THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
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What I mean is this: -Before the Spanish War, in the worst
days of the Depression, it was the usual thing that a fellow-traveler
thought of himself as in some degree a Marxist or as in some degree
committed to the idea of proletarian revolution. His conviction need
not be sufficiently strong to have carried him to Party membership.
Nevertheless, he was soon close to the inner workings of the Com–
munist Party, for in this period the Party overtly participated even
in its innocents' groups. By the mid-'30s, however, the picture had
altered. The worst days of our economic depression were past, and
the fellow-traveler no longer thought in terms of revolution; a major
renovation of our social-economic system no longer seemed manda–
tory. This was the period of the so-called Popular Front, when a
fellow-traveler committed himself, not to Marxism, but only to anti–
fascism or peace or some other decent abstract ideal virtually indis–
tinguishable from the traditional ideals of liberalism, and this was
the period in which the Communist Party learned to keep a safe
distance from the gullible souls it was manipulating to its own pur–
poses. Even the fellow-traveler who, like Dr. Oppenheimer, went to
private meetings addressed by Communist functionaries or gave
money directly to a Party person, need know nothing of the Party
in its actual functioning. Indeed, he could be fully engaged in Com–
munist-controlled affairs and yet be honestly persuaded that he was
only a left-democrat, and it would not be until he came to a precise
recognition of the nature of the Soviet Union and to the realization
that his sympathy for the Spanish loyalists or for migratory workers
or his anti-fascist activities were being used to serve the ends of the
Soviet Union that he would learn the true import of his leftist
associations.
It is of the utmost relevance to his defense and its greatest mis–
fortune that Dr. Oppenheimer, who was
par excellence
the Popular
Front fellow-traveler, seems to know so little of the various stages
through which a fellow-traveler was likely to have passed and that
he has such a poor comprehension of the inevitable part played in
the evolution of the radicalized intellectual by idealization of the
Soviet Union. As he tries to explain his past, both in his autobio–
graphical letter and in the hearings, we see him floundering to make
sense of what he feels
should
make sense but of which he has patently
missed the main thread. Thus he tells us that first he disliked Russia
and that then he slowly came to realize that the American Commu-
