SCIENTISTS under fire
CONDON, EDWARD U.
SCIENTISTS under fire by EDWARD U. CONDON The article below is adapted from a speech delivered recently by Dr. Edward U. Condon, formerly director of the U.S. Bureau of Standards, who was hounded...
...They were tested and found to be good and are now in production...
...McCarthy began lobbing his shots toward the White House...
...If he is correct in the implication that without that work we would have been delayed by about a year, then the lack of that work would have made us come in second in the international rivalry for the hydrogen bomb...
...Many of my friends had been persecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...During the last two months there has come about a general public awareness that America is not automatically, and effortlessly, and unquestionably the leader of the world in science and technology...
...I was told that I would have to go through the same old dreary business again...
...In June of 1955 I was asked to serve on a committee on a nonclassified problem of military importance—and then suddenly asked not to, just before the first meeting of that committee...
...This comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched and tried to warn against the steady deterioration in the teaching of science and mathematics in the schools for the past quarter century...
...You might think that I would now be allowed to go back to work...
...Now, a decade late, we read of crash programs to translate the Russian scientific literature and spread it around in this country...
...Some of our cleared young men tried to deliver the radomes but found these Navy men in such a state of panic that they would not accept them...
...I came East in January 1955 after giving my retiring presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was offered the post of chairman of the department of physics in a leading university...
...Exactly three years ago at Thanksgiving, I was driving from Corning to Washington to take counsel with various friends on what to do...
...Yet, in October, 1954, just before the elections, we find Richard M. Nixon making his twenty-years-of-treason speeches boasting that he got the Secretary of the Navy to suspend my clearance, as was done on October 21...
...During that period some Navy people came to see me with an urgent problem oh the development of a radome for a guided missile...
...I had been under steady political attack for seven years, and had won at every hearing...
...By the time we had the development models made my clearance had been suspended, "pending further consideration," as Secretary Thomas put it...
...Finally this Committee staged a political hearing on the same old stale and outworn material just before the 1952 elections...
...Under these circumstances...
...Some of them had taken refuge abroad from these political persecutions of our scientists...
...Try to picture the situation...
...I hope that this will be the last time that this subject will need to be discussed...
...Our good friend and past president, Robert Oppenheimer, who brilliantly built and led the Los Alamos laboratory during the war, had just been publicly disgraced by an official action of the government— largely on the basis of recently developed hysterical attitudes toward things that had happened before the war...
...Parnell Thomas] went off to serve a term in the federal penitentiary as a common crook...
...A few weeks later—all this was just three years ago—they regained their courage and sheepishly asked to have the radomes...
...Detailed problems about them come up from time to time but I am not allowed to help in their solution...
...But now I was told that I would have to go over all the same material again, before a kangaroo court whose members were to be handpicked to do their job by Defense Department officials...
...I was badgered all those years for having been interested in the American-Soviet Science Society, an organization which received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation ten years ago to foster translation and wider distribution in this country of the Russian scientific literature...
...I hope this is done —humbly and with apologies for the horrible way he was treated...
...Nevertheless all the old stuff was rehashed once in 1952 and again in 1954...
...Incidentally I was cleared from July 1954 to October 1954...
...During most of this period I kept on working to develop the scientific strength and stature of the National Bureau of Standards...
...It was highly secret, but I was cleared for it...
...For while we are rich and powerful, we have not been true to the principles of freedom for which we stand...
...Bureau of Standards, who was hounded out of his post in 1954 although cleared by many investigative bodies...
...You might think that I would now be allowed to go back to work...
...The scientific staff of the Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth had suffered a blow from which it has not yet recovered through the irresponsible attacks of Joseph R. McCarthy—attacks which the President had not resisted until Sen...
...It comes as no surprise to those of us who have known how good American scientists have had to face vilification by political speechmakers in and out of Congress, and have been falsely prosecuted for perjury, and have been improperly denied passports, or have had their passports seized and invalidated without due process by the State Department, or who have had their telephones tapped or their letters intercepted by government agents...
...In connection with all the soul-searching that is going on, we hear a good deal being said about asking Robert Oppenheimer back into government service...
...Three years ago I faced a difficult decision —whether to continue to fight for the government's honor, or whether to yield to the Administration's determination to disgrace itself...
...All covered essentially the same ground which was no ground at all...
...In those seven years so much of my nervous energy had gone into the struggle that I was weary unto sickness, and was forced to neglect the proper courtship of my beloved profession...
...The very best physicists can make their most worthwhile contribution in these ways rather than in weapon development...
...The government ought to make honorable amends to him and others—but we all must recognize that if basic research is to be done, an excellent job of teaching must go along with it, and our very best people are needed for both these things...
...Over the past ten years I have had two full-scale loyalty hearings in the Department of Commerce, a full-field investigation by the Atomic Energy Commission, and finally in 1954 a hearing under the policies and procedures set up by this Administration...
...The House Committee on Un-American Activities made numerous attacks on me in 1947 and 1948 before its then chairman [J...
...Louis.—The Editors Iwant to tell you about the political abuse of the personnel security system, which has done so much in the past decade to blight the relations of loyal American scientists and their government...
...In all of these I received full clearance...
...I decided the situation was hopeless, and that I had done all that could reasonably be expected of me in having resisted these evil dishonorable forces for seven long years...
...It was suspended by a Secretary of the Navy who admitted that he had not seen the record...
...Professor Edward Teller told the last personnel security board hearing in April, 1954 that the Bureau's work on the hydrogen bomb which I organized advanced our achievement of that goal by many months, probably a year...
...In March the chancellor of that university told me that he could not follow through on the appointment because a high government official threatened one of the university trustees that if my appointment went through, that university would lose all of its federal funds...
...Happily this work is being carried on by my successer in spite of his having been summarily fired for a time by the present Secretary of Commerce who wanted the free play of the market place to take precedence over careful scientific experimentation...
...It comes as no surprise to those who have known of dozens of cases of scientists who have been hounded out of jobs by silly disloyalty charges, and kept out of all professional employment by widespread blacklisting practices...
...Then at last our President acted, but in his own self-interest, not in defense of honor and decency and fair play to scientists, or to any of McCarthy's other victims...
...The evil consequences of bad policies have now come home to roost in a way that is plain for all to see...
...In July, 1954, I was given complete security clearance by the Eastern Industrial Personnel Security Board...
...So I decided to withdraw from the struggle, and my resignation from an industrial position for which security clearance was needed was announced in early December...
...Condon is now teaching at Washington University in St...
...It may be that conditions have now become bad enough at last that the Adminstration will soon seek to remove from itself the badge of dishonor it has worn for so long...
...It was arbitrarily suspended without any pretense that additional evidence needed to be considered...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
