Fifty-one years ago today, the U.S. government executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. “The execution of two human beings is a grave matter,” President Dwight Eisenhower wrote in refusing to grant clemency, “but even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose death may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.”

As memories of the case have faded, HBO and the Rosenbergs’ granddaughter, Ivy Meeropol, have sought to portray the treasonous pair as heroic martyrs in “Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story.” The program runs more like an infomercial for the Rosenbergs than a documentary.

“So this,” states Miss Meeropol as she points to a collection can for orphans of the Spanish Civil War, “is proof of evil doing.” HBO and Miss Meeropol might want us to believe that a tin-can found in the Rosenbergs’ home represents all the evidence against them. In addition to the copious amounts of testimony and evidence that convicted them, the Rosenbergs confront from the grave declassified intelligence files from the United States and the Soviet Union that agree the couple engaged in espionage work for Stalin.

Both Rosenbergs conspired to obtain nuclear secrets to aid the Soviet Union, engaged in cloak-and-dagger games to aid the Communists, and recruited spies. Their level of involvement may have differed, but their commitment didn’t. If asked, both of them would have sacrificed anything to serve their unholy cause. When asked, they did just that.

Julius Rosenberg “was a member of a group who did everything to collect information and get it to the Soviet Union,” an old comrade of the Rosenbergs proudly tells the condemned pair’s granddaughter. Clearly uneasy, Ivy Meeropol grapples with family tales of her grandparents’ innocence juxtaposed with her grandparents’ friends bragging of their service to the Soviet Union. Both can't be true.

“Venona didn’t prove a damn thing,” another aging leftist contends. “It was a joke.”

But clearly, not every family member or comrade of the Rosenbergs is so dismissive of the damning revelations in the declassified material. “It’s difficult,” grandson Greg Meeropol admits. “Why didn’t he say it was me and not my wife?”

The answer is because Julius Rosenberg loved Stalin more than he loved his wife and children.