by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Harry,” Strauss snapped back, “let me recommend you to a good oculist.”
A few weeks later, Smyth told Strauss he was determined to write a dissenting report. Working late each night until midnight, Smyth waded through the Gray Report and the hearing transcript, a stack of papers four feet high. To help him in this task, he requested the assistance of two AEC staff aides. Nichols warned one of these aides, Philip Farley, that the job would harm his career, but Farley courageously went to work for Smyth anyway. By June 27, Smyth had produced a draft of his dissenting opinion—only to learn that the final majority opinion had been so completely rewritten as to require him to redraft his own.
Beginning at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, June 28, Smyth and his assistants began writing a completely new dissent. He had merely twelve hours to meet the AEC’s self-imposed deadline for submission of the final opinion. As they worked through the night, Smyth could see through the window a car parked outside his house; two men were sitting inside the car, watching the house. Smyth thought someone from the AEC or the FBI had sent them to intimidate him. “You know it’s funny I should be going to all this trouble for Oppenheimer,” he told one of his assistants late that night. “I don’t even like the guy much.”
At ten that morning, Farley took Smyth’s dissenting opinion downtown to the AEC office and stood by to make sure that it was reproduced in full. That afternoon, Smyth’s dissent and the majority opinions were made available to the press. The commissioners voted four to one that Oppenheimer was loyal and four to one that he was a security risk. Gone from the majority opinion was any reference to the hydrogen bomb issue—even though that had been a central theme of the Gray Board’s decision. Drafted by Strauss, the majority decision focused on Oppenheimer’s “fundamental defects” of character. Specifically, the Chevalier affair and his past associations with various students in the 1930s who had been communists took center stage. “The record shows that Dr. Oppenheimer has consistently placed himself outside the rules which govern others. He has falsified in matters wherein he was charged with grave responsibilities in the national interest. In his associations he has repeatedly exhibited a willful disregard of the normal and proper obligations of security.”
OPPENHEIMER’S SECURITY CLEARANCE was thus rescinded just one day before it was due to expire. After reading the AEC commissioners’ verdicts, David Lilienthal noted in his diary: “It is sad beyond words. They are so wrong, so terribly wrong, not only about Robert, but in their concept of what is required of wise public servants. . . .” Einstein, disgusted, quipped that henceforth the AEC should be known as the “Atomic Extermination Conspiracy.”
Earlier in June, using as an excuse that a copy of the transcript had been stolen from a train (it was soon located in New York’s Pennsylvania Station’s lost-and-found office), Strauss persuaded his fellow commissioners to have all 3,000 typewritten pages of the hearing transcript published by the Government Printing Office. This violated the Gray Board’s promise to all the witnesses that their testimony would remain confidential. But Strauss felt that he was not winning the public relations battle and so he brushed aside this concern.
Comprising some 750,000 words in 993 densely printed pages, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer soon became a seminal document of the early Cold War. To be certain that the initial news stories embarrassed Oppenheimer, Strauss had the AEC staff highlight the most damaging testimony for reporters. Walter Winchell—the right-wing mudslinging syndicated columnist—obligingly wrote: “. . . Oppenheimer’s testimony (which most people skip over) included the name of his mistress (the late Jean Tatlock), a fanatical ‘Redski’ with whom he admitted associations after his marriage ‘of the most intimate kind.’ . . . This when he was working on the Big Bomb and knew his Doll was an active member of a Commy apparatus. . . .”
Radically conservative organs such as the American Mercury hailed the downfall of this “longtime glamour-boy of the atomic scientists” and criticized Oppenheimer’s supporters as men who would “coddle potential traitors.” When the Commission’s ruling was announced on the floor of the House of Representatives, some congressmen stood and applauded.
IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss.
Ironically, publicity surrounding the trial and its verdict enhanced Oppenheimer’s fame both in America and abroad. Where once he was known only as the “father of the atomic bomb,” now he had become something even more alluring—a scientist martyred, like Galileo. Outraged and shocked by the decision, 282 Los Alamos scientists signed a letter to Strauss defending Oppenheimer. Around the country, more than 1,100 scientists and academics signed another petition protesting the decision. In response, Strauss replied that the AEC’s decision was “a hard one, but the proper one.” The broadcaster Eric Sevareid noted, “He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to secrets that may be born in Oppenheimer’s brain.”
Oppenheimer’s friend the syndicated columnist Joe Alsop was outraged by the decision. “By a single foolish and ignoble act,” he wrote Gordon Gray, “you have cancelled the entire debt that this country owes you.” Joe and his brother Stewart soon published a 15,000-word essay in Harper’s lambasting Lewis Strauss for a “shocking miscarriage of justice.” Borrowing from Emile Zola’s essay on the Dreyfus affair, “J’Accuse,” the Alsops titled their essay “We Accuse!” In florid language they argued that the AEC had disgraced, not Robert Oppenheimer, but the “high name of American freedom.” There were obvious similarities: Both Oppenheimer and Capt. Alfred Dreyfus came from wealthy Jewish backgrounds and both men were forced to stand trial, accused of disloyalty. The Alsops predicted that the long-term ramifications of the Oppenheimer case would echo those of the Dreyfus case: “As the ugliest forces in France engineered the Dreyfus case in swollen pride and overweening confidence, and then broke their teeth and their power on their own sordid handiwork, so the similar forces in America, which have created the climate in which Oppenheimer was judged, may also break their teeth and power in the Oppenheimer case.”
After news of the verdict was published, John McCloy wrote Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “What a tragedy that one who contributed so much—more than half the bemedaled generals I know—to the security of the country should now after all these years be designated a security risk. I understand the Admiral [Lewis Strauss] is annoyed at my testimony but great God what does he expect? I was there when Oppie’s massive contribution was rendered and know there is so much more to say, but what’s the use?”
Frankfurter tried to reassure his old friend, writing to him that “you opened a good many minds to a realization of the profound importance of your ‘concept of an affirmative security.’ ” Both Frankfurter and McCloy agreed that the chief culprit in the whole sad case was Strauss.
AT THE APEX of the McCarthyite hysteria, Oppenheimer had become its most prominent victim. “The case was ultimately the triumph of McCarthyism, without McCarthy himself,” the historian Barton J. Bernstein has written. President Eisenhower appeared satisfied with the outcome—but unaware of the tactics Strauss had used to obtain it. In mid-June, seemingly oblivious to the nature and import of the hearing, Ike wrote Strauss a short note suggesting that Oppenheimer be put to work solving the problem of the desalinization of seawater. “I can think of no scientific success of all time that would equal this in its boon to mankind. . . .” Strauss quietly ignored his suggestion.
Lewis Strauss, with the help of his like-minded friends, had succeeded in “defrocking” Oppenheimer. The implications for American society were enormous. One scientist had been excommunicated. But all scientists were now on notice that there could be serious consequences for those who challenged state policies. Shortly
before the hearing, Oppenheimer’s MIT colleague Dr. Vannevar Bush had written a friend that “the problem of how far a technical man working with the military is entitled to speak out publicly is quite a question. . . . I kept in channels rather religiously, perhaps too much so.” From experience, Bush believed he would only destroy his usefulness if he talked publicly about internal government deliberations. On the other hand, “when an individual citizen sees his country going down a path which he thinks is likely to be disastrous he has some obligation to speak out.” Bush shared many of Oppenheimer’s critical instincts about Washington’s growing reliance on nuclear weapons. But unlike Oppenheimer, he had never really spoken out. Oppenheimer had—and now all his colleagues could see him punished for his courage and patriotism.
The scientific community remained traumatized for years. Teller became a pariah to many of his former friends. Three years after the case, Rabi still couldn’t control his anger at those who had judged his friend. Bumping into Gene Zuckert at New York City’s Place Vendôme, an upscale French restaurant, Rabi launched into a tirade of abuse, his voice rising to a fervent pitch. He loudly denounced Zuckert for the decision he had rendered as an AEC commissioner in the case. Mortified, Zuckert beat a hasty retreat and later complained to Strauss about Rabi’s behavior.
Lee DuBridge wrote Ed Condon that “it is probably quite impossible for anything to be done about the Oppenheimer case itself. The term ‘security risk’ is such a broad one that you can start out accusing a fellow of treason and end up by convicting him of fibbing, but still impose the same punishment. I guess there is no doubt that Robert did do some fibbing, and in the public mind now anybody who fibbed and also once was a ‘Communist’ is clearly an unforgivable character.”
FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953 Foreign A fairs essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.
For several decades, American scientists had been leaving the academy in droves for corporate jobs in industrial research laboratories. In 1890, America had only four such labs; by 1930 there were over a thousand. And World War II had only accelerated this trend. At Los Alamos, of course, Oppenheimer had been central to the process. But afterwards, he had taken an alternative course. In Princeton, he was not part of any weapons laboratory. Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost. As the science historian Patrick McGrath later observed, “Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their fullthroated militarism and anti-communism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests.”
Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism. Liberals were not on trial during the Rosenberg atom spy case. Alger Hiss was accused of perjury, but the underlying accusation was espionage. The Oppenheimer case was different. Despite Strauss’ private suspicions, no evidence emerged to suggest that Oppenheimer had passed any secrets. Indeed, the Gray Board had exonerated him of any such accusations. But like many Roosevelt New Dealers, Oppenheimer had once been a man of the broad Left, active in Popular Front causes, close to many communists and to the Party itself. Having evolved into a liberal disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he had used his iconic status to join the ranks of the liberal foreign policy establishment, counting as personal friends men like Gen. George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Liberals had then embraced Oppenheimer as one of their own. His humiliation thus implicated liberalism, and liberal politicians understood that the rules of the game had changed. Now, even if the issue was not espionage, even if one’s loyalty was unquestioned, challenging the wisdom of America’s reliance on a nuclear arsenal was dangerous. The Oppenheimer hearing thus represented a significant step in the narrowing of the public forum during the early Cold War.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“I Can Still Feel the Warm Blood on My Hands”
It achieved just what his opponents wanted to achieve; it destroyed him.
I. I. RABI
THE OPPENHEIMERS WERE DELUGED WITH LETTERS—supportive letters from admirers, abusive letters from cranks, and anguished letters from close friends. Jane Wilson, the wife of the Cornell physicist Robert Wilson, wrote Kitty, “Robert and I have been shocked from the onset, & each new development fills us with nausea and disgust. Uglier little comedies have probably been played in the course of history, but I can’t recall them.” Robert tried to make light of the whole affair, telling his cousin Babette Oppenheimer Langsdorf, “Aren’t you tired of reading about me? I am!” But then the bitterness would seep out in wry comments like “They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.”
In a phone conversation with his brother, Robert said he had known “all the time the way the affair would turn out. . . .” Though certainly disheartened, he was already trying to think of his ordeal as history. He told Frank in early July that he had spent $2,000 for extra copies of the hearing transcripts “so that historians and scholars might study them.”
Some of his closest friends thought he had aged noticeably in the previous six months. “One day he would indeed look drawn and haggard,” said Harold Cherniss. “Another day he was as robust and as beautiful as ever.” Robert’s childhood friend Francis Fergusson was startled by his appearance. His short-cropped, speckled-gray hair had turned silver white. He had just turned fifty, but now, for the first time in his life, he looked older than his age. Robert confessed to Fergusson that he had been a “damn fool” and that he probably deserved what had happened to him. Not that he had been guilty of anything, but he had made real mistakes, “like claiming to know things that he didn’t know.” Fergusson thought his friend knew by now that “some of his most depressing mistakes were due to his vanity.” “He was like a wounded animal,” Fergusson recalled. “He retreated. And returned to a simpler way of life.”
Reacting with the same stoicism he had displayed at the age of fourteen, Oppenheimer refused to protest the verdict. “I think of this as a major accident,” he told a reporter, “much like a train wreck or the collapse of a building. It has no relation or connection to my life. I just happened to be there.” But six months after the trial, when the writer John Mason Brown compared his ordeal to a “dry crucifixion,” Oppenheimer answered with a thin smile, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.” Indeed, the more he tried to trivialize the ordeal—as a “major accident” with “no connection to my life”—the more heavily it weighed on his spirit.
Robert did not plunge into a deep depression or suffer any visible blows to his psyche. But some of his friends noticed a change in tenor. “Much of his previous spirit and liveliness had left him,” Hans Bethe said. Rabi later said of the security hearing, “I think to a certain extent it actually almost killed him, spiritually, yes. It achieved what his opponents wanted to achieve; it destroyed him.” Robert Serber always thought that in the aftermath of the hearings, Oppie was “a sad man, and his spirit was broken.” But later that year, when David Lilienthal encountered the Oppenheimers at a party in N
ew York, hosted by the socialite Marietta Tree, he noted in his diary that Kitty looked “radiant” and that Robert was “looking actually happy, something I can’t remember ever thinking about him.” A close friend like Harold Cherniss “thought that both Robert and Kitty had come through the hearings amazingly well.” Indeed, if Robert had changed at all, Cherniss thought it was a change for the better. After his ordeal, Cherniss said, Robert listened more and displayed “a greater understanding of others.”
Oppenheimer was devastated and yet simultaneously capable of remarkable equanimity. He could pass off what had happened as an absurd accident, but such diffidence left him without the energy and anger that a different kind of man might have used to fight back. Perhaps the diffidence was a deep-rooted survival strategy, but if so it came at considerable cost.
For a time, Oppenheimer wasn’t even sure whether the Institute’s trustees would permit him to keep his job. He knew Strauss would like to see him ousted as director. In July, Strauss told the FBI that he believed eight of the Institute’s thirteen trustees were ready to dismiss Oppenheimer—but he had decided to postpone a vote on the matter until the autumn so it would not appear that Strauss as chairman was acting out of personal vindictiveness. This proved to be a miscalculation, because the delay gave members of the faculty time to organize an open letter in support of Oppenheimer. Every member of the Institute’s permanent faculty signed the letter, an impressive show of solidarity for a director who had bruised more than a few egos over the years. Strauss was forced to back off, and later that autumn the trustees voted to keep Oppie as director. Angry and frustrated, Strauss continued to clash with Oppenheimer at Institute board meetings. Strauss never relinquished his obsession with Oppenheimer, filling his files with memoranda that obsessively detailed Robert’s alleged infractions. “He cannot tell the truth,” he wrote in January 1955 about a minor dispute over a faculty sabbatical payment. Over the years, he filed away vindictive notes on Oppie’s friends and defenders: He called Justice Frankfurter “an unconscionable liar” and took delight in passing around rumors that Joe Alsop’s sexual preferences made him “vulnerable to Soviet blackmail.”23