Word: gellhorn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Marriage, an ancient vaudeville joke has it, "is like a beleaguered fortress; those on the inside are trying to get out, and those on the outside are trying to get in." In her new book, Novelist Martha (The Trouble I've Seen) Gellhorn takes the reader on a skillfully guided tour of the fortress; it is her special merit that she observes the outside as well as the inside (including some rarely seen rooms), with equal sensibility. Two by Two contains four studies of the married state, each taking its title from a vow in the marriage service...
...Agriculture ("He loved the Pig Scheme and he never had to make a speech") gentle Ian is thrust up the Rose-rigged ladder to the very verge of Minister of State for Colonial Affairs-where, abruptly, he rebels, resigns, retires to pig-farming and smashes his marriage. Author Gellhorn is working here in rather tired soil...
...this has been done in the interests of security. But its effect has been just the opposite, in Gellhorn's opinion. The obsession for security and loyalty has discouraged many able people from researching for the government, be argues. Some of the men who were actually discharged later turned in significant scientific discoveries--for someone else. But, most important, the red tape which the government has strung up between scientists has stopped much of the exchange of information and ideas which has been the source of so many valuable discoveries in the past. Work must often be duplicated at different...
...Gellhorn's solution to the morass into which loyalty and security provisions have plunged the nation's laboratories is a program which would (1) be confined to scientific work which was very closely connected with national defense and (2) put the burden of proof on those measures which would tighten security rules. Such "scandals" as the Fuchs spy case emphasize the need for intensive measures directed against espionage, not heterodoxy. The extensive loyalty investigations and "black-lists" have turned up no spies, Gellhorn asserts, but have dangerously weakened the morale of our scientists and our confidence in free inquiry...
...Gellhorn's thesis is a good one. It is an important message for these hysterical times...