THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
633
cause Peters himself told
him
his facts were mistaken. Well,
~uredly
a political man would have been unmoved by this protest. Having
put his opinion on record, he would have stuck to it at whatever
risk of having done someone an injustice. But Dr. Oppenheimer, I
think it has been sufficiently demonstrated, is not a political man–
not even as intellectuals go. And he is a scientist, which is its own
kind of intellectual. What the political man considers undue suscep–
tibility to influence, someone of Dr. Oppenheimer's background and
apparent temperament accepts as in the very nature of his business;
it is his mark and his work to be available to correction. And while
I would not wish to imply that Dr. Oppenheimer's alteration of his
stated opinion of Peters speaks well for his firmness of character,
as firmness of character may necessarily be gauged in the conduct
of the world's business, still this elasticity of judgment and the read–
iness to make amends where one may have done an injustice are of
a kind which, in one's experience of intellectuals, is an everyday
affair of the sensitive life of the mind and spirit, to be interpreted
as an essential untrustworthiness only by those who place rigorousness
and caution above the virtues of imagination and human feeling.
The trouble may be that the intellectual does not belong in the
active world of politics. But if the government presses the scientist
into service, as it now must, it should at least heed the admonition
of Mr. Kennan that virtually in the degree that an intellectual has
special gifts to give his country, he must be recognized as a special
instance of moral-intellectual development and not at each moment
be held to account by the conventional criteria of behavior. In the
sense that their conduct will not, by its very nature, always conform
to the strictest requirements of military or political necessity, all
gifted men and not alone Dr. Oppenheimer must be thought of as
calculated risks.
General Groves and Colonel Lansdale, the two military officers
whose knowledge of Los Alamos is most intimate, have much to tell
us of the scientific temperament as it displayed itself during the
tense days when the atom bomb was being sought for, especially
of the almost willful flouting of security regulations by the top per–
sonnel of the project. Dr. Oppenheimer comes out considerably better
from their report than most of his colleagues--so much better that
it even seems something of a paradox that it is he alone who is now
