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<text> <title> (1950s) Spy Scares And Witch-Hunts </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights </history> <link 07844> <link 04166> <link 00116><link 00113><link 00115><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Spy Scares and Witch-Hunts </hdr> <body> [The turn of the decade from the 1940s to the 1950s was a time of great fear for Americans. The threat of international Communism appeared to come not only from the Soviet Union and China, but also from Communists here at home, "helping stack the deck on the Soviet side," as Red-hunting then-Congressman Richard Nixon put it. The House Un-American Activities Committee turned up supposed spies everywhere, from the movie studios of Hollywood to the halls of government. Some real traitors were uncovered and convicted, but the tactics of the Communist hunters began to seem worse than any plots they might uncover. As the decade began, one celebrated espionage case was concluded, but it has continued to generate controversy to this day. It was followed by the frightening revelation that Communist spies in Britain and the U.S. had given our nuclear secrets to the Soviets.] (January 30, 1950) In silence, the eight women and four men filed into the jury box. From his seat, Alger Hiss looked at each one, his lips wet in a tight smile. None returned his look. Priscilla Hiss fingered her handbag, stared straight ahead. The court clerk spoke in the courtroom hush: "Madam Foreman, have you and the members of the jury agreed on a verdict?" "I have," said Mrs. Ada Condell self-consciously. "How say you?" "I find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second count," said Mrs. Condell. Hiss's face paled. His wife's cheek twitched. The eyes of a young defense attorney filled with sudden tears, and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Patient old Federal Judge Henry Warren Goddard told the jury: "I think you have...rendered a just verdict." Surrounded by swarming newsmen, the defendant walked out of the courtroom and into the cruel light of flash bulbs. Thus came Alger Hiss, 45, to the bitter day of reckoning. He had been found guilty of perjury. But implicit in the charge was Hiss's conviction for a far deeper crime that, because of the statue of limitations, justice could not reach. The verdict branded Hiss a spy. (February 13, 1950) For several years Britons have been looking down their noses at what they called "American spy hysteria." Last week, when one of their top atomic scientists was arrested as a Russian spy, the superior British stare turned slightly glassy. Dr. Klaus Fuchs, once a trusted top-level worker at the U.S. Atomic Laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex., had been detected, not by famed British Intelligence or Scotland yard, but by the FBI, whom the British called into the case. Fuchs, said the FBI, had made a partial confession. He had been a secret member of the Communist Party for at least eight years, probably longer. Since 1943 he had had access to the tenderest U.S. and British atomic secrets. Fuchs's arrest hit Washington between the eyes. A member of the Atomic Energy Commission said: "We realized that this was one of the blackest days in the history...of the security of this country. We are treating this as the biggest problem we ever had." In consternation, President Truman's Cabinet met to discuss the case. One of those who attended the session said: "You can't overemphasize the seriousness of this development." No word or action of Fuchs ever drew suspicion to him; his arrest came about another way. For many months security officers of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission have had reason to fear a leak from [the British atomic research project at] Harwell. The British were not much impressed by American fears. Last September, however, British counter-espionage, working against the Russian espionage, became convinced from what they picked up that atomic information was passing from Harwell to Russian agents. One day last week Fuchs's superiors, at the request of the police asked him to appear at their offices in London's Shell-Mex House. Two Scotland Yard men placed him under arrest. Fuchs turned to one of his scientific superiors and asked: "Do you realize the effect of this at Harwell?" The FBI in Washington said that interrogators had had little trouble drawing a confession from Fuchs. He was taken to grimy Bow Street Police Court and there charged with betraying the official secrets of his adopted country. He listened impassively to the charges. (July 31, 1950) Julius Rosenberg and his wife were listening to the Lone Ranger with their two young sons when a stranger rapped on the door of their battered and drab apartment near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Twelve men filed in from the small hallway and announced that they were from the FBI. They arrested 32-year-old Julius Rosenberg as a spy. A puffy, spectacled native New Yorker with a smudge-sized mustache and disappearing black hair, Rosenberg was the fourth U.S. citizen arrested in the atomic spy roundup that began after the arrest of British Physicist Klaus Fuchs. The FBI said Rosenberg had been an important cog in the machinery, working directly under Anatoli Yakovlev, Soviet vice consul in New York. An electrical engineer (C.C.N.Y., class of '39), Rosenberg had been an inspector for the War Department's Signal Service until early 1945, when he was fired for Communist affiliations. He broke off all open contracts with the party, quit subscribing to the Daily Worker and set up as the owner of a small, non-union machine shop in Manhattan. But the FBI kept its many eyes on him. It was he, said the FBI, who recruited his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, for the spy ring when Greenglass was on furlough from his sergeant's duties at the Los Alamos A-bomb project. Rosenberg tore the top of a Jello box in half, gave a piece to Greenglass as his badge of identification and told him that his contact at Los Alamos would produce the other half. The contact turned out to be Spy Courier Harry Gold, the Philadelphia chemist, who got atomic-energy data from Greenglass and paid him $500. After the arrest of Fuchs and Gold, said the FBI, Rosenberg told Greenglass to leave the country and report to the Soviet embassy in Czechoslovakia; he gave him "substantial funds in 20-dollar bills" to do so (reportedly $5,000). But before he could get away, the FBI got Greenglass, and he talked. Julius Rosenberg was not surprised when the FBI came for him. Alone of the four arrested so far, Rosenberg stoutly insisted on his innocence. The FBI's story, said he, was "fantastic--something like kids hear on the Lone Ranger program." Three days after Rosenberg's arrest, Harry Gold pleaded guilty in federal court to all the FBI's charges. (April 16, 1951) Judge Irving Kaufman looked down at the man & woman before him. "Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed," he told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in a hoarse, faint voice. "I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb...has already caused the Communist aggression in Korea...and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." "I have deliberated for hours, days and nights," said Judge Kaufman. "I have searched my conscience to find some reason for mercy. I am convinced, however, that I would violate the solemn and sacred trust that the people of this land have placed in my hands were I to show leniency...The sentence of the court upon Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is that, for their crime, they are sentenced to death." Sallow Julius Rosenberg and his wife were led away. Later, in their adjoining cells, the Rosenbergs sang to each other: her choice was Puccini's One Fine Day, his The Battle Hymn of the Republic. There would be appeals. But though higher courts may reverse the conviction, none may reduce the sentences. If the sentences are carried out, the Rosenbergs will be the first spies ever executed by order of the U.S. civil court. [The Rosenbergs finally exhausted all appeals and were executed in June 1953.] (June 18, 1951) In ordinary times, the case would have rated a quiet police investigation, some chatter at cocktail parties, perhaps a feature article in the more lurid Sunday supplements. But when two middle-drawer British foreign service men disappeared during a trip to the continent last month, the usually stolid British Foreign Office acted in a way the British call "hysterical" if displayed by Americans. Police on two continents, including Scotland Yard, launched a gigantic man hunt for Donald Duart MacLean and Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. Ordinarily, the two would not be in possession of top military secrets, but would have access to confidential information. If they were in fact working for the Russians, they could have got hold of a lot more. In Washington, Secretary of State Acheson agreed that their defection might be "quite a serious matter." When the two had been missing for three days, Scotland Yard took up the trail together with Britain's M.I.-5 counter-espionage agents. They found that Burgess had booked two tickets for a round-trip excursion steamer to Saint-Malo, Brittany, hired a small sports car for ten days. Headlights blazing, the car flashed through the deserted streets of Southampton just before midnight, screeched to a stop at the dockside. The two men tossed a couple of shillings to the dock attendant, shouted "Buy yourself a drink," and leaped aboard the steamer. "What about the car?" the man called. "We'll be back Monday," they answered. But MacLean and Burgess did not come back. "When the steamer returned to England, two of its 168 passengers were missing. In the cabins booked by the diplomats, ship's officers found two packed suitcases and a litter of towels and shaving gear. The pair, police later found, walked off the ship and hired a taxi; one of them asked the driver in flawless French to drive to Rennes at top speed. During the 90-minute ride, the two sat in taut silence; they gave the driver a 5,000-franc note, waited for 500 francs' change, rushed to catch the train for Paris. Then they vanished. [The U.S. government responded to the spy threat by scrambling to find ways to make Communism a crime. They came up with the Smith and McCarran acts.] (September 25, 1950) "I had pictured myself as defending civil liberties," said Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas last week. "And yet," he added, "there is a Communist danger in this country." Douglas summed up the feelings of the other conscientious and sorely troubled men. For more than two weeks of agonized soul-searching, the Senate had grappled with a problem which the U.S. had never squarely met. And yet, as Douglas pointed out, the country faced an undeniable danger from U.S. Communists who owed their first allegiance to a foreign enemy. In the end, the Senate came down to a debate over two specific ways of holding the danger in check. One bill bore the name of Nevada's portly Pat McCarran. Actually it had started out as a catchall of five different anti-Communist measures. McCarran had gone to work with scissors and paste, put in a few ideas of his own and laid the result before the Senate. His omnibus bill was a clumsy looking vehicle. Nevertheless it moved. It moved along the path of recent court opinions which found Communism a clear and present danger, branded the basic aims of Communism as criminal in intent. It was aimed at Communists and their organizations and fronts, requiring them to register the names of their members and label their propaganda for what it was. President Truman said that he would veto it as an infringement of civil rights. Burying their reservations, the McCarran camp decided to accept the Kilgore bill with a few minor refinements. Paul Douglas and other Administration Senators, with a second, over-the-shoulder look at the Communist danger, decided to accept McCarran's measures. The two bills were put together in a bigger-than-ever omnibus bill and passed by an overwhelming 70 to 7 vote. (June 11, 1951) This week, in its final "decision Monday" of the session, the Supreme Court upheld the conspiracy conviction of the eleven top U.S. Communists. The vote was 6 to 2. Chief Justice Vinson, in his 7,700-word majority opinion, called the Communist conspiracy a "clear and present danger." Justice Holmes' famed dictum, that free speech is hazardous only when such a danger exists, "cannot mean that before the Government may act, it must wait until the Putsch is about to be executed, the plans have been laid and the signal is awaited," said Vinson. Upholding for the first time the constitutionality of the 1940 Smith Act, Justice Vinson held: "An attempt to overthrow the Government by force, even though doomed from the outset because of inadequate numbers of power of the evolutionists, is a sufficient evil for the Congress to prevent." [Another means of dealing with purported spies had come along, one that rode roughshod over the niceties of legal evidence and innocence until guilt was proved: McCarthyism. For four years Senator Joseph McCarthy exploited the nation's fears and brutally attacked Americans of divergent views. Americans were panicked by his diatribes, even though they exposed pitifully few real spies, because they destroyed lives and careers.] (October 22, 1951) "Man is born to do something," says restless Joe McCarthy. Joe is doing something. His name is in headlines. "McCarthyism" is now part of the language. His sturdy figure casts its shadow over the coming presidential campaign. Thousands turn out to hear his speeches. Millions regard him as "a splendid American" (a fellow Senator recently called him that). Other millions think McCarthy a worse menace than the Communist conspiracy against which he professes to fight. McCarthy does not face some questions which the nation cannot evade: 1) Precisely what has McCarthy done? 2) Is his effect on the U.S. good or bad? 3) Does he deserve well of the republic, or should he be treated with aversion and contempt? McCarthy's jump from obscurity to the national limelight began early two years ago, when he made a speech in Wheeling, W. Va. He said: "I have here in my hand a list of 205, a list of names made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department," Next day in Salt Lake City, he declared: "I hold in my hand the names of 57 card-carrying Communists" working in the State Department. Ten days later, on the Senate floor, he cited 81 "cases," particularly "three big Communists." Said McCarthy: "While there are vast numbers of other Communists with whom we must be concerned, if we can get rid of these three, we will have done something to break the back of the espionage ring within the State Department." In a nation that had finally learned without any help from McCarthy that it was locked in a life-or-death struggle with world Communism, these charges were as grave as any that could be made. The underlying accusation was that its State Department was harboring Communists, knew they were Communists, and was doing so deliberately. To investigate these charges, the Senate set up a committee headed by conservative Democrat Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. McCarthy, who had said that he "held in his hand" the names of 205 Communists then in the State Department, did not give the Tydings committee the names of 205. He did not give it the names of 57. He did not produce the name of even one Communist in the State Department. The Reds in Government, if any, were safe. After nearly two years of tramping the nation, shouting that he was "rooting out the skunks," just how many Communists has Joe rooted out? The answer: none. At best, he might claim an assist on three minor and borderline cases which Government investigators had already spotted. On such a miserable showing as an exposer of Reds, how has Joe McCarthy created such an uproar and kept it roaring? A large part of the answer is that Joe McCarthy in 1950 had hit a highly sensitive public nerve. When McCarthy first spoke up, Hiss, whose case Truman had called "a red herring," had just been convicted, and Acheson had declared: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." The U.S. people had just begun to realize fully the malevolence of the enemy they faced. Abroad, the West had suffered a grievous setback in the loss of China to Communism. The public, quite correctly, thought that someone must be to blame. Joe McCarthy went into the business of providing scapegoats. It was easier to string along with Joe's wild charges than to settle down to a sober examination of the chuckle-headed "liberalism," the false assumptions and the fatuous complacency that had endangered the security of the U.S. That he got a lot of help from the Administration spokesmen who still insist that nothing was wrong with U.S. policy helps to explain McCarthy's success--although it in no way excuses McCarthy. Some have argued that McCarthy's end justifies his methods. This argument seems to assume that lies are required to fight Communist lies. Experience proves, however, that what the anti-Communist fight needs is truth, carefully arrived at and presented with all the scrupulous regard for decency and the rights of man of which the democratic world is capable. This is the Western world's greatest asset in the struggle against Communism, and those who condone McCarthy are throwing that asset away. A very practical danger lies in this inevitable, negative reaction to McCarthy. The Administration supporters have gradually come to see that they could make capital out of "McCarthyism." If anybody criticizes the judgment of any State Department official in his past or present analysis of Communism, the cry of "McCarthyism" is raised. In less McCarthyesque language, McCarthy can be summed up this way: 1) His antics foul up the necessary examination of the past mistakes of the Truman-Acheson foreign policy. 2) His constant imputation of treason distracts attention from the fact that patriotic men can make calamitous mistakes for which they should be held politically accountable. 3) There are never any circumstances which justify the reckless imputation of treason or other moral guilt to individuals in or out of office. 4) McCarthy's success in smearing Tydings and others generates fear of the consequences of dissent. This fear is exaggerated by the "liberals" who welcome McCarthyism as an issue; but the fear exists--and it is poison in a democracy. [There seemed no stopping McCarthy. He boasted that "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeve rolled." But he began to overreach himself. While conducting an investigation of supposed subversion in the Army, McCarthy and his counsel and crony Roy Cohn simultaneously badgered Army personnel to get preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a member of McCarthy's staff, who had been drafted.] (March 1, 1954) If the millions of Americans who deplore and despise Senator McCarthy want to understand the millions who admire McCarthy, "despite his methods," they could ponder McCarthy's record of the week. The bully-boy manners, the sneer and the smear are conspicuous in the record. But alongside such trademarks of the McCarthy operation there was also the record of a week packed with investigative achievement. McCarthy scored heavily, and some of his points were of real and current importance. Among them: Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens admitted "defects in the Army procedures" that promoted an Army dental officer while his loyalty was seriously in question and gave him an honorable discharge a few days after he pleaded self-incrimination to avoid answering McCarthy's questions about Communist activity. The effect of the discharge was to put the officer beyond the reach of military law. (March 29, 1954) The Schine case had clearly forced the issue of who was lying. McCarthy or Army Secretary Robert Stevens. McCarthy denied that he and his 27-year-old counsel, Roy Cohn, had demanded special treatment and numerous petty favors for Draftee Schine. He lashed back with desperate counter-charges, e.g., the Army was using Schine as a "hostage" to "blackmail" him and, to take the heat off itself, had offered tips on "dirt" in the other services. Stevens denied the countercharges. The Senators of McCarthy's committee decided to settle the controversy by investigating 1) the Army's investigation of Roy Cohn's activities on behalf of Schine, and 2) McCarthy's countercharges. McCarthy stepped down as chairman, freely admitting that he had "prejudged" the case since he had questioned Cohn and was "fully satisfied" that no "unfair influence" had been used. South Dakota's amiable, rotund Karl Mundt reluctantly accepted an "unwelcome promotion" to the chair after failing to persuade the Armed Services Committee that it should arbitrate the incendiary political dilemma. [Thirty-six days of televised hearings gave 20 million fascinated viewers an edifying, often horrifying, education in how McCarthyism worked. The Senator demolished Army Secretary Robert Stevens and most of the rest of his opponents. But he made one fatal mistake: he attacked a young lawyer who had nothing to do with the hearings. Army Counsel Joseph Welch's impassioned, indignant response set McCarthy's brutality, coarseness and irresponsibility in proper perspective.] (May 3, 1954) The U.S., beginning last week, had a new spectacle: the televised hearings in the case of McCarthy v. the Army. It was a lively show. Robert T. Stevens, Secretary of the Army, was the principal witness of the first week. Stevens, a topflight businessman, found himself snarled in a dirty little fight where the fate of an Army private named G. David Schine and the fate of a New York dentist named Irving Peress somehow became high affairs of state. Senator McCarthy, ever the showman, gave televiewers their time's worth. A new character, Ray Jenkins, the committee's trap-jawed counsel, brought to the screen the forensic flamboyance of a Southern trial lawyer. Some public education--especially about the characters of McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn--might result from this show. But in its first few days, the main point shown was that the legal trial, which everyone takes for granted, is a most complex and valuable institution--not to be parodied by a vulgar imitation of judicial process. (June 21, 1954) What will probably be remembered as the most memorable scene of the McCarthy-Army hearings occurred on the 30th day. Army Counsel Joseph Welch was winding up his dogged cross-examination of Roy Cohn, when Joe McCarthy caressed the McCarthy cheek with the stem of his glasses and commandeered the microphone for what sounded like just another diversion. As McCarthy got tolling, Welch sat bolt upright and stared unbelievingly at the man just six feet away across the table. The packed room hushed: Roy Cohn grimaced toward McCarthy, shook his head, and his lips seemed to form the words, "No! No!" Without any warning or relevancy, McCarthy interjected the name of Fred Fisher, 32, an associate in Welch's Boston law firm, Hale & Door. Fisher, said McCarthy, "has been for a number of years" a member of the National Lawyers Guild, "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party." Welch, he went on, had tried to get Fisher hired as "the assistant counsel for this committee" so Fisher would have a chance to be "looking over the secret and classified material." When McCarthy had finished his harangue and turned to his paper-shuffling, Welch slowly and with great sadness spoke up: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty and your recklessness." Fisher, said Welch, had indeed belonged to the Lawyers Guild while a law-school student and for some months thereafter. He had indeed been chosen to help prepare the Army's case, but it was never suggested (as Chairman Mundt verified) that he work for the committee. "Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. "Let us assassinate this lad no further. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you left no sense of decency? If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good..." There was a moment of profound silence, then a roll of thunderous applause. Chairman Mundt, who had always curbed such outbreaks, let the applause run its course as McCarthy stared in blank surprise. When the uproar had subsided, Joe Welch, face drained white, rose from the committee table, silently walked past McCarthy and out into a corridor where he stood alone, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. (June 28, 1954) The statistics: 187 hours in session during 36 days; 2,000,000 words transcribed onto 7,424 pages; 27 witnesses and a cumulative total of 115,000 spectators in the hearing room; and $1,250,000 in TV costs. The results; much public disgust, some public education, especially on the subject of how Senator Joe McCarthy operates. [The subcommittee exonerated McCarthy along party lines. But the following month another Senate committee reached a different conclusion.] (September 6, 1954) The Mundt committee's seven Senators had agonized day after day over shadings of opinions. In the end they settled on two reports; a majority report, signed by the four Republicans, a minority report, signed by the three Democrats. The two reports differed somewhat in appraising the behavior of Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Counselor John Adams. And while the Democrats rapped McCarthy, the Republicans merely chided him. Both reports agreed that G. David Schine's contribution as a "consultant" to McCarthy's Communist-hunting committee was negligible, and, therefore, as the Democratic report was at pains to emphasize, efforts to spring him from Army duty were unjustified. Both reports, despite their tonal distinctions, agreed that McCarthy himself was to blame for not putting the brakes on Roy Cohn's efforts to get favors for his friend Schine. (October 4, 1954) A Select Committee of the Senate recommended the censure of Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and thereby erected a new landmark in U.S. government. The report was carefully constructed by six shirt-sleeved men in the office of Utah's Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins, a man little known in the past who should be long remembered in the future. Unanimously, firmly, unequivocally, Chairman Watkins and his five committeemen recommended that McCarthy be censured by the Senate on two counts: -- He had been contemptuous of, and had obstructed, the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, which in 1951-52 had attempted to investigate him; he had denounced, "without reason or justification," a member of that subcommittee, New Jersey's Republican Senator Robert C. Hendrickson. -- He had acted in an "inexcusable" and "reprehensible" manner toward an honorable and honest soldier, Brigadier General Ralph Wicker, who was a witness before his investigating committee. The committee's recommendations were, perhaps, not as important as its manner. Its report, like its hearings, was a product worthy of an unusually able appellate court. It was direct, documented and unequivocal. Its impact was far broader than the two censure recommendations. In sum it was a scathing indictment of McCarthyism, condemning the Wisconsin Senator for disregarding the principles of democracy, good government, fair play and decency. (December 13, 1954) Censure by his colleagues does not mean the end of Joe McCarthy. He has been nourished by headlines, and headlines may still feed him. But he was also nourished by myths. One was that he "rooted the Communists out of Government." Like most myths, this had a basis. There were, calamitously, Communists and Communoids in the U.S. Government. Joe did little to root them out. But he learned, to the dismay of his colleagues, to the shame of the executive branch and to the delight of the press, how to bay the loudest when others were following the scent. The myth of McCarthy, The Red Hunter, was hard to kill during the Truman Administration, which had gone on record as considering some of the most serious and necessary Red hunts as "red herrings." There was another, perhaps more vicious and enduring, myth upon which McCarthy fed. Eisenhower's victory could not explode it. It was the myth of McCarthy's prowess. No man--especially no Senator (other than an "extreme left-wing bleeding heart")--dared stand against him. This myth, propagated mainly by anti-McCarthy "liberals," helped swell McCarthy's headlines, and, since headlines are a form of power, a gross exaggeration of power begot actual power. This second myth was killed by the censure vote. [McCarthy died in 1957, abandoned and practically forgotten. One of the most controversial, even tragic, victims of the climate of fear and suspicion was neither convicted nor even accused of a crime.] (June 14, 1954) For the three citizens who sat in judgment behind a big, horseshoe-shaped table, it symbolized one of history's most thankless tasks: to decide between a demonstrably great and compelling public figure and an impersonal something called the security of the U.S. Through the eight weeks they read transcripts, studied FBI reports, questioned witnesses, listened to examinations and cross-examinations by counsel. Then, one day last month, they were ready to answer the question: Is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who directed the creation of the world's first atom bomb a decade ago, now to be denied access to classified information because he is a risk to the security of the U.S.? The majority's "yes" was firm and unequivocal, but regretful and full of understanding of what "yes" would mean to Dr. Oppenheimer, to the legions of Oppenheimer partisans, and to the other legions who would read only the headlines. Moreover, they said "yes" the hard way; they absolved Physicist Oppenheimer of any charges of present-day disloyalty, or of any "attachment to the Soviet Union", they commended his "high degree of discretion, reflecting an unusual ability to keep to himself vital secrets." Their verdict lay in a new and carefully reasoned proposition: beyond loyalty and discretion lie certain harsh requirements of security that Robert Oppenheimer, as an individual, does not measure up to. The majority report was a stunning blow to Oppenheimer, even though its impact was muffled by certification of his personal loyalty. When his clearance was quietly picked up last December under terms of President Eisenhower's executive order redefining security, it was Oppenheimer who first released the text of the Administration's charges to the press, along with a lengthy and eloquent accounting of his own personal life that he believed would explain his past errors. He had gone into the hearings before the Gray board flanked by four attorneys and all the character support his friends could muster. Now on the very points of "conduct, character and association," the Gray board rejected him. (July 12, 1954) A fortnight ago, five men met in the office of Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss to express their opinions on an explosive personnel matter. Strauss spoke first, and then each of the other four commissioners had his say. At the end their decision was clear: they stood 4-1 for a vote of no confidence in Atomic Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The majority finding confirmed the judgment of the special board headed by onetime Army Secretary Gordon Gray. But there were two important differences. Where the Gray board had commended Oppenheimer's discretion with secret data, the AEC majority was significantly silent. Where the Gray board criticized Oppenheimer's opposition to H-bomb development, the commissioners held that the physicist's policy opinions are not relevant to his security status. Thus, the AEC acted to silence the criticism that Oppenheimer had been punished because he was not "enthusiastic" about the H-bomb. Like the Gray board, the AEC gave great weight to Dr. Oppenheimer's untruthfulness about security matters. Oppenheimer, who had remained silent after the Gray board's decision, issued a statement remarkable in its restraint: "Dr. Smyth's fair and considered statement, made with full knowledge of the facts, says what needs to be said. </body> </article> </text>