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To: james-rockford who wrote (12319)	7/3/2003 11:28:56 PM
From: Mark Marcellus	Respond to of 17683

Okay, I apologize. I was wrong. You obviously do know what was going on, and especially what the bad guys were doing. I do find it difficult to understand how anyone could believe that it was cowardly rather than courageous to refuse to name names. Or maybe you feel that what former Party members should have done rather than take the Fifth was to go ahead and admit their membership in the party that they had, as you say, a legal right to join. That way instead of simply destroying their own careers (which they effectively did by taking the Fifth) they could also go to jail for contempt when they refused to take others down with them. That would certainly be courageous, but I can understand why many chose not to go that route. Sorry but IMO while there were bad guys in the government who were Communists, and that was a problem, McCarthy and what he represented was a much bigger problem. I also fear that his ghost has returned to haunt us. And, FWIW, I believe that it is logically consistent to hold the view that Klaus Fuchs was evil but that Oppenheimer was unfairly demonized. One could even argue that without the open collaborative environment he created at Los Alamos which enabled spies like Fuchs to infiltrate, the U.S. could not have successfully developed the atomic bomb before the end of the war.