IN THE MATTER OF . . .

Charlton Heston includes the name of the noted American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, along with Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, in a list of individuals he asserts “damaged the country” (Letters, Oct. 26).

Whatever the status of Hiss or the Rosenbergs, J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the great scientific minds of this century. His insights in nuclear physics, and his skills as an administrator and director of this country’s atomic research, played a pivotal role in the American victory in World War II, in recognition of which he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit in 1946.

He was an able, and considering the difficult times in which he served, a heroic administrator and public servant. He broke no laws, and it would be slander--then as now--to suggest he had committed any act to the detriment of his country. Nor was it ever suggested he in any way dishonored his country.

However, in the postwar climate of innuendo and slander, he was charged with indiscretion. On this flimsiest of charges his security clearance was revoked. This is the crime and the “punishment” Heston suggests Oppenheimer somehow merited.

BRUCE HENSTELL

Santa Monica

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Oppenheimer was a fellow traveler in the ‘30s and belonged to organizations that aimed to “damage” the U.S by integrating swimming pools in Oakland and supporting the Spanish republic against an army supplied by Hitler and Mussolini.

The only recent “evidence” to support the long-discredited charge that Oppenheimer spied for the Soviet Union comes from a former Soviet intelligence officer who waited until the fall of his empire (no defector he) to make a few dollars now that his employer had gone out of business.

MICHAEL R. MOORE

Los Angeles

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Letter writer Burt Prelutsky claims that comparing labels on CDs and TV ratings to the damage caused by the Hollywood blacklist is wrong, even absurd.

Perhaps he’s not aware that careers already have been destroyed by labeling. Recording artists have been dropped from rosters, some prosecuted, and to this day labeled records are not sold at certain major outlets. And many states were encouraged to pass repressive laws regarding music, some still on the books.

You’d think we’d have learned that this sort of governmental harassment and denial of basic freedoms is a bad idea. But we don’t learn, I guess, because there are always people around to say, “What we did in the past was awful, but this--this is different.”

STEVEN KURTZ

Los Angeles

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It was amazing to me to realize from the various letters about Patrick Goldstein’s blacklist series just how many people apparently missed the point of the McCarthy era.

It doesn’t matter if you believe Uncle Joe (Stalin) was a swell guy, that you openly adore Hitler or that you think the KKK is your kinda club. Our Constitution gives us the right to believe, speak and join what we want to, no matter how appallingly stupid it is.

Yet how quickly the American people allowed their government to trample on the very freedom they claimed to honor, how easily they threw away their rights with both hands, and then how willingly they chose to forget the whole disgraceful episode by failing to understand the true meaning of what We, the People, allowed to happen.

ANN CALHOUN

Los Osos