THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
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"At the same time over in the War Department I was being
subjected to pressure from military superiors, from the White House
and from every other place because I dared to stop the commis–
sioning of a group of 15 or 20 undoubted Communists. I was
being vilified, being reviewed and re-reviewed by boards because
of my efforts to get Communists out of the Army and being frus–
trated by the blind naive attitude of Mrs. Roosevelt and those
around her in the White House, which resulted in serious and
extreme damage to this country....
"By golly, I stood up in front of General McNary then Deputy
Chief of Staff of the Army and had him tell me that I was ruining
peoples' careers and doing damage to the Army because I had
stopped the commissioning of the political commissar of the Abra–
ham Lincoln Brigade, and the
guy
was later commissioned on direct
orders from the White House."
Nothing is made of Colonel Lansdale's helpful hints, either by Dr.
Oppenheimer or his counsel. Indeed, between the lines of the record
one reads the strained embarrassment of all of Colonel Lansdale's
listeners as they have such a bitter dose of historical truth forced
upon them. This aspect of Dr. Oppenheimer's situation is not to be
overlooked, however, even though its pursuit give comfort to those
in our present Administration who, for their own bleak purposes,
refer to the Roosevelt regime in terms of twenty years of treason.
Fairness to Dr. Oppenheimer requires that we remind ourselves that
our current acute relations with Russia, of which the Oppenheimer
case is only one relatively small result, would very likely never have
reached their present point of crisis had not so much of the energy
of liberalism been directed, in the very period in which Dr. Oppen–
heimer failed to report Chevalier, to persuading the American people
that Russia was our great ally instead of the enemy of democracy
and peace which she had already clearly demonstrated herself to be!
If
the dominant liberal sentiment of the time, from the White House
down, could put its whole blind force on the side of protecting
friends of the Soviet Union, why should Dr. Oppenheimer alone
have been expected to see with the unclouded eyes of the future and
promptly report his friend?
In
short, Dr. Oppenheimer's defense should not have rested on
trying to assimilate Dr. Oppenheimer's present temper and the temper
