Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  When Peters displayed an interest in physics, Oppie encouraged him to take a course in the subject at Berkeley. He proved to be a talented student and, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, Robert got him enrolled in Berkeley’s physics graduate program. Peters soon became Oppenheimer’s designated note-taker in his course on quantum mechanics and wrote his thesis under Oppie’s supervision. Not surprisingly, Oppie and Jean Tatlock frequently socialized with Hannah and Bernard Peters. Although the couple always insisted that they never joined the Communist Party, their politics were clearly left-wing. By 1940 Hannah had a private practice in a poverty-stricken district of downtown Oakland, and this experience “strengthened a conviction that had been growing for some years, namely that adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.” Hannah also insisted on racial integration in her practice, accepting black patients at a time when few other white physicians did so. Both views stamped her as a radical—and the FBI concluded that she was a member of the CP.

  All these new friends drew Oppenheimer into their world of political activism. On the other hand, it would be wrong to suggest that Tatlock and her circle were solely responsible for his political awakening. Sometime around 1935, Oppenheimer’s father lent him a copy of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, a rosy description of the Soviet state written by the well-known British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He was favorably impressed by what it said about the Soviet experiment.

  In the summer of 1936, Oppenheimer is said to have taken all three volumes of the German-language edition of Das Kapital with him on a three-day train trip to New York City. As his friends tell the story, by the time he arrived in New York, he had read the three volumes cover to cover. In fact, his exposure to Marx occurred several years earlier, probably in the spring of 1932. His friend Harold Cherniss remembered Oppie visiting him in Ithaca, New York, that spring and boasting that he had read Das Kapital. Cherniss just laughed; he didn’t think of Oppie as political, but he knew his friend read widely: “I suppose somewhere someone said to him, ‘You don’t know about this? You haven’t seen it?’ So he got this wretched book and read it!”

  Though they had yet to be introduced, Haakon Chevalier knew of Oppenheimer by reputation—and it was not for his work in physics. In July 1937 Chevalier noted in his diary a remark by a mutual friend that Oppenheimer had bought and read the complete works of Lenin. Chevalier, impressed, commented that this would make Oppenheimer “better read than most party members.” Although Chevalier considered himself a relatively sophisticated Marxist, he had never plowed through Das Kapital.

  Born in 1901 in Lakewood, New Jersey, Haakon Chevalier might nevertheless easily have been mistaken for an expatriate. His father was French and his mother had been born in Norway. “Hoke,” as his friends called him, spent parts of his early childhood in Paris and Oslo; consequently, he spoke fluent French and Norwegian. But his parents brought him back to America in 1913, and he finished high school in Santa Barbara, California. He studied at both Stanford and Berkeley, but interrupted his college studies in 1920 to spend eleven months working as a seaman aboard a merchant ship sailing between San Francisco and Cape Town. After this adventure, Chevalier returned to Berkeley and received his doctorate in Romance languages in 1929, specializing in French literature.

  Six feet one inch tall, with blue eyes and wavy brown hair, Hoke cut a debonair figure as a young man. In 1922, he married Ruth Walsworth Bosley—but divorced her on grounds of desertion in 1930, and a year later married Barbara Ethel Lansburgh, twenty-four, one of his Berkeley students. The blond, green-eyed Lansburgh came from a wealthy family and owned a stunning redwood seaside home at Stinson Beach, twenty miles north of San Francisco. “He was a terribly charismatic teacher,” recalled their daughter Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff. “That drew her to him.”

  In 1932, Chevalier published his first book, a biography of Anatole France. That same year, he began writing book reviews and essays for the left-leaning New Republic and Nation magazines. By the mid-1930s, he had become a fixture on the Berkeley campus, teaching French and opening his rambling redwood home on Chabot Road in Oakland to an eclectic collection of students, artists, political activists and visiting writers such as Edmund Wilson, Lillian Hellman and Lincoln Steffens. Frequently partying late into the night, Chevalier was so often tardy to his morning classes that his department finally barred him from teaching in the morning.

  An ambitious intellectual, Chevalier was also politically active. He joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the Teachers’ Union, the Inter-Professional Association and the Consumer’s Union. He became a friend and supporter of Caroline Decker, a leader of the California Cannery and Agricultural Workers, a radical union representing Mexican-American farm laborers. In the spring of 1935, the Berkeley campus mobilized to protest the expulsion of a student who had offended university authorities by advertising his communist affiliations. The meeting held to protest this expulsion was then broken up by the football team, egged on by the coach. According to one account, only one faculty member—Haakon Chevalier—“gave shelter and moral support to the trailed [sic] and terrorized students.”

  In 1933, Chevalier had visited France, where he managed to meet such left-wing literary figures as André Gide, André Malraux and Henri Barbusse. He returned to California convinced that he was destined “to witness the transition from a society based on the pursuit of profit and the exploitation of man by man to a society based on production for use and on human cooperation.”

  By 1934, he had translated André Malraux’s acclaimed novel of the Chinese uprising of 1927, La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) and his Le Temps du Mépris (The Time of Contempt), novels inspired by what Chevalier thought of as “the new vision of man.”

  As for so many on the left, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was a turning point for Chevalier. In July 1936, right-wing factions in the Spanish army rose against the democratically elected left-wing government in Madrid. Led by General Francisco Franco, the fascist rebels expected to overthrow the Republic within weeks. But popular resistance was tenacious, and a brutal civil war ensued. The United States and the European democracies, suspicious of communist influence in the Spanish government, and encouraged by the Catholic Church, declared an arms embargo against both sides. This handed a distinct advantage to the fascists, who received generous aid from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Only the Soviet Union aided the besieged Republican government. In addition, volunteers from around the world, mostly communists but also other leftists, joined international brigades to defend the Republic. During the years 1936–39, the defense of the Spanish Republic was the cause célèbre in liberal circles everywhere. Over these years, some 2,800 Americans volunteered to fight the fascists by joining the communist-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

  In the spring of 1937, Chevalier accompanied Malraux on a tour through California. Recently wounded in the Spanish Civil War, Malraux was promoting his novels and fundraising on behalf of the Spanish Medical Bureau, a group that sent medical aid to the Republic. For Chevalier, Malraux personified the serious intellectual who was also politically committed.

  By 1937, all the evidence indicates, Chevalier was committed to the Communist Party. His 1965 memoir, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, is remarkably forthcoming in describing his political outlook in the 1930s. But even then, writing eleven years after the high point of McCarthyism had passed, he thought it prudent to be vague about the critical question of Party membership. The late 1930s, he wrote, were “a time of innocence. . . . We were animated by a candid faith in the efficiency of reason and persuasion, in the operation of democratic processes and in the ultimate triumph of justice.” Like-minded men such as Oppenheimer, he wrote, believed that abroad the Spanish Republic would triumph over the winds of fascist Europe, and at home, the reforms of the New Deal were clearing the way for a new social compact based on racial and class equality. Many i
ntellectuals had such hopes—but some also joined the Communist Party.

  By the time Oppenheimer met him, Chevalier was a committed Marxist intellectual, probably a Party member and, quite likely, a respected though informal adviser to Party officials in San Francisco. Over the years, he had seen Oppenheimer from a distance, spotting him at the Faculty Club and elsewhere on campus. He had heard, however, through the Berkeley grapevine, that this brilliant young physicist was now “anxious to do something more than read about the problems that beset the world. He wanted to do something.”

  Chevalier and Oppenheimer were finally introduced at an early meeting of a newly formed teachers’ union. Chevalier later dated this first encounter as taking place in the autumn of 1937. But if they met, as both men later said, at this union meeting, that would place the event a full two years earlier, in the autumn of 1935. That was when Local 349 of the Teachers’ Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), expanded to admit university professors. “A group of people from the faculty talked about it,” Oppenheimer later testified, “and met, and we had lunch at the Faculty Club or some place and decided to do it.” Oppenheimer was elected recording secretary. Chevalier later served as the local’s president. Within a few months, Local 349 had about a hundred members, forty of whom were professors or teaching assistants at the university.

  Neither Oppenheimer nor Chevalier could remember the exact circumstances of their first encounter, only that they liked each other immediately. Chevalier recalled a “hallucinatory feeling . . . that I had always known him.” He felt both dazzled by Oppenheimer’s intellect and charmed by his “naturalness and simplicity.” That very day, according to Chevalier, they agreed to create a regular discussion group of six to ten people who would meet every week or two to discuss politics. These salons met regularly from the autumn of 1937 through the late fall of 1942. During these years, Chevalier regarded Oppenheimer “as my most intimate and steadfast friend.” Initially, their friendship arose from shared political commitments. But, as Chevalier explained later, “our intimacy, however, even at the beginning was by no means purely ideological, but full of personal overtones, of warmth, curiosity, reciprocity, of intellectual give and take, rapidly developing into affection.” Chevalier quickly learned to call his new friend by his nickname, Oppie, and Oppenheimer in turn found himself dropping by the Chevalier household for dinner. From time to time, they went out to a movie or concert. “Drinking was for him a social function that called for a certain ritual,” Chevalier wrote in his memoirs. Oppie made the “best martinis in the world,” invariably drunk with his trademark toast, “To the confusion of our enemies.” It was, Chevalier thought, quite clear who their enemies were.

  FOR JEAN TATLOCK, it was the causes, not the Party or its ideology, that were important. “She told me about her Communist Party memberships,” Oppenheimer later testified. “They were on-again, off-again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking. I do not believe that her interests were really political. She was a person of deep religious feeling. She loved this country and its people and its life.” By the autumn of 1936, the single cause that captivated her most was the plight of Republican Spain.

  It was Tatlock’s passionate nature to push Oppenheimer to move from theory to action. One day he commented that while he was certainly an “underdogger,” he would have to settle for being on the periphery of these political struggles. “Oh for God’s sake,” protested Jean, “don’t settle for anything.” She and Oppenheimer soon began organizing fund-raisers for a variety of Spanish relief groups. In the winter of 1937–38, Jean introduced Robert to Dr. Thomas Addis, the chairman of the Spanish Refugee Appeal. A distinguished professor of medicine at Stanford University, Dr. Addis had encouraged Tatlock in her studies at the Stanford University School of Medicine; he was both a friend and a mentor. He also happened to be a friend of Haakon Chevalier, Linus Pauling (Oppie’s Caltech colleague), Louise Bransten and many other people in Oppie’s circle of Berkeley acquaintances. Addis himself quickly became “a good friend” of Oppenheimer’s.

  Tom Addis was an extraordinarily cultivated Scotsman. Born in 1881, he was raised in a strict Calvinist household in Edinburgh. (Even as a young doctor, he still carried a small Bible in his pocket.) He received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1905 and did postdoctoral research in Berlin and Heidelberg as a Carnegie Scholar. He was the first medical researcher to demonstrate that normal plasma could be used to treat hemophilia. In 1911 he became chief of the Clinical Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine in San Francisco. At Stanford he commenced a long and distinguished career as a physician-scientist, becoming a pioneer in the treatment of kidney disease. He wrote two books on nephritis and more than 130 scientific papers, becoming America’s leading expert on the disease. In 1944 he was elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

  Even as he was building his reputation as a physician-scientist, Addis was always politically active. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Addis violated U.S. neutrality laws by raising funds for the British war effort. Indicted in 1915, he was formally pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917. The following year, Addis became an American citizen. Though he came from a privileged background—his uncle, Sir Charles Addis, was a director of the Bank of England—he had a pronounced distaste for money. In California, he became a well-known advocate of civil rights for Negroes, Jews and union members, signing numerous petitions and lending his name to scores of civic organizations. He was a friend of the radical longshoreman union leader Harry Bridges.

  In 1935, Addis attended an academic conference of the International Physiological Congress in Leningrad and he returned from his visit to the Soviet Union with glowing accounts of the socialist state’s progress in public health. He was particularly impressed that Soviet doctors had experimented with human cadaveric kidney transplants as early as 1933. Thereafter he lobbied vigorously for national health insurance, which eventually prompted the American Medical Association to expel him. But his Stanford colleagues regarded his admiration for the Soviet system as “an act of faith,” a tolerable foible on the part of a respected scientist. Pauling thought him “a great man, of a rare sort—a combination of scientist and clinician. . . .” Others called him a genius. “He was not one of those who have an inner need to play it safe, to appear sound and rational,” recalled Dr. Horace Gray, a colleague. “He was an explorer, a liberal open mind, a nonconformist without being rebellious.”

  By the late 1930s, the FBI was reporting that Addis was one of the Communist Party’s major recruiters of white-collar professionals. Oppenheimer himself later thought Addis was either a Communist or “close to one.” “Injustice or oppression in the next street,” wrote a medical colleague at Stanford, “or in the city, or in South Africa or Europe or Java or in any spot inhabited by men was a personal affront to Tom Addis, and his name, from its early alphabetical place, was conspicuous on lists of sponsors of scores of organizations fighting for democracy and against fascism.”

  For a dozen years, Addis served off and on as chairman or vice-chairman of the United American Spanish Aid Committee, and it was in this capacity that he first approached Oppenheimer for financial contributions. By 1940, Addis was claiming that his committee had been “instrumental” in rescuing many thousands of refugees, including many European Jews, from concentration camps in France. Already sympathetic to the cause of the Spanish Republic, Oppenheimer found himself charmed and deeply impressed by Addis’ sophisticated blend of utilitarian commitment and intellectual rigor. Dr. Addis was an intellectual much like himself, a man of broad interests whose knowledge of poetry, music, economics and science “reached into his work. . . . There was no division to all these things.”

  One day Oppenheimer received a phone call from Addis, inviting him to come to his Stanford laboratory. They met in private and Addis told him, “You are giving all this money [for the Spanish Republic cause] thro
ugh these relief organizations. If you want it to do good, let it go through Communist channels . . . and it will really help.” Thereafter Oppenheimer regularly gave cash payments in person to Dr. Addis, usually in Addis’ lab or at his home. “He made it clear,” Oppenheimer later said, “that this money . . . would go straight to the fighting effort.” After a while, however, Addis suggested that it would be more convenient to give these regular contributions to Isaac “Pop” Folkoff, a veteran member of the San Francisco Communist Party. Oppenheimer donated in cash because he thought it might not be entirely legal to contribute money for military equipment, as opposed to medical aid. His annual donations for Spanish relief work given through the Communist Party amounted to about $1,000—a hefty sum in the 1930s. But after the fascist victory in 1939, Addis and then Folkoff solicited money for such other causes as the Party’s efforts to organize migratory farm workers in California. Robert’s last such contribution was apparently made in April 1942.

  Folkoff, a former garment worker then in his late seventies, was paralyzed in one hand. At the time he met Oppenheimer, he was head of the Party’s finance committee in the Bay Area. “He was a respected old left-winger,” recalled Steve Nelson, a political commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who became the Party chairman in San Francisco in 1940. “I don’t mean to denigrate him, but the guy dabbled as a worker and became interested in philosophy. He became quite versed in Marxist philosophy. So he had a kind of prestige and dignity and trustworthiness. He used to meet with the professionals around the movement and collected money from them.” Nelson confirmed that Folkoff collected money from both Oppenheimer brothers.