Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Around the same time, Borden sent versions of his letter to various members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who in turn showed it to the Republican senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, a man known as a fervent anti-communist. Evidently Borden was anxious that his letter be acted upon. The pressure on Hoover to do something with Borden’s letter mounted when, on 24 November, Joseph McCarthy – whose interest in Oppenheimer was by this time well known – delivered a speech, broadcast on both radio and television, in which he accused the Eisenhower administration of ‘whining, whimpering appeasement’ in its dealings with communists. Three days later, Hoover distributed copies of Borden’s letter to the President, the Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Lewis Strauss. On 3 December, Eisenhower ordered that a ‘blank wall’ be constructed separating Oppenheimer from atomic secrets. From that day on, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was suspended.

  Oppenheimer himself had been in London since early November and was blithely unaware of Borden’s letter to Hoover and the chain of events it had set off. The suspension of Oppenheimer’s security clearance was for the moment kept secret, not only from the press, but also from Oppenheimer himself, who, the FBI believed, might flee to the Soviet Union if he knew what was happening in Washington. Oppenheimer had gone to London in order to give the Reith Lectures, a series of six talks sponsored each year by the BBC. To be chosen as a Reith Lecturer was a great honour, and Oppenheimer attracted a good deal of publicity. A photograph in the Sunday Express on 15 November 1953 shows the forty-nine-year-old wandering alone through London’s Mayfair district, wearing an expensive-looking three-piece suit and his famous pork-pie hat, with a cigarette in his left hand. The accompanying text, ironically, concentrates on his freedom: ‘He moves about as a free man. Free, that is, from the hordes of G-men who dogged his steps when he went to France and Germany in 1951.’ In fact, his every step was being watched by the FBI.

  The following week, Oppenheimer was the subject of an admiring profile in The Observer, which unwittingly contained some phrases that would have struck an ominous note back in Washington:

  He is said to have done more than anyone to make Congressmen understand the implications of nuclear fission. Like most of his colleagues, he was appalled by the destructive power which had been unleashed, and his first reaction was to suppose that the atom bomb made future wars unthinkable and national sovereignty obsolete. He was an early advocate of sharing the secrets with Russia, and of jointly controlling the manufacture of bombs . . . In public and private he has constantly opposed the United States policy of extreme secrecy in atomic matters.

  As for the Reith Lectures themselves, they were generally regarded by their British audience as something of a disappointment. As The Economist put it: ‘Something different was expected from the man who had engineered the mightiest scientific experiment in history.’ The advertised aim of the lectures, the overall title of which was ‘Science and the Common Understanding’, was to examine ‘what there is new in atomic physics that is relevant, helpful and inspiriting for men to know’, but this promised more novelty than Oppenheimer delivered. The disappointment was ‘at finding that the ideas expressed are, on the whole, familiar ones’. What Oppenheimer had to say turned out to be ‘an oft-told tale’. By ‘new in atomic physics’ Oppenheimer seemed to mean ‘atomic physics as it was thirty years ago’, since his focus was on the ‘heroic period’ of quantum physics in the 1920s, and even then he spent a long time getting there. His first lecture was on Newton, his second on Rutherford and his third on Bohr and the ‘old’ quantum theory. Only in the fourth lecture did he get on to the wave-particle duality at the heart of quantum mechanics, together with the notion that was always at the heart of his thinking: complementarity. The fifth lecture attempts to show how the notion of complementarity can be applied outside physics, to an understanding of human nature and society, for example; and the sixth lecture rounds the whole thing off with a series of more or less empty platitudes, such as the following, which is the concluding sentence:

  For us as for all men, change and eternity, specialization and unity, instrument and final purpose, community and individual man alone, complementary each to the other, both require and define our bonds and our freedom.

  Rarely have so many words been used to say so little. The contrast, both in style and content, with ‘Atomic Weapons and American Policy’ could not be greater. There, he had something urgent to say that he wanted to communicate as clearly as possible; here, in the Reith Lectures, his wordy and obscure style seems designed to disguise the fact that he really has nothing to say. Robert Crease’s damning phrase about Oppenheimer’s public lectures – that they are ‘rhetorically evocative and conceptually stagnant’ – is in general somewhat unfair, but about the Reith Lectures it is devastatingly accurate.

  Only twice does Oppenheimer’s style free itself from the verbose torpor that characterises the lectures as a whole. The first time is in the second lecture, when he takes a digression from Rutherford to talk about more recent developments, describing how ‘the story of sub-nuclear matter began to unfold and ramify’:

  A whole new family of hitherto unknown, and, for the most part, unrecognised and unexpected objects began to emerge from the nuclear encounters. The first of these were the various mesons, some charged and some uncharged, about ten times lighter than the proton and some hundreds of times heavier than the electron. In the last years there have appeared in increasing variety objects heavier than the mesons, other objects heavier even than protons, whose names are still being changed from month to month, by solemn conferences. Physicists call them vaguely, and rather helplessly, ‘the new particles.’ They are without exception unstable, as in the neutron. They disintegrate after a time which varies from one millionth to less than a billionth of a second into other lighter components. Some of these components are in turn unfamiliar to physics and are themselves in turn unstable. We do not know how to give a clear meaning to this question. We do not know why they have the mass and charge they do, or anything much about them. They are the greatest puzzle in today’s physics.

  If only, one can imagine the British audiences thinking, he had chosen this as his subject.

  The second time the lectures come to life is when Oppenheimer touches on the question of whether there will ever be a scientific explanation of consciousness. ‘It seems rather unlikely,’ he says, ‘that we shall be able to describe in physio-chemical terms the physiological phenomena which accompany a conscious thought or sentiment, or will.’

  Today the outcome is uncertain. Whatever the outcome, we know that, should an understanding of the physical correlate of elements of consciousness indeed be available, it will not be the appropriate description for the thinking man himself, for the clarification of his thoughts, the resolution of his will, or the delight of his eye and mind at works of beauty. Indeed an understanding of the complementary nature of conscious life and its physical interpretation appears to me a lasting element in human understanding and a proper formulation of the historic views called psycho-physical parallelism.

  When the lectures were over, Oppenheimer and Kitty went first to Copenhagen to see Bohr and then to Paris, where, with security officers watching their every step, they called on the person who, of all the people in the world, Oppenheimer should not have been seen visiting at this time: Haakon Chevalier. Chevalier had been living in Paris for three years, working as a translator. ‘It was a happy reunion,’ Chevalier later remembered. The next day, he took Oppenheimer to meet André Malraux and listened ‘to an extraordinary dialogue between these two men, so different in mind and temperament, but each supreme in his field’. The conversation got on to Einstein, and Oppenheimer shocked both Malraux and Chevalier by remarking: ‘It is very sad for us who are close to Einstein and have such enormous respect for his early contribution, to have to say that for the past twenty-five years Einstein has done no science.’

  Oppenheimer and Kitty retur
ned from Europe on 13 December 1953. Waiting for Oppenheimer was an urgent message to call Strauss as soon as he could. When Oppenheimer called him the next day, Strauss told him ‘it might be a good idea’ for them to meet in the next day or two. Having been told by the FBI that they needed more time to examine Borden’s letter, however, Strauss got in touch with Oppenheimer and put off their meeting till 21 December. This gave Strauss time to consult others on how to deal with Oppenheimer. At a high-level meeting at the Oval Office on 18 December, involving Vice President Nixon and Allen Dulles of the CIA, it was decided to present Oppenheimer with the charges against him and offer him two possible responses: he could either resign as an AEC consultant or he could appeal against the suspension of his security clearance in front of a panel appointed by Strauss.

  When Oppenheimer arrived at Strauss’s office on the afternoon of 21 December, he was met by both Strauss and General Kenneth Nichols, the recently appointed general manager of the AEC. Nichols had known Oppenheimer ever since the early days of the Manhattan Project and had developed an antipathy towards him almost as strong as Strauss’s. After a few pleasantries about the recent sudden death of Deak Parsons, Strauss told Oppenheimer that, in the light of a presidential order of 27 April 1953 requiring the re-evaluation of all individuals about whom there was ‘derogatory information’ in their files, his security clearance had been suspended. It seems strange that Oppenheimer did not point out, upon hearing this, that his most recent reappointment as a consultant in June 1953 had occurred after this presidential order and so was presumably in accordance with its requirements, but he was evidently too shocked to think clearly. In any case he possibly did not have time to react in this way before Strauss followed up this shock with an even worse one. A letter had been drafted, Strauss told Oppenheimer, listing all the charges against him. The letter, which ran to eight pages, was then handed to Oppenheimer.

  Written, but not yet signed, by General Nichols, the letter consisted of yet another summary of Oppenheimer’s FBI file, running once more over the list of communist front organisations to which he had belonged in the 1930s and ’40s, the number of communists among his family and friends, his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and, above all, the Chevalier Affair and Oppenheimer’s delay in reporting it, all of which, the letter alleged, ‘raise questions as to your veracity, conduct and even your loyalty’. ‘Accordingly,’ the letter continued, ‘your employment on Atomic Energy Commission work and your eligibility for access to restricted data are hereby suspended, effective immediately.’ Finally, the letter informed Oppenheimer that, if he wanted to contest these charges and the suspension of his security clearance, he had the ‘privilege’ of appearing before an AEC personal security board. Strauss gave Oppenheimer as little leeway as possible in responding to this letter, allowing him only until the following day to decide whether or not to take up his ‘privilege’ and refusing his request for a copy of the letter. It seems that Strauss and Nichols hoped Oppenheimer would resign, in which case the as-yet-unsigned letter could be destroyed and forgotten about.

  Obviously shaken by the turn of events, Oppenheimer, after leaving Strauss’s office, went to see Joe Volpe, the former AEC lawyer, the two of them being joined soon afterwards by Oppenheimer’s own lawyer, Herb Marks. Unknown to them, their conversation was recorded by hidden microphones installed at Strauss’s request. At the end of the evening Oppenheimer took the train back to Princeton to talk it over with Kitty. Shortly after noon the next day, he received a call from Nichols, telling him he had just three more hours to reach a decision. An hour later, Oppenheimer called back to tell Nichols that he would give his decision in person the following morning.

  That afternoon Oppenheimer and Kitty travelled to Washington, where, together with Marks and Volpe, they drafted a letter rejecting the idea that he should resign, on the grounds that such an action ‘would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government that I have served now for some twelve years. This I cannot do.’ Rather than implicitly concede his guilt, he would subject himself to the ordeal of a security hearing. In the meantime, his access to restricted documents would remain suspended, as was forcibly brought home to him two days later – Christmas Eve – when representatives of the AEC arrived in Princeton with a letter telling Oppenheimer that he was ‘hereby directed to deliver’ all remaining AEC documents in his possession. The same day, he received the letter from General Nichols that he had looked through in Strauss’s office. This time it was signed.

  On 1 January 1954, in accordance with the wishes of Strauss, the telephones in Oppenheimer’s home and Princeton office were tapped and he himself was put under close surveillance, followed wherever he went. When the FBI agent in Newark found himself listening to conversations between Oppenheimer and his lawyers, he contacted Hoover’s office expressing concern about the legality and propriety of the procedure, ‘in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney–client relations’. As disclosing attorney–client relations was precisely the point of the surveillance (Strauss was reported to have commented to an FBI 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’), the agent was reassured that it was all right, that such surveillance was necessary to alert the authorities to any plans Oppenheimer might have to flee the country.

  In the New Year of 1954, Oppenheimer, advised by both Marks and Volpe, considered who should represent him at the hearing. Volpe thought he needed a trial lawyer, someone with experience of the cut and thrust of the courtroom. Marks, on the other hand, influenced partly by the fact that the hearing was, officially at any rate, not actually a trial, but rather an inquiry, thought Oppenheimer needed someone eminent and distinguished, instead of a tough courtroom fighter. So it was that the genteel Lloyd Garrison was chosen. Garrison lacked courtroom experience, but was from a distinguished family and was an extremely educated man. In his spare time he read philosophy and Greek literature.

  ‘The fact that this clearance has been suspended is presently classified information,’ Nichols had emphasised in a letter circulated to the army, navy, air force and AEC installations. Nevertheless, news of it began to spread around Washington in early January. On 2 January, Rabi, in his role as chairman of the GAC, went to see Strauss to tell him that he hoped the security board would ‘whitewash Oppenheimer’, a suggestion that Strauss dismissed out of hand. Not long afterwards Vannevar Bush told Strauss that news of Oppenheimer’s suspension and forthcoming hearing was ‘all over town’.

  On 25 January, Oppenheimer went to Rochester to attend the fourth in the series of conferences there on high-energy physics. The conference lasted three days and concentrated mainly on the properties of the unstable ‘new particles’ that Oppenheimer had described in his Reith Lectures as ‘the greatest puzzle in today’s physics’. One important recent development in this field much discussed during the conference was the classification of some of those particles into two categories: hyperons, which are heavier than neutrons (an example is the Lambda hyperon, which decays into a proton and a negatively charged pi-meson), and K-particles, which are intermediate in mass between a proton and a pi-meson. What Oppenheimer had described a few years earlier as the ‘particle zoo’ was showing no signs of becoming either less puzzling or less interesting.

  Oppenheimer not only took part in the discussion of this conference, but also chaired its opening session on ‘Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering and Polarization’. According to Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer even played a ‘leading role’ at the conference, though he adds: ‘I don’t know how closely he had been following the physics.’ Those taking notes at the conference were, Bernstein says, at pains ‘to record Oppenheimer’s often Delphic remarks’. When he reread those remarks, one thing that struck Bernstein was ‘just how gratuitously nasty Oppenheimer could be when he thought his time was being wasted’:

  My thesis adviser, the late
Abraham Klein, who was then a young, very junior faculty member at Harvard, gave one of the lectures. He came to a problem and inquired if it was safe to assume that everyone was familiar with it. The notes read: ‘Oppenheimer remarked that it was not safe to assume that everybody was familiar with this, but it was also not safe to assume that this is any reason for discussing it.’

  Abraham Pais was there, too, and also reread the notes taken at the conference. What struck him was ‘how unusually quiet Robert had been at that time’.

  Neither Pais nor Bernstein knew about the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance and his imminent security hearing, though there were several there who did, among them Edward Teller. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your trouble,’ Teller told Oppenheimer when they met between sessions. ‘I suppose, I hope, that you don’t think that anything I did has sinister implications?’ Oppenheimer replied. When Teller assured him that he did not, Oppenheimer asked him if he would speak to his new attorney, Garrison. At this point Oppenheimer knew nothing about Teller’s meetings with FBI agents, and Teller knew nothing about the Chevalier Affair. When Teller met Garrison (and Marks), therefore, the issue that figured most in their conversation was the hydrogen bomb, in connection with which Teller was able to assure them that, though he and Oppenheimer disagreed, he did not think Oppenheimer was disloyal. After his meeting with Oppenheimer’s lawyers, Teller later said, he left with the determination that ‘I would testify that Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen.’ Garrison, however, decided that Teller’s dislike of Oppenheimer was so intense and so obvious ‘that I finally concluded not to call him as a witness’.

  By this time Strauss had chosen his own lawyer to represent the AEC at the hearing. The man in question was Roger Robb, who had a reputation as one of Washington’s toughest trial lawyers. Almost immediately Robb was granted an ‘emergency Q clearance’, which enabled him to immerse himself in Oppenheimer’s FBI files, as a result of which he became convinced that ‘Oppenheimer was a Communist and a Russian sympathiser’. Having read through the FBI material, Robb flew out to California to meet some of the scientists – Teller, Alvarez, Lawrence, Pitzer and Wendell Latimer – who were on record as having doubts about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. However, the strategy he was developing would in fact focus less on Oppenheimer’s alleged disloyalty, which, Robb knew, would be difficult (if not impossible) to prove, than on his ‘veracity’, legitimate doubts about which would be very easy to demonstrate: all one had to do was to draw the hearing’s attention again and again to the Chevalier Affair and to Oppenheimer’s documented lies on the subject. He intended to mention the affair as early as possible at the hearing. ‘My theory,’ he later said, ‘was that if I could shake Oppenheimer at the beginning, he would be apt to be more communicative thereafter.’