Fifty years ago, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the United States government for conspiracy to commit espionage, when their son Robert Rosenberg (now Meeropol) was just six years old. Their execution took place in 1953, but the case still attracts enormous fascination today. But not only fascination - opinion as well. The Rosenbergs became for many a cause célèbre, a kind of test case used to show the evils of McCarthyism. Most of their supporters people believed, or wanted to believe, that the couple had been innocent. Conversely, those on the other side were certain that Ethel and Julius had given atomic secrets to the KGB.

Now having read Robert Meeropol's memoirs, An Execution in the Family, heard his nuanced analysis of his parents' case, and turned to the chorus of journalistic and academic voices on the Internet who rush to pronounce the Rosenbergs definitively guilty, I get the same feeling as I did with the anti-war debate. When people are so sure, surely they're not seeing the whole picture.

I don't mean to proclaim the Rosenbergs framed heroes; I wouldn't want to be accused of being the latest dupe of what Jacob Weisberg has called "the left's creation science" ('Cold War Without End', New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1999). According to Hayden B Peake, former military intelligence and CIA expert on both Soviet and American intelligence, it is impossible for any sensible person "to avoid concluding that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage."

But Hayden Peake is wrong, in that there are many sensible people who have acquainted themselves with the supposedly clinching evidence and avoided that very conclusion. Among them is Meeropol. But perhaps surprisingly, Meeropol does not cling to his parents' innocence either. In fact An Execution in the Family can be read as a 270 page argument for agnosticism and, vitally, the chronicle of a journey towards a form of political activism that can be based on not facts but doubt.

One thing that An Execution in the Family does is show us the development (or a version of the development) of Robert Meeropol's life and attitudes, including his stance towards his parents and the case. According to this depiction, his first position was one of righteous certainty. When in his late teens he read Walter and Miriam Schneir's Invitation to an Inquest (New York: Doubleday, 1965), he writes, "my emotional belief in my parents' innocence became an intellectual certainty." (67) Yet Meeropol, who took the name of Anne and Abel Meeropol, left-wing activists who adopted him and his brother, kept his identity a secret until 1973, when he felt forced by a possible breach of copyright on his parents' letters to reveal himself. When he did, he took a similarly sure stance. He describes how he started traveling around the country to campuses and audiences of potential donors, laying out what he believed were 'the facts of the case', showing why the key pieces of evidence against the Rosenbergs should all have been inadmissible.

Yet it is clear from An Execution that over the course of his life Robert Meeropol has become less certain. He explicitly acknowledges the change:

The press regularly asked me if I sought my parents' vindication. Although I'd answered that question affirmatively in the 1970s, by the 1990s I was saying no. My goal was to force both the American and Russian governments to release all their secret files and let the chips fall where they may. (202)

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