Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  Oppenheimer worked “incredibly hard” on his letter in response to the AEC’s charges. Hobson recalled that it went through “draft after draft after draft, a painful attempt to be as clear and true as possible. I can’t think how many hours he put into that.” Sitting in his leather swivel chair, he would think in silence for a few minutes, jot a few notes, then rise and start dictating as he paced the office. “He could dictate in rounded sentences and paragraphs for an hour straight,” Hobson said. “And just when your wrist was about to give way, he would say, ‘Let us take a ten-minute break.’ ” And then he would come back and dictate for another hour. Robert’s other secretary, Kay Russell, typed Hobson’s shorthand in triple-space. Robert would review it and after Kay had retyped it, Kitty would edit it. Finally, Robert would go over all the changes once more.

  If Robert was working hard to defend himself, he did so almost fatalistically. Late that January, he traveled to Rochester, New York, to attend a major physics conference. All the familiar faces were there, including Teller, Fermi and Bethe. In public, Robert gave no hint of his impending ordeal, but he confided in Bethe, who clearly saw that his old friend was in “distress.” Oppie confessed to Bethe his conviction that he was going to lose. Teller already had heard of Oppenheimer’s suspension and so walked up to him during a break in the conference and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your trouble.” Robert asked Teller if he thought there was anything “sinister” in what he (Oppenheimer) had done over the years. When Teller said no, Robert coolly suggested that he would be grateful if Teller would talk to his lawyers.

  On his next visit to New York City, Teller saw Garrison and explained that, while he thought Oppenheimer had been terribly wrong about many things, in particular the H-bomb decision, he did not doubt his patriotism. Garrison sensed, however, that his feelings toward Oppenheimer were not warm: “He expressed a lack of confidence in Robert’s wisdom and judgment and for that reason felt that the government would be better off without him. His feelings on this subject and his dislike of Robert were so intense that I finally concluded not to call him as a witness.”

  Robert had not been in touch with his brother for some time. Frank had intended to come East that winter, but work on the ranch forced a postponement. Early in February 1954, the two brothers talked on the phone and Robert revealed that he was in “considerable trouble.” He hoped they could meet soon, he said, because since returning from Europe he had tried, but was unable, to compose a letter that would “adequately discuss his problem.”

  To his friends, Robert seemed distracted and inexplicably passive. One day, while listening to the lawyers talk about legal strategy, Verna Hobson lost her patience and began to push Robert. “I thought Robert was not fighting hard enough,” she recalled. “I thought Lloyd Garrison was being too gentlemanly, I was angry. I thought we should go out and fight.”

  Hobson was often privy to the lawyers’ discussions, and as far as she could determine, they were not helping their client. “It seemed to me that the whole story was such an obvious piece of nonsense,” she said. Robert’s critics in Washington “were not open to sweet reason, and whoever was doing this must be using it as a tool and the thing to do was push back, kick back, attack.” Hobson was “too scared” to say what she thought before the whole group of lawyers, “but I kept muttering it at him.” Finally, Oppenheimer took her aside and, as they stood on the back steps of Olden Manor, he said very gently, “Verna, I really am fighting just as hard as I know how and what seems to me to be the best way.”

  Hobson was not the only one who thought Garrison was not aggressive enough. Kitty, too, was unhappy with the direction the legal team was taking her husband. Kitty was a fighter. Twenty years had passed since as a young woman she had stood outside factory gates in Youngstown, Ohio, passing out communist literature. Now, perhaps for the first time since, this ordeal would require all her energy, tenacity and intelligence. Her past life, after all, was part of the indictment against her husband. She, too, would probably have to testify. It would be an ordeal for her as well as for him.

  One Saturday at midday, after working all morning on his reply to the AEC charges, Oppenheimer emerged from his office, accompanied by Hobson. “I was going to drive him to his house,” Hobson recalled. But as they walked out to the parking lot, Einstein suddenly appeared and Oppenheimer stopped to chat with him. Hobson sat in the car while the two men talked, and when Oppie returned to the car, he told her, “Einstein thinks that the attack on me is so outrageous that I should just resign.” Perhaps recalling his own experience in Nazi Germany, Einstein argued that Oppenheimer “had no obligation to subject himself to the witch-hunt, that he had served his country well, and that if this was the reward she [America] offered he should turn his back on her.” Hobson vividly remembered Oppenheimer’s reaction: “Einstein doesn’t understand.” Einstein had fled his homeland as it was about to be overwhelmed by the Nazi contagion—and he refused ever again to set foot in Germany. But Oppenheimer could not turn his back on America. “He loved America,” Hobson later insisted. “And this love was as deep as his love of science.”

  Einstein walked to his office in Fuld Hall, and nodding in Oppenheimer’s direction, told his assistant, “There goes a narr [fool].” Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process.

  Einstein’s instincts were right—and time would demonstrate that Oppenheimer’s were wrong. “Oppenheimer is not a gypsy like me,” Einstein confided to his close friend Johanna Fantova. “I was born with the skin of an elephant; there is no one who can hurt me.” Oppenheimer, he thought, clearly was a man who was easily hurt—and intimidated.

  IN LATE FEBRUARY—just as Oppenheimer was putting the final touches on his letter responding to the AEC charges—his old friend Isidor Rabi attempted to broker a deal whereby Robert could avoid a hearing altogether. Earlier in the year, having heard that Rabi was trying to see President Eisenhower about the case, Strauss had successfully blocked this attempt. Now Rabi proposed directly to Strauss that if he and Nichols would withdraw the formal letter of charges and restore Oppenheimer’s suspended security clearance, Oppenheimer would quickly resign his AEC consultancy. It wasn’t as if the AEC were using Oppenheimer’s time very much—during the last two years he had racked up a grand total of only six days on his consulting contract.

  Soon after this meeting, on March 2, 1954, Garrison and Marks themselves appeared in Strauss’ office and confirmed that Oppenheimer was willing to accept such a compromise. But Strauss, confident of victory, dismissed this solution as “out of the question.” AEC regulations, he insisted, called for the case to be heard by a hearing board. He countered that if Oppenheimer would indicate his desire to resign in writing, “the AEC would give it further consideration.” This was a very thin reed, and later that day Garrison and Marks revisited Strauss to say they had talked to their client on the phone and had decided to “fight his case before the hearing board.”

  Consequently, on March 5, 1954, Oppenheimer’s response to the charges, written in the form of an autobiography, was delivered to the AEC. It ran to forty-two typed pages.

  AS A WIDER circle of Oppenheimer’s friends in the scientific community became aware of what was happening, many called to express their concern. On March 12, 1954, Lee DuBridge phoned from Washington and asked if there was anything he could do. Oppenheimer bitterly observed, “I think there are things that the White House might do if they wanted to, but I don’t think they are ready to. . . . I don’t need to tell you that I think the whole thing is damn nonsense.�
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  “It’s more troublesome than that,” DuBridge replied. “If it were only nonsense, we might fight it, but it is deeper than that.” Robert seemed to agree and said he had resigned himself to just having to go through the “rigamarole.” Another friend, Jerrold Zacharias, reassured him that “You have nothing personal to fear—really not—and your stand is so important for the nation. I guess all I mean is, give them hell.”

  On April 3, Robert phoned his old love, Ruth Tolman, and told her what was about to happen. It was the first time they had talked in months. “It was incredibly good to hear your voice this morning,” Tolman wrote in a letter to him. “I suppose you have felt too harassed and confused to write. . . . You have been constantly in my thoughts, Dear, and with, of course, much concern. . . . Oh Robert, Robert, how often it has been this way for us: that we have felt powerless to help when we wanted to so deeply.”

  A few days later, the Oppenheimers sent Peter and Toni by train to their old Los Alamos friends the Hempelmanns. The children would remain in Rochester, New York, for the duration of the hearings. Just before Robert and Kitty themselves departed for Washington, Robert received a letter from his old friend Victor Weisskopf who, having learned of his predicament wrote to express support and encouragement: “I would like you to know that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware that you are fighting here our own fight. Somehow Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle. . . . Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of all that for which we are living. Please think of us when you are low. . . . I beg you to remain what you always have been, and things will end well.”

  It was a nice thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “I Fear That This Whole Thing Is a Piece of Idiocy”

  The proceeding was skewed from the outset.

  ALLAN ECKER Oppenheimer defense team

  LEWIS STRAUSS WAS ANXIOUS to have the security board proceedings commence. For one thing, he actually feared that his quarry might flee the country. Hoping that Oppenheimer’s passport could be confiscated, Strauss warned the Justice Department that “if he decided to defect while the AEC charges were pending against him, it would be most unfortunate.” He also worried that Senator McCarthy might interfere with his plans. On April 6, McCarthy—replying to an attack on him by CBS television commentator Edward R. Murrow—charged that America’s hydrogen bomb project had been deliberately sabotaged. Clearly, there was a real danger that the unpredictable senator could go public with what he knew about the Oppenheimer case.

  So Strauss was relieved when the hearing board finally convened on Monday, April 12, 1954, in Building T-3, a dilapidated two-story temporary structure built during the war on the Mall near the Washington Monument at 16th Street and Constitution. It housed the office of the AEC’s director of research, but for this occasion, Room 2022 had been turned into a bare-bones courtroom. At one end of the long, dark, rectangular room, the three board members—Chairman Gordon Gray and his two colleagues, Ward Evans and Thomas A. Morgan—sat behind a large mahogany table stacked with black binders containing classified FBI documents. One of Garrison’s assistants, Allan Ecker, recalled how stunned Robert’s attorneys were to see that each member of the security review board had those bound books in front of them. “This was the shock of the day,” Ecker recalled, “and the shock of the case, because the classical notion of the legal system is the tabula rasa. There is nothing in front of the judge except that which is put in front of the judge openly and with an opportunity of the person accused or charged to respond. . . . They had examined [those books] in advance; they knew what was in there. We did not know what was in there. We did not have a copy; we had no opportunity to challenge whatever documents were not brought forward. . . . So I thought that the proceeding was skewed from the outset.”

  The opposing teams of lawyers sat across from each other at two long tables positioned to form a “T.” On one side sat the AEC’s lawyers, Roger Robb and Carl Arthur Rolander, Jr., the AEC’s deputy director of security. Facing them were Oppenheimer’s defense team, Lloyd Garrison, Herbert Marks, Samuel J. Silverman and Allan B. Ecker. At the bottom of the “T” was placed a single wooden chair, where the defendant or other witnesses sat facing the judges. When Oppenheimer was not testifying, he sat on a leather couch against the wall, behind the witness chair. Over the next month, Oppenheimer would spend some twenty-seven hours in the witness chair—and many more hours languishing on the couch, alternately chain-smoking cigarettes or filling the room with the aroma of his walnut pipe tobacco.

  That very first morning, Oppenheimer and his lawyers had arrived nearly an hour late. A few days earlier, Kitty had had another one of her accidents. This time, she had fallen down the stairs and her leg was in a cast. Hobbling on crutches, she slowly made her way to the leather couch, where she sat down with her husband and waited for the proceedings to begin. Robert appeared subdued and almost resigned to his fate. “We made a pretty bedraggled kind of spectacle,” Garrison recalled. “Her appearance didn’t add much to the smoothness of things.” The board seemed “pretty irritated” by the delay. Garrison apologized for their tardiness. Vaguely alluding to the fact that the press might be on to the story, he said they were delayed because they had been keeping their “fingers in the dike.”

  Gray spent the morning reading aloud the AEC’s letter of “indictment” and Oppenheimer’s reply. Over the next three and a half weeks, Gray repeatedly insisted that the proceedings were an “inquiry,” not a trial. But no one could listen to the AEC’s letter of charges without thinking that Robert Oppenheimer was on trial. His alleged crimes included joining numerous Communist Party front organizations; being “intimately associated” with a known communist, Dr. Jean Tatlock; associating with such other “known” communists as Dr. Thomas Addis, Kenneth May, Steve Nelson, and Isaac Folkoff; being responsible for the employment in the atom bomb project of such known communists as Joseph W. Weinberg, David Bohm, Rossi Lomanitz (all former students of Oppenheimer’s) and David Hawkins; contributing $150 per month to the Communist Party in San Francisco; and, perhaps most ominously, failing to report promptly his conversation with Haakon Chevalier in early 1943 about George Eltenton’s proposal to funnel information about the Radiation Laboratory to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco.

  Oppenheimer’s letter of response acknowledged the truth of his friendships with Tatlock, Addis and other left-wingers—but he denied there was anything nefarious about these relationships. “I liked the new sense of companionship,” he said of those associations. He freely admitted being a fellow traveler in the 1930s and acknowledged that he had made financial contributions to a variety of causes through the Communist Party. He could not remember saying, as claimed by the AEC indictment, that he had “probably belonged to every Communist-front organization on the west coast.” The quotation, he now said, was not true, but if he had ever said something like it, “it was a half-jocular overstatement.” (In point of fact, these were Col. John Lansdale’s words, posed to Oppenheimer as a question in 1943— “You’ve probably belonged to every front organization on the coast”—and at the time he had merely replied, “Just about.”) He denied that he had been responsible for the employment of his former students by Ernest Lawrence in the Radiation Laboratory. And as to the Chevalier affair, Oppenheimer acknowledged that Chevalier had spoken to him about Eltenton’s suggestion: “I made some strong remark to the effect that this sounded terribly wrong to me. The discussion ended there. Nothing in our long-standing friendship would have led me to believe that Chevalier was actually seeking information; and I was certain that he had no idea of the work on which I was engaged.” As to the delay in reporting this conversation, Oppenheimer acknowledged that he should have reported it at once. But he pointed out that he had eventually volunteered the information about Eltenton to a security officer—and he doubted that this story would ever have become known “without my report
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  On the whole, Oppenheimer’s replies seemed credible. If judged by his whole life, the charges lodged against him involved behavior not at all unusual for a New Deal liberal in the 1930s committed to supporting and working for racial equality, consumer protection, labor union rights and free speech. But there was one more allegation in the AEC indictment that would prove to be almost as difficult to deal with as the Chevalier affair. The indictment claimed that “during the period 1942–45 various officials of the Communist Party, including Dr. Hannah Peters, organizer of the professional section of the Communist Party, Alameda County, Calif., Bernadette Doyle, secretary of the Alameda County Communist Party, Steve Nelson, David Adelson, Paul Pinsky, Jack Manley and Katrina Sandow are reported to have made statements indicating that you were then a member of the Communist Party; that you could not be active in the party at that time; that your name should be removed from the party mailing list and not mentioned in any way; that you have talked the atomic-bomb question over with party members during this period; and that several years prior to 1945 you had told Steve Nelson that the Army was working on an atomic bomb.”