THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
631
never have been in the position of saying in 1953 that he would
not have sponsored Lomanitz in 1943 had he known Lomanitz was
a Communist, only to have the Commission prove that in 1943 he
did know Lomanitz was a Communist. And his counsel could then
have advantageously recurred to the fact revealed in Colonel Lans–
dale's testimony, that it was Dr. Ernest Lawrence, one of Dr. Op–
penheimer's chief opponents in the H-bomb controversy, w]J() had
"yelled and screamed louder than anybody else" when the security
officers tried to rid the atomic project of Lomanitz by inducting
him into the Army.
And two such confirmations of probity would have started the
ball rolling in the direction of trusting Dr. Oppenheimer rather than
distrusting him, and permitted the generous but by no means strained
interpretation of the contradiction between the fact that Dr. Oppen–
heimer told Lansdale in 1943 that Weinberg was a Communist and
the fact that he told the
FBI
in
1950 that he knew Weinberg was
a Communist only when it became public knowledge. After all, it
is perfectly plausible that over seven years a man can forget the
nature or source of information he once had.
As
to the charge that
he told Lansdale in 1943 that he did not even know what Rudy
Lambert looked like whereas in 1953 he admits to having seen him
six or seven times, including one or two luncheon meetings at which
he discussed with Lambert and another Party representative his
contributions to Communist causes, surely Dr. Oppenheimer could
only have strengthened his case if he had simply proposed, in rebuttal,
the two likely and quite uncontradictory reasons for having told Lans–
dale what he once did-( 1) that possibly such were still the remnants
of his Communist partisanship and guilt in 1943 that he did not wish
to incriminate either Lambert or himself by recollecting him and (2)
that he may actually have forgotten Lambert in 1943 but recalled
him to mind now through his recent intense searching of his past.
This second explanation is, indeed, strongly suggested by Dr. Oppen–
heimer's testimony taken in conjunction with Mrs. Oppenheimer's:
when Dr. Oppenheimer was preparing for these hearings, he evi–
dently and most naturally consulted his wife's recollection of persons
and events on which his own memory was unsure.
It
is perfectly
conceivable that Dr. Oppenheimer was telling the entire truth when
he told Lansdale he had no recollection of Lambert, and that Lam-
