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chemical analysis may always reveal further impurities in the well. And
if
this kind of chemistry is applied to our unconscious motivation-and
what does the critic know about Oppenheimer's "unconscious?"–
where do we begin and where do we end? It is a bottomless pit in all
our lives; and something can always be dredged up, if we dig long
enough, which throws a different and less favorable light upon our
actions than we thought they had. The procedure, therefore, is quite
safe; but is it relevant? Does it still say anything? Does it openly say:
Oppenheimer still had Communist sympathies when he said he didn't.
No, because it
only
says that he had them unconsciously. Does it say:
he did not have these sympathies? No, because he
may
still have them
unconsciously to the nth degree of dilution. The method is so safe as
to be meaningless.
Unfortunately, the same method is used in order to catch the
whole liberal tradition in guilty involvement with "the movement."
After Mrs. Trilling has put forth her thesis that it was not loyalty to a
friend, but loyalty to the Communist movement which motivated Op–
penheimer
in
the Chevalier incident, she qualifies this statement- and
confuses the whole issue-by identifying the Communist movement
with something that looks like it, but is quite different: namely, "the
radical spirit," or "the good part of his (Oppenheimer's) past which
first brought him to Communism," or the "idealistic aspect of his for–
mer radicalism." Now loyalty to the Communist movement is one thing;
loyalty to the good part of one's past is something else again. To the
unsophisticated reader, the former sounds incriminating; the latter,
praiseworthy. But Mrs. Trilling's presentation moves blithely from one
concept to the other as if they were one and the same. Are they? Do
we, as liberals, no longer distinguish between loyalty to the movement
and loyalty to one's idealistic self? And if we do, why this equivocation;
worse: why having made this false identification does the critic only
refer to Communism and the Soviet Union for the rest of her article?
Is it perhaps because the "idealistic aspect" of Oppenheimer's self–
and by implication the whole idealistic component of liberalism-is to
be subtly tainted by this equivocation with the Communist movement?
The Alsop brothers must be naive not to have seen these implica–
tions. They must be naive in thinking that anything of current interest
is at stake. They must be naive in protesting against organized injustice
or pleading for a defense of freedom. That's for the readers of
Harper's.
For PR readers, the conclusions are quite different: We are told, first,
that the case must have been quite an experience and education for
Dr. Oppenheimer. By all means, let's have more experience and edu-
