PAGE FOUR THE MICHTCAN DATILY ... r. . (Editor's Note is written by Co-Managing Edi- tor Craig Wilson.) Students may now make themselves heard in the unique grass-roots campaign to get Congressional action on reorganization of the executive branch of the Federal Gov- ernment. All you have to do, is fill out the blanks on Page One of today's Daily and mail them to the Managing Editors of The Daily. Or just drop them off at the Student Publica- tions Building. They will be forwarded to the appropriate offices in Washington. er Commission Report is necessary is like saying air is necessary for a strangling man. Although there have been heated debates on many of the commission's decisions, a cutting or at least loosening and simplifying of Governmental red tape is thoroughly in order. They say there is little chance for Con- gressional action. There isn't time-they say. However, if enough voters--you and 1- bluntly tell our representatives that we want that $4 billion for education, roads, and health, Congress will find time to do something about it. In the words of former-President Herbert Hoover, "ljeither the President nor the Con- gress can exercise effective supervision and direction over such a chaos of establish- ments, nor can overlapping, duplication, and contradictory policies be avoided . .. "(It) has been common knowledge for twenty years that the President cannot ade- quately handle his responsibilities; that he is overworked; that it is humanly impossi- ble, under the system which we have, for him fully to carry out his constitutional duty as Chief Executive because he is over- whelmed with minor details and needless contacts arising directly from the bad or- ganization and equipment of the Govern- ment." To say that legislation based on the Hoov- Fill the blanks with a soft pencil; the paper doesn't take ink very well. Editorials published in The Michigan Daily are written by members- of The Daily staff and represent the views of the writers only. NIGHT EDITOR: CRAIG WILSON Letter to McMahon "Where Does It All Get To?" Letters to the Editor THE DAILY publishes today a letter from physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to Sen- ator Brien H. McMahon (Democrat from Connecticut). * * * DEAR SENATOR McMAHON: From the press, and directly from the Atomic Energy Commission, I have learned of the recent discussions about the Commis- sion's fellowship program, which raises the question of whether candidates for fellow- ships supported by funds from the Com- mission should or should not be subject to investigation and clearance procedures . . The question at issue clearly does not pre- sent some of the grave and often tragic as- pects that the maintenance of security on secret, technical work has brought so prom- inently to the forefront. For this reason, I have come to believe that we can and should deal with it unequivocally. * * * THE PRESENT situation, as I understand it, is this: The Atomic Energy Commis- sion has advanced funds to the National Re- search Council to use these fdr the granting of fellowships. In making this request, the Commission has asked the Council to pursue its traditional methods of selecting fellows. In this selection, considerations of scientific and intellectual competence play a decisive part. Considerations of character are not excluded; but, in the past, no effort has been made by the National Research Council to determine the political views, sympathies, or associations of candidates. My under- standing is that the Commission has accept- ed this procedure and has endorsed it. With the basic wisdom of this decision, I fully agree. IN CONSIDERING the issue, we need first to ask ourselves what effects we can an- ticipate if from time to time young men and women who are Communists, or who have Communistic sympathies or associa- tions, are in fact granted fellowships. The fellowships are of course in fields where no access to restricted data will be needed or granted; and there can be no question of any jeopardy to security. What is more, there is no direct commitment, and no implica- tion, that recipients of fellowships will later be engaged in secret work. The Commission does not require this, nor do the research fellows. As a matter of fact, only a small fraction of the scientists of the country can or should be engaged in such secret work. The Scientific Panel of the Secretary of War's Interim Committee at one time esti- in .' 4 CRENT=1' MC)V I fs mated that even in the fields of the greatest relevance, not more than 15 per cent of our scientists would be associated with the atomic energy programs; and of these, of course, many will be concerned with their non-classified aspects. The actual practices of the Commission bear out these predic- tions. Thus one must ask the question of whether it is a proper charge upon the Fed- eral Government, and upon the Atomic En- ergy Commission in particular, to support the training and research of men who wil not be directly involved in the work of the Commission. It is the Commission's opinion, and this is an opinion fully shared by the General Advisory Committee, that the answer to this question is in the affirmative. For basic work in science, in aspects which are not and may not be under the direct con- trol of any one Federal agency, is never- theless a major source of our scientific progress, of invention, discovery, and tech- nical leadership. There are many examples of discoveries basic to the present work of the Atomic Energy Commission which were in fact made by Communists or Communist sympathizers. Of these many examples, we may cite a famous one: The major-one might almost say the only-present peaceful application of atomic energy rests on the preparation and use of artificial radioactive materials, which were discovered by Joliot, who is a Communist, and by his wife, who is a Com- munist sympathizer. It would be folly to suppose that the United States would be the stronger, or our science and industry the more vigorous, if this discovery had not been made. It would be contrary to all experience to suppose that only those who throughout their lives have held conformist political views would make the great discoveries in the future. The peo- ple and the government of the United States have a stake in scientific discovery and invention; and it is of this stake, rather than as an act of benevolence toward ,the recipients of the grants-in-aid, that one must look for justification for having a fel- lowship program at all. * * * THE ARGUMENT given above would seem to me a cogent ground for maintaining the Commission's policy, even if the deter- mination of loyalty and reliability could be made by the most straightforward and satis- factory methods. As you well know, the ac- tual procedures which have been employed,. and which perhaps must be employed, in order to establish the loyalty of an appli- cant, are far from simple and far from satisfactory. They involve secret investigative pro- grams which make difficult the evaluation and criticism of evidence; they take into consideration questions of opinion, sym- pathy and association in a way which is profoundly repugnant to the American tradition of freedom; they determine at best whether at a given time an individual does have sympathy with the Communist program and association with Commu- nists, ,and throw little light on the more relevant question of whether the man will in later life be a loyal American. It would be foolish to suppose that a man. against whom no derogatory information can be found at the age of 20 was by virtue of this guaranteed loyal at the age of 30. It would be foolish to suppose that a young man sympathetic to and associated with Communists in his student days would by that fact alone become disloyal, and a p- tential traitor. It is basic to science and to democracy alike that men can learn by error. * 'I * MY COLLEAGUES and I attach a special importance to restricting to the utmost the domain in which special secret investi- gations must be conducted. For they inevi- tably bring with them a morbid preoccupa- tion with conformity, and a widespread fear of ruin, that is a more pervasive threat pre- cisely because it arises from secret sources. Thus, even if it were determined, and I do not believe that it should be, that on the whole the granting of fellowships, or, miore generally, Federal support, to Communist sympathizers, were unwise, one would have to balance against this argument the .high cost in freedom that is entailed by the in- vestigative mechanisms necessary to discover and to characterize such Communist sym- pathizers. This is what we all have in mind in asking that these intrinsically repugnant security measures be confined to situations where real issues of security do in fact exist and where, because of this, the measures, though repugnant, may at least be intellig- ible. You and I have had occasion to discuss in the past how central a place the control of atomic energy occupies in the preserva- tion of the basic freedoms of inquiry, free- doms essential at once for scientific progress and for the preservation of our democratic institutions. It is because I believe that the issue which has been raised here bears di- rectly on the maintenance of freedom of inquiry that I hold it so important that it be wisely resolved. With every warm good wish, -Robert Oppenheimer. . k I \'. w., -M wwy 14