Upon returning from England Oppenheimer found a message to call Admiral Strauss. Strauss urged him to come to the capital at once; the matter was pressing and couldn’t be discussed over the telephone. On the afternoon of December 21 the scientist entered the AEC’s gleaming marble building on Constitution Avenue, and in room 236, the admiral’s large, paneled office, he found Strauss in conference with Major General Kenneth D. Nichols, the commission’s general manager. They asked him to join them at a conference table. There, after an exchange of pleasantries and news of mutual friends, Strauss told Oppenheimer, as gracefully as you can tell a man such a thing, that he was suspected of treason. Eisenhower’s directive was explained to him, and then the possibility of a graceful exit was discussed. Oppenheimer refused to take it.
On Christmas Eve a special indignity was visited upon him. Security men from the AEC arrived in Princeton to confiscate all classified material in his possession. The hearing was then scheduled for April. Reston knew of it. He intended to publish nothing until a decision had been reached, but since McCarthy was planning to announce it in the Senate to claim that he had forced the administration’s hand, Reston went ahead. The news was sensational, and the determination to avoid further sensationalism gave the subsequent hearing a furtive air. The sessions, closed to the press and public, were held in temporary building T-3, a shabby relic of OPA’s wartime bureaucracy. To hoodwink any reporters who might learn of the location, Oppenheimer used a back door. The trial—for that is what it amounted to—was held in T-3’s room 2022, a 24- by 12-foot office which had been converted to its temporary purpose by an arrangement of tables, chairs, and a seedy old leather couch. Oppenheimer used the couch; afterward a participant would recall that the scientist “leaned back lazily, sometimes as though his thoughts were elsewhere, on the sofa which had been turned into a dock for the occasion.”
A bench had been set up at the opposite end of the room. There sat Oppenheimer’s judges: Gordon Gray; Thomas A. Morgan, a retired industrialist; and Ward V. Evans, emeritus professor of chemistry at Northwestern. The AEC was represented by Robert Robb, counsel to its Personnel Security Board. Robb contributed to the inquisitional aura by adopting the abrasive manner of a prosecuting attorney. His attitude toward Oppenheimer was one of contempt. A stranger entering room 2022 would never have guessed that the man under interrogation had been director of the laboratory that had perfected the atomic bomb. Robb used all the time-worn trial tricks, including keeping the sunlight in the defendant’s eyes by putting his own back to a window. The 992-page transcript of the hearings bristles with his disdain.
Periodically Oppenheimer’s disembodied voice would be heard over a portable public address system—recordings of wartime G-2 telephone taps which had been made without his consent or even knowledge. It was humiliating; at times it was almost unbelievable. When André Malraux read the record of the proceedings he expressed astonishment that Oppenheimer, who after all was a free man, had remained to hear Robb’s studied insults. Malraux said, “He ought to have stood up and shouted, ‘Gentlemen, I am the atomic bomb.’” But Oppenheimer was too diffident, too introverted for that, and he had suffered much brooding over the destruction of Hiroshima; he felt, as he told a friend, that “We did the devil’s work.”
After taking testimony from forty witnesses, the tribunal retired to write its opinion. The allegation that Oppenheimer had been an enemy agent was rejected: “We have given particular attention to the question of his loyalty and we have come to the clear conclusion, which should be reassuring to the people of this country, that he is a loyal citizen.” Indeed, the panel observed, “It must be said that Dr. Oppenheimer seems to have had a high degree of discretion reflecting an unusual ability to keep to himself vital secrets.” Evans, the only scientist on the tribunal, wanted to restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance, but Gray and Morgan wouldn’t go that far. They didn’t like some of Oppenheimer’s friends. It was their opinion that his “associations have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system.” Then there was his troubling lack of enthusiasm for the superbomb:
We find his conduct in the hydrogen bomb program sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt as to whether his future participation, if characterized by the same attitudes in a government program relating to the national defense, would be clearly consistent with the best interests of security.
Oppenheimer appealed the two-to-one decision to the AEC, which upheld it in a four-to-one vote. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth urged the others to see that Oppenheimer’s “loyalty and trustworthiness emerge clearly,” that in the light of his distinguished attainments “his services could be of great value to the country in the future,” and that “the security system has… neither the responsibility nor the right to dictate every detail of a man’s life.” But it was precisely there that the others parted company with him; a man of great achievements might be forgiven much, and the commissioners were less rigid than the Gray board in passing judgment on Oppenheimer’s mixed feelings about thermonuclear weapons, but failure to repudiate friends and relatives with unorthodox political persuasions could not be overlooked.
Ironically, the effect of purging Oppenheimer was the exact opposite of what his enemies had intended. In martyrdom he acquired new stature. Teller, on the other hand, became something of an outcast. The plotters had expected him to become the new wise man of nuclear physics. Instead he was ostracized. The only established scientist who had spoken against Oppenheimer, he was looked upon as an FBI informer, a turncoat who had betrayed both a fellow scientist and science itself. At scientific meetings he was snubbed by the others; when he protested they walked away. Eventually he came to be tolerated, but he was never really trusted again; in panel discussions and conversations his fellow physicists were formal and guarded. He appealed to Enrico Fermi, now near death, and the great Italian scientist supported him in an article in the magazine Science, but to Teller’s critics this was just one more breach of ethics. They put him down as a publicity seeker and continued to ignore him. In the world of science his Dr. Strangelove image had already formed.
Meantime the human condition which would be symbolized by Strangelove had been brought into focus by a chance wind in the western Pacific Ocean, giving Americans a brief but terrible glimpse of what they were doing to themselves and to the world. On March 1, when Robb was preparing his case against Oppenheimer, the AEC had exploded its second hydrogen bomb on Bikini atoll, just east of Eniwetok. Outstripping all expectations, it ripped open the coral reef with a force of some 18 million to 22 million tons of TNT—the equivalent of 900 to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Then the wind picked up the fallout. Meteorologists had predicted a stiff breeze to the north. Instead, it blew southward until, 120 miles from Bikini and far from the danger zone marked by the bomb testers, it dropped clouds of radioactive dust on a Japanese trawler grimly misnamed the Lucky Dragon No. 5. The startled Japanese fishermen at first thought themselves to be in the world’s first tropical snowstorm. By the time they reached their home port of Yaizu, the ghastly truth had begun to emerge. All twenty-three of them were sick and had to be hospitalized. Subsequently one, the wireless operator, died. Meanwhile sensitive devices had picked up traces of radioactivity from rainfall in Japan, Australia, the United States, Europe, and even in the oil in airliners which had been flying over India.
This brought new term to the vocabulary of death: strontium 90, or radiostrontium, a heavy radioactive isotope of strontium with a half-life of 25 years. That was what had been in the lethal blizzard which had struck the Lucky Dragon No. 5. Deposited in the bones, like calcium, and combined with radioactive iodine, which had been discovered in the thyroid glands of the fishermen, strontium 90 was a cause of cancer. It was further believed to threaten posterity, though its impact there could not be measured for several generations. Admiral Strauss called the scientists who warned of these dangers, “appeasers” and “alarmists.” He dispatched his own teams of technicians around the
world, and their findings appeared to justify his name for the project, “Operation Sunshine.” Other investigators were gloomy. A. H. Sturtevant, emeritus professor of biology at Cal Tech, said that “the bombs already exploded will ultimately result in the production of numerous defective individuals.” Curt Stern, professor of genetics at Berkeley, said, “By now everyone in the world harbors in his body small amounts of radioactivity from past H-bomb tests,” and physicist Ralph Lapp, a consultant for the Bikini tests and head of the Office of Naval Research nuclear branch, predicted that at some time in the 1970s the buildup of radioactive material in the stratosphere would exceed the maximum permissible amount and begin to affect the health of everyone on earth.
At the distance of twenty years this issue may seem to transcend all others of that spring—the uproar over the Bricker amendment, the crisis in Indochina, the fall of Oppenheimer—but at the time it, like them, was overshadowed by a question so absurd, so petty, so devoid of significance or even seriousness as to cast grave doubts upon the ability of democratic institutions to survive the challenges of the second half of the twentieth century. Incredible as it seems now, for thirty-five days the nation was engrossed in a dispute which began as a quarrel over who had granted a routine promotion, from captain to major, to a left-wing Army dentist named Irving Peress.
***
“Who promoted Peress?” Senator McCarthy demanded over and over. He never found out, and the truth is that he wasn’t much interested. Peress merely gave him an excuse to wade into the Army. Actually the dentist’s majority had come to him not because any of his superiors approved it, but because he was entitled to it under automatic provisions of the Doctor Draft Law, a measure meant to correlate military pay with civilian earnings—and one which McCarthy had approved. Peress had entered the Army in October 1952. He received his bronze oak leaves a year later. Next it developed that he had belonged to the American Labor Party, then tantamount to being a Communist. In testifying before McCarthy’s subcommittee at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, on January 30, 1954, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. The Office of the Adjutant General had already instructed the First Army to discharge him, and three days later it did, but that wasn’t good enough for the junior senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy thought the Army should have court-martialed Peress. He took its failure to do so as proof that Communists had infiltrated the Department of the Army, a situation which he meant to remedy by his investigative powers.
McCarthyologists reasoned that there must be more to it than that, and in fact there was much more. To be sure, as a nihilist Joe McCarthy was opposed to the Army for no better reason than that it represented established authority. His first appearance as a Washington mischief-maker, predating his discovery of Communism, had pitted him against the Army. During the Battle of the Bulge seventy-three SS troopers had murdered 150 captured American GIs at Malmedy. After the war they had been sentenced to death, and in 1949 Joe had taken up the SS cause. The furor had brought the senator the sort of headlines he craved (MCCARTHY HITS BRUTALITY; MCCARTHY HINTS AT MYSTERY WITNESS; MCCARTHY CHARGES WHITEWASH). The Germans’ lives had been spared, and nothing that had happened since then suggested that he would be reluctant to take on the Pentagon again. Yet he bore it no grudge. There was no conflict between his interests and the Army’s. In early 1954 he had stronger motives for attacking other institutions. The decision to attack the Army was not really his; it was made for him by two remarkable young men, two members of McCarthy’s staff who might be called the Leopold and Loeb of the 1950s. Their names were Roy M. Cohn and G. David Schine.
Cohn typified young political militants of his generation, just as Mario Savio and Mark Rudd would later typify theirs. Short, dark, insensitive, and haughty, he also possessed a photographic memory. His drooping eyelids and his curiously sensual mouth gave him a sullen, vulpine expression. Like McCarthy, he loved a quarrel for its own sake. The fact that Cohn always kept his dark hair combed was just about the only sign that he came from a good family. His father—a Democrat—was a judge in the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court. Roy’s mother worshipped him. Once in his childhood, when he was invited on an excursion to be supervised by the father of one of his friends, the father had a phone call from Mrs. Cohn. She said, “You’re in for a great treat. Roy’s going with you. He’s such a smart boy and knows so much about so many things. I’m sure you’ll get a lot of pleasure out of him and probably learn a lot from him, too.”
Certainly he was precocious. At twenty he was graduated from Columbia Law School; he had to loiter around Manhattan waiting to turn twenty-one before he could be admitted to the bar. On that day he was sworn in as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. He became a specialist in what was called subversive activities, working on, among other cases, the Remington and Rosenberg trials. At twenty-three he was an inside source for Walter Winchell and George Sokolsky, and while he was scratching their backs, they scratched his with flattering references which gave him a start on his next goal: appointment as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General James McGranery. He reached it in September 1952. Cohn’s first day in Washington was a portent: he was sworn in McGranery’s private office, although no new oath was necessary; he held a press conference to announce his duties but forgot to reveal his title, held a second press conference to correct the oversight, demanded a private cable address and a private telephone line to his former boss in New York, and was turned down both times but somehow managed to have three other junior lawyers evicted from the office they shared so that it could become his private office. In December he prepared the indictment which charged Owen Lattimore with perjury. That case collapsed, but by then Cohn didn’t care; on January 14, 1953, he had resigned from the Justice Department to become chief counsel for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee.
Schine was the sleeker of the two, a fair, languid youth with the face and physique of a fledgling Greek god. Born to wealth, he was a graduate of Andover and Harvard, ’49. In Cambridge he had been conspicuous for his valet and his big black convertible with a two-way phone-radio. The Harvard Crimson took note of his way of arriving at parties:
This consisted of phoning from his car and saying, “This is G. David Schine. I’m now driving through Copley Square. Could you direct me a little further,” and then later, “This is G. David Schine. I’m now at Kenmore Square. Could you give me more directions please.”
Like Cohn, he became interested in Communism. In school he wrote a paper about it which he afterward published as a six-page pamphlet, Definition of Communism. After Schine became famous Time called it “remarkably succinct.” The New Yorker, more critical, reported that “It puts the Russian Revolution, the founding of the Communist Party, and the start of the First Five Year Plan in years when these things did not happen. It gives Lenin the wrong first name. It confuses Stalin with Trotsky. It confuses Marx with Lenin. It confuses Alexander Kerensky with Prince Lvov. It confuses fifteenth-century Utopianism with twentieth-century Marxism.” By then copies of it had become extremely rare, but when it first appeared, Definition of Communism could be found beside the Gideon Bible in every Schine hotel—the Roney Plaza in Miami Beach, the Ten Eyck in Albany, the Ambassador in Los Angeles, the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City, and the Boca Raton in Boca Raton. One guest who read it with pleasure was a certain Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, the director of something called the American Jewish League Against Communism. Rabbi Schultz sought Schine out and introduced him to George Sokolsky. Through Sokolsky, Schine met Cohn, and through Cohn he met McCarthy.
Putting a multimillionaire on the subcommittee payroll would have been ridiculous. Besides, Schine didn’t have any qualifications, as the word is understood on Capitol Hill. Early in 1953 Cohn persuaded McCarthy to appoint his new friend chief consultant on psychological warfare. There was no such position. Cohn made it up. Schine was delighted to serve without pay. In New York the two young men set up temporary headquarters in the Waldorf Towers, where Schine had a permane
nt suite, and there they planned an ingenious investigation of the Voice of America. Voice employees were quietly urged to put the finger on fellow workers with odd ideas or habits—it was these informants McCarthy had in mind when he talked of his “Loyal American Underground”—and after televised hearings under klieg lights there was general agreement in the press that the Senator’s exuberant protégé had demoralized the Voice program. Cohn and Schine were still only twenty-six. There was no limit to how far they might go.
They flew to Europe, surfacing in Paris on Easter Sunday, April 4. Eighteen days of madness followed: in-and-out trips to European capitals during which they strutted and posed for the press and exercised, to the greatest possible degree, their rights and prerogatives as representatives of the U.S. Congress. And wherever they went they were trailed by a gleeful corps of correspondents who chanted:
Positively, Mr. Cohn!
Absolutely, Mr. Schine!
Or sang:
Oh, the Cohn Schines east!
The Cohn Schines west!
McCarthy knows
Where the Cohn Schines best!
By late 1953 McCarthy’s hostility toward the White House was apparent to all around him. Two days before Thanksgiving he made it public. In a November 16 broadcast Harry Truman had referred scathingly to “McCarthyism.” Joe had demanded equal time to reply. Like the administration, the networks were trying desperately to appease him, and the request was granted. But after the first few minutes the senator turned his wrath from Truman to Eisenhower. At a press conference the week before Ike had said he didn’t know what McCarthyism meant. He would soon find out, Joe said ominously. Ike had also expressed confidence in his ability to rid the government of security risks; in next year’s congressional elections, he said, the issue would be a dead one. Far from it, the senator told his radio and television audience. The “raw, harsh, unpleasant fact” was that “Communism is an issue and will be an issue in 1954.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 105