Rosenberg Sons Say Father Was Guilty, Mother Was Framed

David did not consent to have his grand jury testimony released, but Ruth died on April 7, and hers was made public. In that testimony, Ruth said she had handwritten her husband's notes and did not mention Ethel Rosenberg typing.

The revelation supported a prior confession by David Greenglass to Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter who was writing a book, that he had lied on the stand.

"I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don't remember," Greenglass told Roberts, the journalist wrote in "The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case."

"You know, I seldom use the word 'sister' anymore; I've just wiped it out of my mind," Greenglass said, adding, "My wife put her in it. So what am I going to do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife."

For the Rosenberg sons, who were 6 and 10 when their parents were executed, the grand jury testimony finally dislodged their childhood assumptions of their parents' innocence.

Robert Meeropol said he remembers visiting his parents at Sing Sing penitentiary.

"I remember sitting on my father's lap, and my father played word games with my brother. I remember my mother seemed shorter in prison than I expected. She was wearing flat prison slippers, and also, I was growing."

"Everybody said they were innocent," he said. "It was a part of my reality. That's the way I grew up."

The boys were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. He was a teacher and lyricist who wrote hits such as "Strange Fruit" and "The House I Live In."

In the 1970s, the brothers began to lobby through the Freedom of Information Act for the release of sealed materials, hoping to vindicate their parents.

Then, Robert Meeropol said, "when I went to law school in the 1980s, I looked at the evidence in the case with the eyes of someone with some legal training." He began to realize that evidence of prosecutorial blunders is not the same as evidence of innocence.

In the 1990s, the government released decrypted Soviet World War II-era cables that implicated their father.

"My brother and I are honest enough to admit that when we started this in the early 1970s, we were certain of one thing," said Michael Meeropol. "And we changed our minds. I would like to see the United States government have the same kind of honesty."