Son of the Rosenbergs

History will record that we were victims of the most monstrous frame-up of our country.

--Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, June 1953.

My parents were executed because they resisted. We choose to celebrate and honor that resistance at a time when resistance has never been more important.

--Robert Meeropol (nèe Rosenberg), June 2003.

On June 19, 1953, despite international outcry and urgent pleas for an 11th-hour reprieve, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were put to death by means of electrocution in New York's Sing Sing prison.

The Rosenbergs left behind two young children, Michael and Robert, who were respectively 10 and 6 years of age when their parents were executed.

Robert Meeropol was young enough that the graphic details of his parents' execution eluded him, even as his sense of the emotions swirling around told him that something was indeed very wrong. In 1950, Julius was arrested in the family's modest Lower East Side apartment; Ethel was next. Soon after, the two were sentenced to death for "conspiracy to commit espionage" the following year, during the height of the red-baiting McCarthy era.

In the 18 months between their arrest and execution, the Rosenberg's sons visited their parents numerous times in prison. The visits, as Meeropol recalls in his newly released autobiography, "An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey" (St. Martin's Press, 2003), were as comforting and loving as the circumstances could allow. For all of the publicized insinuations that the Rosenbergs cared more for communism than for their own children, Meeropol says, nothing could have been further from the truth.

"We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives with you," Ethel and Julius wrote to their children on the eve of their execution. "We press you close and kiss you with all our strength."

To the moment they drew their final breaths, the couple maintained their innocence and pointed to a government frame-up. And then, in a blaze of electricity and agony, the Rosenbergs were gone. Small wonder that the state-sanctioned execution of his parents has been with Meeropol ever since. The nightmare start to his young life could have marred him irreparably. To be sure, there were emotional hardships, countless struggles, and even a nervous breakdown along the way.

But in the final analysis, Meeropol's sense of responsibility for humanity -- and toward the pursuit of justice for all -- has triumphed over the pain. Vengeful fantasies of ordering his parent's executioners to their own deaths eventually gave way to something that Meeropol refers to as "constructive revenge," focused on positive aims. For Meeropol, it represents a non-partisan agenda of proactive social change best articulated through his stewardship of the Rosenberg Fund for Children (RFC).

Government 'Obedience Model'

Since founding the RFC in 1990, Meeropol has overseen the distribution of $1.1 million in grant monies to help the children of activist parents who have suffered consequences of their actions. The RFC, which also supports "targeted" activist youth, does not always agree with the activism of their grantees. The point, says Meeropol, is recognizing that dissent is the very kernel of a functioning democracy. Censorship, harassment, incarceration and capital punishment are tools at the government's disposal, but that does not make the use of those tools right, righteous, or even rightfully granted to an entity charged with constitutional, representative governance over our lives.

"Dissent is not a right, it's an obligation," says Meeropol. "It is a part of citizenship to actively engage the world, to critique it, to try to solve problems, and to heal it."

The primary mechanism of dissent -- the dissemination of information -- is now under constant attack, charges Meeropol. Unquestioning approval and hurrah-style patriotism fit neatly in the folds of a governmental "obedience model" to which Meeropol refers. Anything outside the model is a threat and an occasion for fear.