THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
607
number
in
his circle. There were no associates from the days of Dr.
Oppenheimer's admitted Communist sympathies. (Curiously enough,
Haakon Chevalier, who figures so largely in one of the major charges
against Dr. Oppenheimer, was never called by either side.) Of the
thirty-eight witnesses other than Mrs. Oppenheimer, only the three
or four security officers had not either worked for or with Dr. Oppen–
heimer, or made policy with him, or tried to make policy in opposition
to his views, or been professionally affirmed or hampered by his
scientific-political attitudes. And even the security officers, having
once had to formulate judgment on him, had positions to defend.
And this is to speak only of the witnesses we confront directly
and not of the crucial part which, we learn, must have been played
in Dr. Oppenheimer's case by persons who are never presented in the
inquiry-Roosevelt, Truman, Senator MacMahon, General Vanden–
berg, General Doolittle, Air Force Secretary Finletter, Acheson, Ber–
nard Baruch, Commissioner Strauss, Commissioner Murray: to name
some of the most notable of them-and by professional groups who
have no official spokesman before the Board. Even in advance of the
hearings one had heard of considerable conflict between Admiral
Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Dr. Op–
penheimer on the H-bomb issue and one had naturally assumed that
Dr. Oppenheimer'S situation involved disagreements at high policy
levels. What the record adds to such elementary information while
still leaving one with the conviction that the full inside story of the
Oppenheimer case has not even begun to be disclosed and may in–
deed never be known to the public, is the realization that it was not
alone one grave policy-conflict in which Dr. Oppenheimer was caught
but a whole vast tangle of personal, professional and poHtical animos–
ities. The conflict between the H-bomb proponents and the H-bomb
opponents
is
undoubtedly the climax of dissension but we cannot fail
to be aware of the multitude of alignments and groupings, commit–
ments and cross-purposes, all of which are unmistakably bound up
with Dr. Oppenheimer's predicament. The scientific "ins" versus the
scientific "outs," the friends of Dr. Oppenheimer versus the friends
of Dr. Teller, the military versus the academics, the Air Force versus
the Anny and versus the Navy, the Strategic Air Command versus
the Air Defense Command, Los Alamos versus Livermore, MIT
versus the University of Chicago, Dr. Oppenheimer the individual
