Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  He spoke for an hour—much of it extemporaneously—and his audience was mesmerized; years later, people were still saying, “I remember Oppie’s speech. . . .” They remembered this night in part because he explained so well the welter of confused emotions they all felt about the bomb. What they had done was no less than an “organic necessity.” If you were a scientist, he said, “you believe that it is good to find out how the world works . . . that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.” Besides, there was a “feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States.” Nevertheless, as scientists, Oppenheimer told them, they could not escape responsibility for “the grave crisis.” Many people, he said, will “try to wiggle out of this.” They will argue that “this is just another weapon.” Scientists knew better. “I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, they are not just a slight modification. . . .

  “It is clear to me that wars have changed. It is clear to me that if these first bombs—the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki—that if these can destroy ten square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them.” As a result of this quantitative change, the very nature of war had changed: Now the advantage rested with the aggressor, not the defender. But if war had become intolerable, then very “radical” changes were required in the relations between nations, “not only in spirit, not only in law, but also in conception and feeling.” The one thing he wished to “hammer home,” he said, was “what an enormous change in spirit is involved.”

  The crisis called for a historical transformation of international attitudes and behavior, and he was looking to the experiences of modern science for guidance. He thought he had what he called an “interim solution.” First, the major powers should create a “joint atomic energy commission,” armed with powers “not subject to review by the heads of State,” to pursue the peaceful applications of atomic energy. Second, concrete machinery should be set up to force the exchange of scientists, “so that we would be quite sure that the fraternity of scientists would be strengthened.” And finally, “I would say that no bombs be made.” He didn’t know if these were good proposals, but they were a start. “I know that many of my friends here see pretty much eye to eye. I would speak especially of Bohr. . . .”

  But if Bohr and most other scientists approved, everyone knew they were a distinct minority in the country at large. Later in his remarks, Oppie admitted that he was “troubled” by numerous “official statements” characterized by an “insistent note of unilateral responsibility for the handling of atomic weapons.” Earlier that week, President Truman had given a bellicose Navy Day speech in New York’s Central Park that seemed to revel in America’s military power. The atomic bomb, Truman had said, would be held by the United States as a “sacred trust” for the rest of the world, and “we shall not give our approval to any compromises with evil.” Oppenheimer said he disliked Truman’s triumphalist tone: “If you approach the problem and say, ‘We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,’ then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed . . . you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.” Oppie told his audience that he was not going to argue with the president’s motives and aims—but “we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth.” However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”

  No one left the auditorium that night unmoved. Oppie had spoken to them on intimate terms, articulating many of their doubts, fears and hopes. For decades afterwards, his words would resonate. The world he had described was as subtle and complicated as the quantum world of the atom itself. He had begun humbly, and yet, like the best of politicians, he had spoken a simple truth that cut to the core of the issue. The world had changed; Americans would behave unilaterally at their peril.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Robert, Kitty and their two young children, Peter and Toni, climbed into the family Cadillac and drove to Pasadena. Kitty was particularly relieved to leave Los Alamos behind. But so, too, was Robert. Here on his beloved mesa he had achieved something unique in the annals of science. He had transformed the world and he had been transformed. But he could not shake a sense of brooding ambivalence.

  Soon after his arrival at Caltech, Robert received a letter from the occupant of the small house by the Otowi Bridge. Edith Warner wrote him with the salutation “Dear Mr. Opp.” Someone had given her a copy of his farewell speech. “It seemed almost as though you were pacing my kitchen, talking half to yourself and half to me,” she wrote. “And from it came the conviction of what I’ve felt a number of times—you have, in lesser degree, that quality which radiates from Mr. Baker [Niels Bohr’s alias]. It has seemed to me in these past few months that it is a power as little known as atomic energy. . . . I think of you both, hopefully, as the song of the river comes from the canyon and the need of the world reaches even this quiet spot.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “People Could Destroy New York”

  I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.

  ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

  OPPENHEIMER WAS NOW AN INFLUENTIAL VOICE in Washington—and the fact of his influence attracted the scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover. That autumn, the FBI director began circulating derogatory information about the physicist’s ties to communists. On November 15, 1945, Hoover sent a three-page summary of Oppenheimer’s FBI file to both the White House and the secretary of state. Hoover reported that Communist Party officials in San Francisco had been overheard referring to Oppenheimer as a “regularly registered” member of the Party. “Since the use of the atomic bomb,” Hoover wrote, “individual Communists in California who knew Oppenheimer prior to his assignment to the atomic bomb project have expressed interest in re-establishing their old contacts.”

  Hoover’s information was problematic. It was certainly true that FBI wiretaps had overheard some California communists referring to Oppenheimer as a Party member. But this wasn’t surprising, since there were many Party members who, before the war, had assumed that Robert was similarly committed—and all who had known Oppenheimer before the war naturally wanted to claim the famous “atomic bomb” physicist as one of their own. Thus, just four days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, an FBI wiretap recorded a CP organizer, David Adelson, remarking, “Isn’t it nice that Oppenheimer is getting the credit he is?” Another Party activist, Paul Pinsky, replied, “Yes, shall we claim him as a member?” Adelson laughed and said, “Oppenheimer is the guy who originally gave me the push. Remember that session?” Pinsky replied, “Yes,” and then Adelson said, “As soon as they get the gestapo from around him I am going to get hold of him and put the bee on him. The guy is so big now that no one can touch him, but he has got to come out and express some ideas.”

  Clearly, Adelson and Pinsky thought Oppenheimer was sympathetic to their political agenda. But was he a comrade? Even the FBI recognized that Pinsky’s question—“Shall we claim him as a member?”—“appears to leave some doubt as to the Subject’s [Oppenheimer’s] actual membership in the Party.”

  Similarly, on November 1, 1945, the FBI listened to a conversation among members of the Executive Committee of the North Oakland Club, a branch of the Alameda County Communist Party. One Party functionary, Katrina Sandow, stated that Oppenheimer was a Communist Party member. Another CP official, Jack Manley, boasted that he and Steve Nelson were “close to Oppenheimer,” whom he ca
lled “one of our men.” Manley said the Soviet Union had its own very large uranium deposits and that it was “foolish” to think America could keep a monopoly over the new weapon. Significantly, he claimed that Oppenheimer had “talked it over in great detail with us” two or three years before. Manley also said that he knew other scientists at the Rad Lab who were working on an even more powerful bomb than the one dropped on Japan. He innocently claimed that he intended to get “a simplified diagram of the bomb and print it in all the local papers . . . in order that the public would understand it.”

  The White House and the State Department did nothing with Hoover’s wiretaps. But Hoover pushed his agents to continue. By the end of 1945, the FBI had a wiretap inside Frank Oppenheimer’s home outside Berkeley. At a New Year’s Day party on January 1, 1946, the FBI wiretap overheard Oppie, who had come to visit his brother, talking with Pinsky and Adelson. They tried to persuade him to make a speech about the atomic bomb at a rally they were organizing, but Oppie politely declined (though Frank agreed to do it). Adelson and Pinsky were not surprised. They had talked about the physicist with another Party official, Barney Young, who said that the Party had tried to communicate with Oppenheimer, but the physicist had “done nothing towards maintaining contact.” Oppie’s old friend Steve Nelson, the head of the Oakland CP, had tried repeatedly to resume their friendship—but Oppie had failed to respond.

  Steve Nelson never did meet Oppenheimer again. Other Party functionaries may have thought of him as someone once on the fringes of the Party. But even Haakon Chevalier knew that Oppenheimer had never subjected himself to Party discipline. Then and now, he had always taken an “individualistic course.” This made it difficult for anyone other than Oppenheimer himself to know exactly what his relationship had been to the Communist Party—and what that meant to him. The FBI would never be able to prove Oppenheimer’s Party membership. But over the next eight years, Hoover and his agents would generate some 1,000 pages each year of memos, surveillance reports and wiretap transcripts on Oppenheimer, all directed toward the goal of discrediting this “individualistic” thinker. A wiretap on Oppenheimer’s home phone at One Eagle Hill was installed on May 8, 1946.

  Hoover personally directed the investigation—and he had few scruples. Early in March 1946, the FBI used a Catholic priest in an attempt to turn Oppie’s former secretary at Los Alamos, Anne Wilson, into an informant. Father John O’Brien, a Baltimore priest, claimed he knew Wilson as “a Catholic girl” and thought he could persuade her to cooperate with the FBI “for the purpose of developing information concerning Oppenheimer’s contacts and activities particularly with regard to possible disclosure of atomic bomb secrets by him.” Hoover agreed to the attempt, scribbling on the action memo, “OK if Father will keep quiet about it.”

  Father O’Brien then requested “derogatory information concerning Oppenheimer that could be used in giving a ‘pep talk’ to the girl.” His FBI handler told him this would not be a safe tactic—not, at least, until they had sounded out Wilson. The priest met with Wilson on the evening of March 26, 1946; the next morning he phoned the FBI to report that “the girl could not be persuaded to cooperate on the basis of her religious convictions and patriotism. . . .” Loyal and feisty, Wilson told the priest that she had “complete faith in Oppenheimer’s integrity.” Though she knew the tall, blond, handsome priest as a former high school teacher and close family friend, Wilson refused to give Father O’Brien any information. She “expressed resentment over the fact that security agencies” were watching Oppenheimer. Wilson said Oppenheimer had told her that the FBI had him under surveillance, and she thought this outrageous.

  Oppie was angry about the surveillance. One day in Berkeley, he was talking to his former student Joe Weinberg when he suddenly pointed to a brass plate on the wall and said, “What the hell is that?” Weinberg tried to explain that the university had ripped out an old intercom system and covered the hole in the wall with this brass spacer. But Oppie interrupted him and said, “That was and always has been a concealed microphone.” He then stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Oppenheimer, to be sure, was not Hoover’s only target. In the spring of 1946, the FBI chief was investigating scores of high-ranking Truman Administration officials and disseminating outlandish allegations. Based on so-called “reliable informants,” he questioned the loyalty of numerous officials associated with atomic energy policy, including John J. McCloy, Herbert Marks, Edward U. Condon and even Dean Acheson.

  Hoover’s investigations of Oppenheimer and other members of the Truman Administration in 1946 were a prelude to the politics of anticommunism—the use of the charge of “communist,” “communist sympathizer” or “fellow traveler” to silence or destroy a political opponent. It was not in fact a new tactic: Such charges had proven lethal at the state level in the late 1930s. But with the growing rift between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was easy to focus attention on the need to protect our “atomic secrets,” and from this need emerged the justification to put anyone associated with nuclear research under close surveillance. Hoover was suspicious of anyone who deviated from the most conservative positions on nuclear issues; and no one working on atomic energy policy was more suspect to him than Robert.

  ON A LATE afternoon during the bitterly cold Christmas week of 1945, Oppenheimer visited Isidor Rabi in his New York City apartment on Riverside Drive. Watching the sun set from Rabi’s living room window, the two old friends could see ice floes bathed in yellow and pink floating down the Hudson River. Afterwards, the two men sat alone in the spreading darkness, smoking their pipes and talking about the dangers of an atomic arms race. Rabi later claimed that he “originated” the idea of international control—and that Oppie became its “salesman.” Oppenheimer, of course, had been thinking along these lines ever since his talks with Bohr at Los Alamos. But perhaps their conversation that evening inspired Oppie to refine those ideas into a concrete plan. “So it came to me,” Rabi recalled, “there must be two things: It [the bomb] must be under international control, because if it was under national control there was bound to be rivalry; [second,] we also believed in nuclear energy, that the continuation of this industrial age would depend on it.” Rabi and Oppenheimer thus proposed an international atomic authority that would have real clout because it would control both the bomb and peaceful uses of atomic energy. Potential proliferators would face the certain penalty of a punitive closing down of their energy plants if they were found to be acquiring atomic weapons.

  Four weeks later, in late January 1946, Oppenheimer was heartened to learn that negotiations begun several months earlier had resulted in an agreement among the Soviet Union, the United States and other countries to establish a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. In response, President Truman appointed a special committee to draw up a concrete proposal for international control of nuclear weapons. Dean Acheson was to chair the committee, and other members included such leading lights of the American foreign policy establishment as former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Vannevar Bush, James Conant and Gen. Leslie Groves. When Acheson complained to his personal assistant, Herbert Marks, that he knew nothing about atomic energy, Marks suggested he create a Board of Consultants. A brilliant and gregarious young lawyer, Marks had once worked for David Lilienthal, the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority—and now he suggested that Lilienthal could help to devise a coherent plan. Though not a scientist, Lilienthal, a liberal New Dealer, was an experienced administrator who had worked with hundreds of engineers and technicians. He would bring gravitas to their deliberations. He quickly agreed to chair the Board of Consultants, and four other men were appointed to join him: Chester I. Barnard, president of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company; Dr. Charles A. Thomas, vice president of Monsanto Chemical Company; Harry A. Winne, vice president of General Electric Company— and Oppenheimer.

  Oppenheimer was delighted with this development. Here, at last, was the opportunity he had
been awaiting to address the major problems associated with controlling the atomic bomb. Acheson’s committee and his board of consultants began meeting intermittently that winter to sketch out a preliminary plan. As the only physicist, Oppenheimer naturally dominated the discussions and impressed these strong-minded men with his clarity and his vision. He needed unanimity and he was determined to get it. Right from the start, he enthralled Lilienthal.

  They met for the first time in Oppenheimer’s hotel room at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel. “He walked back and forth,” Lilienthal noted in his diary, “making funny ‘hugh’ sounds between sentences or phrases as he paced the room, looking at the floor—a mannerism quite strange. Very articulate. . . . I left liking him, greatly impressed with his flash of mind, but rather disturbed by the flow of words.” Later, after spending more time in his company, Lilienthal gushed, “He [Oppenheimer] is worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being. . . .”

  General Groves had seen Oppie work his charms on people, but this time he thought the physicist overdid it: “Everybody genuflected. Lilienthal got so bad he would consult Oppie on what tie to wear in the morning.” “Jack” McCloy was almost equally entranced. McCloy had met Oppie early in the war years, and he still thought of him as a man of wide culture, possessed of an “almost musically delicate mind,” an intellectual of “great charm.”

  “All the participants, I think,” Acheson later wrote in his memoirs, “agree that the most stimulating and creative mind among us was Robert Oppenheimer’s. On this task he was also at his most constructive and accommodating. Robert could be argumentative, sharp, and, on occasion, pedantic, but no such problem intruded here.”