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PARTISAN REVIEW
penheimer recounts
it
is his own belief that
it
is so very special. Dr.
Oppenheimer tells us, for instance, that before his first essays into
radicalism he was living so removed from the world that he had no
telephone or radio and read no newspapers or magazines, and he
proposes this as an unparalleled lack of preparation for his political
awakening. But actually, nothing could be more typical of
his
time
than the intellectual's separation from the concerns of his nation
and the world-who among Dr. Oppenheimer's intellectual contem–
poraries, albeit he did have a radio and telephone and did take a
daily newspaper, was better prepared than Dr. Oppenheimer for the
political developments of the '30s? Dr. Oppenheimer may have exer–
cised more literally than others of his generation the intellectual's
right, so loudly enunciated in a previous decade, to be above the
social battle, but he was no more politically handicapped and no more
prone to the illusion of salvation by Communism. Here alter a date,
there adjust the degree of leftist leaning, and Dr. Oppenheimer's
political story is the story of countless high-minded persons of liberal
impulse who came to maturity with him.
Nor does the fact that Dr. Oppenheimer made his first affirma–
tive political gestures at a time when there were those of
his
con–
temporaries who had already learned the whole miserable lesson of
Communist perfidy-the part played by the German Communists
in bringing Hitler to power; the part played by the Communists in
the Spanish Civil War-and that he was still a fellow-traveler when
others of his generation had .already learned that a staunch anti–
Communism was the great moral-political imperative of our epoch,
support any moral judgment against him.
It
merely attests to the
different rates of evolution measurable in the lives of the modern
liberal intellectual.
If
we are moved to judge Dr. Oppenheimer harshly because he
was so slow in seeing the error of the Communist way, it is well to
remind ourselves that the speed with which a fellow-traveler breaks
with Communism
is
not necessarily a guarantee of moral and intel–
lectual superiority. A quick disillusionment with the Communist
Party can reflect just the opposite of a person's innocence of intense
connection with Communism; it can testify to his one-time closeness
to the Party. It is the person who came late and who was
not
in–
timately associated with the Party who is likely to have stayed
longest.
