Two Papers on Oppenheimer [1955]

EXTRACTS FROM THE blurb for Seeker and Warburg’s publication of A Nation’s Security (31a) appeared in a publisher’s advertisement in The Times Literary Supplement, no. 2,802 (11 Nov. 1955): 669 (B&R Gg55.04). Frederic Warburg had impressed upon Russell that Michael Wharton’s edited transcript of evidence heard in the Oppenheimer case “is a most important book for the English public to have, but not an easy one to sell and if you could see your way to giving us an advance quote, it would be most useful” (19 Aug. 1955). In March Russell had declined an offer to contribute a preface, but he did agree in his reply to Warburg to provide an “advance quote” (22 Aug. 1955). Wharton (b. 1913) was a conservative writer and critic then employed by the BBC. After 1957 he gained much wider recognition pseudonymously as The Daily Telegraph’s curmudgeonly columnist (and scourge of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation) “Peter Simple”. The editing commission which he had received from a London literary agency was a somewhat incongruous undertaking, since the security investigation of Oppenheimer was a source of much more widespread disquiet on the Left than on the Right. But whereas Russell felt “very strongly…that the adverse conclusion which was reached was the wrong one…” (141:8-9), Wharton refrained from any such unequivocal assertions in Oppenheimer’s favour. Indeed, in a memoir published many years later, he reflected that the latter had been “suspected of being a ‘security risk’, on the whole, I think, rightly” (1984, 186). He also recalled how his short introduction to A Nation’s Security had been dismissed by the New Statesman as “surprisingly right-wing” (quoted at ibid.), although the intrusion of any such bias seems to have escaped Russell’s notice.