death. Time magazine literary critic Richard Lacayo, in a 2005 review of two new books about Oppenheimer, said of the hearing: "As an effort to prove that he had been a party member, much less one involved in espionage, the inquest was a failure. Its real purpose was larger, however: to punish the most prominent American critic of the U.S. move from atomic weapons to the much more lethal hydrogen bomb." After the hearing, Lacayo said, "Oppenheimer would never again feel comfortable as a public advocate for a sane nuclear policy." In a lengthy analysis of the security case published in the Stanford Law Review in 1990, cold war historian Barton J. Bernstein posits that the remarkable thing about Oppenheimer was that he was ever able to hold a high-level security clearance in the first place, given his past associations and record of evasions, and that he had been given special treatment and protection by the U.S. government to allow him to work in the classified nuclear area for as long as he did. Cornell University historian Richard Polenberg noted that Oppenheimer testified about the left-wing behavior of his colleagues and speculated that if his clearance had not been stripped, he would have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. In his book Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (2002), Gregg Herken, a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution, contended, based on newly discovered documentation, that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party. However, Herken did not subscribe to the Borden letter's charge: "I don't think he was a spy. The significance of his being a Communist was that it gave him something he had to hide, and may be one explanation of why he was so quiet after 1954." In a seminar at The Wilson Center on May 20, 2009, and based on an extensive analysis of Alexander Vassiliev's notes taken while viewing KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Vassiliev concluded that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviets. Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him, but were never successful. Allegations that he had spied for the Soviets are unsupported, and in some instances, contradicted by voluminous KGB and Venona documentation released after the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition, he had several persons removed from