The Rosenberg Boys - The Atlantic

For those old enough to remember, Michael and Robby Meeropol will always be the Rosenberg boys.<br>I never knew them as such, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were like, in part because there are so many pictures. In one, from June 1953, they are sitting outside the White House in shirts and ties, wool coats, and Brooklyn Dodgers caps. Six-year-old Robby holds his grandmother’s hand; to his right stands a rabbi.<br>Explore the August 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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The boys look uncomfortable, and solemn. Their parents, Ethel and Julius, have been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. Robby and Michael are there to ask President Dwight Eisenhower to spare their lives. Michael, who is 10, has written a letter that he will hand to a White House guard: “Please let my mommy and daddy go and not let anything happen to them. If they come home Robby and I will be very happy we will thank you very much.”<br>Out of the frame, but documented in other photos from that day, are the placards that protesters carried invoking Robby and Michael, the helpless boys made symbols of what many believed was a grave injustice about to be perpetrated against their parents. (Counterprotesters, carrying signs saying FRY ’EM and HANG ’EM, disagreed.) Similar scenes played out around the world. After Pope Pius XII called for clemency, the Vatican’s newspaper cited the “two little innocents on whose soul and destiny the death of their parents would forever leave sinister scars.”<br>I learned the broad outlines of the events that followed—the electric chair, and the orphans it left behind—half a century later, on a weekend visit to the home of my parents’ friends Robby and Elli in western Massachusetts. I was 8. I don’t recall how the subject came up or exactly what I was told, but I remember trying to picture the electrocution, and that I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew Robby mostly as the kind of adult who enjoys making bad puns and funny faces for kids’ amusement. The notion that, as a kid himself, he had been orphaned by the United States government didn’t seem to match his playful persona. I wondered, but didn’t quite know how to ask, how anyone could go on living after something like that had happened. And how could he possibly seem so normal?<br>I later learned more: that Robby and Michael had been adopted after the executions, taken a new last name, and all but disappeared from the public eye. They went to college and graduate school, got married, had children of their own—only to reemerge as public figures in the 1970s, vowing to clear their parents’ names. From then on, they’d never really stopped talking about Ethel and Julius, or pressing the government for answers about its evidence and motivations for seeking their death. By the time I was old enough to observe their advocacy firsthand—at a public event commemorating the executions’ 50th anniversary, and later in a presentation Robby gave at my high school—I understood their basic posture to be one of resolute protest. Ethel and Julius, they maintained, had not been atomic spies. They had been scapegoated for their political allegiances, framed by prosecutors, and wrongfully killed.<br>This was not, I came to understand, an uncontroversial position. One year, my family’s Yom Kippur break-fast meal was very nearly derailed when my dad got into an argument with one of our guests about the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel, this guest insisted, were both guilty as charged, and to pretend otherwise was a pinko fantasy. The incident left me with yet more questions about my parents’ friend and the complicated historical legacy he’d inherited.<br>I’ve lately been able to ask Robby and Michael many of these questions directly—and to go beyond the abbreviated, textbook version of their family’s story, deep into the countless primary and secondary sources that, for nearly 75 years, have helped shape an ever-evolving debate about what, in this case, constitutes truth, and what justice really means. The facts are messier and more resistant to facile conclusions than either side of the argument might care to acknowledge. Even now, new ones continue to emerge.<br>Christopher Churchill for The Atlantic; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University Libraries<br>Michael ( left ) and Robby with items from the Rosenberg papers at Boston University, more than 70 years after the executions

Since the fall of the Soviet Union 35 years ago, government files have been declassified and grand-jury testimonies unsealed; key players have made dramatic confessions. Robby and Michael, the old men who were once such young boys, have had to make their own sense of these revelations. Not all of them have been easy to accept.<br>In April of last year, I spent a day with the brothers in Cold Spring, New York, where Michael and his late wife, Ann, moved in...