Despite overwhelming evidence and the strong support of Representative Jim McGovern, my brother’s Congressman, President Biden left office without acting on our request that he issue a formal apology for the wrongful conviction and execution of my mother, Ethel Rosenberg.
By his inaction, President Biden has followed in the shameful pattern set originally in 1953 when President Eisenhower refused clemency for both my parents. In 2017, President Obama left office without even acknowledging our request for an exoneration proclamation. This time around, we know that someone in the White House considered our request because the Pardon Office requested materials from Congressman McGovern’s office. Yet President Biden failed to act and failed to explain his inaction.
The reason we launched a new campaign to get President Biden to take an official action is because of the release last September of a memo written by Meredith Gardner, the chief decoder of encrypted Soviet messages between New York and Moscow during World War II. In that memo, written ten days after my mother’s arrest, he concluded that my mother was not a spy. To see how this fit with previously discovered material, the following OP ED by my son, daughter and two nieces that was published in the Boston Globe on December 31 of last year is useful:
“We are the four grandchildren of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
When our fathers, Michael and Robert, were 10 and 6, their parents Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the US government after being found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. Our dads have spent the past 50 years seeking to learn the truth about our grandparents.
In September, their Freedom of Information Act request to the National Security Agency resulted in the release of the “smoking gun” in our grandmother’s case: a memo by American codebreaker Meredith Gardner. In that memo, written shortly after Ethel’s arrest in 1950, Gardner concluded after reviewing Soviet Intelligence thatEthel Rosenberg was not a spy, writing that Ethel “knew about her husband’s work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.”
This memo is the capstone to a series of documents released over the past few decades that completely undermine the case against Ethel. After the grand jury testimony of the chief prosecution witness, Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, was released in 2015 and revealed his perjury about Ethel, our fathers called on President Obama to exonerate our grandmother. They laid out in great detail how the justice system failed our grandmother at every step. But Obama did not act on the request. President Biden has the chance to do so now.
When Biden pardoned his son, he said, “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.” We understand better than most. Biden’s political enemies sought to use his son to attack him and his family. The same thing happened to our family: Prosecutors arrested and charged our grandmother to, in their words, “use her as a lever” against her husband. She refused to cooperate and was ultimately executed. As then-deputy attorney general William P. Rogers admitted, “she called our bluff.”
We grew up living with this painful and unique family history. Our lives have been shaped by our grandparents’ trial and execution and by our fathers’ search for the full story behind the destruction visited on their family.
By all accounts our grandmother was a loving person, a committed union activist, and a gifted singer. But we never heard her voice or learned from her example. There are no family photos of us together or treasured memories of holidays and vacations. Instead, we learned about our grandparents’ case as children, studied it in school, and wrestled with our feelings about it as young adults. We had nightmares about the electric chair, wondered how our dads survived losing their parents, and struggled with what we could do to provide comfort to them every year on the anniversary of their parents’ death.
Our fathers are now 81 and 77, and despite the traumatic experiences of their childhood, they are good, productive men, loving and beloved dads and grandfathers.
We are asking Biden to once again let his conscience guide him as he did when he commuted 37 federal death row sentences. It is too late to save our grandmother but he has the ability to correct this historical wrong. Ethel’s final plea for clemency to President Eisenhower was ignored, but Biden, having all of the facts, can listen to ours.
Signed: Jennifer, Ivy, Greg, Rachel Meeropol”
For more detailed information, I recommend two recent articles by historians responding specifically to the import of the Gardner memo.
The first is by historian Lori Clune entitled “I wrote a book on the execution of the Rosenbergs for Cold War spying – and a recently declassified document has convinced me that Ethel was innocent,” which was published on line in The Conversation (November 26, 2024) available at https://theconversation.com/i-wrote-a-book-on-the-execution-of-the-rosenbergs-for-cold-war-spying-and-a-recently-declassified-document-has-convinced-me-that-ethel-was-innocent-240642. The second is by historian Phillip Deery entitled “President Biden Should Pardon Ethel Rosenberg,” The Nation (January 2, 2025) available at https://www.thenation.com/authors/phillip-deery/.
On January 21, in response to Biden’s inaction, The Rosenberg Fund for Children issued the following statement which is available on their website.
“We are deeply disappointed in President Biden’s failure to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg. This is both a personal disappointment to our family and a political one. Despite overwhelming evidence that Ethel was not a spy and the government knew this before convicting and executing her, President Biden did not have the courage to admit our government’s wrongful actions and apologize.
Despite Biden’s failure, we are very grateful for the support of thousands of people who joined with us to share the new information, signed the petition, and sent letters of support to the Pardon Office. We are particularly grateful to Congressman Jim McGovern and Isabella Edo for their support and advocacy. With their help, and your help, we have been successful in correcting the historical record.
One bright spot on January 20 was the long-overdue return of Leonard Peltier to his family and community. Leonard is an RFC Advisory Board member and several generations of his family have received RFC grants. We’re so grateful that he’s going home.
We’re not finished with this fight; stay tuned for additional updates. In the meantime, thank you for standing in solidarity with the RFC and our family.”
I want to personally reiterate that this fight is not over. I believe that the release of the Gardner memo and the publicity around it has increased public awareness of the terrible injustice done to my mother and by extension our nation. In the oral commentary broadcast on Friday, January 24, I concluded that all Americans should be disappointed because the truth about our nation’s history is important --- we lose nothing by learning from our mistakes --- in fact we gain --- we take a step towards a more just society.
Despite Biden’s failure to take official action, the truth has broken through. My mother has been vindicated by history. My brother and I are very grateful that we lived long enough to see this day.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
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