Michael Meeropol (born 1943) is one of two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage, and were executed on June 19, 1953. On December 11, 1975, Meeropol appeared in Madison, Wisconsin on behalf of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. The group was attempting to induce the federal government to release all official files pertaining to the Rosenbergs, arrest and trial.
Julius Rosenberg was an engineer who worked during World War II for the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a product inspector in New York City. He was fired from his job with the Army in 1945 on the grounds that he was a communist. A year later Rosenberg and his brothers-in-law, Bernard and David Greenglass, established their own machine shop. Over the next three years the business gradually failed and Rosenberg and David Greenglass became increasingly hostile partners. In 1949 the Greenglasses took other jobs and left the business to Rosenberg.
Very soon after this break between the Greenglasses and Rosenberg, investigations commenced that eventually led to the arrests for espionage not only of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but also of David Greenglass, Harry Gold, a chemist in Philadelphia, and Morton Sobell, an acquaintance of Julius Rosenberg. In February of 1950 Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist, admitted having given atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. In May, Harry Gold claimed that he had been Fuch's American courier. Within two more months, David Greenglass, who worked as a machinist at the Los Alamos Atomic Project during World War II, had confessed to being Gold's accomplice and had provided the FBI with evidence for the arrest of Julius Rosenberg as the person who had recruited Greenglass to engage in espionage. In August, Ethel Rosenberg was arrested as a conspirator for having been the spy ring's typist. Finally, one week after Ethel Rosenberg's arrest, the FBI brought charges against Morton Sobell.
The prosecution's contentions in the Rosenberg-Sobell case, as it came generally to be known, depended on the testimony of Harry Gold and David Greenglass and his wife Ruth and on a certain amount of physical and circumstantial evidence. Critics of the government's case, both before and after the executions of the Rosenbergs, claimed that the witnesses lied to protect themselves and that government employees coached them for months to assure that their evidence would be consistent. Critics also regarded the physical and circumstantial evidence as both irrelevant and contrived. The Rosenberg-Sobell case very quickly became an international cause celebre and has continued to inspire a regular output of published exposes and apologias.
Michael Meeropol [then Rosenberg] and his brother Robert (born in 1947), after a number of moves between homes of friends and relatives of the Rosenbergs, were placed with Abel and Anne Meeropol of New York City in December of 1953. The next September that arrangement was made permanent and in 1957 the boys were legally adopted by the Meeropols. Both sons of the Rosenbergs became active radical reformers in the 1960s and 1970s, both went through Ph.D. programs (Michael in economics at the University of Wisconsin, Robert in anthropology at the University of Michigan), and both settled, with their families, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1973 they ended their public anonymity to initiate a lawsuit against Louis Nizer, author of The Implosion Conspiracy, a book the Meeropols claimed reproduced private letters without their permission and misrepresented their parents and themselves. In February, 1974, the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case was founded and the Meeropols decided to co-operate with its members. Together they also wrote We Are Your Sons, a reminiscence and autobiography published in 1975.
