by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
By the end of the evening, Robert was clearly tired and despondent. After more than one drink, he rose and announced that he was retiring upstairs to the guest bedroom. A few minutes later, Anne, Herb and Kitty heard a “terrible crash” and Anne was the first to the top of the stairs. Robert was nowhere to be seen. After knocking on the bathroom door and then shouting his name, with no response, she tried to open the door. “I couldn’t get the bathroom door open,” she said, “and I couldn’t get a response from Robert.”
He had collapsed on the bathroom floor and his unconscious body was blocking the door. The three of them together gradually forced the door open, pushing Robert’s limp form to one side. They then carried him to a couch and revived him. “But he sure was mumbly,” Anne recalled. Robert said he had taken a sleeping pill, a prescription drug Kitty had given him. Anne called a doctor—who said, “Don’t let him go to sleep.” So for an hour they walked him back and forth, coaxing coffee down his throat until the doctor arrived. Oppie’s “beast in the jungle” had struck; his ordeal had begun.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“It Looks Pretty Bad, Doesn’t It?”
Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial
AS SOON AS OPPENHEIMER INFORMED STRAUSS that he would not resign, the AEC’s general manager, Kenneth Nichols, set in motion an extraordinary American inquisition. Nichols told Harold Green, on the day the young AEC attorney was drafting the letter of charges against Oppenheimer, that the physicist was “a slippery sonuvabitch, but we’re going to get him this time.” In retrospect, Green reflected that the remark was an accurate reflection of the AEC’s conduct throughout the hearing.
On Christmas Eve, two FBI agents arrived at Olden Manor and seized control of Oppenheimer’s remaining classified papers. That same day, Oppenheimer received the AEC’s letter of formal charges, dated December 23, 1953. Nichols informed Oppenheimer that the AEC now questioned “whether your continued employment on Atomic Energy Commission work will endanger the common defense and security and whether such continued employment is clearly consistent with the interests of the national security. This letter is to advise you of the steps which you may take to assist in the resolution of this question. . . .” The charges included all the old “derogatory” facts of Oppenheimer’s associations with known and unknown communists, his contributions to the Communist Party of California, the Chevalier affair—and “that you were instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen bomb project, and that the opposition to the hydrogen bomb, of which you are the most experienced, most powerful, and most effective member, has definitely slowed down its development.” With the exception of this last charge—delaying the hydrogen bomb’s development—all of this information had been reviewed previously and discounted by both General Groves and the AEC. With the full knowledge of these facts, Groves had ordered the Army to give Oppenheimer his security clearance in 1943, and the AEC had renewed it in 1947 and thereafter.
The inclusion of Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. The AEC’s charges were not the kind of narrowly crafted indictment likely to bring a conviction in a court of law. This was, rather, a political indictment, and Oppenheimer would be judged by an AEC security review panel appointed by the chairman of the AEC, Lewis L. Strauss.
A DAY OR TWO before Christmas, Oppenheimer’s secretary was at her desk when Robert and Kitty walked into his office and shut the door. That was unusual: Robert almost always kept his door open. “They stayed in there a long time,” Verna Hobson recalled. “It was clear that something was wrong.” When they finally came out, they had a drink and offered Hobson one as well. Later, when Hobson went home, she told her husband, Wilder, “The Oppenheimers are in some kind of trouble; I do not know what it is, but I want to give them some kind of present.” Wilder had just bought a record cut by a Brazilian soprano, so Verna took it into the office the next day and gave it to Robert, saying, “This is not a Christmas present, and I did not go out and buy it for you; it has been played. It’s just a present I want to give you now.” Robert took it and sat with his head down very still for a moment, and then he looked up and said, “How incredibly dear.”
Later that afternoon, he called Hobson into his office and, closing the door, he said he wanted to tell her what had happened. For the next hour and a half, he sat there telling her not only about the charges but about the whole story of his childhood, his family and his adult life. It was all new to Hobson. And in retrospect, she thought he may have been rehearsing what he planned to say by way of answering Nichols’ letter of charges. He had decided that the “items of so-called derogatory information . . . cannot be fairly understood except in the context of my life and my work.”
Over the next few weeks, Robert worked feverishly to prepare a defense. The AEC had given him a thirty-day deadline to reply to the charges. First, he had to assemble a legal team. So early in January 1954, he consulted with Herb Marks and Joe Volpe. Marks strongly believed that his friend needed to be represented by a distinguished, politically connected lawyer. Volpe disagreed, and urged Oppenheimer to get a skilled trial lawyer. For a time, it was thought they might get John Lord O’Brian, a highly regarded but elderly New York attorney. O’Brian had to bow out for reasons of health. Another prominent trial lawyer, eighty-year-old John W. Davis, said he would be willing to take the case—if the AEC would agree to hold the hearing in New York City. Strauss made sure this did not happen. Eventually, Oppenheimer and Marks went to see Lloyd K. Garrison, a senior partner in the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Oppie had met Garrison the previous spring, when the lawyer had become a trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he liked his genteel manners. Garrison’s lineage was as distinguished as his own reputation. One of his great-grandfathers was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and his grandfather had served as the literary editor of The Nation. Garrison himself was a firm liberal and a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Not long after the New Year, Marks and Oppenheimer saw Garrison in his New York home and showed him General Nichols’ letter of charges. After Garrison read through the document, Robert said, “It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” Garrison replied simply, “Yes.”
Garrison was sympathetic. The first thing to do, he said, was to get the AEC to extend its thirty-day deadline for Oppenheimer’s response to the charges. On January 18, Garrison went to Washington and got the necessary extension. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit as chief counsel a lawyer with trial experience. In the meantime, he began working with Oppenheimer on his written response to the charges. As the weeks rolled by, Garrison became by default Oppenheimer’s lead counsel. Everyone realized, including Garrison, that his lack of trial experience made him a less-than-ideal choice. When, in mid-January, David Lilienthal learned from Oppenheimer that he had retained Garrison, Lilienthal noted in his diary, “I had hoped it might be an experienced trial lawyer, but the case against Robert is so weak, really, that choice of counsel isn’t as important as if it were.”
NEWS OF Oppenheimer’s impending hearing soon began to leak all over Washington. On January 2, 1954, the FBI overheard Kitty on the phone trying, unsuccessfully, to reach Dean Acheson to see if he knew “how things stand.” A few days later, Strauss reported to the FBI that he was “receiving some pressure from scientists . . . to appoint a hearing board in the Oppenheimer case which would ‘whitewash’ Oppenheimer.” Strauss told the FBI that he “did not intend to be pressured into any action of this kind. . . .” Moreover, he said he understood that the selection of the board which would judge Oppenheimer “was most important.” Vannevar Bush confronted Strauss in his office and told the AEC chairman that n
ews of his action against Oppenheimer was “all over town.” Bush bluntly informed him that this was a “great injustice,” and that if he pursued the case, “it would undoubtedly result in attacks against Strauss himself.” Strauss angrily replied that he “didn’t give a damn” and that he wasn’t going to be “blackmailed” by any such suggestions.
Strauss later portrayed himself as a man under siege, but in truth he knew he held the advantage. The FBI was feeding him daily summaries of Oppenheimer’s movements and conversations with his lawyers, thereby allowing him to anticipate all of Oppenheimer’s legal maneuvers. He knew Oppenheimer’s FBI file contained information that Oppenheimer’s lawyers would never see—because he was going to make sure that they were not given the necessary security clearance. Moreover, he was going to select the members of the hearing board. On January 16, Garrison requested a security clearance for himself and Herb Marks, and Strauss responded by denying a clearance for Marks, a former member of the AEC’s legal staff. Whether or not Garrison would have received his clearance in time to help him prepare the case is an open question. But he took the position that either the entire defense team should be cleared, or none, a decision he would soon regret, and try unsuccessfully to reverse.
Late in March, however, Garrison learned that the members of the hearing board were going to spend a full week studying raw FBI investigative files on Oppenheimer. Worse, Garrison learned to his dismay that the AEC’s “prosecuting” attorney would be present to help guide the board members through the derogatory items in the FBI file and answer their questions. Garrison had a “sinking feeling” that after a week’s immersion in the files, the board members would become prejudiced against his client. But when he asked for the same privilege, to be present during this weeklong briefing, he was flatly rebuffed. Simultaneously, Garrison tried to get an emergency security clearance for himself, so that he might at least read some of the same material. But Strauss told the Justice Department that “under no circumstances should we grant emergency clearance.” In Strauss’ view, neither Oppenheimer nor his lawyer had any of the “rights” afforded to a defendant in a court of law; this was an AEC Personnel Security Board Hearing, not a civil trial, and Strauss was going to be the arbiter of the rules.
Strauss was unfazed by the extraconstitutional nature of things he was doing to undermine Oppenheimer’s defense. He knew, but did not care, that the FBI wiretaps were illegal, telling one agent “that the Bureau’s technical coverage on Oppenheimer at Princeton had been most helpful to the AEC in that they were aware beforehand of the moves he was contemplating.” Such tactics so offended Harold Green that he told Strauss “that the case was not so much an inquiry as a prosecution and that he did not want to have anything to do with it.” He asked to be removed from the case.
One day, while visiting the Bachers in Washington, Robert made it clear to his hosts that he thought he was being monitored. “He’d come in the room,” recalled Jean Bacher, “and before he’d do anything else, he’d lift the pictures and look under them to see where the recording device was.” One night he took down a picture that was hanging on the wall and said, “There it is!” Bacher said the surveillance “terrified” Oppenheimer.
When an FBI agent in Newark suggested discontinuing the electronic surveillance on Oppenheimer’s home “in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney-client relations,” Hoover refused. The FBI’s surveillance, moreover, was not confined to Oppenheimer alone. When Kitty’s elderly parents, Franz and Kate Puening, returned by ship from a trip to Europe, the Bureau arranged to have their baggage thoroughly searched by U.S. Customs agents. They also photographed all the written material in the possession of the Puenings. Kitty’s father, who was confined to a wheelchair, and Mrs. Puening were so unnerved by the treatment that they had to be hospitalized.
Strauss elevated his scheme to end Oppenheimer’s influence on AEC affairs to a crusade for America’s future. He told the AEC’s general counsel, William Mitchell, that “if this case is lost, the atomic energy program . . . will fall into the hands of ‘left-wingers.’ If this occurs, it will mean another Pearl Harbor. . . . if Oppenheimer is cleared, then ‘anyone’ can be cleared regardless of the information against them.” With the country’s future at stake, Strauss reasoned, normal legal and ethical constraints could be ignored. Simply severing Oppenheimer’s formal link to the AEC as a contract consultant was insufficient. Unless the physicist’s reputation was smeared, Strauss feared that Oppenheimer would use his prestige to become a vocal critic of the Eisenhower Administration’s nuclear weapons policies. To foreclose that possibility, he proceeded to orchestrate a “star chamber” hearing guided by rules that would assure the elimination of Oppenheimer’s influence.
By the end of January, Strauss had selected Roger Robb, a forty-six-year-old native Washingtonian, to bring the case against Oppenheimer. With seven years of prosecutorial experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Robb had a well-deserved reputation as an aggressive trial lawyer with a flair for ferocious cross-examination. He had tried twenty-three murder cases and won convictions in most of them. In 1951, as the court-appointed attorney, he successfully defended Earl Browder against charges of contempt of Congress. (Browder called him a “reactionary” but praised his legal abilities.) Robb was politically conservative in every respect; his clients included Fulton Lewis, Jr., a vitriolic right-wing columnist and radio broadcaster. Over the years, he also had “cordial contacts” with the FBI and, Hoover was informed, always had been “entirely cooperative” with Bureau agents. On one occasion, Robb had taken the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the director by writing to congratulate him on his reply to the eminent civil libertarian Thomas Emerson, who had criticized the FBI in a Yale Law Review essay. It was no surprise, then, that Strauss was able to arrange a security clearance for Robb in just eight days.
As Robb prepared for the hearing in February and March, Strauss sent him information from his own notes from Oppenheimer’s file that Robb might use to impeach the testimony of potential defense witnesses. “When Dr. Bradbury testifies . . . When Dr. Rabi testifies . . . When General Groves testifies . . .” And in each instance, Strauss provided Robb with a document that he thought was sure to undermine what the witness might have to say in defense of Oppenheimer. In addition, and also at Strauss’ urging, the FBI provided Robb with its extensive investigative reports on Oppenheimer—including selective contents of the physicist’s trash from his Los Alamos residence.
Having chosen his prosecutor, Strauss now turned his attention to selecting the judges. He needed three men to serve on the AEC security review board and he sought candidates who could be counted on to be suspicious of Oppenheimer’s integrity once his left-wing past was revealed. By the end of February, he had settled on Gordon Gray to chair the board. Gray, who was then president of the University of North Carolina, had served as secretary of the Army in the Truman Administration. Strauss, an old friend, knew that Gray was a conservative Democrat who had voted for Eisenhower in the 1952 election. A Southern aristocrat whose family money came from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Gray had no idea what he was getting into. He seemed to think the assignment would last a couple of weeks and that Oppenheimer would be cleared. Unaware of the high stakes at issue, not to mention Strauss’ personal hostility to Oppenheimer, Gray naïvely suggested David Lilienthal as a prospective nominee to the security board. One can only imagine the look on Strauss’ face when he heard that suggestion.
In lieu of Lilienthal, Strauss selected another reliably conservative Democrat, Thomas Morgan, chairman of the Sperry Corporation. For the third member, Strauss chose a conservative Republican, Dr. Ward Evans, whose two major qualifications were his science background—he was a professor emeritus of chemistry at Loyola and Northwestern universities— and his unblemished record of voting to deny clearances on previous AEC hearing boards. Gray, Morgan and Evans shared an ignorance of Oppenheimer’s history as a fellow traveler, but they were sure to be sho
cked by what they would read in his security file. From Strauss’ point of view, they were the perfect empty vessels.
ONE DAY in January, by coincidence, James Reston, the New York Times’ bureau chief in Washington, boarded the flight that Oppenheimer was taking from Washington to New York City. They sat together and chatted, but afterwards Reston wrote in his notebook that Oppie seemed “unaccountably nervous in my presence and obviously under some strain.” Reston began making some phone calls around Washington, asking, “What’s wrong with Oppenheimer these days?” Soon the FBI wiretaps overheard Reston repeatedly trying to phone Oppie.
Oppenheimer was “highly irritated” that the suspension of his security clearance might soon become public knowledge. When he finally took one of Reston’s phone calls, Reston told him of the rumors he’d heard that his security clearance was suspended and that the AEC was investigating him. Moreover, he said this information had been passed to Senator McCarthy by someone in the government. When Oppenheimer said he didn’t feel that he could comment, Reston said he was on the verge of printing the story. Oppenheimer refused to comment but told him to talk with his lawyer. Reston saw Garrison in late January, and the two men came to an agreement. Knowing that the story would probably get out sooner or later, Garrison agreed to give Reston a copy of the AEC letter of charges and Oppenheimer’s prepared response. In return, Reston agreed not to print the story until it appeared that the news was about to break.
OPPENHEIMER’S PREPARATION for his defense became a grueling ordeal. Most days he sat in his Fuld Hall office with Garrison, Marks and other lawyers drafting his statement and discussing fine points of the case. Each evening at five o’clock, he would leave and walk across the field to Olden Manor; often the lawyers would follow him home, where they would work late into the evening. “They were very intense days,” his secretary recalled. Robert, however, seemed almost serene. “He looked as though he were holding up very well indeed,” Verna Hobson said. “He had that fantastic stamina that people often have who have recovered from tuberculosis. Although he was incredibly skinny, he was incredibly tough.” It was now well into February and Hobson, a loyal and highly circumspect secretary, had still not told her husband what was going on. It made her feel uncomfortable, so one day she asked Robert, “May I have your permission to tell Wilder what the trouble is?” Oppenheimer looked at her in astonishment and said, “I thought you had done so a long time ago.”