Was the Father of the A-Bomb a Communist and Soviet Spy?
Many conservatives have argued that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, was both a Communist and a Soviet spy. In 1954 — way after the war’s end and the once top-secret Manhattan Project at wartime Los Alamos — the Atomic Energy Commission called Oppenheimer to answer questions about associations he had before the war, about which he had answered dishonestly. Despite his success in completing the bomb on time (giving the United States an atomic monopoly), the AEC took away his security clearance. As liberals of the time saw it, even America’s most famous scientist was not immune to the wrath of the McCarthyites.
Liberals saw Oppie, as he was called, as a victim of guilt by association. Much of the Right saw him as a legitimate security risk. No one, it seemed, was immune to having his or her career halted, no matter what their accomplishments. So what is the truth? Was Oppie a Communist, a spy, or both? Or was he neither?
Now, in a scholarly but very readable and important article, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have answered the question. They do not satisfy either those who believe he was a Soviet spy — as did my friend the late Eric Breindel — or those on the left who believe he was a good liberal smeared by the right wing.
Two authors who take the latter point of view are Kai Bird and historian Martin J. Sherwin. Both won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2005, for their book American Prometheus. As the PW review of their book puts its theme, Oppenheimer “was branded a security risk at the height of anticommunist hysteria in 1954” and the authors claim that Oppie had only “‘hazy and vague’ connections to the Communist Party in the 1930 — loose interactions consistent with the activities of contemporary progressives.”
– those close to him were, right? A complex man, who should have been kept in place, but watched constantly. Not for what he might do, but what those around him might do.
“No, but” gets right to the point about Oppenheimer and his associations. He was surrounded by CPUSA members from his brother, sister-in-law and wife (whose marriage to Dallet, literally a Soviet agent/agent of influence, was a key tip-off as to what “a fine mess” he found himself in.
I have a name for this situation, and other precedents for it. It is called the “sandwich tactic” for the simple reason that the individual in the middle, i.e. Robert Oppenheimer, found himself sandwiched in-between CPUSA members who was also possibly Soviet agents of some kind.
The same thing happened to Albert Einstein re his private secretary (a woman whose name I have forgotten), and his work colleague, German Communist Otto Nixon. Einstein was “sandwiched” in-between the two key people in his work life, both hardcore Communists and probable Soviet operatives.
The late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also got “sandwiched” by his top financial advisor and personal advisor, admitted CPUSA member and KGB cash handler, Stanley Levison, and his personal aide in the SCLC, Jack O’Dell, a key CPUSA leader and probable Soviet agent of influence (based on documents seized by the police in their 1956 raid of O’Dell’s apartment).
O’Dell later went on to be the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s key “international department” man in Operation Breadbasket, Operation PUSH, and the National Rainbow Coalition, as well as being a key member of the various “Mobe” organizations of the Hanoi Lobby, and its successors, the Mobilization For Survival, etc.
You have to be careful of what you eat, and a red sandwich can give you indigestion and make you into either a willing dupe or an unwilling dupe fool.
Bon appetit!
The difficulty with the “honesty-is-the-best-policy” argument, in this case, is that a lot of progressive people with only modest communist connections were being raked over the coals pretty harshly, in this era. I know we’d like to think that Americans, even back then, would be open-minded enough to accept that someone had changed, but it wasn’t always the case. My favorite incident is the one outlined by Iris Chang in the book “Thread of the Silkworm”. The subject of the book was a guy named Tsien Hsue-Shen. He was a scientist, an expert in the field of fluid dynamics, and one of the founders more-or-less of what became the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA (or La Canada/Flintridge, if you want to count every part of the facility other than the mailing address). He came to the US before World War II, and was deported at the height of the McCarthy era, after it was discovered that he’d attended meetings of communists in Pasadena in the ’30s. He went back to China, and voila, they have the Silkworm missile, which he more or less designed by himself. Yeah, we were worried he was a Communist (he said he wasn’t and wanted to stay here) so we sent him back there, where he became a Communist, and designed missiles for them.
Anyway, I’m not saying that anti-Communism in all cases is wrong. I think you can make a case that at least some of the suspicions of various individuals (Alger Hiss most obviously) were well-founded. That being said, there were times when things went off the rails, and it’s not surprising Oppenheimer didn’t trust his critics to be understanding.
If an apologist were to make essentially the same self-serving statement as you did but in defense of Nazis I doubt you’d be very impressed. Likewise, I find your statement to be either naive or disingenuous.
If there was confusion back in the late 1940s and early 1950s about who was a Communist and who wasn’t it was every bit as much the fault of those activists and agents who made it their mission to obfuscate the truth, both about Communists here in the United States and about the Soviets abroad. It’s also true that Americans were targeted by the media for being anti-Communists as well. Much of our perception of the Cold War years has been distorted by a media that was already infected by left-wing bias and paid propaganda.
Well, actually, there was Werner Von Braun, who went from making flying bombs for the Nazis to making manned rockets (more flying bombs?) for the US. Of course, by that time, the Nazis were not much of a threat.
See my response to snork, just below, for my answer to the Nazi question. As to the main thrust of your response, if I get it correct you’re essentially saying that they were all guilty, and that the media and academic response of a few decades ago, that they were all innocent, was misleading and deceptive. I give you points for being half-right.
The trick here is that judging anyone by the actions of another person is dangerous, to say the least. Yes, there were people in the ’40s and ’50s who were Communists, spies and operatives of various sorts. Yes, some of them did considerable damage to our interests, and some of them tried and failed to do more. That doesn’t mean that *everyone* who went to a “meeting of the Party” at someone’s house in the ’30s should bear equal responsibility, any more than it means that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent. Of course they weren’t; they were guilty and deserved to be punished. Hiss, if you ask me, got off lightly. Ted Hall got away with it pretty much completely. Those facts being in evidence, someone who (for whatever reason) attended a meeting of “progressive” liberals in the ’30s somewhere, or even a whole bunch of meetings, isn’t neccessarily guilty of the same sort of betrayal.
I’m not saying Oppenheimer’s innocent; I’m saying that for you to convince me he’s guilty, you’re going to have to do better than tell me that he attended some communist “gatherings” in the ’30s. Him actually doing espionage stuff would be helpful. I seem to remember that Pavel Sudoplatov’s book “Special Tasks” made mention of Oppenheimer as a source of intelligence about the bomb, but from what I remember Sudoplatov asserted that Oppenheimer hadn’t *knowingly* assisted the Soviets; instead they duped him. Better, but still not good enough. For me to condemn him as a Soviet spy, he has to actually be demonstrably guilty, like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.
WTF is a “modest Communist connection”? Is that like being a moderate Nazi, or a reasonable Klansman?
Which brings to mind a story from a book I finished a couple of weeks ago. FDR is campaigning in the south, meeting local Democrats:
“…His interlocutor, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was flanked by an Italian and a Jew. Roosevelt asked whether they also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, hinting at its anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic attitudes. Yes, came the answer. “[T]hey were considered all right since everyone in the community knew them. [I]t was a good illustration of how difficult it was to have any prejudices—racial, religious, or otherwise—if you really knew people,” concluded Roosevelt…”—S.M. Plokhy, “Yalta: The Price of Peace” 2010.
The difficulty with stereotypes is that they often don’t hold up, for a group, when you examine individuals within the group. Harry Truman was in the Klan…and had a Jewish business partner. Not everyone in the Klan was an out and out racist lunatic…so yes, there were moderates.
As for the Nazis, that one’s even easier. Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party.
What this does is expose the fallacy of determining guilt based on one’s membership in an organization. It should be taken as evidence, yes. It *might* imply, even indicate, that someone’s guilty of something; it shouldn’t be taken as absolute proof that they certainly are guilty of anything, other than perhaps bad judgment.
In my own experience with security clearences, the main thing they are looking for are people who are honest and truthfull, not perfect. If you can’t be trusted to tell the truth you can’t be trusted seems to be the way it works.
We’re not talking about yesterday, you know. Back then, a number of things that excited suspicion and led to arrests would be thrown out of court in the current era. Security checks back then were focused on who you knew and associated with. The “I don’t care if you’re gay as long as you’re not hiding it” philosophy came much much later.
The most telling stroke against Oppenheimer has nothing to do with his past Communist affiliation. Rather, he was dead set against American development of the H-Bomb, even after it was known that the Soviets had it. He tried to convince Dean Acheson, then the Secretary of State, that the U.S. could disarm the Soviets “by example” — i.e., by disarming first and without an enforceable guarantee that the Soviets would reciprocate.
I would not want such a man in a position of authority over nuclear weapons development.
“…that the U.S. could disarm the Soviets “by example” — i.e., by disarming first and without an enforceable guarantee that the Soviets would reciprocate.
I would not want such a man in a position of authority over nuclear weapons development.”
And in the news: “President Obama proposes to pare our nuclear arsenal down to as low as 300 nuclear missiles.”
Incredible.
I was born and raised in Los Alamos, N.M. We live every day with the duality of our amazing accomplishment and deadly feat. What these men and women did under the leadership of Oppie was incredible and saved many, many lives but yet it took many lives as well. Oppie and many others were terribly affected by this burden. It is never as easy as the armchair quarterbacks think.
Everyone who is in the least way complicit in killing other people — even in a just cause — is affected by it if they have the slightest trace of humanity.
I get quite a pain in my hindquarters when I hear about how terribly conflicted Manhattan Project participants felt about the whole enterprise, as if combat infantrymen were not at least as morally troubled. Though many of them had very good personal reasons for hating the enemy, none that I know did. None that I know regarded it as anything but a necessary evil. Evil yes. But sadly, necessary as well.
The firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo are stark reminders that we didn’t need nuclear weapons to destroy a city or kill tens of thousands of people. We didn’t need them in 1945, and we certainly don’t need them for that purpose today. Physicists didn’t make a unique and terrifying contribution to warfare any more than a particular airman or infantryman or sailor did. It’s called “duty” instead of, say, recreation, because everyone who does it knows that it exacts a terrible cost.
Yet, that is exactly what President Baraq Hussein Obama is shooting for with the Chinese today.
This is the reason we don’t let scientists determine policy. Several of the Jewish members of the Manhattan Project, in 1945, just assumed that when Germany surrendered the whole thing would be shut down. They were horrified when the bombs were assembled, tested, and then used on the Japanese…they thought the whole point was to drop an a-bomb on Berlin to kill Hitler, not on the Japanese.
Scientists are technicians…and they should be kept to that. A scientist who develops weapons should no more decide how or when they’re deployed than a general should determine when and whether his country goes to war. It’s dangerous for it to be otherwise, and Oppenheimer is just a good example of why.
Well said.
Oppenheimer was not a soldier or a weapons manufacturer by training. Rather, he was an astrophysicist who was recruited to run the Manhattan Project based on his knowledge of supernova mechanics. He was quite reasonably traumatized by what the atomic bomb was capable of, so when confronted with the possibility of America building bombs a thousand times as powerful as the ones he built, he was horrified.
It’s like blaming the effects of a virus on the attempts at a cure. In reality, is it not more accurate and honest to say that Stalinism and Soviet Communism, along with actual agents, fellow travellers and useful idiots, being dangerous, duplicitious and treacherous is what is actually to blame for all of this?
Well put and true.
What’s the evidence Oppenheimer was a communist? The web is so full of articles that claim irrefutable evidence for one argument or another and don’t summarize it. Instead we go haring off to links that do the same.
If you enjoy Feynman like I do, you’ll remember he writes about the Manhatten Project and how security was really, really lax. Feynman would prove this by breaching it all the time (I’m sure both to prove his point and to amuse himself). It is curious why it was so lax, considering Oppenheimer was basically in charge. This doesn’t incriminate Oppenheimer, but it is weird.
And Feynman borrowed a car from Klaus Fuchs,,,who was an honest-to-Gawd Communist spy, passing information along, carried to Santa Fe in the very same car.
Did the security types either nab or suspect Fuchs?
No.
A lot of sincere, even patriotic, left-wing Americans strayed close to Communism. Ernest Hemingway fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Prior to the end of World War II, the U.S.S.R. was not viewed by many Americans as an existential threat. In fact, during World War II, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies, with the U.S. shipping aid to the U.S.S.R. And the U.S.S.R., with its rhetoric about the triumph of the working class, actually sounded pretty good to Americans in the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate hit 20% while many capitalist industrialists still lived in luxury.
The turning point came with the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The vast majority of left-wing Americans broke with the U.S.S.R. after that. Those few who did not represented the real internal threat to our nation, because it was now clear that they supported totalitarianism.
Long before the Hungarian uprising, occurred the Hitler/Stalin pact and the carving up of Poland. Anyone still in the thralls of Stalinism and thinking it would deliver the socialist Utopia, at that point, was living in La La Land.
Sinz, if you were only around in 1954 and you were a child for many years after that, you can’t have a memory of how most Americans felt about Communism during the late 40s and early 50s. Just for example, an American librul, Truman, took us to war in Korea to stop the forceful spread of Communism a mere five years after WWII had ended, leading a war-weary nation, but one very much opposed to Communism, into uniform by enlistment or draft.
We also had drills to try to prepare school children for a nuclear attack by the USSR well prior to 1954.
Wide-spread anti-Communism was well underway no later than 1948.
The “turning point” did not come in 1956, not by a long shot. 1956 was horrifyingly inevitable (to those who understood communism) that the communists had been able to deceive those they wanted to deceive in order to be in the position to do what they did in 1956. Sickening.
That is an oxymoronic statement.
The values of the left are diametrically opposed to the values on which this country was founded.
A man who despises the very liberty that made this country great cannot be called a patriot.
From what I read, it seems RO had been an active member of some Commie organization or another for a few years, as had his brother. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that he was a spy. However, it seems reasonable to conclude (as the government did) that RO was a security RISK in that a fair number of Commies back then were in fact working with the Soviets (e.g., Hiss and the Rosenbergs). The whole “Red Scare” era has been caricatured as a witch hunt, but this ignores the fact the Soviets really were trying to take over the world and were actively using fellow travelers in the government (and Hollywood, for that matter) to try to bring about that end.
Good grief, people, where have ya’ been! Half the boffins on the Manhattan project were communists! The ones that weren’t card carrying reds were sympathizers, or their families and friends were! They were all university academic types. That bunch have been communists and sympathizers of the USSR since its inception. These were the men that had the expertise to do the job, so they were ones the government got on board to do the job. The army tried as best they could to keep them under a tight security cone, and they did create the bomb, but some still managed to pass the secrets on to the soviets. America was awash in soviet agents back then. It was inevitable that they would get the key pieces of information needed to build an A-bomb. It’s relatively easy to build simple ‘little-boy’ style bombs. The hard part is getting the fissionable material.
You are correct. It was pathetic how penetrated it was. Klaus Fuchs and Theodore hall wee definitely Soviet Agents. Hall simply took a vacation to his hometown of NYC and contacted a communist friend from Harvard.
Communist sympathies were common at the time among immigrants from Eastern Europe. I guess it was en vogue to be a commie back in the day. I just read where the English upper classes and spy agencies were riddled with communists. I their case homosexual communists.
I believe there were (and continue to be) far more agents pretending to be spies than actual spies. We may never know who was friendly or hostile.
What does this “agents pretending to be spies” stuff mean?
Are you asserting that even if someone who actively worked to advance the cause of Communism–say a writer at a Hollywood studio who tried to insert Communist themes in movies, or a newspaper reporter who shaded news stories to favor Communism– should be seen as merely a relatively harmless “agent,” as opposed to those individuals who advanced the cause of Communism by actually stealing classified or other valuable information and then deliberately handed it over to the Communists, and who were, therefor, much more harmful and dangerous “spies.”
Clearer, please.
I was loosely referring to double agents, if I understand the term right… A toy duck attracts real ducks, which can then be shot. From a distance, there is no telling which ducks are toys.
A joke common back around 1970 was that the easiest way to tell who was a police spy was to see who was current in their dues. Others claimed, in apparent sincerity, that the assorted dissident groups would go broke if the police spies stopped paying their dues.
Soros is ridiculously obvious. It almost like they want us to know.
To Phillep Harding re the 1970s joke about funding the leftists. BS!! A double BS. I was in the New Left (SDS for one meeting – pathetic at Am. Un.; SMC, Nat. Mobe, founder of New Mobe, NCAHCUA, etc).
Money was the “faux” cause because the Communists always saw to it that their organizations got it somewhere, be it from CPers like Sid Peck, John Rossen, Quentin Young, etc, from CP sympathizers in various fronts (esp. those anti-HCUA groups), or from communist/marxist foundations (DJ Bernstein, Mott,Stern, etc, now Soros, Tides Foundation, Arca Fdtn, and a host of CPUSA legacies).
No one knows how much cash communist fronts got from churches, pass-the-bucket collectors at protests, KGB cash funneled through the Party, and CPUSA money from their own members, not to mention those in the SWP/YSA.
All I can say is that it wasn’t “chump change.”
Check out the IRS 990 forms for a lot of these organizations like the Institute for Policy Studies, Fund for Peace, Youth Project, and you will see, even back in the 1970s, some real, serious funding of the marxist Left. You just have to know which groups were red and which were pink. In some cases, as time has revealed, there was no difference, only the camouflage over them.
Oh, I forgot Hollywood fundraisers for various CP fronts such as Lillian Helman’s “Committee for Public Justice”, or old leftists like Norman Mailer funding PEPIC/Organizing Committee for the 5th Estate.
I could write a book on this topic of the hidden funding of the marxist Left in America. Humm, maybe I should considering the degree of ignorance shown by some posters here, as well as the almost total lack of investigative journalism shown by the mainstream media, not only back then, but now as well (Media Matters, Tides Foundation, Apollo Alliance, etc.)
That’s all consistent with the point we were making – that most people can’t tell fronts vs. real enemies… not even considering the overlap with turncoats and confused young morons in both camps.
On Oppenheimer and other Sov agents of that period its worth taking a look at Romerstein, Herbert and Breindel, Eric. The Venona Secrets. Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors. Regnery, Washington. 2001. isbn 978-9-89526-225-7.
This book is based on decryptions of Soviet telegrams released by the US government and other public document sources. Oppenheimer gets a lengthy discussion in the context of various California spy rings.
I find the notion that there was “Communist hysteria” a bit disingenuous.
If, indeed there was a concerted effort to infuse Communism into America through deceit, fraud, conspiracy…then pointing at it not only is not hysteria, it’s responsible and necessary behavior.
Similarly, today we face a rampant, runaway, conspiratorial infusion of what I call “small c communism”. It is not a tinfoil hat response to point out, oppose and disclose the acts, people and entities that are engaged in such a conspiracy.
The fact that Oppie had Communist sympathies certainly at a stage in his life, made the question about whether he retained them, disavowed them completely or partially held some, a legitimate cause for concern for the protection of national security secrets of this magnitude.
Small c communists love to hide behind all manner of masks and camouflages. There is absolutely nothing hysterical about recognizing a plot, a conspiracy and a scheme. To NOT expose it, for fear of being called “paranoid” or “hysterical”, is the act of a coward, not a patriot.
We shouldn’t be peer pressured out of saving the country from overthrow and conspiracy and traitorism.
Well, we have been peer pressured out of pointing it out or even acknowledging it. Only racism is a stronger epithet than McCarthyism in most Americans’ painfully ignorant minds.
Absolutely right, Art.
The race card is actually an ace in the communist rigged deck.
Nothing has kept the African-American community down longer, more efficiently and more decidedly…than the scam pulled on them by the small c communists.
The Workers Party mentality is pervasive in black neighborhoods. The fear instilled in them that the “white man’s party” (Republican) will “take away” their “safety net”…is so ingrained, it has nearly 100% acceptance in large metropolitan areas.
No matter how many West, Rice, Thomas, Cain examples PROVE it to be false, playing the racial warfare card in combination with the class warfare card…works.
Small c communism needs victims, so it creates them…then blames its actual intended target. Capitalism and free market proponents.
Small c communists feast on wedge issues. Religion can be made a wedge issue? Small c communists will seize on it.
Class warfare can be made a wedge issue…small c communists will set a thousand traps to fall into.
Gender?
Ethnicity?
Small c communism is ALL about divide and conquer. Having a “black” candidate gives them an automatic weapon, locked and loaded.
Picking a fight with Catholics, Evangelical Christians…even pro-Israel Jews…part of the small c communist playbook.
And, an automatic shield is “McCarthyism”. A loaded charge, that prevents anyone who spots the conspiracy from voicing it. The propaganda machine will explode into action and smear the hell out of any effective voice.
Now that we know that the Journolistas confer on how to slander and the Media Matters Mafia will stalk and plant stories…the conspiracy is pretty much an open secret. That fact will stop exactly…nothing.
“Nothing has kept the African-American community down longer, more efficiently and more decidedly…than the scam pulled on them by the small c communists.”
Speaking of which:
http://times247.com/24-7-videos/obama-launches-african-americans-for-obama
My only point of disagreement is your characterization of “small c communist.” The communists with the big C bankrolled and manipulated much of the Civil Rights Movement, many leaders of which were educated in schools run by Party members and close fellow travellers. Likewise the anti-war/anti-draft movements. If you went to one of those big demonstrations odds were that there was both a KGB and a CIA/FBI agent somewhere in your field of vision. The Left is still busily trashing J. Edgar Hoover because he was the only one in America who would actually go after the KGB and it’s Comintern apparatchiks, and he was smart enough to know that the OSS/KGB had been hopelessly compromised. At least the Brits ran their foremost mole to ground and forced Kim Phiby to go join his comrades in the USSR; we never caught ours, that we know of anyway. God knows Reagan and Bush bringing back old boys from the OSS days sure put a shock in the CIA and State systems.
Anyway, at the apparatchik level, they’re all big C communists; its just with the fall of the USSR, there is no Comintern to call the shots. Somebody called the shots that so grossly manipulated the World economy in ’08 and allowed the coup d’etat, but I don’t really know who or what combination of interests.
‘I find the notion that there was “Communist hysteria” a bit disingenuous.’
From a review in American Scholar:
“In 1946, an FBI informant in Hollywood warned his superiors of two productions that reeked of communistic propaganda. One was a war-vet drama that associated criticism of Russia with “anti-Semitism, Jim Crowism [and] Ku Klux Klanism.” The other was a Christmas fable that featured a “demeaning” portrayal of bankers. These threats to the American way? William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Well, that proves it then.
Everyone was hysterical, nothing to look at here. Move along.
Plenty to look at, in fact.
Yeah, plenty of useful idiots like you to look at.
Plenty? Perhaps.
Like, Mission to Moscow (1943). Or, The North Star (1943). Or, Song of Russia (1944).
I just cannot recall which made Viktor Kravchenko, who had just defected from the Soviet trade mission, sick with disbelief.
But, perhaps, all of them.
While Stalin murdered millions decade after decade,American communists stood by him.Even Hitler became acceptable after Stalin signed their pact.Our children today know all about Manzanar but nothing of the gulags.Stalin and Hitler worked together from 1939 to 1941 trying to destroy freedom forever, and the American communists helped all they could.This ugly time for the far left has been scrubbed from our history.Soviet penetration of the OSS was also real.Just as the far-left deliberately blinded itself to communist massacres in the Soviet union and China, today’s progressives refuse to acknowledge Islamic suppression of other religions.
It is ironic that from among all the books written about Oppenheimer, the one that won the Pulitzer Prize is so lacking in accuracy and integrity on this critical point.
Remind you of that Pulitzer the NYT Walter Duranty won?
A favorite story of mine is when Oppie was visiting the White House after the war, he lamented to president Truman that he couldn’t help but feel like he had blood on his hands for his role in developing the bomb. Truman was reported to say afterwards that he never wanted that crybaby to step foot in the White House ever again. Of coarse I might be biased for thinking that dropping both bombs on Japan was justified as my dad was on Saipan at the time.
well, I don’t know that he was. But I do know, people were nervous. and it’s hard to tell. communism looked clever and foresighted.
and, well, it’s just hard to tell, when someone is insisting on being hard-headed independent, unchecked by anything. I expect that Mr Oppenheimer was fairly riven with contempt for all sorts of normal intelligence folks, or people without his social polish. I doubt that that interview would go well. It’s a trope in movies, even today: the sweaty local cops screaming and yelling and the interview subject laughing at him, or the audience- even in Something About Mary, a gross comedy, has that scene- and then elegant high-wire quizzing from a top-drawer socialite with x-ray vision, basically. Oppenheimer wouldn’t have trusted a regular FBI worker to have any sense, since he probably didn’t have the class polish, either.
And, well, if one cherished bohemian ideals- the Greenwich Village true bohemians were shipping off to Russia on a pretty regular jaunt. You can’t explain Bill Clinton, otherwise. My dad is like that, in so many ways. We had to leave all my toys at one of his postings- they were hecho en ussr- cheap toys. This sort of makes sense- except, there were cheap non- russian toys to be had, as well, I think. maybe? who can tell? He’s hard liberal, but hates the Soviets. How does judgment on that work? I think that comes down to the interviewer. 20 years service in the military, near worship of FDR, five copies of Germinal…..he’s american, just maybe not a right-wing version of american.
and i think that’s part of it- someone ideological can love their country, they just want a different version of it, a place with the same name, and a different political order. is that treasonous?
would you give that person a security clearance? there are competing visions on the right, as well. not compelling, but they are here.
That’s why the loyalty oath all government employees and elected or appointed officials once had to swear said that you wouldn’t support the violent overthrow of the US or your state’s government. Unfortunately, we have today by a more less democratic process elected an avowed communist who so far is doing a pretty good job of using democratic processes, and the failings thereof, to establish a Stalinist-style bureaucratic communist government. It is interestingly ironic that the methods used to bring him to power and which his Junta uses to exercise power are essentially those of Trotsky, and Trotsky became an apostate for opposing the bureaucratic communist state. One thing we can be sure of; many of those who helped to bring him to power will wind up with an ice axe in their head once he has power firmly established. The first casualties of any revolution are always the revolutionaries. That’s really going to come as a surprise to all those useful idiots who thought they were going to be a part of the nomenklatura.
I’ve seen this play out several times in union decertification elections; the radicals who bring down the incumbent union can’t do it on their own so they ally with some powerful International Union (few of them are truly international by the word has another meaning communist circles) that comes in to “help” them take over and then become the recognized union. Then a year later, not one of the old radicals is holding a union office or working for the union, and lots of them have already been sold out to the employer and fired. Tragic, I say, truly tragic.
There is no question that Stalin stole our highest classified secrets, both military and encryption, and that our government, at levels reporting to the President contained traitors, paid by the USSR, following WWII. This is just well documented factual history. Stalin gained, perhaps 50 years, in the global race for the bomb, the ability to kill millions of people with one stroke. If monsters lacked this power, history would be different, for billions of people.
Yes, McCarthy, and his henchman, Dick Nixon, persecuted hundreds of innocent, pink people, destroyed their lives, without uncovering one legitimate traitor. They were despicable men, but the lack of fruitful result was due to incompetence and alcohol. They were correct in threat assessment.
Spying hurts. Russia obtained the force necessary to enslave hundreds of millions of people. Hitler tried but lost the race. Tojo lost the race, and got melted. This is what happens to nuclear losers.
Oppenheimer had been a communist, had family members who were communists, and had empathy for this social system. But so did Christ’s apostles. The key is whether communism strives for a violent overthrow of the existing society.
We face the same conundrum today. 51% of the PhD candidates in nuclear physics, in US grad schools, are/were citizens of China. These are the farm clubs for our DOE labs, smart people who work on H bombs, and as any sailor knows, one tiny hole can sink any boat. The Academy of Science, begun in Stalin’s Russia and copied in China, is an arm of the military. Chinese hackers continually probe our military networks. Thus how do we identify, “them killers”, in a globally intertwined community? And finally how much information, methods and sources, must a free society publish in fighting this lethal battle?
We contend with the same problem today; is he loyal, or will he kill us all?
“McCarthy, and his henchman, Dick Nixon, persecuted hundreds of innocent, pink people, destroyed their lives, without uncovering one legitimate traitor.” Sorry, Mr Hails, Alger Hiss was certainly a traitor, and Richard Nixon “persecuted” him into prison, where he belonged.
McCarthy had little involvement with the Hiss case. However, he did refer to Hiss in speeches in 1952 commenting on the Eisenhower vs Stevenson presidential campaign. McCarthy repeatedly used the faux Freudian slip, “Alger — I mean Adlai.”
As for the accusation of “hundreds of innocent, pink people, destroyed”, surely you can provide an example or two. The 1956 book, “McCarthy and His Enemies”, by William F Buckley and Brent Bozell, discusses the prominent individuals attacked by McCarthy and shows that McCarthy’s attacks were correct. And there weren’t “hundreds” of McCarthy “victims.” The actual count was well below 100. McCarthy did refer to a list of 57 in his famous speech in Wheeling, PA, but, in his congressional follow up, he didn’t supply several of the 57 names because (as he stated) he thought the evidence against them was insufficiently persuasive.
You might also say what you mean by “destroyed.” One of the individuals McCarthy named later became the president of the New York state bar association. (I wish I could be so destroyed.)
I’ll also point out that after he was released from prison for his perjury conviction (he had denied under oath having known Whittaker Chambers), New York state reinstated the law license of Alger Hiss. What a travesty! If any nonviolent felony should disqualify a person for a license to practice law, perjury surely is that crime.
“Yes, McCarthy, and his henchman, Dick Nixon, persecuted hundreds of innocent, pink people, destroyed their lives, without uncovering one legitimate traitor. They were despicable men, but the lack of fruitful result was due to incompetence and alcohol. They were correct in threat assessment.”
So McCarthy was correct, but wasn’t competent enough to handle it? Probably correct. Don’t blame him.. he died young and was on his own for most of it.
Care to take a guess who his assitant was and apparrently was so enthralled asked him to be godfather to his first born?
I assume you’re referring to Bobby Kennedy, brother of JFK and JFK’s Attorney General. The whole Kennedy family liked Joe McCarthy, and McCarthy had an inside track to becoming a JFK brother-in-law.
I agree with most of these comments; none of my disagreements would directly relate to Oppenheimer. [Briefly, the hundreds are the judgments of Hollywood types, media types, pickos, who claim injured careers. Yes, even today, there are claims of the innocence of Alger Hiss, after his treason has been documented in the opened files in post Stalin Moscow. McCarthy was an severe alcoholic and attacked the loyalty of Gen. G. Marshall, who IMHO, was the greatest allied military leader of the war.] There are excellent points made by other commenters; I will not repeat them. America was successfully (in Stalin’s eyes) attacked by communist spies. They severely threatened America’s survival, and directly led to a half century of global suffering and death.
My points are these. Oppenheimer, like many in at that time, was/ had been a communist, either large or small c. He fought against Teller, and his scheme for the H bomb, and was canned, not on scientific grounds, but in a policy/ morality/loyalty conflict. More importantly, for today’s generation, Oppenheimer’s America lived in a real fear, of being annihilated by Stalin. That fear, branching in part, into McCarthyism, was well founded, talented people were trying to kill us. Others try today. We ignore spies, hackers, traitors at our peril. But it is “fashionable ???” to discount this concern as “McCarthyism”, connoting a racist, power mad fraud, but with no actual national security threat. This mind set is dead wrong. Hate filled people really want to kill us.
However, our countermeasure policies, eg Homeland Security, or our 36 year pogrom against civilian nuclear power are terribly flawed. Electronic detection, and communication is infinitely more complicated, and thus vulnerable, than in Oppie’s time. The problem is our problem. Americans who are terrified of a nuke, or global warming, perceive little danger from a terrorist WMD attack. How else can our non existent border security, illegal immigrant, energy policies, or drug war failures be reconciled? Tens of thousands of tons of white powder are smuggled yearly into our commerce, for our fun. It is cocaine; it could be anthrax. The people who ran Fast and Furious supposedly defend us against an smuggled A bomb. Feel warm and fuzzy? Do voters comprehend the difference between a millirem, or thousands of rems?
Oppenheimer, a genius, did not clearly see risks, and threats. American leaders, today, do not either.
A communist is almost by definition not un-patriotic, but anti-patriotic. Centralization and uniformity are his gods, and his politics are international, not national. American communist were attached to Stalin because he and Moscow represented to them an aggressive international movement. Which it was indeed.
If Oppenheimer moved away from his close attachment to the movement it was because he saw no future in risking his many newer associations and coming old age to it. The plans were laid, but the time in which Americans would elect a communist President was far off. Enough was enough.
Absolutely right on! International Communism, with the elimination of nationhood, was seen as the panacea for all the world’s problems. It was just the silly little details that needed to be worked out. Like human nature and the fact that there are no real socialists. Hitler, with his sick genius, correctly saw through Stalin and recognized Russian imperialism in drag. The only real difference between Stalinism and Hitlerism was that Hitler made no bones about having no intention of giving up German nationalism. Thus National Socialism vs. International Communism. A totalitarian battle for the non-existing soul of the non-existent socialist man.
Where are today’s communists? Centralized government control of the entire economy. What President believes in that? Only the words change. Reverse discrimination becomes affirmative action becomes diversity.Social security contributions become payroll tax.Debt becomes stimulus.Global warming becomes climate change.Communism becomes progressive.
Oppenheimer roots in 1930′s Bay Area communist circles have been well documented.Stalin was in full glory and US communists followed party discipline when he and Hitler embraced.Communist scientists did congregate at certain university physics and math departments so the dangers was real as history shows.
It was Oppenheimer’s knowledge of George Eltenton’s connections to the Soviets and his deception in protecting Haakon Chevalier that raised a red (no pun intended) flag. Espionage from any side is a crime against the state, whether one is working for the commies or a hostile democracy. If Oppenheimer were loyal to the U.S. Gov. while espousing communist ideas, that would not have been a crime or even a legitimate reason for excluding him from a security clearance, and there was no proof that he held communist sympathies. It was in his acts of duplicity and withholding information that Oppenheimer demonstrated unreliability and generated suspicion, though the instances were few and the consequences ultimately minor. Joe McCarthy and his ilk were twits who stomped on the Constitution through persecuting Americans for their perceived ideas and beliefs.
“Yes, McCarthy, and his henchman, Dick Nixon, persecuted hundreds of innocent, pink people, destroyed their lives, without uncovering one legitimate traitor. They were despicable men, but the lack of fruitful result was due to incompetence and alcohol.”
This is a gross mis-statement of fact! Those of us who care to check the history that exists outside the main stream liberal media know that the Senate and House of Representative’s investigations proved that there were many Soviet spies working in Washington DC in the 30s through the 50s. Some fled the country and others went to jail like Alger Hiss. Others like Harry Dexter White died before thay could be completely uncovered. Those who promelgate the lies that no Soviet spies were discovered and innocent lives were ruined only make it easier for the modern communists to work toward the same goals that the traitors of the 50s worked for!
Let me fix that for you:
Klaus Fuchs was the only proven commie rat in Oppenheimer’s coterie of brainiacs and oddballs. The only thing certain that can be said about Oppenheimer is that Roger Simon now wears his hat.
I had the opportunity to hear Kai Bird speak at an historical symposium in San Antonio in 1995. This happened to occur during the Smithsonian’s shameful attempt to redefine the atom bomb mission of the Enola Gay as something motivated by American racism. On that occasion, Mr. Bird stood before an auditorium full of veterans of the Pacific war and other historians and proposed that the veterans’ memories were actually muddled by time and mistaken, and that racism was, in fact, the principal factor motivating them to fight.
Although one might be tempted to give him high marks for outrageous moxie in his willingness to publicly insult the recollections and motivations of the veterans present, I also quite clearly recall Mr. Bird’s early exit from that engagement, escorted as he was out a side door, chased by shouts of outrage and a chorus of boos from the audience.
I do not know whether Oppenheimer was a communist or a spy. But I am fairly confident that whatever position Kai Bird has taken in the matter may reliably be considered a doctrinaire, agenda-driven, contra-indication of the truth.
Kai Bird is a veteran leftist, back as far as the 1970′s. He poses as a professional journalist but upon closer examination of his major writings, it shows a definite more-than-liberal leftist ideology.
The fact that a lot of the journalism/book world accepts him as a legitimate, unbiased writer, is a sad commentary on the state of writing today.
I don’t care if he writes lies or distortions the rest of his life. I’m concerned that people continue to be fooled by them and then defend him from the documented exposures such as those of Haynes/Klehr.
Philby, Burgess and McLain were given complete access to the US atomic facilities because the British had helped to bring uranium from Belgium to the US which led to the US-British Special Relationship in the development of the atomic bomb. Opie was not the only Soviet spy.
What a pity it is that Western Democracies have fallen for the Political Correctness, Multi Cuturalism , Feminazism, Green Nazism, Islamophilia and Race Card playing that the Left Wing Moonbats have infest the world with.
In his autobiography “A Mind Always in Motion” (U Cal), the physicist Emilio Segre writes about his Berkeley colleague, J.R. Oppenheimer, notices his eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses and recalls that “Oppenheimer and most of his acolytes followed the political line of the Communist Party of the United States, which was highly uncritical and simple-minded. Although most of these young people were not members of the Party, some were members of auxiliary organizations and later fell victim to cruel persecutions.” This was in the late 1930′s.
Are you kidding? America has a communist president right now! The liberals have won. Americans are now so ignorant and stupid, they have happily elected a full blown communist for their president, and don’t even know it! Liberals have insisted so long, and to so many generations, that you can be certain of nothing, that words have no meaning, that notions of good and evil are silly because those are “mystical” words, that not even the Republican party will call a Red a Red. Who cares if some dead scientist was a communist or not? There is a duck in the White House dismantling our country with the help of those useful idiot pink-o Republicans. Quack. Quack. Quack!
Oppenheimer was a victim of politics in the form of physicist-wannabee Lewis Strauss .