by Craig Nelson
In 1947, after Oppenheimer was named chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee, the FBI turned over the twelve-pound file of its surveillance to the AEC. Some of the agency’s new board members went through these documents and became so alarmed they went to meet directly with J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover said he was convinced that Oppenheimer had turned away from communism and was worthy of a security clearance . . . but the same assurances could not be made for his brother, Frank. Even so, for eight years after World War II, the FBI, at the personal insistence of Hoover, generated another eight thousand pages or so from its spying on J. Robert Oppenheimer.
On June 7, 1949, Oppie appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and so charmed the congressmen that they all rose from their seats at the end of the session to shake his hand. Two days later, he testified before Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which was deciding whether the AEC should allow the export of radioisotopes to foreign nations. The sole AEC commissioner who thought this was a peril was the balding, moon-faced Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss—financier at Kuhn, Loeb, aide-de-camp to President Herbert Hoover, “troubleshooter” for Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, cobalt experimenter with Leo Szilard, and board member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. In testimony employing his patented withering, Oppenheimer showed Strauss to be a fool: “No man can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and in my knowledge no part at all.” David Lilienthal remembered Strauss’s reaction: “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.”
Physicist Max Born said that Oppenheimer “was a man of great talent, and he was conscious of his superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble. . . . Vast insecurities lay forever barely hidden beneath his charismatic exterior, whence came an arrogance and occasional cruelty befitting neither his age nor his stature.” Lewis Strauss was apparently just the kind of man who brought out Robert’s arrogance, and cruelty. The year before, Oppenheimer had politically maneuvered to keep Strauss from getting a stronger leadership position at Princeton. The year after, in 1950, at Strauss’s fifty-fourth birthday party, when the financier tried to introduce his children to the father of the atomic bomb, the physicist snubbed them. Strauss had a global reputation for being ruthless and vindictive, which Oppenheimer was possibly unaware of, and his great achievement with Trinity and the resulting public hubbub perhaps inspired him to feel invincible. But such behavior explains why Oppenheimer wasn’t a wholly innocent bystander—or was, at the very least, suffering from a classic level of hubris—in the drama that would end with his public martyrdom.
During this period, Edward Teller wanted to create a Super measured in megatons, not kilotons, and so did nothing further with his workable Alarm Clock fusion bomb design. Instead, his attempt to make the ultimate thermonuclear weapon, pre-Ulam, was going nowhere, and on top of feeling like a failure, Teller interpreted the lack of support of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee and its chief, Oppenheimer, as a brutal rejection. In the spring of 1952, Teller repeatedly went to the Albuquerque FBI office with such information as that “[Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered development of H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds.” Oppenheimer’s opposition, Teller thought, was not due to any subversive intent “but rather to [a] combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on A-bomb done better on H-bomb, and also because he does not feel H-bomb is politically desirable. Teller also feels [Oppenheimer has] never gotten over the shock of first A-bomb being dropped. . . . A lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-bomb on direct orders from Moscow. Teller states he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of H-bomb.”
At an interview with AEC public information officer Charter Heslep, “Teller feels deeply that [Oppenheimer’s] ‘unfrocking’ must be done or else—regardless of the outcome of the current hearings—scientists may lose their enthusiasm for the [nuclear weapons] program,” and Teller told the Joint Committee on Atomic Affairs that “were Robert, by any chance found to be disloyal (in the sense of transmitting information) he could of course do more damage to the program than any other single individual in the country.”
In an aria of threat inflation, Teller then told Lewis Strauss that the Soviets were rapidly moving forward with implosion research and that, any day now, the United States would cede nuclear superiority to Moscow. This news enraged and terrified Strauss. Strauss told Teller that Oppenheimer “had been instrumental in bringing to Los Alamos a number of men known to him to be Communists. It would be reasonable to suppose that they were doing what Fuchs and others did, viz., passing on to the Soviets everything they could discover. Oppenheimer’s later decision, therefore, to do what he could to prevent the United States from developing the Super [meaning the various times he had voted against Teller along with the rest of the AEC’s committee] was a decision reached in the knowledge that such weapon data as we then had were in the hands of men whose leaning to the Soviets he knew. Consequently, if he had been able to block the development of the weapon by the United States, its denial to the Russians was beyond his control. It is hardly conceivable that the consequences of such a condition could have been overlooked by a mind as agile as his.”
In a speech given on February 17, 1953, Oppenheimer insisted that government secrecy about nuclear science and weapons did not protect anyone; instead, it led to ignorance, fear, magical thinking, gossip, and paranoia, so that “we may anticipate a state of affairs in which the two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. . . . We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” Here was the Atomic Age’s creator, the most famous scientist in America after Einstein, calling defense policy ignorant and foolish. Eisenhower was nearly alone in Washington in thinking that candor was a good suggestion and the scorpions a good analogy; others thought the speech treasonous and insane.
To those arrayed against Oppenheimer, there had to be a pattern, there had to be meaning. Why was it that the man at the very center of the nation’s atomic weaponry program opposed the ultimate hydrogen bomb, argued against the air force’s nuclear-powered bombers, and called civilian nuclear power plants “a dangerous engineering undertaking. I was astonished to know that many people were wishing for this proving ground in their state”? Suffering from what is today called conspiracism, some of the capital’s elite began to wonder, was the great hero of Los Alamos actually a traitor, secretly working for the Soviets to ensure they would win the arms race?
On May 25, 1953, when Eisenhower asked Lewis Strauss to replace Gordon Dean as AEC chairman, he accepted on the condition that Oppenheimer would no longer be “connected in any way” to the agency. After Strauss was sworn in, however, the president said, “Lewis, let us be certain about this. My chief concern and your first assignment is to find some new approach to the disarming of atomic energy. . . . The world simply must not go on living in fear of the terrible consequences of nuclear war.” To the new chief of the AEC, this liberal directive was more evidence of Oppenheimer’s demonic and treasonous influence within the highest levels of Washington.
Lewis Strauss began meeting secretly with the twenty-eight-year-old, square-jawed, all-American William Borden—executive director of Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who, while a student at Yale, had written a nuclear horror fantasy, There Will Be No Time—to amass evidence against Oppenheimer. Strauss arranged for the FBI to dramaticall
y increase its Oppenheimer surveillance, bugging and wiretapping Oppie’s home, his Princeton office, and even his lawyer’s office, such a breach that the FBI Newark supervisor wrote to headquarters questioning the phone taps’ legality, “in view of the fact that [the taps] might disclose attorney-client relations.” Washington responded that it was fine to record Oppenheimer’s conversations with his attorneys since, at any moment, he might defect to Moscow. Strauss then ensured that the resulting transcripts were set to a security clearance higher than that held by Oppenheimer, so that only Strauss and his allies would have access to them.
When Strauss presented excerpts of the transcripts along with Borden’s research to various government agency chiefs, Hoover was unimpressed, the secretary of defense was alarmed, and the president thought it all material that had been gone over before and cleared up by army intelligence. Still, Eisenhower worried: “The truth is that no matter now what could or should be done, if this man is really a disloyal citizen, then the damage he can do now as compared to what he has done in the past is like comparing a grain of sand to an ocean beach. It would not be a case of merely locking the stable door after the horse is gone; it would be more like trying to find a door for a burned-down stable.”
On December 21, 1953, Strauss informed Oppenheimer that his AEC security clearance would have to be reviewed, presented him with a list of accusations, and asked if he would like to gracefully resign. The exceedingly proud Oppenheimer did not want to quietly exit from his life’s work and tried to get Strauss to fire him. Neither would accede. Later Oppenheimer wrote Strauss, “I have thought most earnestly of [resignation]. Under the circumstances, this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this Government that I have now served for some twelve years. This I cannot do.” When Isidor Rabi then told Strauss that the whole of the General Advisory Committee would testify on behalf of Oppenheimer, Strauss said that he considered that nothing less than blackmail. An FBI report said that Strauss “felt that if this case is lost, the atomic energy program and all research and development connected thereto will fall into the hands of ‘left-wingers.’ If this occurs, it will mean another ‘Pearl Harbor’ as far as atomic energy is concerned. Strauss feels that the scientists will then take over the entire program. Strauss stated that if Oppenheimer is cleared, then ‘anyone’ can be cleared regardless of the information against them.”
Valentine Telegdi: “The day the Oppenheimer case broke, we were having lunch with Fermi at the Quadrangle Club. He said, ‘What a pity that they took him and not some nice guy, like Bethe. Now we have to all be on Oppenheimer’s side!’ ” Einstein told Oppenheimer that he “had no obligation to subject himself to the witch hunt, that he had served his country well, and that if this was the reward that she offers, he should turn his back on her,” and told Abraham Pais, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.”
At the beginning of April 1954, American newspaper headlines were dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations that secret Communist agents employed by the federal government had stifled for eighteen months “our research on the hydrogen bomb.” Then on April 12, in World War II barracks converted to AEC Building T-3, with a table for the security inquisitors, two more for the defense team, a chair for the witnesses, and a couch for the victim, the inquiry known as “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” began.
On the very first morning AEC attorney Roger Robb, using FBI and army documents the defendant and his attorneys were not allowed to see, caught Oppenheimer in a series of contradictions about Los Alamos events from ten years before. “I felt sick,” Robb said. “That night when I came home, I told my wife, ‘I’ve just seen a man destroy himself.’ ”
The story was fairly straightforward. In 1942, the Soviet consulate had asked British engineer George Eltenton to contact Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez for any information on atomic bomb research at the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory. Eltenton may have asked Oppenheimer’s friend Haakon Chevalier to talk to Robert or to Frank Oppenheimer. Nothing more happened, until Oppenheimer started working at Los Alamos and began to wonder if Eltenton constituted a material threat. He wanted army security to be aware of these entreaties, but did not want to implicate his friend Chevalier or, more importantly, his brother, Frank. So Oppenheimer told one version of these events in 1943, and a different one in 1946, but he told the truth to Leslie Groves, who kept the matter quiet until “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” when Groves testified, “There was an approach made, that Dr. Oppenheimer knew of this approach, that at some point he was involved, in that the approach was made to him—I don’t mean involved in the sense that he gave anything—I mean he just knew about it personally from the fact that he was in the chain, and that he didn’t report it in its entirety as he should have done. . . . [He] was doing what he thought was essential, which was to disclose to me the dangers of this particular attempt to enter the project. . . . It was always my impression that he wanted to protect his brother, and that his brother might be involved in having been in this chain, and that his brother didn’t behave quite as he should have, or if he did, [Robert Oppenheimer] didn’t even want to have the finger of suspicion pointed at his brother, because he always felt a natural loyalty to him and had [a] protective attitude toward him.” Robb was able to prod Groves into admitting that, under the agency’s more stringent rules, for this fibbing, Oppenheimer did not now deserve a security clearance.
The vast majority of the hearings were then spent analyzing Robert’s years of opposition to the hydrogen bomb—before he declared the Teller-Ulam design “sweet” and encouraged its development—and whether that opposition meant he was a traitor to the United States. Rabi, Conant, Bethe, Bush, Groves, and even von Neumann all testified to his loyalty, and to his character. Like Teller, childhood friend Ernest Lawrence had turned on Robert, infuriated that he had opposed the Super, opposed creating the Livermore lab, and had conducted a love affair with the wife of a mutual friend. Lawrence agreed to testify against clearance, but felt too ill with colitis to attend and so provided a transcript saying that a man with such a poor moral sense should obviously not have influence over defense policy.
On April 28 at 4:00 p.m., Edward Teller took the stand. After talking over Oppenheimer’s many faults ad nauseam with Lawrence and Alvarez and seeing the damning FBI and army intelligence materials about Haakon Chevalier, it’s clear that Teller believed he was following his conscience by testifying. Freeman Dyson: “Teller thought Oppenheimer was somehow a Machiavelli who had far more influence than he really had in the real world. And Teller must have had, somehow, the feeling that if he could once destroy Oppenheimer’s political power, that somehow things would be all right.” At this moment in history, any number of Americans in Washington were fearfully trying to save the world in their own fashion, perhaps no one with as much fervor as Edward. But Teller couldn’t save Teller from Teller:
Q. Is it your intention in anything that you are about to testify to, to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States?
A. I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume, that he is loyal to the United States.
Q. Now, a question which is the corollary of that. Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?
A. In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him on numerous issues, and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust
more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
Q. I would then like to ask you this question: Do you feel that it would endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Dr. Oppenheimer?
A. I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr. Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance. If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.
After Edward finished his testimony, he shook Robert’s hand and murmured, “I’m sorry.” Oppie replied, “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean.”
For J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Teller damnation would in the long run mean little, since Lewis Strauss was clearly determined Oppenheimer would not get his needed security clearance. A decade later, Oppie would tell the Washington Post: “The whole damn thing was a farce.” But for Edward Teller, this moment would make of him a pariah in the scientific community. His colleagues in nuclear physics were enraged, not just because of loyalties to Oppenheimer or because Teller was such a remarkably difficult character to work with, but because if anyone was responsible for delaying the progress of thermonuclear research, it was not Robert Oppenheimer, but Edward Teller. His Alarm Clock was ready to move forward, but he was so insistent on achieving megatons of destruction that he only pursued the most extreme version of the Bomb, the design that required Stan Ulam’s intervention. The eighteen-month delay that so riled up Joe McCarthy and Lewis Strauss was entirely Edward Teller’s doing.