David Mills
If you know the history, you know why the movie “Oppenheimer” gives Klaus Fuchs his own scene, as he arrives at Los Alamos, when it gives him only a line or two the rest of the movie.
He was a Soviet spy, sent there to steal American secrets.
The Soviets were very good at getting their spies into places they shouldn’t be. The English and Americans were disastrously not as good at keeping them out.
In the closed-court trial that makes up the last third of the movie, Oppenheimer’s association with Fuchs is used against him. The prosecutor offers their professional relation as evidence that he was a security risk, even though he didn’t hire him and Army Intelligence had cleared him.
More significant to the trial and to his later reputation, though, was his early involvement with communism. That was held against him in the trial, which ended with him losing his security clearance and — in those days, when fear of communism was so intense — almost all his public influence.
So let me say a word in favor of being a communist sympathizer in the early ’30s. The Depression had wrecked the American economy. Capitalism seemed to have had its day. Many people had fallen into poverty and destitution through no fault of their own and saw no way out. There seemed no reason to believe that the system would heal itself.
At the same time, the Nazis were a rising power in Germany and a recognizable threat to Europe, and fascism, as ugly as the European variety, grew even in America.
But most governments, especially our own, didn’t seem worried. They worried more about Communists than about Nazis and fascists. The Communist parties were the people fighting both movements the hardest.
Communism seemed to many people to be the answer. They seemed to be the only people who were really doing something. They pointed at problems that many influential people didn’t see as problems.
That wasn’t an unreasonable position to take at the time. Especially for an affluent intellectual, already on the political left, living in a university community. The “best people” were firmly on the left and some were just on the left side of the left.
In their world, being a Communist was no more controversial than being a Republican in most parts of western Pennsylvania.
Communism’s loudest opponents weren’t people that someone in Oppenheimer’s circles would take seriously. Many were defending their own interests without caring what effect their interests had on others — whether they were businessmen making money, newspapers selling copies, or politicians gaining power. You could make money or a career out of “red-baiting.”
And being a Communist wasn’t illegal. As the movie shows, the Communists and the fellow travelers met, fairly openly, in nice houses in nice neighborhoods with (mostly) nice people. They faced some risk for their commitments, but not that much.
So Oppenheimer made a reasonable political choice at the time, given the way the world looked to him and the life he was living. It would make sense to many of us, if we lived then.
He didn’t go all in. He had his reservations. In 1950, he would tell a congressional committee that by the end of the war, he had become “a resolute anti-communist” and criticized communism for “hideous dishonesty” and “elements of secrecy and dogma.”
We know more now, not just about how bad the Soviet Union was. As we see now, the Communists of the early ‘30s were divided between the idealistic sympathizers like Oppenheimer and the serious believers in communism and the Soviet Union.
The first backed away when evidence of the real nature of the Soviet Union came to light, like the notorious Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. The second stayed all in and some of them became spies.
Oppenheimer’s story shows that people can be on the wrong side for good reasons, even the right reasons. It also shows that what is the right side can be more ambiguous at the time than it looks years later, and — the most important point, I think — that even the wrong side may point to truths to which people on the right side may be blind or inattentive. The danger of fascism, for one.
That experience gives us a model for evaluating American political life today, especially what to think about the Republican right. Leave aside Trump and the grifters, clowns, and thugs he’s gathered around himself. To what extent is the wider movement a parallel to the Communists of the ‘30s? What are they saying that more people need to hear?
I have one idea: their reaction to the administrative state, a thing that like every other thing of its sort grows to advance its own interests, which are not completely the nation’s, and defend them tenaciously. The “deep state” is a political reality. They recognize that it is not necessarily our friend. Which is, as it happens, a criticism a Communist can make.
David Mills is the associate editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.