608
PARTISAN REVIEW
versus individuals of a dramatically different disposition of mind–
scarcely a witness appears before the Board whose testimony does
not point to one or more of the myriad oppositions whose existence
and resolution must surely have been decisive in Dr. Oppenheimer's
fate.
As
good an example as any is the testimony of David Tressel
Griggs, a geophysicist and witness for the Commission, who was chief
scientific consultant to the Air Force and a close associate of
Air
Force Secretary Finletter from the fall of 1951 through June of
1952-the period in which Dr. Oppenheimer is accused by the Com–
mission's witnesses of having in various ways demonstrated his ad–
vocacy of a military program that concentrated on continental de–
fense at the sacrifice of our striking power against a foreign enemy,
and of having failed to support a second laboratory, in addition to
Los Alamos, for thermonuclear research but, instead, put his influence
on the side of such enterprises as the Lincoln Summer Study which
concerned itself with defensive warning systems and antisubmarine
warfare. We do not have to assess the merit or lack of merit in a
defensive military policy or even determine whether this is an accurate
description of Dr. Oppenheimer's position- actually it is not-to
recognize that if Mr. Griggs
thought .
this was Dr. Oppenheimer's
emphasis he would naturally and immediately be worried by its threat
to the prestige of the
Air
Force. And if Mr. Griggs is quick to testify
that the reason he watched Dr. Oppenheimer's views so closely was
because both General Vandenberg and Mr. Finletter had told
him
that they had serious question of Oppenheimer's loyalty, he is equally
unhesitant to discuss the more pressing cause for his worry about the
Lincoln Summer Study. Himself an Air Force man, Mr. Griggs was
deeply concerned because the Summer Study was being promoted
and participated in by people who did not share his allegiance to
that branch of the service. He was worried because the way
it
was
being administered suggested the unhappy possibility that it might
venture into such matters as budgetary allocation between the Strate–
gic Air Command and the Air Defense Command and that its results
might be reported directly to the National Security Council instead
of to
his
chiefs. He was deeply disturbed that despite the fact that
the Lincoln Project, of which the Study was a kind of offshoot, took
80 to 90 percent of its financial support from the Air Force, the
Study planned in part to devote itself to submarine warfare.
