THE OPPENHEIMER
CASE
247
cation for everybody. Next, we are told that,
if
Dr. Oppenheimer was
not a security risk in the past, he is obviously less so now. To have
taken the clearance away from him now seems to Mrs. Trilling "at best
to be tragic ineptitude." And at worst? Why not say so? Yet even this
mild concession to the present meaning of the case is immediately with–
drawn in the following sentence, the last of the long article, in which
Mrs. Trilling sums up her findings in the truly remarkable words: "In
effect, it [the verdict] constitutes a projection upon Dr. Oppenheimer
of the punishment we perhaps owe to ourselves for having once been
so careless with our nation's security." Once more depth psychology is
invoked to shift the scene from the present to the past. It wasn't Ad–
miral Strauss that did
him
in, after all; it was all of us. Oppenheimer
wasn't a victim of a struggle over power and strategy; he was a victim
of our own guilt feelings. We made him a scapegoat. Who is we?
Everybody? The liberals? Mrs. Trilling doesn't say; but it isn't hard to
guess from the general tenor of her article. Once more depth psychology
is invoked to give the whole case a fatal twist and distortion: to transfer
(if I may use a psychological term) the causal, political, and moral
responsibility for this case from the present enemies of freedom to the
collective consciousness of the liberal movement. Surely, there is some–
thing wrong with this species of the liberal conscience and imagination.
In a postscript Mrs. Trilling adds that she may have done "poor
justice to the case in all its complexity of context and implication."
But the question is not that she has made her own selection: any critic
would have had to do so to deal with the enormous mass of material.
Nor is the question whether Oppenheimer is a "culture hero," as she
puts it, or not. I have other culture heroes. Dr. Oppenheimer is obviously
a man of great complexity and great eminence, who has rendered out–
standing service to his government and the security of this country.
For this service, one administration, in 1946, awarded him the Medal
of Merit ; in 1954, another administration purged him from its ranks
either because he was guilty of a thought-crime or because, under our
security and loyalty system, a man is never "cleared," the trial, as in
Kafka, is always pending, is only postponed, but never settled in favor
of the defendant.
But these remarks are beside the point. I did not take issue with
Mrs. Trilling's article because her reading of the Oppenheimer case
differs from that of the Alsop brothers or my own. I took issue with it
because it represents a species of liberal criticism which leads to the
following odd and perverse conclusions: The case has no significance for
any contemporary issue, whether political, ideological, or moral. The
