Criminalizing Association at TIME

In his generally admiring review of two biographies of Robert Oppenheimer, TIME‘s Richard Lacayo makes two incredibly dense statements:

Even a generous evaluation of his fate would call him complicit in his downfall. Whether through hubris or naiveté, he refused to take seriously that his years of association with communists would open him to suspicion.

and in the very next paragraph:

Oppenheimer always denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. But he never sought to conceal that he had spent much of his professional life surrounded by party members, including his younger brother Frank. Even his wife had been a member before their marriage.

Despite the best efforts of people like J. Edgar Hoover, being a member of the Communist Party or sympathizing with communists wasn’t any more of a crime than being a fascist (and it’s still not, despite TIME‘s Acc Coulter cover).

Oppenheimer had been American enough to be chosen to lead the research team in the most secret scientific pursuit of World War II. He’d helped win the war for the US, and given them a nuclear monopoly. In a sane society, that contribution would have been weighed against his “years of association with communists.” Perhaps Oppenheimer was naive about just how stupid people could be, but by any reasonable standards there should have been no “suspicion.”

And how (and why) was he supposed to hide the fact that his brother and wife had been members of the Communist Party (an organization they could legally belong to)? He never “sought to conceal” it because if you weigh the fact that they weren’t doing anything illegal against the fact that Oppenheimer built the fucking bomb, a rational person would have said “So what?”

This is another example of lazy writing, lazy editing, and lazy thought. Lacayo falls into a “blame the victim” fallacy of faulting Oppenheimer for being locked out of the nuclear research establishment while simultaneously acknowledging that the FBI illegally bugged his home, office, and phones. He mentions how Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss used transcripts of those taps in hearings to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, but the guilt has already been placed on Oppenheimer by Lacayo for not taking his communist associations seriously and not trying to cover them up (and for signing farmworker rights petitions and raising funds for Republican Spain). Lacayo’s implies that Oppenheimer was pretty much asking for it, what with wearing that pretty dress and all.

Oops. I meant what with being a liberal and all.

Only a few more weeks before they stop sending me these things.