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PARTISAN REVIEW
his
own initiative, he directed the Federal officers to Eltenton.
As
to the embroidery around the story he told-the gratuitous
mention of microfilm and the fanciful multiplication of himself into
three persons-these additions I do not find either as inexplicable or
as naive as they now seem to Dr. Oppenheimer.
It
is very likely that
even on the periphery of the Communist Party, and at his innocent
distance from spying, Dr. Oppenheimer had heard tales of microfilm
and espionage chains which came to mind as an effective means of
underscoring the reality of a spy danger while yet concealing what
had actually happened. When we remember that less than two years
before this Chevalier approach took place, Dr. Oppenheimer was still
making his contributions to various causes he thought worthy directly
through a Communist Party representative, and when we consider
the extreme difficulty with which even the staunchest anti-Commu–
nist liberal, long years after he has entirely broken with the Party,
reveals the names of former associates in the movement, perhaps what
should surprise us is not that Dr. Oppenheimer suppressed Chevalier's
name but that he had already progressed to the stage where he was
able to name Eltenton.
But there is another point connected with Dr. Oppenheimer's
attitudes in
1943
which makes his behavior in the Chevalier incident
understandable even without this much subjective analysis-and that
is the liberal culture of the time. Several witnesses for the defense,
when they are asked their opinion of the Eltenton-Chevalier matter,
call attention to the difference between our present feelings about
security, especially vis
a
vis Russia, and those of
1943.
Fortunately
for our confidence in the historical memory, there are even some few
who can recreate the general political-cultural context in which Dr.
Oppenheimer committed the mistakes on which he is now judged.
Notable among the latter is Colonel Lansdale, a defense witness,
whose transcripts of conversations with Dr. Oppenheimer in the days
when Lansdale was chief security officer for Los Alamos are, ironic–
ally enough, brought forward by the Commission as some of the
chief evidence against Dr. Oppenheimer. Colonel Lansdale has been
talking about the problem of Dr. Oppenheimer's questionable security
clearance at Los Alamos, about the extra precautions the security
people took because of his former Communist associations, and he
goes on:
