THE WEEK

Nikita Khrushchev has challenged the U.S. to compete with Soviet Russia “in the peaceful things such as the production of radios and televisions and vacuum cleaners, any kind of cleaners.” Knowing the Soviet ability to surfeit its own population and those of its satellites with all maimer of high-grade consumers’ goods, we would not be surprised to hear tomorrow that one of the Barnum and Bailey midgets had challenged Ted Williams to a home-run hitting contest. Or, as the mouse shouted after his third cocktail, “Bring on that goddam cat.”

Operation Rehabilitation of Oppenheimer is entering its final phase. The initial phase was Oppenheimer’s consolidation in his post at the Institute for Advanced Studies. The next phase was the Murrow telecast-movie and the pains the Liberals took to cause everyone to see it; and the next, of course, Oppenheimer’s appointment to a year’s tenure of the James professorship at Harvard. Tn the background, always, there has been the sustaining chorus of doleful voices deploring the nation’s loss of the services of so brilliant a scientist, its overemphasis on security, its savage persecution of the repentant sinner. The refrains were borrowed from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s famous article proving that Oppenheimer must be forgiven because the Soviets already had all the information Oppenheimer could have given them before he could have given it to them. Now—with the inevitability of a Dostoevsky denouement—the demand, from a new and more authoritative and more official quarter every day, that the Oppenheimer case be “reopened” and (else why reopen it?) decided differently this time. The man, moreover, is not visible on the horizon who might do the things that would have to be done in order to prevent it.

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Nikita Khrushchev has challenged the U.S. to compete with Soviet Russia “in the peaceful things such as the production of radios and televisions and vacuum cleaners, any kind of cleaners.” Knowing the Soviet ability to surfeit its own population and those of its satellites with all maimer of high-grade consumers’ goods, we would not be surprised to hear tomorrow that one of the Barnum and Bailey midgets had challenged Ted Williams to a home-run hitting contest. Or, as the mouse shouted after his third cocktail, “Bring on that goddam cat.”

Operation Rehabilitation of Oppenheimer is entering its final phase. The initial phase was Oppenheimer’s consolidation in his post at the Institute for Advanced Studies. The next phase was the Murrow telecast-movie and the pains the Liberals took to cause everyone to see it; and the next, of course, Oppenheimer’s appointment to a year’s tenure of the James professorship at Harvard. Tn the background, always, there has been the sustaining chorus of doleful voices deploring the nation’s loss of the services of so brilliant a scientist, its overemphasis on security, its savage persecution of the repentant sinner. The refrains were borrowed from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s famous article proving that Oppenheimer must be forgiven because the Soviets already had all the information Oppenheimer could have given them before he could have given it to them. Now—with the inevitability of a Dostoevsky denouement—the demand, from a new and more authoritative and more official quarter every day, that the Oppenheimer case be “reopened” and (else why reopen it?) decided differently this time. The man, moreover, is not visible on the horizon who might do the things that would have to be done in order to prevent it.