With the success of the airlift, the prospect of war diminished, though it did not mean the end of the cold war. “There has been a definite crystallization of American public and congressional opinion over the Berlin issue,” Marshal declared with satisfaction, noting the country was now “unified in its determination not to weaken in the face of pressure.” Conant’s sharp anti-Soviet rhetoric and hardened attitude toward national security was in keeping with the United States’ new antagonism toward Russia and Communism. To his mind, containment had been tested and proven. The transferring of B-29s to forward bases for strategic nuclear bombing was a sign of the United States’ readiness and resolve to fight should the crisis escalate. But Washington’s response to the standoff had also revealed a lack of clarity concerning a long-term solution to the threat posed by Russia. He worried the country’s dangerous swing to the right and the rising anti-Communist hysteria might lead to a misguided public discussion about using its stockpile of nuclear weapons to “do something foolish on the international scale.”
* * *
As the November 1948 presidential election approached, and rumors and portents of war dominated the headlines, Americans seemed dissatisfied with their “accidental president.” Growing doubts about Harry Truman’s handling of international developments and ongoing domestic turmoil were undermining public confidence in his ability to do the job. High taxes, inflation, industry strikes, and increasing controversy about Communist sympathizers in the federal government had allowed the Republicans to recapture the House and the Senate in the 1946 midterm elections. Back in power after fourteen years, the Republicans were in a fighting mood, and no political figure would prove more forceful in his attacks than the thirty-seven-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph P. McCarthy. A Marine Corps veteran and self-proclaimed war hero, he had garnered popular support by promising to “clean up the political mess” in Washington, particularly the administration’s failure to protect the government from enemy infiltrators and spies.
It seemed all but certain that the Republicans would repeat their success. As part of the conservative backlash, they were out to show that Roosevelt’s New Dealers were “soft on Communism” and that Truman’s government was riddled with traitors and fellow travelers, with the current Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace, FDR’s former vice president, being a prime example. There was talk of the “treason of Yalta,” as GOP right-wingers criticized the secret wartime agreements that had led to the division of Eastern Europe, occupation zones in Germany, and the ceding of territorial rights to Russia in the Far East. Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee, tried to avoid the mudslinging, but in the final weeks he hopped on the Reds-in-the-government bandwagon. All the major papers predicted a Dewey sweep, and Conant was resigned to reporting to yet another nuclear neophyte.
In the end, however, the public defied the polls, as Truman won comfortably. “The American people admire a man with courage even if they don’t always agree with him,” wrote Drew Pearson in his November 2 syndicated column, struggling to make sense of the stunning political upset.
To Conant, it meant continuity. The Democrats were back in control of Congress and its committees. He was relieved to be carrying on with the same men who had gotten their heads under the tent years ago. Despite the many new Republican faces in Congress and on the AEC, the president still trusted the “firm hands” of his wartime atomic statesmen with charting the nation’s nuclear future. As one of the wise men on the AEC’s powerful General Advisory Committee (GAC), and chair of the weapons subcommittee, Conant—along with Bush and Oppenheimer—was one of the government’s “nuclear oracles,” accorded the highest security clearance and access to the most sensitive defense and national security documents. At the same time, he was head of the Committee on Atomic Energy for the Joint Research and Development Board, coordinating R&D for the army and navy on a continuing peacetime basis, and responsible for reviewing all atomic programs as well as research into other weapons of mass destruction, including biological and radiological warfare. President Truman had awarded him the Medal for Merit, the highest civilian award, and the Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster for military service. He had been made a commander of the Legion d’Honneur by France and an honorary commander of the British Empire by Britain in 1948. The Atlanta Constitution named him first among the “Five Greatest Living Americans” based on his achievements in the field of education and “tremendous contributions to the winning of both our great wars.”
The late 1940s were a period of intense, almost frenetic activity, which Conant pursued with his usual prodigious energy. No longer content with a wholly academic life in Cambridge, he admitted to being drawn to the more exciting and “glamorous” high councils of government, where he could “engage all sorts of enemies in the thickets of Washington.” At the peak of his powers, he brought his enormous self-confidence to bear on the largest conflicts of his day: confronting the nuclear age, cold war competition, the spread of Communism, domestic reactionaries, and class divides. Conceding reluctantly that Russia was not ready for atomic control at the present time, he believed the United States had to build up its nuclear arsenal to maintain the military balance of power, and placed his hopes for the future in a patient foreign policy anchored to the bedrock principles that informed his view of America’s imperial role. To the degree that the United States demonstrated its unique doctrine of equality of opportunity was no mere myth or legend, it might become an “exportable commodity” that could contribute to the stability of the other nations even as it advanced their own democracy along its historic path. “Conant tried to find in the practical world of daily affairs solutions to the deep cleavages in twentieth-century American and European society,” observed historian Samuel Bass Warner Jr. “At the height of his powers, enriched by the experience of being a university president for more than a decade, and now with five years as a national science advisor as well, he rushed from committee to lecture platform to writing desk, trying to ease major public problems.”
Oppenheimer, who had achieved the same Olympian heights and even more outsize fame as the celebrated “Father of the A-bomb,” had not made the transition to the peacetime corridors of power as smoothly. During his first face-to-face interview with Truman, he had failed to hide his conviction that the president had missed his chance to avert nuclear war by not being open with the Russians at Potsdam, and then punctuated his appearance with the bizarre confession “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman had been so infuriated by the remark that he told Acheson, “I never want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,” and even six months later, he was still ranting about the “cry baby scientist.”
Oppenheimer had also succeeded in offending many influential military and government figures with his mournful, quasi-religious remarks after the bombings, only just managing to redeem himself in their eyes with his important contribution to the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. Arrogant and enigmatic, he had a knack for making enemies—chief among them J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI—and was fortunate to still count Conant as a strong ally. The two wartime leaders had forged an unshakable bond, and Conant did not think twice about going to bat for his old friend during the renewed security investigation that followed his appointment as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC, after Conant had ducked the job, citing an already heavy workload.
With anti-Communist sentiments running high in the winter of 1947, the AEC confirmation hearings had been particularly vicious. Senate Republicans had a field day interrogating Truman’s five nominations for the commission leadership, disparaging the scientists’ “leftist” sympathies and “Communist tendencies,” even branding the affable Lilienthal an “appeaser of Russia,” according to the conservative Washington Times-Herald. Conant had been forced to put aside his own personal differences with Lilienthal—who had angered him by criticizing the release of the Smyth Report as the “principal breach of security since the beginning of
the atomic energy project”—and defend him from Tennessee senator Kenneth D. McKellar’s outrageous questions about his Austro-Hungarian parentage, “Americanism,” and “Communist proclivities.” Lilienthal finally won Senate approval on April 9, but the nastiness of his lengthy inquisition had not boded well for Oppenheimer, whose appointment to the GAC put him back in the FBI’s crosshairs.
In early March 1947, just when Lilienthal’s drawn-out ordeal was coming to an end, J. Edgar Hoover had a special messenger deliver a thick file of “derogatory information” about Oppenheimer to the AEC. One of the provisions of the McMahon Act was that all AEC employees who had been cleared to work on the Manhattan Project had to be investigated by the FBI, so agents had reinterviewed dozens of Oppie’s old friends and colleagues and gathered information for a fresh dossier. The file revealed that both Oppenheimer and his brother, Frank, were alleged to be members of the Communist Party, and as both had extensive knowledge of the bomb, this could present a security risk. In addition, it rehashed all the material dug up by the FBI during the war about Kitty Oppenheimer’s radical past, her Communist first husband, and Oppenheimer’s dubious conduct in spending a night in June 1943 with Jean Tatlock, a former lover with a history of Communist sympathies. The most damning piece of information was that sometime in January or February of that year, Oppenheimer had been approached by his leftist friend Haakon Chevalier and asked to leak secret information about the bomb, and that he subsequently gave inconsistent accounts of this exchange in interviews with security officers, while always maintaining that he had refused to pass information. Although Oppenheimer’s statements were at times vague and conflicting, there was no proof of his complicity in any espionage scheme.
On Monday, March 10, Conant, who happened to be in Washington for a meeting on atomic matters at the Pentagon, found the shocked leaders of the fledgling agency in Lilienthal’s office poring over the contents of Oppenheimer’s FBI file. One look at their stony faces told him they had concluded they had to take the allegations seriously. After Lilienthal summarized the findings, Conant told them that he was not especially concerned. Both he and Bush, who had also received an urgent summons, went on to explain that none of the information was new: Oppenheimer’s left-wing tendencies had been known to General Groves at the time of his selection to head the bomb laboratory in the fall of 1942, and the various allegations had been discussed and dismissed then. Both men stressed that Oppenheimer’s “brilliant and driving leadership” and outstanding postwar advisory role had “clearly demonstrated his loyalty,” and that losing him would be a serious setback for the atomic program. Such was Conant’s admiration and affection for his Los Alamos colleague that immediately after the war he had made Oppenheimer a very attractive offer to come to Harvard. He thought the world of him and had been profoundly disappointed when the sought-after physicist chose instead to accept the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, despite Oppie’s fond assurances of his “regret” at not having Conant as his “boss in the times to come.”
The five AEC commissioners were in a quandary about what to do about the FBI material. If word of the dismaying information contained in Oppenheimer’s file made its way back to the Senate committee, the whole confirmation process would be plunged back into the sewer of innuendo and speculation from which they were just emerging. On the other hand, Hoover was clearly concerned enough to bring the report to their attention, even phoning Lilienthal to express the hope he would give personal attention to the matter. The FBI had devoted hours of interviews and untold days of technical surveillance to accumulating the evidence against the controversial Berkeley physicist. At first glance, the AEC members felt there was enough there to “seriously impeach” Oppenheimer’s reputation. They decided they had no choice but to inform the president of the FBI’s suspicions. Truman, who was caught up in the crises in Greece and Turkey, was too preoccupied to meet with them. Instead, he referred them to his White House counsel, Clark Clifford, who, much to their relief, saw no reason to pursue the matter.
To help Oppenheimer’s case, Conant wasted no time marshaling his forces, obtaining statements from Secretary of War Patterson and Groves vouching for the Los Alamos director, and providing his own glowing testimonial:
I can say without hesitation that there can be absolutely no question of Dr. Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Furthermore, I can state categorically that, in my opinion, his attitude about the future course of the United States in matters of high policy is in accordance with the soundest American tradition. He is not sympathetic with the totalitarian regime in Russia, and his attitude toward that nation is, from my point of view, thoroughly sound and hardheaded. Therefore, any rumor Dr. Oppenheimer is sympathetically inclined toward the Communists or toward Russia is an absurdity.
His impassioned championing of Oppenheimer, reaffirmed by Bush and Groves, allowed the physicist to skate through the vetting process. On August 11, 1947, despite weeks of sensational newspaper stories about his brother’s Communist past, the AEC unanimously agreed to approve Oppenheimer for a “Q” clearance granting him access to all of the nation’s atomic secrets.
In the interim, however, Truman announced an onerous federal loyalty program in an effort to deflect Republican accusations of Communist influence in the government. The disclosures of the Russian spy ring in Canada in 1946 had sent twenty people to trial in Ottawa and provided demonstrable proof of Soviet espionage. Forced to act, Truman’s Executive Order 9835 required that all federal employees had to be of “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States” and should be screened for “activities and association” that might be disloyal, including membership in or affiliation with any organization designated as “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive.”
Having scored their first victory, the Republicans continued to use the national anxiety over loyalty and security to hold Truman’s feet to the fire and taunt Democrats for failing to curb Communist infiltration and keep the country’s atomic secret safe. Groves, called before Congress to testify about security practices at the AEC, created a stir by blaming the breaches on an unnamed power and “its misguided and traitorous domestic sympathizers.” While his intention was to discredit civilian control of atomic energy and return it to military control, the resulting furor over secrecy gave new impetus to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations of bomb spies.
Conant’s wartime allegiances did not extend to the increasingly unreasonable Groves, whose persistent challenging of international control and efforts to retain custody of the Manhattan Project’s nuclear arsenal had succeeded in alienating many of his former scientific colleagues. By early 1948, Groves, who had been appointed chief of special weapons as well as the army representative on the Military Liaison Committee, was locked in a bitter feud with David Lilienthal over his stewardship of the AEC, and had allowed his bulldog tenacity to get the better of his judgment. He finally went too far, reportedly leaking documents to Congress that led to the AEC being charged with what the newspapers termed “incredible mismanagement.”
The “Groves situation” had grown sufficiently problematic that Conant was summoned to a meeting in mid-January with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for the purpose of deciding how to dislodge the driven officer. Recognizing the need for change at the top, Conant had earlier written a “Personal and Confidential” letter to Oppenheimer plainly stating that the only way to end the internal strife and create an efficient, well-run weapons bureaucracy was to push aside Groves, asking for anonymity from everyone considering the “drastic nature of the proposals in so far as personalities are concerned.” In the course of their four-hour meeting with the defense secretary, Conant, Bush, and Oppenheimer debated the awkward business of relieving someone of such colossal stature, but all three insisted that “Groves must get out.”
The general, who knew his days in the army were numbered, saved them the ordeal of a head-on confrontation by announcing his intention t
o retire. From Conant’s point of view, it was the best outcome—no one, not even Groves, could be allowed to impede the proper functioning of the nation’s atomic energy program. In the years that followed, he continued to speak highly of the general’s oversight of the Manhattan Project, and the two remained on friendly terms.
Right to the end, Groves remained convinced the Russians were still as much as twenty years away from an atomic bomb, telling a reporter at his last press conference in February 1948 that he was “not a bit worried.” Conant was not willing to bank on that “military insurance.” Twice in the past year, the country had been on the brink of war, despite its nuclear hegemony. Moreover, the inevitability of a Soviet bomb meant that America’s atomic monopoly was rapidly disappearing, “like a cake of ice on a hot sunny day.” Groves had been unwavering in his advocacy of more, bigger, and better bombs, and while Conant would not miss him, he wished that American policy makers, conflicted about whether to emphasize military action or deterrence, would evolve as clear and consistent a position on atomic warfare. He worried that the United States’ military strategy was increasingly reliant on the atomic blitz, and what he saw as a dangerous—and potentially disastrous—tendency to want to capitalize on the country’s short-term advantage.
Returning to the National War College that fall, Conant spoke out against the right-wing “preventive war” movement—the “Let’s smash ’em now before they’re ready” chorus—which wanted to rush into war with the Soviets while they were still unable to respond in kind. Some of the country’s most renowned government officials and military leaders—Generals LeMay and Spaatz were among the most vocal proponents—were pressing for a preemptive attack against the Soviet Union, insisting that the one sure way to prevent nuclear war was to strike the first blow and overcome the enemy arsenal before it was launched. Even William Laurence, the respected science writer for the New York Times, wanted to force the Soviets to accept nuclear disarmament through an ultimatum, and if they rejected the American demand, “their nuclear plants should be destroyed before bombs could be produced.” Conant dissented strongly, arguing that such a panicked approach would lead us to “develop a Machiavellian foreign policy culminating in our launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union or declaring war for the sole purpose of waging destruction which would negate the very premise on which our culture rests.”
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