THE HANDOUT

Throughout its eight weeks of hearings and deliberations on the case of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Atomic Energy Commission's security board tried to hold a tight cloak of secrecy around its proceedings. The board's purpose, to conduct an orderly hearing with no taint of Mc-Carthyism, was laudable. But there was an unfortunate result: a widely distorted public picture of the case.

From the first, the reporting on the Oppenheimer case suffered seriously from a basic shortcoming of Washington newsgathering: dependence on the handout. Naturally, the security board had no pressagent to predigest the news. On the other hand, Oppenheimer's attorneys were wise in the ways of press relations. As a result, many dispatches filed out of Washington gave a portrait seen through the eyes of counsel for J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer's lawyers, not the security board, handed out texts of the board's majority and minority reports, along with the lawyers' own comments. The top sheet of their handout was a handy, one-page index which stressed the board's finding that Oppenheimer was loyal. Naturally.

Oppenheimer's lawyers played down most of the board's unfavorable findings. They singled out and emphasized one criticism which, out of context, suggested that the board was unfair to Oppenheimer. This was the charge that he had lacked enthusiasm for the hydrogen bomb project. Lazily, many editors followed the lawyers' line.

To set the record straight, the Atomic Energy Commission last week took an unusual step: it made public the 500,000-word transcript of the case. But even that did not correct the distortion.

To give reporters time to read the transcript and write considered stories, the AEC set a release date 18 hours after the copies were handed out. But within one hour the Mutual Broadcasting System's Fulton Lewis Jr. broke the release date and used material from the transcript. To meet that kind of competition, reporters rushed onto the wires with stories admittedly written after only a shallow skimming of the bulky transcript. As a result, much of the real meat (see below) of the 500,000 words uttered at the security-board hearings was left unchewed.

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