MORE THOUGHTS ON COMMUNIST INFLUENCE IN AMERICA

My previous post on CP influence in the US, brought a few more questions to mind.

1)  Martin Luther King, Jr., was gaining importance in the civil rights movement, and one of his chief advisors was Stanley Levison.  Both Pres. Kennedy and Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy told King to drop Levison, stay away from him because he was a suspected subversive.  King lied, said he would do so, and then continued to remain in contact with his friend and advisor.  Let that seep in.  The President of the US urges King to avoid any more contact with a communist, and King listens, and then ignores/defies the wishes of the leaders of the American government.  King's action speaks - asserting his own independence, and his willingness to hear, confide, befriend, and consider the advise of a possible communist.  What would you do if the President urged you to drop connections with a friend?

2)  In the previous post I mentioned scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.  What inspired that project?  Who inspired it?  Refugee scientists were worried when they learned that European scientists were moving ahead with discoveries that might lead to an atomic bomb for the Nazi regime in Germany.  Some urged famed scientist, Albert Einstein, to write to President Franklin Roosevelt about the danger if German developed such a weapon, and urged him to promote development of an American weapon.  From this, the Manhattan Project emerged.  We know that Oppenheimer was eventually selected to be the lead scientist on this project.  Why Oppenheimer?  Why NOT Einstein?  Einstein was German, but not loyal the the anti-Jewish Nazi regime.  Indeed, the Nazis had enacted laws removing the citizenship of Jewish Germans.  Einstein had left for a post at Princeton even before Hitler had gained full power.  But Einstein was a left-winger.  He was not considered for the Manhattan Project because he was a security risk.  Yet, Oppenheimer, whose wife was a member of the CP, whose brother was a member of the CP, whose mistress was a member of the CP, and who according to authorities Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Oppenheimer himself was also a member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, IS chosen as the lead scientist for the project.  Seems there should be more to this story.

Hugh Murray