THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
243
Here follows the section quoted by Mrs Trilling.
It
is lifted out
of context because she 'cuts out this prelude and she again deletes, by a
few dots, the conclusion in which the Colonel repeats his warning
against present dangers. Why this careful job of editing the evidence?
Why this suppression of relevant testimony throwing an entirely different
light upon the issue at stake? Does the liberal critic find the Colonel's
main point embarrassing and/ or irrelevant? For if there is any "strained
embarrassment" among his listeners, it refers to the Colonel's outburst
against the present hysteria (for which he is duly rebuked by Messrs.
Robb and Gray), not to his revelations about 1943 which do not seem
to come as a surprise to anybody. What a monstrous and absurd shift
in the scale of values: the conservative lawyer raises the issue of free–
dom in the current political climate and the liberal intellectual exer–
cising her critical conscience suppresses this very issue to achieve the
effect of blackening the liberal record of the past. Surely, this is one
way of reducing liberalism to absurdity.
So much for the background. Mrs. Trilling uses the same method,
with the same result of damning the liberal tradition, for an explana–
tion of Oppenheimer's motives. The Alsop brothers accept the official
version that Oppenheimer lied in the Chevalier incident in order to
protect a close personal friend (and possibly his wife and brother).
They accept this version, not only because Oppenheimer says so, but
because no other motive is suggested by anybody throughout the pro–
longed proceedings. And some of the people who testified presumably
have known Oppenheimer as well as anybody has outside the circle of
his own family.
Now this theory of motivation may be true or false. I don't know.
What I do know is that Mrs. Trilling's analysis of motives proceeds on
such flimsy evidence and is so far-fetched and wildly speculative that it
is certainly misleading and that its cumulative effect is only to implicate
the liberal tradition still more deeply in guilty involvement with the
Communist movement. She constructs a theory of motivation on the
basis of one hypothesis: Oppenheimer's behavior in the four charges
relating to 1943 can be explained, if we assume that he was still much
more strongly committed to "the movement" than he realized himself,
then or now.
Mrs. Trilling does say that "obviously Oppenheimer would have
wanted to protect his friend and himself," but that it does not follow that
this "was his only or even major concern." Correct! Only Mrs. Trilling
does not mean what she says; for the next sentence takes back what she
has just conceded: "It is my opinion that it was not loyalty to a friend
