by Ray Monk
On 14 June 1949, the day before the Rochester Times-Union broke the story of Oppenheimer’s testimony against Peters, it was Frank’s turn to be summoned before HUAC. Frank was at that point in the worst position of all of them, since he had gone on record as denying that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Two years earlier, on the basis, obviously, of leaked FBI documents, the Washington Times-Herald had published a front-page story with the headline ‘US atom scientist’s brother exposed as communist who worked on A-bomb’. The newspaper emphasised that ‘the official report on Frank Oppenheimer in no way reflects on the loyalty or the ability of his brother, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer’, but claimed (correctly) to have evidence that Frank was ‘a card-carrying member of the Communist Party’.
When, the day after this story was published, Frank was asked to comment on it, he made a fundamental error. Instead of saying ‘no comment’, he rather foolishly said he had never been a Communist Party member, a lie he repeated to the authorities at the University of Minnesota. Now, at his HUAC hearing in June 1949, Frank decided to tell the truth and admitted that he and Jackie had been members of the Communist Party for three and a half years, beginning in 1937. Despite repeated requests to name other members, Frank refused to do so. Prior to testifying before HUAC, he had been to see J.W. Buchta, the head of the physics department at Minnesota, to tell him that he had, indeed, been a member of the Communist Party, and handed him a letter of resignation ‘just in case’ – the assumption being that this was a mere courtesy and that his resignation would not be acted upon. Within hours of giving his testimony, however, while he was still in Washington, Frank heard from newspaper reporters that the University of Minnesota had accepted his resignation. A week later, more than fifty physicists, including Hans Bethe, signed a joint letter, sent from the Idaho Springs conference in Colorado, asking the president of the university, James Morrill, to change his mind and reinstate Frank. Edward Teller wrote a separate letter, saying that, although he had ‘never agreed with Frank Oppenheimer on politics’, he thought he was a very good physicist. ‘I always liked him,’ Teller added, and besides, he told Morrill, he strongly believed in ‘the freedom to make mistakes’. One person who was conspicuous in not offering vociferous public support for Frank was his brother. ‘Jackie was absolutely furious,’ a friend of Frank has said, ‘and that was causing a lot of pain in that family.’
Despite the pleas of Frank’s fellow physicists, Morrill refused to let Frank keep his job. In desperation, Frank turned to his old friend and colleague Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley. The last time he had seen Lawrence, on a trip to Berkeley from Minnesota, Lawrence had put his arm round him and said: ‘Come back any time you want to.’ Now, however, Lawrence would have nothing to do with him. ‘Frank Oppenheimer is no longer welcome in this laboratory,’ read a telegram from the Rad Lab. ‘What is going on?’ Frank wrote to Lawrence. ‘Who has changed, you or I? Have I betrayed my country or your lab? Of course not. I have done nothing.’ Finding it impossible to get a university job, Frank bought a ranch in Colorado and, much to his brother’s disdain, would work as a rancher for the next ten years.
By the end of June 1949, then, leaked FBI documents had severely weakened the esteem in which Oppenheimer was held by his fellow scientists, had wrecked the careers of several of his ex-students, and had all but destroyed the closest and most important emotional relationship of his life: that with his brother. In the same month Oppenheimer himself took a major step towards his own ruin when he made an implacable enemy of a man who, on more than one account, was in a position to do him great harm.
That man was Lewis Strauss, who was both a member of the AEC and a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study. Within a few years he would be chairman of both the AEC and the institute’s board of trustees. He was a vain man who craved above all admiration and respect. Oppenheimer felt neither admiration nor respect for Strauss and made no secret of it. Two years earlier, Strauss had felt slighted by Oppenheimer, when Oppenheimer gave evidence to the AEC concerning the possible military uses of radioactive isotopes. Such isotopes were a by-product of the nuclear reactors at, for example, Oak Ridge and Hanford, which fell under the administration of the AEC, and it had been US policy to allow the isotopes to be sent abroad to friendly countries to be used in scientific research. In the spring of 1947, Strauss attempted to reverse that policy on the grounds that the isotopes might be used for military purposes. When asked for his opinion on the matter, Oppenheimer simply dismissed Strauss’s concerns as not worthy of serious attention, and, much to his chagrin, Strauss found himself outvoted on the issue by four to one.
Now, in June 1949, Strauss, who had never accepted that he was wrong about the possible military application of isotopes, had another chance to reverse the policy. This time the occasion was not a closed session of a small committee in an out-of-the-way office, but a full Congressional hearing, with cameras and reporters present, held in the huge Caucus Room of the Senate. The hearing was before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which had been set up in 1946 to ‘oversee’ the AEC and had the power, if necessary, to veto AEC decisions. In 1949, the chairman of the Joint Committee was Brien McMahon, who had become an enthusiastic advocate of the policy of building huge stockpiles of atomic bombs. Also on the committee was the right-wing Republican senator Bourke Hickenlooper, who had a fierce distrust of the AEC and of Oppenheimer in particular. The general purpose of the hearings now under way was to investigate Hickenlooper’s allegations that the AEC was guilty of ‘incredible mismanagement’. Strauss, whose political views were in general close to Hickenlooper’s, had succeeded in enlisting the senator as an ally in his campaign to stop the export of radioactive isotopes, the practice of which was now examined as an example of the alleged mismanagement of the AEC. On 9 June, Strauss had testified before the Joint Committee that isotopes might, indeed, have some military value and that therefore he was against their export. Hickenlooper agreed. When the US provided other nations with isotopes, he said, it was embarking on a programme ‘inimical to our national defense’.
This was the context in which Oppenheimer gave his very public, and subsequently heavily reported, demolition of Strauss’s position. Oppenheimer himself, of course, was not without vanity, especially about his legendary ability to make fools of others. Jeremy Bernstein remembers that at physics seminars at the institute, Oppenheimer ‘sat in the front row, and if he made what he thought was a witty comment he would look around to make sure that we had all taken it in’. He liked an audience, and this hearing provided him with a large and attentive one.
The specific issue at hand was whether the US should, as they had been requested, provide Norway with an isotope of iron, Fe-59, to use in the monitoring of the manufacture of molten steel. Strauss had discovered that one of the members of the Norwegian research team was a communist, which, in his eyes and Hickenlooper’s, made all the more pressing the question of whether Fe-59 could have any conceivable military use. When called upon as a witness, Oppenheimer made it clear that his purpose was not only to refute Strauss’s view, but to subject it to lacerating ridicule. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘can force me to say that you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy.’
You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact, you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part, and in my knowledge, no part at all.
As Philip Stern, who was there at the time, has noted: ‘Even to an observer who had no background on the issues and personalities involved, it was clear that Oppenheimer was making a fool of someone.’
The AEC lawyer Joe Volpe was sitting next to Oppenheimer and, looking over to where Strauss was sitting, saw Strauss’s eyes narrowing, his jaws working and colour rising in his face. From that point on, he said, he kept ‘one eye on Oppenheimer and the committee and one eye on Strauss’. Rubbing salt into the wound, Op
penheimer continued: ‘My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins, somewhere in between.’ The official record of the meeting records at this point: ‘[laughter]’. When Oppenheimer stepped down, he said to Volpe: ‘Well, Joe, how did I do?’ ‘Too well, Robert,’ Volpe replied. ‘Much too well.’ Years later, David Lilienthal, recalling the sight of Strauss at the end of Oppenheimer’s testimony, remarked: ‘There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.’
A few months later the cover of Life magazine carried a photograph of Oppenheimer that Abraham Pais has described as ‘the best picture of him I know’. Looking extraordinarily self-confident and strikingly handsome, he is staring straight at the camera, intense but relaxed, with his head resting on his right hand, while in his left hand burns a cigarette. Inside the magazine there is another arresting image of him, standing in front of a blackboard, upon which are written impressively unintelligible symbols. The caption to the photograph explains: ‘Equations at top of the board describe processes of meson production in cosmic ray explosions. Those below pertain to certain interactions in quantum field theory.’
The Life profile covers much the same ground as the previous year’s Time magazine piece, but in both content and tone it is interestingly and significantly different. The emphasis in Time had been on Oppenheimer as a leader – of physicists, of the institute and of humanity. It delved fairly deeply into his politics, both the radical views of his past and his later campaigns for international control of atomic energy, and hardly at all into his achievements in science, not one of which, in fact, was mentioned. In these respects the Life piece could not have been more different. It does not mention his radical past at all, and talks about his post-war involvement in politics as if it had been something imposed upon him against his will (‘although he tried to immerse himself again in academic duties at California and Cal Tech, the demands made on him by various branches of the government were so numerous that he found himself spending much of his time in the air between the West Coast and Washington’).
In the Life article, the emphasis was instead firmly on Oppenheimer as a scientist, and not just one who had done good work in the past, but a practising physicist at the top of his game, whose work was at the cutting edge of his field: particle physics. Indeed, one would almost get the impression from this article that Oppenheimer had retired from politics to concentrate on physics. The article quotes Oppenheimer as saying that those physicists who, during the war, were ‘off doing the devil’s work making armaments and whatnot – things that have nothing to do with physics’ were now ‘back at their real work – the sober, modest, consecrated task of penetrating the unknown’.
The article then goes on to describe in some detail both Oppenheimer’s own contributions to physics, concentrating in particular on the Oppenheimer–Phillips effect and his role in the development of positron and meson theory, and the present state of physics. Rather oddly, the author, Lincoln Barnett, does not mention the QED revolution that had just taken place, or Oppenheimer’s midwifery role in that revolution. The article does, however, give a good idea of what issues were dominating physics in the summer of 1949, by which time the QED revolution was complete, and physicists had turned their attention away from quantum electrodynamics and towards the attempt to understand elementary particles.
This was a field in which everything was unclear and, seemingly, getting a little bit more unclear with every discovery, and the article conveys well the confused state of particle physics during this time, emphasising in particular the alarming growth in the number of elementary particles that were being discovered. Where previously there had been three – the electron, the proton and the neutron – there were now fifteen.fn62 These included some that most people had by this time got used to, such as the photon, the neutrino and the positron, and also some recently discovered exotica such as the pi-meson (in positive, negative and neutral forms), the mu-meson (likewise) and the tau-meson (the heavy meson, soon to be renamed the K-meson or kaon). Nearly half a page of this article is devoted to a table, grouping these fifteen particles into five categories: nucleons, electrons, mesons, massless particles and ‘probable particles’.
‘Almost every month has surprises for us in the findings about these particles,’ Oppenheimer is quoted as saying. Indeed, ‘what we are forced to call elementary particles retain neither permanence nor identity’. For example, protons and neutrons might really be composites: ‘each of these may have some kind of bare substructure in the center and around it, bound closely to it, a cloud of mesons’. His hope was that ‘what is at the moment just a picture of chaos will ultimately reveal again that deep harmony and order which one has always found in the physical world when one has pushed hard, and which is very beautiful indeed’.
The impression is given that this revelation of deep harmony would come, if it came at all, from people working at the institute, ‘the world’s foremost center of elementary particle research’. In particular, the article suggests, it might come from Oppenheimer himself, who, having before the war ‘devoted most of his investigative efforts to the study of mesons, their role in the atomic world and their possible relation to nuclear force’, was now working ‘in close partnership with Yukawa whom he recently brought to the Institute’, in a renewed attempt to solve those questions – questions that constituted ‘the deepest and most urgent challenge to physics at the present time’.
In fact, almost all of this is a fantasy. It is as if Oppenheimer had bewitched the Life writer into accepting as fact what was merely wishful thinking on Oppenheimer’s part. Oppenheimer may have wanted to work with Yukawa on meson theory – indeed, that was surely the reason he invited Yukawa to the institute – but the two of them never collaborated on a single piece of work, and by the time this Life article was published, October 1949, Yukawa had left the institute for a professorship at Columbia. Nor was it true that the Institute for Advanced Study was ‘the world’s foremost center of elementary particle research’. There were in 1949 just a handful of particle physicists at the institute, only one of whom was doing important original work in the subject, namely Abraham Pais, who, curiously, is not mentioned in this article. Oppenheimer does not mention, for example, that less than two years earlier Pais had made an important and, as it turned out, lasting contribution to the taxonomy of the rapidly proliferating elementary particles, when he introduced the term ‘lepton’ to characterise particles like electrons and positrons (and, it would soon be realised, mu-mesons) that are not subject to the strong nuclear force. However, while there is no sign of Pais in this article, the influence of Yukawa is apparent in almost everything Oppenheimer is quoted as saying, much of which strongly echoes things noted by Yukawa in a survey article that he published in July 1949 called ‘Models and Methods in the Meson Theory’.
Finally, and most significantly, it is not true that Oppenheimer was at this time making important contributions to particle physics. Indeed, this article was published at precisely the time when he effectively ceased to be an active research scientist altogether. In January 1949 he had published a short paragraph in Reviews of Modern Physics as part of a discussion on the disintegration and nuclear absorption of mesons, but this was to be his last-ever publication in physics.fn63 He continued to be an avid follower of cutting-edge research, and could be relied upon to summarise the important work in more or less any given area of the subject, but he himself did not make a single original contribution to particle physics – or indeed to any branch of the subject – from January 1949 till the day he died. Nor did he provide the kind of leadership in particle physics that he had provided in QED with his running of the Shelter Island, Pocono and Oldstone conferences. After Oldstone, it was decided to end that particular series and to put in its place a series that concentrated solely on particle physics. These were organised not by Oppenheimer, but
by Robert Marshak at the University of Rochester. It was at places like Rochester, Columbia, Chicago and Berkeley that most of the leading work in particle physics would be done in the 1950s; places, that is, with large experimental-physics departments and, crucially, large particle accelerators. The institute had neither – as the Life article was at pains to stress, it had no laboratory of any sort.
One way of reading this article is to see it as a response by Oppenheimer to the attacks upon him and other left-wing physicists by the FBI and HUAC, as his way of saying that he was happy to withdraw from the fight, to give up politics and return to pure research. But as he did not, in fact, return to pure research or give up politics (he did not, for example, resign his chairmanship of the GAC), perhaps the best way to read the article is as an insight into what Oppenheimer, in the autumn of 1949, wished his life was like: dominated by fundamental research (‘Of his manifold activities, however, the one that gives him the fullest measure of satisfaction, the one he considers his real calling is exploration’) at the very centre of progress in theoretical physics, and in the company of other people absorbed in the struggle to understand the nature of physical matter.
Actually, what dominated his life at this point, and would (as he well knew) dominate it for the foreseeable future, was the fact that a month earlier irrefutable evidence had been obtained that the Soviet Union had exploded its own atomic bomb. This fact is mentioned in the Life article, but in a way that seeks to downplay its importance. From the perspective of the physicists who took part in the ‘devil’s work making armaments’, the article says blithely, ‘the news that Russia has at last produced an atomic bomb comes as no great surprise, nor does it appear in the aftermath of this revelation that their endeavours will now be diverted as they were by the recent war’. This, like so much of the article, was wishful thinking. As chairman of the General Advisory Committee, it fell to Oppenheimer to advise the AEC, and therefore the US government, on how to respond to the news that the Soviet Union had its own atomic bombs. This was such a heavy burden that it does not take much imagination to see why Oppenheimer would wish to pretend that it did not exist.