This story about the president threatening to remove the security clearances of former intelligence officials is a great time for some J. Robert Oppenheimer 101. washingtonpost.com/politics/rand-…
Oppenheimer is of course famous for his work on the atomic bomb. But among people who study "science and politics," he's just as famous for losing his security clearance in 1954.
The thing that's so odd about the story, at first glance, is that Oppenheimer wasn't really doing much that required a clearance in 1954. At the time, he was the director of Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
So why did he have a clearance to revoke, you might ask? Because, like all the people named in the WaPo story, he sometimes got pulled in to offer useful advice. 
People like Oppenheimer (and Michael Hayden and John Brennan and James Clapper et al) are useful to have around if you're still doing the things that they know about, whether it's nuclear weapons or intelligence.
Oppenheimer spent a lot of the 1930s hanging out with Communists and may or may not have been part of a CPUSA cell in Berkeley. His judgement of other people's trustworthiness was...not always great.
But that information had been available to counterintelligence authorities for a long, long time. His security troubles in 1954 were all about subtext, not text.
Stripping him of his AEC clearance in 1954 wasn't about "protecting national security" or pulling him off an individual project; it was about keeping a prominent voice in check.
The main difference from today's story is that Oppenheimer had an actual hearing, in which people (especially Edward Teller) said damaging things.
The root, though, is the same: Stripping ex-officials of their clearance is about authorities exercising their power to humiliate those they disagree with, not about access.
Afterthoughts: Though usually interpreted as a straightforward story of harassing scientists for their political beliefs, Oppenheimer's security hearing can also be interpreted as straightforward, old-fashioned partisan politics.
Let's not forget that his less-than-perfect record only became a problem after a change in administrations (Eisenhower's election in 1952), with new appointments to the AEC (especially Lewis Strauss).
Oppenheimer's continued clearance was in that way a direct parallel to the current situation. It was, technically, a "holdover" from a prior administration of a different party. He was brought back into the fold in the early 1960s, with other party back in charge.
My point is that it's easy to think of Cold War politics as "consensus" based, McCarthyites vs. everybody else, but old-fashioned partisan politics were still important, even in science policy, even in 1954. /fin [really and truly]
