Rosenbergs’ son sees similarities between McCarthy era and today

People who have suffered a horrendous tragedy can go in one of two basic directions: They can seek revenge, or take the experience and try to do something positive with it.

Robert Meeropol thinks he is doing the latter.

“I had a need that was unrecognized: to figure out a way to make something good come out of my childhood experience,” he said in a telephone interview from his office in western Massachusetts. “And once I started working on the Rosenberg Fund for Children, that need was fulfilled.”

Meeropol was 6 years old in 1953 when his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed for allegedly sharing atomic information with the Soviet Union at the height of the Korean War.

They were communists. And Jews.

Meeropol will be back in the Bay Area next week — he lived in Berkeley from 1979 to 1981 — to discuss his memoir of a few years ago, “An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey,” and how the current situation in America has some dangerous parallels to the era of McCarthyism, during which his parents were executed. Monday, June 20 will be the 53rd anniversary of his parents’ executions.

After his parents were killed, Robert and his brother, Michael, were adopted by Abel and Ann Meeropol, a childless couple sympathetic to the Rosenbergs. The boys took their foster parents’ surname to hide their identity, and lived in relative anonymity. They only went public in the 1970s, when they mounted an effort to get the government to reopen their parents’ case.

Meeropol says that he and his brother were only able to survive — and thrive, even — because of a community of progressive activists who were sympathetic to their plight. Which is how he came to found the Rosenberg Fund for Children. The RFC provides assistance for children of progressive activists who have been targeted for their political activity. It provides them with resources so they may attend summer camp, take music lessons or attend a special school.

“I see it as progressive social insurance,” he said. “All the thousands of supporters chip in for the benefit of families who get in trouble. We are a public charity, but I don’t like to think of it as charity, I think of it as a thank you to the kind of people who suffered losses and make the country a better place for all of us.”

In regard to his upcoming lecture topic at the College of Marin, and what comparisons there are to be made with the McCarthy era, Meeropol said: “If you look at my parents’ case in the 1950s, what the government succeeded in doing was it took the people the public were most afraid of, the communists, and linked them to the thing people were most frightened of, the atomic bomb, when the Korean War was raging.

“If you compare that kind of scenario to today, you see the government taking the people the public are most afraid of, Islamic fundamentalists, and linking them to the thing people are most frightened of, weapons of mass destruction, while we’re in perpetual war, and it’s just like before.”

He also sees some differences though, which he will discuss in the lecture.

Meeropol identifies culturally as a Jew, and though he’s not religious, his wife and daughters are Jewish, as are most of his friends. He says he identifies most of all with humanity as a whole.

When asked whether he felt he was on some kind of government watch-list, he replied, “Given who my parents were — there’s no way, unless I want to go stick my head in the sand or hide in the woods — there is no way for me to be a good boy, so why should I try?”

While he and his brother were plaintiffs in a precedent-setting Freedom of Information Act case to obtain 300,000 pages of secret FBI documents about their parents, he has never tried to obtain his own file simply because he feels he has better things to do with his time.

“What I do with my life is open and above board,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t like a lot of what I do and say, but [my brother and I] are objects of sympathy, and who can blame children for wanting to speak up for their executed parents?”

Meeropol believes they have mostly been ignored, even when it comes to the work of the fund. “In my most paranoid state,” he observed, “is it an accident that no major magazine has ever done a feature story on me or the Rosenberg Fund for Children?”

Robert Meeropol will speak 7 p.m. Sunday, June 18 at the College of Marin Student Services Center cafeteria, Kentfield. The talk is free, but donations to the RFC are encouraged. Information: (415) 485-9390. He will speak 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 19 at the Middle East Children’s Alliance, 901 Parker St., Berkeley. Cost is $10 to $20, to benefit the RFC. Reservations requested; call (510) 548-0542.