554
~ARTISAN
REVIEW
One had to "reserve the possibility that a McCarthy, too, may turn up
someone who is as guilty as Hiss."
But it was in her now-forgotten analysis of the Oppenheimer Affair
that Diana Trilling was to make her signal contribution to the debate.
The mid-I950S hearings before the Gray Commission, in which the
nation's most prominent physicist,
J.
Robert Oppenheimer, was forced
to defend his prewar political alliances and after which his security
clearance would be revoked, is often cited as one of the major events
that brought fear to the country's scientific and intellectual community.
As usual, Mrs. Trilling had a quite different take on its meaning.
In her eyes, what was revealed by the sordid affair was the very "lib–
eral culture of the time" that allowed an avowed pro-Soviet fellow trav–
eler to receive security clearance in the first place. "The dominant liberal
sentiment of the [I940S]," she wrote, "from the White House down,"
put its "whole blind force on the side of protecting friends of the Soviet
Union." In Trilling's brilliant exegesis, she turned the table on how the
Oppenheimer case was viewed. Oppenheimer had his security clearance
revoked in I9 54, when in her eyes he should have never received it in
the first place. "Surely," she wrote, "it was the gravest of risks to trust
him with secrets which the Soviet Union wanted so badly." But to then
take his clearance away years later, after he had learned how wrong his
fellow-traveling views were, was "tragic ineptitude." Hence, he was
being punished for the Roosevelt administration's willingness to be
"careless with our nation's security" during the years of the wartime
alliance with Russia.
Moreover, Mrs. Trilling hardly saw the scientist as another victim.
"Had Dr. Oppenheimer not once been sympathetic to Communism,
there would have been no Oppenheimer case." Hence the issue was not
Oppenheimer alone, but her own generation's refusal to face the truth
about Communism. Thus, the hearings could not be seen as "a mani–
festation of McCarthyism." Many "conscientious, thoughtful men and
women" who firmly opposed McCarthy, people like her own group,
agreed when examining the evidence brought before the Atomic Energy
Commission that Oppenheimer "[did] not meet the tests of a good secu–
rity risk." And these people, she stressed, were from the "liberal camp."
Diana Trilling thus made refusal to adhere to the tenets of the Popu–
lar Front a main principle for comprehending McCarthyism. Men like
Oppenheimer, whose own record had been relentlessly pro-Communist,
did not. Thus she pointed out that by his own testimony he failed to
understand "that there is but a single criterion of a proper knowledge
of the nature of the Soviet Union-the awareness that the Soviet Union
