to the judge, look, you know, the execution schedule for 11pm Friday night, that will desecrate the Jewish Sabbath, you know. And he thought, well, you know, they'll wait until Monday.
No, they moved it up. It was supposed to happen before sundown, which, by the way, it didn't.
I'm sorry to be gruesome about this. It took so many shots to kill my mother that she was dead after.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: Do you think Eisenhower had any inclination to give clemency or something like that to your mother?
[00:34:34] Speaker C: He was under a lot of pressure, but he had a self sort of justification, which was garbage, but he had it that my mother supposedly was the leader because she was older than my father and my father was kind of like a puppet in her hands, which is absolute garbage. I mean, the evidence is very clear that she was a housewife, that that was a, sorry to say, a relatively sexist marriage. My father led, was the leader and she was the follower. I think that she didn't get involved in espionage as a safety play. If he gets caught and arrested, she takes care of Robbie and me.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: So that's an interesting little tidbit you just dropped. Because, in other words, the President, United States, had to create a lie for himself in order to justify it.
[00:35:21] Speaker C: Wasn't just him. There was this unbelievably disgusting ACLU lawyer named Morris Ernst.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: Who was a good friend of J. Edgar Hoover who told the FBI he would try to join the defense of my parents to convince them to confess. And then he said he had done a psychological study of them. Mind you, dick, he never met them. You know, he'd done a psychological study where she was the leader and he was the slave. And this is based on one thing and one thing only, that she was two years older than him. It's such garbage. It boggles the mind.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: All right, so now why are you bringing this up at this point?
[00:36:04] Speaker C: We. Back in 2016, I give my brother full credit for this. He said, you know, the story of the Rosenberg case is the story of two different people. And we could argue that the death penalty for my father, which we do, was ridiculously out of proportion for what he did. But it's a little more complicated to say he's a victim because he's framed for one crime and guilty of another, but my mother is a complete hostage. And we tried to get President Obama to issue an exoneration proclamation back in 2016. Unfortunately, we believe that Obama was so traumatized by Trump's victory that we are not even sure he saw the material we sent to try to convince him. He certainly never said anything about it. And when Biden was elected, we knew he had another chance because he is the only president who's ever come out officially against the federal death penalty.
And as a practicing Catholic, he knew that the Pope himself had asked for clemency for our parents. So we were readying an effort to make this proposal to Biden again. But then we also knew, based on the stuff from Venona, that there might be more information about my mother and her code name. So we filed a Freedom of Information act request two years ago, and it bore fruit this summer with that memo that I just quoted to you. So we think this memo gives our effort much more strength. And we're, once again, we're asking people to sign a petition. You go to www.rfc.org RFC Rosenberg Fund for Children. And there's a page which has all the details of exonerate Ethel, that I couldn't even begin to touch all of them without using up a couple of your hours. But we're trying to get another round of petitions signed. And you know, at some point we are going to hope that President Biden does the right thing. He has till January 20, obviously.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: So you have some people in Congress who are advocating for this?
[00:38:09] Speaker C: Yes, my brothers congressional representative, a wonderful guy named Jim McGovern of Western Massachusetts. I don't know which district it is in Massachusetts. I myself have relocated from Massachusetts to New York and I've got a Republican congressman, so I'm not even going to ask him for his help. But Jim McGovern is very clear. And this was a very interesting article in Bloomberg, which I'm sure you've seen, Dick, where McGovern himself has specifically asked President Biden to write this historic wrong done to our mother. And so hopefully this time the president will at least respond to the request.
[00:38:45] Speaker B: Are you thinking of trying to get.
[00:38:46] Speaker C: A meeting with him or that at this point we're still uncertain exactly how to proceed? I mean, McGovern. It may be that McGovern will be making the effort on our behalf, you.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Know, so you mentioned the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which is an important thing to mention. And I know that others.
[00:39:05] Speaker C: Great.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:06] Speaker C: Contribution.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: So tell us about that. I've been a supporter since the beginning and Robbie. Robbie's come to Santa Barbara a couple of times in behalf of that. And so we feel close to it. But that's quite an amazing project.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: Why don't you say what happened is my brother trained as a lawyer and his hope was that he was going to become a tax lawyer to help people give money to worthy causes.
And in 1990, it came to him, well, what more worthy cause could there be than helping kids? The way people helped Robby and me by giving money to Manny Block to set up the fund that paid for our college education and got us started in life. And there are loads of people, you know, all sorts of political prisoners who have kids. And it came to him that this is something that he could do, that he has the cachet because he's our parents son. That he has the cachet to reach out to people of our generation, people older, remember? I mean, when he did this 1990, what was he? He was 33 years old. No, 43. 43 years old. And there were people in their 60s and 70s who remembered the fight to save our parents. So he linked that with current political prisoners at the time. And in fact, one of the first efforts he Made was at the apartment of Billy Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, where Kathy Boudin's son Shaza listened to Robbie's story and said, oh, my God. He didn't say oh, my God because he was seven. Said, oh, he's had a life like mine, only worse.
And that was the beginning. He raised money and he's been giving the money away. In fact, he's older. You know, he's. I'm 81, so he's 77. He's retired. And my niece Jennifer, his older daughter, is now the director of the fund. And we. They've given away millions of dollars to the kids of targeted activist youth and the kids of parents who have been targeted in the result of their progressive activities. It's. It's an absolutely wonderful organization. I'm proud to be on the advisory board. I'm proud every once in a while when they have events to get up and give mini talks and to sing because, you know, a lot of the movement is a movement that sings. I've had the opportunity to do that at various events for the fund. And the fund is the center for the exonerate Ethel campaign now. Twice.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: Right. So that's www. RFC.org. am I correct?
[00:41:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: Well, if you're on their list and you get their mailings, one thing you learn from that is that there still are these political prisoners, so to speak.
[00:41:52] Speaker C: All over the place. Yeah, sometimes they're not prisoners. Sometimes they're people who are harassed, you know.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Harassed.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: Yeah, docs, the right wing is after them, and they have a difficulty. And kids. Kids have traumatic experiences. And some kids get counseling, some kids get music lessons. Some kids get travel money to go visit their parent who's in jail.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Some go to camp, summer camp. And that's part of what motivates me to give because I'm a alumnus of Camp Kinderland, which just celebrated my grandkids.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: My granddaughter, and so is Robbie's granddaughter.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: And Kinderland just celebrated a year ago its hundredth anniversary. It's been a haven and a home for generation after generation of, well, we call them red diaper babies, but not only them.
[00:42:45] Speaker C: It's not only by any means.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: No. And so that's one way that the fund, the RFC The Rosenberg Fund for.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: Children, some of the kids at Kinderland have their summer fee paid by the RFC that's right.
[00:43:03] Speaker B: So that's part of the legacy. And you alluded to grandchildren of.
Of yours who are. Well, you said your niece, Robbie's daughter, is now running the fund.
[00:43:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: And Who. Which of the offspring made the very outstanding film?
[00:43:23] Speaker C: That's my daughter, Ivy. Annie and I had two kids. We adopted Gregory, and Ivy is our DNA daughter.
And she made the film. She interviewed her cousin Rachel. She interviewed her brother Greg. She interviewed me and Annie and Robbie. She had footage that she couldn't use where the entire family was interviewed. And back in 2016, let me tell you this mini story. Dick. One of the earliest things that Rob did in the exonerate EFO campaign is he got members of the New York City Council to sign a proclamation saying that our mother's conviction and execution was wrongful. And on what would have been her 100th birthday in 2013, all generations, four generations of the Rosenberg family, including one great granddaughter, gathered at New York City hall where the New York City Council members read that proclamation.
And it was filmed and we had some press. Interestingly enough, this always happens. The New York Times didn't cover it. As far as the New York Times was concerned, it never happened. They've been this unbelievably rotten journalistic malpractice from the very beginning in our parents case. In fact, when I go to colleges and universities, I always like to try to talk to a journalism class and tell them how rotten the New York Times has been since all the way back in the 1950s.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned Sam Roberts, though, who did do something to break the story, right?
[00:44:53] Speaker C: Yeah, but his. He. He basically gave David Greenglass the mouthpiece, you know, and he's. He's credulous. He accepts David Greenglass's story. And when, when Walter Schneer's book was published, the New York Times, in a case of journalistic malpractice, gave it to Sam Roberts to review and dismissed it. I mean, if he had been honest about that book, he would have recognized that he had egg on his face from what David Greenglass had snookered him in the interviews. But that's.
Now we're getting kind of inside baseball.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: That's a way to play baseball inside. So anyway, well, all right. So does Ivy make. So what's the title?
[00:45:35] Speaker C: He also made the Roy Cohn film.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: That's right. I was going to bring that up.
[00:45:38] Speaker C: So Bully Coward Victim about Roy Cohn.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: So are those films available online on hbo?
[00:45:45] Speaker C: They're both available on hbo, Max.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: The title of the Rosenberg film by Ivy Miropol is what?
[00:45:52] Speaker C: Heir to an Execution, A granddaughter's story.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: And the Roy Cohen film, Bully Coward.
[00:45:59] Speaker C: Victim, the Story of Roy Cohn.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: I would recommend highly people not miss that. And if you Want to get another flavor, additional flavoring of Roy Cohen. There's this new movie, the Apprentice. The Apprentice, where Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, I would say, masterfully. And Donald Trump is also fictionalized in that film because he was, I'd say, disciple of Roy Cohen. And so that's another horrifying way in which the story we've been telling here with Michael Mirror Pole continues to haunt America.
[00:46:38] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Well, thank you for sharing that story. And these. Let's remind people Again, go to wwrfc.org to see a petition to President Biden to ask him to what be the right terminology?
[00:46:57] Speaker C: It's a little bit more. It's somewhat complicated because when we did it with Obama, we asked for an exoneration proclamation.
Now it's a little bit more complicated. Right now the petition is asking for exoneration. But anything that Biden says that will acknowledge what happened to our mother, we think we'll be a, a way of writing a historical wrong.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: So if he did that and freed Leonard Peltier, he'd be, oh, my God. That'd be a good way to end.
[00:47:27] Speaker C: Yes, it was somewhat checkered.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Checkered life as president.
So back to Strange Fruit, because I want to end the program with that. So what was this brief?
[00:47:37] Speaker C: Very briefly, my father saw a picture in a magazine. And we think, but it's not certain. But, you know, it's one of these things where everybody says it. So we say, well, it may be true. It was a joint lynching of two young men in Indiana in 1930.
And he saw a picture of it in a magazine and it haunted him. And so he published a poem which he then called Bitter Crop in a New York City teacher's magazine. And then about a year later, in 1937, he set it to music. And it was performed at teachers union events by my mother. It was performed at a teacher's union event at Madison Square Garden by a singer named Laura Duncan, who I didn't know this, but the writer David Margulik wrote a book about it, and he uncovered all this information. And then what happened is my father knew the guy who owned Cafe Society, a guy named Barney Josephson. And Barney Josephson thought that maybe the leading singer at his club, a young jazz singer named Billie Holiday, might be somebody who could interpret Strange Fruit. So he had dad come down and play the song for Billie Holiday.
And then Barney Josephson really sort of pushed her to develop a version of it to make it her own. And she did, and it was an unbelievable hit. But her recording company Refused to let her record it. They were scared. They gave her a one session release to record it with a con. Here's a connection, Dick, the uncle of Billy Crystal, a guy named Milt Gabler who owned a record company called Commodore.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: Commodore, yeah.
[00:49:30] Speaker C: And that's where Strange Fruit was recorded, where they eight piece band, the same band from Cafe Society. And because it was a short song, Gabler asked the pianist Sonny White to do a long introduction. And that's what's on the Gabler record. If you're going to play the Gabler record, the reason for the piano introduction is because Gabler thought it was too short otherwise.
[00:49:56] Speaker B: Well, I'm not going to play that. I'm going to play something I just discovered within the past week. A performance by a singer named Shirley Barrett.
Brilliant singer and I had not, I'm embarrassed to say I'd never heard of her. She's an extraordinary career. She was in the Met and she made an album of more popular in folk songs in the mid-60s. And I just. My grandson sent me this, this link to Spotify and I hear Strange Fruit performed by her and you told Maybe when we.
[00:50:34] Speaker C: It was my favorite record to play for my father when he was in. In a decline living in a nursing home.
[00:50:40] Speaker B: Well, that's then how we're going to end this episode of the cultural protest. We hear Shirley Barrett do this song in a very dramatic interpretation. Michael, thank you so much for everything.
[00:50:55] Speaker C: Great pleasure.
[00:50:56] Speaker B: And I so glad we renewed acquaintance and hope this work can bear some fruit. Not strange fruit, but productive.
[00:51:05] Speaker C: Yes, indeed. Indeed. Let's hope.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Take care of yourself, my friend.
[00:51:10] Speaker C: All the best.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: All right.
[00:51:12] Speaker D: Southern trees bear a strange fruit not on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swaying in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: Tree.
[00:51:49] Speaker D: Past the scene of the gallant south the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth sand of magnolia sweet and fresh and the sudden smell of burning flesh Here is the fruit for the cross to pluck for the rain together for the wind to suck for the sun to rise For a tree to drop Here is a strange and bitter cross Here is a fruit for the cross to fly for the rain together for the wind to suck for the sun to rot For a tree to drop Here is a strange and pit Darkrai.
