By Steve Sailer
08/18/2023
From Commentary:
by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes
September 2023
… Chevalier also identified Oppenheimer as the author of two 1940 pamphlets put out by the “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Oppenheimer, who was the scion of a wealthy New York family, had also paid for the printing and distribution of those pamphlets. Herken interviewed Philip Morrison, a former Oppenheimer graduate student and then Communist, who claimed that he, Morrison, had taken to the printer a third pamphlet written by Oppenheimer justifying the Soviet invasion of Finland.
It would be interesting to know what Oppenheimer’s defense of the Soviet invasion of Finland in late 1939 was: you could make a purely realpolitik argument that the Soviets needed more land west of Lake Ladoga to resupply Leningrad when the Germans laid siege to it in the future. But good Communists in 1940 weren’t supposed to talk about the German threat because the Soviets had a pact with the Nazis since August 23, 1939.
In the end, the words of Oppenheimer’s friends and the evidence from the wiretaps and burglary, according to Bird and Sherwin, all amounted to nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. Oppenheimer left the impression that he was a Communist, so friends and party members naturally assumed he was and spoke of him as Communist. In fact, Bird and Sherwin even suggest he may have fooled himself: “For a brief time,” they write, “he may well have thought of himself as an unaffiliated comrade” even though he wasn’t. No, Oppenheimer was an ardent New Dealer and FDR loyalist.
If he had been, why would he have written fiercely anti-FDR pamphlets in 1940 during the period when the Nazis and Soviets were in an alliance and Oppenheimer actively supported the Soviet invasion of Finland? Bird and Sherwin write that at that moment, Oppenheimer’s “rational style had abandoned him” and that his “words reveal someone primarily worried about the impact on domestic politics of a world teetering on the brink of a great disaster.” What they cannot admit is that he was parroting the CPUSA’s anti-interventionist, anti-FDR, anti-New Deal line — and this after thousands of disillusioned close allies of the CPUSA abandoned (some permanently, some temporarily) their alignment with the party because of its new friendship with Hitler. Several hundred members openly quit the CPUSA because it had abandoned the putative anti-fascism that had led them into the party. Odd behavior, indeed, if Oppenheimer had been only a dedicated liberal.
As I said in my movie review, the humorless WASP Christopher Nolan was never going to be the man to get much out of the contortions that American Jewish Communists went through in 1936-1940. Only the Coen Brothers, who satirized mid-century Hollywood Leftists in Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar!, could do that history justice.
One thing I’ve tried to emphasize was how Communism in this time period can also be called Stalinism. Communism was not a broad tent in the 1930s. Its organizations were universally under the thumb of Stalin.
Recall that Stalin spent much of 1936-1938 murdering his fellow Leftists in the Great Purge, so Leftists tended to be the most aware of just how murderous Stalin was because their friends kept getting killed by Stalin.
Oppenheimer, with his 180 (or whatever) IQ, could have educated himself about Stalinism from American Leftists, such as the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, which objected to the Moscow show trials. It numbered among its members literary critic Edmund Wilson, Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, novelist John Dos Passos, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, anthropologist Franz Boas, and philosophers Sidney Hook and John Dewey.
But Oppenheimer chose not to.
By the late 1940s, [Oppenheimer’s] views were well within the mainstream of anti-Communist liberalism, so much so that a 1950 KGB document in Vassiliev’s Notebooks labels Oppenheimer as one of several “leading reactionary scientists” whom the KGB should seek to discredit.
As I pointed out, while the conventional wisdom contorts itself to deny and forgive Oppenheimer’s Stalinism, no forgiveness whatsoever is presently extended to the memory of scientists tainted by eugenicism, such as Oppenheimer’s boss at Caltech, founding President and 1923 Physics Nobelist Robert A. Millikan, who recently had his name stripped from three buildings at the college he did more than anyone else to build.
Caltech’s archivist Judith R. Goodstein wrote the history of Caltech: Millikan’s School.
Caltech’s rare two-time Nobelist, Leftist Linus Pauling (Chemistry and Peace), blurbed:
Millikan’s School presents an interesting and thoroughly reliable account of the astonishing change over a period of a few years of a small technical school in Pasadena, California, into one of the world’s leading scientific institutions.
From Wikipedia:
At Caltech, Pauling struck up a close friendship with theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, who spent part of his research and teaching schedule as a visitor at Caltech each year.[16][37] Pauling was also affiliated with Berkeley, serving as a visiting lecturer in physics and chemistry from 1929 to 1934.[38] Oppenheimer even gave Pauling a stunning personal collection of minerals.[39] The two men planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the chemical bond: apparently Oppenheimer would supply the mathematics and Pauling would interpret the results. Their relationship soured when Oppenheimer tried to pursue Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen. When Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer came to their home and blurted out an invitation to Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico. She flatly refused, and reported the incident to Pauling. He immediately cut off his relationship with Oppenheimer.
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