It’s easy enough for Energy Secretary Granholm to restore, posthumously, the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as she says she’s done. It’s not so easy to see the logic of the move, even if Hollywood is dramatizing the life of the father of the A-bomb. Where does Ms. Granholm get the authority to restore his clearance? Is she pressing in reverse the politics she claims infected the decision to deny the physicist’s clearance in 1954?

It’s not our purpose here to question Oppenheimer’s loyalty. The left-wing physicist played a heroic role in enabling us to defeat the Japanese Empire and save the countless American lives that would have been lost in a conventional attack. It is our purpose to mark the principle that no man has a “right” to a security clearance, particularly not in the face of such spying as was launched against us by Stalin and his camarilla at the Kremlin.