THE OPPENHEIMER CASE: AN EXCHANGE
THROUGH THE LIBERAL LOOKING GLASS-DARKLY
Recently we have had two reports by liberal cntIcs on the
Oppenheimer case: one by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in
Harpers Mag–
azine
(October 1954), the other by Diana Trilling in
Partisan Review
(November-December 1954).1 Both reports agree that Oppenheimer
got a bad deal, and that the deal he got involves two separate issues:
( 1) the military-political struggle over the H-bomb; (2) the personal
charges against Dr. Oppenheimer. Yet both reports differ sharply as
regards the meaning they assign to these issues; and this difference leads
to surprising and disturbing consequences in these reports which are pre–
sumably written from the same critical perspective of the liberal tradi–
tion.
The Alsop brothers take a firm and unequivocal line. They con–
sider the personal charges a decoy hiding the real issue; and they set
out, first, to prove this point. "In the Oppenheimer case layer after
layer of false appearances, of chaff dressed up to look like corn, of
petty matters artificially inflated must be painstakingly got rid of be–
fore what is really serious can be reached." The second and concluding
part of their essay then deals with these serious matters and their
im–
plications for the American scene of today: with the conduct of the
AEC and Admiral Strauss, with the responsibility of the government,
with the operations of the security system, with fair evidence and fair
trial, with the problem of loyalty in our age, and the threat to freedom.
Having drawn these lines clearly they can also make perfectly clear
what is the political and moral platform from which they are writing.
They can invoke the shades of Zola: "We Accuse!" They can appro–
priate his plea on behalf of Dreyfus-"still the symbol of one of our
1 For summary comments on several other articles by liberal critics, see
the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
vol. X, no. 10 (December 1954), pp. 387-
88. For the purpose of this comparison, I have chosen the article by the Alsop
brothers, not because I think theirs is the most definitive analysis, but because
it provides the most striking contrast to the review appearing in
PRo
(The
Alsops have now brought out an expanded version of their original article in
book form: Joseph and Stewart Alsop,
We Accuse,
Simon
&
Schuster, 1954.)
