THE OPPENHEIMER CASE
249
if it had about the moral, political and intellectual significance of his
excursion into Sanskrit. What is even more important, I consider it an
evasion of truth, and I regard such evasions of truth as incompatible
with liberalism. Will Mr. Meyerhoff recall that Dr Oppenheimer's
period of Communist sympathy survived the Russian purges and the
Nazi pact and that his ties were sufficiently intimate for him to make
substantial contributions to various radical causes directly through
Communist Party representatives? Will Mr. Meyerhoff also recall that
it was as late as January 1948 that Dr. Oppenheimer reported the
revelation, which had come to him only in the previous year or year and
a half, of the true nature of the Soviet Union? When we take into
account that Dr. Oppenheimer was in charge of this country's most
secret military operations, is his Communist history the negligible fact
that the Alsops would make it out to be?
I think that Dr. Oppenheimer has now broken with this past and
that he is no longer a security risk. But whatever his present freedom
from Communist involvement and however complex the situation which
inspired his recent reinvestigation-and I tried in my article to show
that the case involves a myriad professional and personal entanglements
as well as large moral-political considerations-surely Dr. Oppen–
heimer's past and its surrounding culture are of the greatest possible
relevance to our present understanding of the case. It should have
been clear to Mr. Meyerhoff, but I emphasize it here again, that I do
not examine this past in order to ask punishment for
it.
It is my
opinion that Dr. Oppenheimer should
not
now be punished for his
past. I nevertheless adduce this past because it is to this past that the
final specific charges against him have reference. Had Dr. Oppen–
heimer not once been sympathetic to Communism, there would have
been no Oppenheimer case. How, then, can one understand the Oppen–
heimer case without understanding as fully as possible the nature and
extent of this sympathy and its source in its contemporary culture?
Several of the charges on which clearance was denied Dr. Oppenheimer
rest upon discrepancies in his testimony which have never been re–
solved. In my article I undertook-successfully or unsuccessfully it is
for others to judge-to explain these discrepancies in terms of Dr.
Oppenheimer's evolving relation with the Communist Party. This rela–
tion is a
fact
in Dr. Oppenheimer's personal history, not an artifact of
my creation. To blink this fact, as Mr. Meyerhoff would have me do,
would be not merely to blink reality but to leave these charges totally
unanswered. It would also mean leaving the historical truth for the
reactionary forces in our society to deal with for their own purposes,
