Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR OPPENHEIMER Robert E. Fitch's "Oppenheimer and Teller: An American Tragedy" [NL, February 14] was the finest article on the case I have lead to date. Unlike many other writers, Dr....
...Glencoe, Illinois MORRIS ELROW Dr...
...The Gaullist policy toward the North Africans is much more liberal than that important right-wing segment of the Radical Socialist party which follows Rene Mayer...
...Yet, despite his keen historical perspective, Sir Norman fails to tell us how to defeat modern totalitarianism...
...In this case, Dr...
...We had a nice little item floating around in our industrial areas, too, and I understand it was circulated rather widely throughout the country...
...Well, at any rate, it's been safely buried again, so they can all breathe easier...
...Unlike Mr...
...The record shows that the nation was lied and tricked into both World Wars by Democratic Presidents who promised the voters peace...
...This may be true in some cases, but, set down as a general principle, it is preposterous...
...Fitch was able to rise above current polemics and view the whole affair as the many-planed human tragedy that it is...
...New York City BENJAMIN PROTTER ILL FEELING Judging from William E. Bohn's "Washington's Era of Ill Feeling" [NL, January 24], he thinks it frightening that Illinois voters, succumbing to the phony "peace" line of desperate Republicans, almost ousted his friend Paul Douglas from the Senate...
...Bohn replies: I was not attempting to give general account of the manners and morals of American political campaigns...
...Fitch believes that a scientist on the General Advisory Committee has the right to testify only in his capacity as a scientist, and not otherwise to engage in policy-making...
...Neither Americans nor Britons today blame the Russian people for the kind of regime that oppresses them...
...Nor do I recall him chiding his good Quaker friend, Paul Douglas, in 1953 when he was loudly proclaiming the second coming of the Republican depression and, incidentally, ruining his reputation as an honorable and respected economist at the same time...
...Fitch's argument: 1. Dr...
...The people can be emotionally stampeded by promises to settle complex issues by simple but dangerous remedies...
...I don't know what he means by "the decision against the H-bomb...
...It looks as if Republican slogan-writers stumbled onto a bombshell with that tactic—or could it be that the politicians have known it was there all along...
...Fitch understands to be the scientific hypothesis in question...
...Indeed, Socialists and "liberals" have exercised little restraint in hurling the most libelous and grotesque charges against the two major parties and our whole system before, during and after political campaigns...
...And it was the stupid or treasonable New-Fair Deal Asiatic policies that led inevitably to the Korean tragedy...
...There is no guarantee that dictators won't make more serious mistakes because of their isolation from public opinion and ultimate reality...
...Bohn, I think the reaction is heartening, one of the most encouraging signs of life in John Q. Public in many a noisy campaign...
...A contribution to policymaking is the prerogative of all members of an advisory committee...
...Mayer sought to avert this danger to his party by his frontal attack on Mendes-France...
...Mayer, as a party leader, would naturally head the Radical list in Algeria next spring and thus could be fairly sure of reelection...
...Squires mentions a rather bad joke perpetrated by some Democrat in connection with Secretary Wilson's awkward reference to dogs...
...It suggests that, should any rash young politician have the nerve and a clean enough record to make such an appeal honestly, he might get to first base, or even second, before being slapped down by Big Brother...
...If Mendes-France had remained in office, all of French North Africa would have been under Gaullist control...
...The simple fact is that there is an element of the unforeseeable about scientific discovery, and that here we can justly punish nobody for the failure or success of a project...
...Bohn, but it happens to be true...
...A system of law becames totalitarian when it assumes the political determination of the unconscious...
...A Gaullist headed the Moroccan and Tunisian department in his Cabinet...
...Historical conditions prevented the alternatives to dictatorship from seeming clear or attractive enough so that the people were determined to attain them...
...What Charlie Michelson did to President Hoover hardly seems relevant...
...In answer, Mr...
...Fitch only informs us that "the decision against the H-bomb plays "central part...
...Philadelphia Walter R. Storey...
...Salt Lake City ERMER JOHNSON Two false assumptions seem to me to underlie Dr...
...PUBLIC OPINION Norman Angell in THE NEW LEADER of February 14 demolishes the blind faith some of us once had in the inevitable good judgment of the masses...
...Another danger, to Mayer's way of thinking, was the change in the mode of electing Deputies sought by PMF...
...True, the same things might have happened under a Republican administration...
...Was he raising his voice in righteous indignation...
...Then came the decision to replace the Radical Socialist Governor-General of Algeria with another prominent Gaullist, Jacques Soustelle...
...The charge that the Democrats have been the war party and that they coddled Communists and security risks may seem "grotesquely silly and false" to Mr...
...All through this case, there is a horrible muddling of questions that are scientific, military, moral and political," says Dr...
...Now we are all too tragically aware of the cost and futility of armed combat...
...New York City GEORGE S. SCHUYLER While two wrongs do not make a right, I cannot help wondering where Mr...
...2. Dr...
...Presumably, then, Conant, Rabi and Fermi, who shared Oppenheimer's opinions on the hydrogen bomb, were moved at least unconsciously by the same political sympathies...
...Bohn obviously chose not to do this, because the exceptions that he so carefully selected make a prettier set of supporting facts for the conclusion he sought...
...Eureka, Illinois LENNA MAE GARA William E. Bohn seemed to be almost as outraged as the Democrats over the recent campaign strategy of some Republicans...
...This would quite naturally have redounded to the benefit of the Gaullists in the forthcoming elections, and thus made even less secure the fragile hold of the Radicals on that part of the French Empire...
...The danger is that a few men in the Kremlin or in Peking will go too far in their aggressive designs under the delusion that the free world won't fight...
...That was more than twenty years ago...
...New York City LEWIS S. FEUER Robert E. Fitch's article was one of the best you've had in many months...
...The cards read: "If you want to live like a dog, VOTE REPUBLICAN...
...This is the kind of dispassionate summing up of an emotion-laden issue which, to me at least, makes THE NEW LEADER unique and indispensable...
...Roosevelt, and while Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore were being protected by Truman...
...Bohn was when Charlie Michelson was masterminding the campaign to discredit President Hoover and the CONTINUED ON NEXT PACE DEAR EDITOR Republican party in 1932...
...These were, however, exceptions...
...When PMF (as the French press liked to refer to him, in flattering imitation of our FDR) made his surprise visit to the Bey of Tunis, he was accompanied by two prominent Gaullists...
...What I was describing happened a few months ago and under the present Republican National Committee...
...Fitch's doctrine coincides with Soviet principle...
...One parting thought: Will the Republican Administration save face and redeem itself with THE NEW LEADER if it manages to blunder into World War III, or can it continue to mention now and then that it prefers peace...
...I was giving a rather detailed account of a particular propaganda drive carried on by the Republican campaign committee in 1954...
...But certainly political strategists who failed to seize upon the vulnerability of their antagonists would be unworthy of their salt...
...Contrary also to the fuzzy opinions of our press, the Gaullist Deputies were among the most consistent supporters of Mendes-France, and he leaned on them heavily...
...This way of campaigning against the Democrats was false, silly and wicked...
...Washington, D. C. PAUL R. SQUIRES Dr...
...I thought everybody who keeps up with events knew that Reds romped through the White House and Government while the Dies Committee was being ridiculed by President and Mrs...
...A good reporter would recognize them as such and view the whole picture...
...The Farmers Union also had some very pretty stuff...
...It proves that he still responds to basic issues, and that the most basic issue with him and his family right now is peace...
...Oppenheimer to the University of Washington as a guest lecturer has been vetoed by the university president, who says that it would not be "in the best interests of the university.'' "And in this tale," says Dr...
...Undoubtedly, there were instances during the 1954 campaign in which Republicans went overboard on either the war or the Communism theme...
...Fitch says that Oppenheimer deserted scientific objectivity, that his political ethics dictated his answers to scientific problems...
...Fitch, "the principal resistance to the advance of science comes from the scientists themselves...
...Soustelle is young, energetic, intelligent and was prepared, I believe, to bring about some needed reforms...
...And the Democratic National Committee did not hesitate to bring the depression theme before the voters in a variety of ways...
...I doubt it, for his voice is raised in this respect only when the nasty Republicans are belaboring the righteous Democrats...
...Fitch says that Oppenheimer cannot be regarded as a "hero to anyone who has a regard for the objectivity of science and for the political processes of a democracy.'' Edward Teller, on the other hand, he says, was right when most of the scientists were wrong...
...On the basis of individual merit, he would have a much harder time of it...
...He likens him to Semmelweiss, Pasteur and many before them...
...According to Dr...
...But this excellent campaign material might have given us a GOP Congress if it had been used earlier and more intensively...
...Fitch, and I feel like adding: "In this account, too.'' A proposal to bring Dr...
...Contrary to what has been written time and again in our press, there will be no municipal elections this April in France...
...The majority of Germans, Russians and Chinese never chose Nazism or Communism in a free election...
...Incidentally, many of the important points made by Mr...
...Hitler didn't think England and France would go to war in 1939 over his invasion of Poland...
...The decision to make the H-bomb was obviously not "scientific" and was properly made by President Truman...
...Nobody would assume that a banker on this committee was there only to advise in his capacity as a banking expert...
...Fitch were first raised by Lionel Gelber in your journal last summer (July 19, 1954...
...It is of the essence of scientific method that all evidence, pro, con or otherwise, must be openly displayed for the criticism and evaluation of all scientists...
...Fanatical minorities imposed ruthless governments on the helpless majority...
...I cannot understand what Dr...
...Washington, D. C. SIDNEY KORETZ MENDES-FRANCE Allow me to make few additions to Sal Tas's informative article, "France after Mendes-France" [NL, February 211...
...In Russia, if a scientist makes a mistake, or fails to make a desired discovery, it is taken for granted that he did so for political reasons...
...It is difficult to arouse people of the democracies to an hysterical acceptance of war...
...There will he cantonal elections for the conseillers generaux, the men who elect French Senators...
...This change was simply a reversion to the prewar system, which favored the individual candidate as against the present scrutin de liste weighted in favor of the party as a whole...
...Bohn might have included in his list of horrible examples the advertisements appearing in the labor papers during the campaign...
...The rest of his defense goes back to Herbert Hoover and Charlie Michelson...
...So it was thumbs down for Mendes-France all along the line with the right wing of his own party...
...Fitch's doctrine, we can punish scientists on the basis of conjectures as to their unconscious motives...
...The next Senatorial elections are due in May or June of this year...
...DEAR EDITOR OPPENHEIMER Robert E. Fitch's "Oppenheimer and Teller: An American Tragedy" [NL, February 14] was the finest article on the case I have lead to date...
...Few New Dealers and their apologists regarded as "grotesquely silly and false" the persistent Democratic charge that President Hoover's administration was responsible for the 1929 economic collapse...
...And the slap, when it came, would be from the two-party system, not from the voters themselves...
...Many Americans did come under the spell of General MacArthur in 1951, and then were fooled for a short time by the demagogy of Senator McCarthy...
...I watched with interest that last-minute maneuver and wondered just what effect it would have...
...His grasp of these underlying human realities reminded me of Shakespeare's approach to such historic figures as Brutus and Coriolanus...
...We were far more emotional when we blamed and hated the Germans in both World Wars...
...The "dirty" element in the Republican campaign was not the charge thrown at the Democrats, but the implication that the Republicans themselves were innocent, or that, given the same set of circumstances, they would not have acted in the same way...
...The heart of this drive was the pretense that the Democrats had started and were thus responsible for all of our recent wars...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 10
