THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
619
good sense, was far from reassuring on the score of his present poli–
tical comprehension. Nevertheless, overriding the political story, there
was the purely human story- dignified and poignant-which con–
spicuously confirmed his decency and probity, and this despite one
or two taints of what looked like disingenuousness, such as his refer–
ence to
Harpers
and
Time
rather than
The Nation
and
New Republic
as typical of the magazines with which, in his remoteness from the
world, Dr. Oppenheimer had had no acquaintance until the eco–
nomic depression of the '30s brought him to political awareness.
Dr. Oppenheimer's letter also admirably sustained the Oppen–
heimer legend as it had grown up over the years. Ever since Los
Alamos, Dr. Oppenheimer had of course been something of a culture
hero for American intellectuals, especially for literary intellectuals-–
our contemporary scene does not offer many figures so exciting and
sympathetic to the humanistic imagination as this most theoretical
of physicists so apt for decisiveness in practical affairs, this genius
of science who knows how to read and write English, this lean hand–
some aristocrat bred in the indulgent Jewish middle-class, this remote
man of civilization called from the academy into the fiercest of
worlds-a world of inventions to destroy civilization--only to return
at will into that purest of academies, the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton. In identification with Oppenheimer, the Ameri–
can intellectual had been able to identify himself with a society
whose most elaborate effort it had been to reconcile individual free–
dom with governmental responsibility, whose peculiar torment it had
been to cherish the private gift while subduing it to the social need
and will. And this identification remained unbroken, it was even
fortified, by Dr. Oppenheimer's sketch of his life. From the story
Dr. Oppenheimer told, the sensitive reader could already determine,
even before the hearings had started, that its author was fated to
suffer as much for his virtue as for his error, since they were so
completely of a piece-which is always the character of the honest
radical intellectual. The political history Dr. Oppenheimer traced in
his autobiography was, indeed, the almost archetypical political his–
tory of the idealistic temperament of his generation: any number
of its readers could find themselves in it.
Not that this was Dr. Oppenheimer's own view of his past.
What is probably most special about his political story as Dr. Op-
