Since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, the left in general, and the media in particular, have tended to regard it as a kind of cosmic joke: hysterical American reaction—indeed, overreaction—to the peaceful postwar existence of the Soviet Union and other Communist states, including China. You don’t hear much about the killing of tens of millions of people inside those countries and elsewhere; but you do read a lot about the suffering of Hollywood screenwriters and the baleful influence of the Cold War in American politics.
Two events last week only emphasized this wearisome truth. One was the death of 92-year-old David Greenglass, brother of the atomic spy Ethel Rosenberg, which prompted (among others) the New York Times to publish an obituary so tendentious, and hopelessly estranged from the facts that the historian Ronald Radosh was obliged to publish a succinct, corrective account of the whole Rosenberg case in the New York Sun ( nysun.com/national/how-david-greenglass-helped-break-up-soviet-spy).
The other event was the sudden, and slightly mysterious, declassification by the Department of Energy of transcripts from the secret 1954 hearings on whether J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous theoretical physicist and wartime director of the weapons laboratory for the Manhattan Project, was a security risk. As is well known, Oppenheimer, who had been chief scientific adviser to the postwar Atomic Energy Commission, lost his security clearance as a consequence of the hearings, and in the words of Times reporter William J. Broad, “lived out his life as a broken man.”
The Times took this occasion not to examine the complexities of security debates in an era when Joseph Stalin was alive and Soviet espionage had successfully stolen the secrets of atomic weaponry, but to wonder at the official motive for the release, 60 years after the fact, of the transcripts; and, with helpful quotations from partisan authors and commentators, to reflect on the silliness of an exercise to determine whether J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy.
In fact, of course, the principal issue in the hearings was not whether Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, which he was not, but whether someone with strong personal attachments (wife, brother, friends, colleagues) to actual Communists, and who harbored deep reservations about our postwar nuclear program (calling for a ban on weapons as early as 1945), was the right man for the job of advising the government on the subject. This explains both the reams of testimony from fellow physicists on Oppenheimer’s singular character and opinions, and the final decision to erect, in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s words, a “blank wall” between Oppenheimer and nuclear secrets.
This judgment strikes The Scrapbook, among others, as a sensible—and entirely comprehensible—conclusion at a difficult time in our history. Whether this left J. Robert Oppenheimer a “broken man,” however, is open to question. His fellow physicist-colleague Edward Teller, whose agonized testimony about Oppenheimer (“his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated”) was decisive, really did suffer ostracism from academic science. By contrast, Oppenheimer didn’t lose his berth at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and certainly gained the admiration of journalists and academics worldwide. He delivered the William James Lecture in philosophy and psychology at Harvard in 1957, and in that same year was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.
During and after his lifetime, Oppenheimer has been the inspiration for more than a few admiring plays, one opera, several television dramas and documentaries, and innumerable friendly biographies. Shortly before his death, President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award. Yet the mythology lives on.