What’s the Point of Restoring Oppenheimer’s Security Clearance?

It’s easy enough for Energy Secretary Granholm to restore, posthumously, the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as she says she’s done. It’s not so easy to see the logic of the move, even if Hollywood is dramatizing the life of the father of the A-bomb. Where does Ms. Granholm get the authority to restore his clearance? Is she pressing in reverse the politics she claims infected the decision to deny the physicist’s clearance in 1954?It’s not our purpose here to question Oppenheimer’s loyalty. The left-wing physicist played a heroic role in enabling us to defeat the Japanese Empire and save the countless American lives that would have been lost in a conventional attack. It is our purpose to mark the principle that no man has a “right” to a security clearance, particularly not in the face of such spying as was launched against us by Stalin and his camarilla at the Kremlin.There is no doubt that Oppenheimer was a compelling figure. He grew up on Riverside Drive and sailed through Harvard in three years, excelling in the classics as well as science, not to mention Eastern philosophy. After graduate studies in Europe he taught physics at Berkeley. Racing against Germany in World War II, he led America’s crash program to develop an atomic bomb. Even then the FBI had doubts over Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s work culminated in the first nuclear explosion in July, 1945, and atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August, ending the war. In the postwar era, though, Oppenheimer’s behavior again came under scrutiny. Amid a fight over whether to develop the H-Bomb — called “the Super” — Oppenheimer was opposed, claiming it would slow the creation of a needed stockpile of A-bombs like the ones used against Japan.Another towering physicist on Oppenheimer’s team, Edward Teller, saw that America was in a race with the Soviets to develop the more powerful weapon. Teller reckoned that Oppenheimer’s opposition delayed the H-bomb by four years, to 1953. By then, the Soviets had the new weapon, too. In 1953, a former aide on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, William Borden, wrote to the FBI that Oppenheimer “more probably than not” was a Soviet agent.President Eisenhower then blocked the physicist from access to any government secrets. No doubt many innocents were smeared during the Red Scare, especially when the accusations were lobbed by Senator McCarthy. Yet the concerns about Oppenheimer were raised by Borden, who was a liberal Democrat and an opponent of McCarthy. Plus, too, just as even paranoid people have enemies, there were real spies at work against America.This was no minor struggle, and Oppenheimer stood out. Even the Times notes that “his brother, his wife, and his ex-fiancée were party members.” He wasn’t, historian James Nuechterlein wrote. Yet he was “as fervent a fellow-traveler as could be imagined.” In hearings in 1954, Teller denied his old boss was disloyal, yet “if it is a question of wisdom and judgment,” the physicist’s actions suggested that “one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”Which brings us back to Ms. Granholm and President Biden. They, in our view, owe the American people a great deal more explanation than we’ve seen on Oppenheinmer. For one thing, how does this fit into the current political context in which a movie version is being made of the life of Oppenheimer based on a biography by the historian Kai Bird, a contributing editor of the Nation magazine? Mr. Bird professes to be “overwhelmed with emotion” at the news of Oppenheimer’s clearance. Yet it comes at a time when America faces, in the People’s Republic of China, another communist power that has launched against us a vast network of spies. So the idea of restoring the clearance of Oppenheimer, even as a gesture, is a decision that will leave Americans wondering what signal the Biden administration is sending.

What’s the Point of Restoring Oppenheimer’s Security Clearance?

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