ABROAD, foreign opinion reacted to the trial with incredulity. European intellectuals saw it as further evidence that America was gripped by irrational fears. “How can the independent experimental mind survive in such an atmosphere?” asked R.H.S. Crossman in The New Statesman and Nation, Britain’s leading liberal weekly. In Paris, when Chevalier received his copy of the hearing transcript—shipped to him by Oppenheimer himself—he read portions of the document out loud to André Malraux. Both men were struck by Oppenheimer’s strange passivity in the face of his interrogators. Malraux was
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