THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
not to his politics in 1943, but to his exposition of
his
attitude toward
the H-bomb. The Gray Board, in fact, went out of its way to make a
sympathetic reconstruction of the political atmosphere in 1943.
Thus, who would have profited from this line? Who would have
profited from the admission that Dr. Oppenheimer, in 1943, was still
more deeply involved in Communism than he thought he was and that
he lied, not out of loyalty to a friend-Mrs. Trilling says in the most
revealing clause: "this would not have been so important to him"–
but out of loyalty to "the movement"? Obviously, the people who, un–
like Messrs. Gray and Morgan, convicted him on these personal charges.
Mr. Robb, prosecutor and counsel for Fulton Lewis, Jr., would have
had a field day with these admissions. And Admiral Strauss would not
have failed to bite at such attractive bait. What more could they ask
for but this support by an eminent liberal critic?
And does it really make sense to assume, as Mrs. Trilling does,
that the prosecution needed further enlightenment on Oppenheimer or
on the degree of liberal culpability during this period? It must be re–
membered that Oppenheimer submitted to constant, searching investi–
gations, that he was kept under continuous and close surveillance by
special agents, and that the prosecution had at its disposal the complete
FBI file. The files must be bulging with material not known even to
Mrs. Trilling. No, if Mr. Robb knows what Fulton Lewis, Jr., knows
about the Roosevelt era, there is little that the defense (or Mrs. Trilling)
could have told him, and if the prosecution did not have anything else
on the defendant than what he freely admitted, there is at least a
strong presumption that there was no more.
But this presumption is not enough for Mrs. Trilling. There "must
have been" more, as she keeps repeating. And she discovers what she
is looking for by a psychological analysis in depth. It is depth psychol–
ogy which discloses the "slow stages" by which a radicalized intellectual
weans himself from Communism and which explains why Oppenheimer
could think he was loyal to a friend when, in fact or in "theory," he
was loyal to the movement.
It is difficult to come to grips with this psychological hypothesis.
In the first place, I have no personal experience of this weaning pro–
cess. In the second place the hypothesis is so stated as to be practically
unassailable. The alleged Communist sympathies in 1943 are hedged
by equivocal phrases like: "however ambiguous or however uncon–
scious," or, "in whatever attenuated form." With such semantic protec–
tion, the critic can't go wrong; for "in whatever attenuated form" ob–
viously goes all the way. There is always
that
doubt. A more thorough
