Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  . . . All the passages in the record that you refer to I had read. I have, in fact, gone through it quite thoroughly. But I am afraid neither you, nor the Board, nor the Commission, went into me quite thoroughly enough.

  On 3 September 1954, Chevalier finally had a response from Oppenheimer himself to the letter he had sent on 27 July. The response was, however, rather disappointing. ‘It is not nearly as clear to me as it appears to be to you,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘how much, in the past, at present, or in the future the shadow of my cock and bull story lies over you.’ ‘In December of 1943, when I first mentioned your name I thought the story dismissed. I had supposed that for a long time it had been recognised for the fabrication that it was.’

  ‘This letter,’ Chevalier writes in his memoir, ‘seems to have been his final word.’ He did not reply directly to it. Rather, having decided that ‘I must make my side of the story public,’ Chevalier chose instead to write an open letter to Oppenheimer to be published in the Nation. He sent the piece to the magazine on 26 September, but two months later it remained unpublished. The French magazine France-observateur was more enthusiastic and published it on 2 December with a headline on its front cover announcing: ‘Un document exclusif: Robert Oppenheimer pourquoi avez-vous menti? par Haakon Chevalier.’fn70 Having thus been scooped, the Nation declined to publish the letter.

  Worried that Oppenheimer would thus read his open letter ‘in a truncated and perhaps distorted form’, Chevalier wrote to Oppenheimer on 13 December, telling him:

  I have no doubts about your intentions. But the effect of your words and acts has been incalculably disastrous (whether it is clear to you or not) both to me and to yourself. You have, I hope, found out how hard it is to untell a lie.

  . . . This is not a trivial mistake, a casual error of judgment. It is something weighty, monstrous and calamitous borne in knowledge and conscience for years, during which time it was breeding its poisonous mischief.

  ‘Do what we may,’ Chevalier told Oppenheimer, ‘by your unfathomable folly, you and I are linked together in a cloudy legend, which nothing, no fact, no explanation, no truth will ever unmake or unravel.’ He also warned Oppenheimer that he was hard at work on a novel designed to resolve the worries and problems Oppenheimer had caused him: ‘I hope to finish it in the spring. It is entitled The Man Who Would be God.’

  Oppenheimer did not reply to this letter and spent the rest of his life determined to free himself from the ‘cloudy legend’ to which Chevalier continued to feel inextricably linked. He did not speak to or about Chevalier again and, both privately and publicly, said as little as he could about the security hearing that had attached so much importance to that legend.

  Meanwhile, the world at large continued to be fascinated by the ‘Oppenheimer case’ and everything associated with it. Life magazine on 6 September 1954 carried a long profile of Edward Teller, heralded on the front cover with the words: ‘Dr Teller who stood up to Oppenheimer and achieved H-Bomb for US’. Inside the story was headed ‘Dr Edward Teller’s Magnificent Obsession’, and portrayed Teller as the man without whom the H-bomb would never have been made. ‘In that event,’ it said, quoting Eisenhower, ‘Soviet power would today be on the march in every quarter of the globe.’ The article devoted several paragraphs to Teller’s testimony against Oppenheimer, representing it as something that Teller did with a heavy heart, but felt obliged to do because of his loyalty to the US.

  As was made clear on the first page of the article, it was based largely on a book that came out at about the same time called The Hydrogen Bomb, written by two Time-Life reporters called James Shepley and Clay Blair. ‘This book,’ said Gordon Dean, reviewing it for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ‘is in one sense a sort of “Valentine” presented to Dr Edward Teller – but it has blood stains upon it – the blood of Dr Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, the entire staff of that laboratory, Dr Oppenheimer, and many others.’ What Shepley and Blair presented was the story of the hydrogen bomb as seen by Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, a story of noble persistence triumphing – for the good of the United States and the entire Free World – over perverse, and possibly sinister, prevarication. ‘These two boys have done a serious disservice,’ thundered Dean. ‘Their book may very well do what the Communists would love to do – undermine the atomic energy program of this country.’ Isidor Rabi, meanwhile, dismissed the book as ‘a sophomoric science-fiction tale, to be taken seriously only by a psychiatrist’.

  In the October 1954 edition of Harper’s Magazine appeared an article by Joseph and Stewart Alsop that was a kind of mirror-image of the Shepley/Blair book, presenting the Oppenheimer case as a struggle between good and evil, but this time Oppenheimer was the hero and Strauss the villain. In an echo of Emile Zola’s famous article, ‘J’Accuse’, published in 1898 in defence of the wrongfully condemned Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfuss, the Alsops called their essay ‘We Accuse!’

  We accuse the Atomic Energy Commission in particular, and the American government in general, of a shocking miscarriage of justice in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

  We accuse Oppenheimer’s chief judge, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Admiral Lewis Strauss and certain of Oppenheimer’s accusers, of venting the bitterness of old disputes through the security system of this country.

  And we accuse the security system itself as being subject to this kind of ugliness, and as inherently repugnant in its present standards and procedures to every high tradition of the American past.

  Both the Shepley/Blair book and the Alsops’ article gave rise to heated controversies that kept the Oppenheimer case in the newspapers and magazines of both the US and the world beyond it for the next few years.

  One person who showed no inclination whatever to take part in those controversies was Oppenheimer himself. When, immediately after the AEC announced its decision, he was asked for his reaction, he gave a studiedly bland answer that would remain his final word on the subject for many years:

  Dr Henry D. Smyth’s fair and considered statement, made with full knowledge of the facts, says what needs to be said. Without commenting on the security system which has brought all this about, I do have a further word to say. Our country is fortunate in its scientists, in their high skill, and their devotion. I know that they will work faithfully to preserve and strengthen this country. I hope that the fruit of their work will be used with humanity, with wisdom and with courage. I know that their counsel when sought will be given honestly and freely. I hope it will be heard.

  To another reporter shortly afterwards Oppenheimer said that he was looking forward to returning to a ‘cloistered life’.

  If Strauss had had his way, the ‘cloistered life’ of the Institute for Advanced Study would have been closed to Oppenheimer. In July 1954, Strauss told an FBI agent that he and the Board of Trustees had decided to delay a decision about Oppenheimer’s position as director of the institute until the autumn, since, if Oppenheimer were to be asked to resign straight away, it would look like ‘a direct result of personal vindictiveness’ on Strauss’s part. When the Board met in October, however, it was clear to Strauss that there was so much support for Oppenheimer among the Trustees there was no point pushing for his resignation. He therefore switched tactics and, with a show of ‘magnanimity’, urged the Board to reappoint Oppenheimer, which they did.

  ‘So far as I was concerned,’ Freeman Dyson has written, Oppenheimer ‘was a better director after his public humiliation than he had been before. He spent less time in Washington and more time at the institute . . . He was able to get back to doing what he liked best – reading, thinking and talking about physics.’ Dyson is here choosing his words carefully: Oppenheimer got back to reading, thinking and talking about physics, but not to writing it. He wrote a lot of popular lectures on physics during these years, but he did not return to being an active research physicist. Back in the summer of 1952, he had written to Frank: ‘Physics is comp
licated and wondersome, and much too hard for me except as a spectator; it will have to get easy again one of these days, but perhaps not soon.’

  As a spectator, Oppenheimer was unusually well informed, and at the institute he had some excellent people to keep him up to date with the latest research. The one who was intellectually closest to him was Abraham Pais, whose work centred on what Oppenheimer regarded as the most interesting part of the subject: particle physics. In the early 1950s, Pais had done some pioneering and important work attempting to find order in what Oppenheimer referred to as the ‘particle zoo’. Oppenheimer was not exactly a collaborator on this work, but, for an observer, he was very close to it, even making the odd contribution here and there. For example, Pais’s paper at the second Rochester Conference in January 1952 had a title provided by Oppenheimer – ‘An Ordering Principle for Megalomorphian Zoology’ – and, when this was turned into an article for the Physical Review, a footnote acknowledged: ‘J.R. Oppenheimer, discussion remark at the Rochester Conference’.

  In 1954, Pais began a fruitful collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann, a brilliant young physicist who had spent a year at the institute in 1951 before accepting a position at Chicago as an instructor. Pais and Gell-Mann made an important contribution to fundamental particle theory when they introduced a new quantum number to which Gell-Mann gave the name ‘strangeness’. Oppenheimer kept a close eye on this development, but did not contribute to it. At the end of 1954, Pais left the institute for a year to take a sabbatical at Columbia.

  Freeman Dyson was still at the institute, but he and Oppenheimer never became close, either personally or intellectually. ‘I disappointed him by not becoming a deep thinker,’ Dyson has said.

  When I came to Oppenheimer asking for guidance, he said: ‘Follow your own destiny.’ I did so, and the results did not altogether please him. I followed my destiny into pure mathematics, into nuclear engineering, into space technology and astronomy, solving problems that he rightly considered remote from the mainstream of physics.

  The same ‘difference of temperament’, Dyson recalls, also appeared in their discussions about the School of Physics at the Institute: ‘He liked to concentrate new appointments in fundamental particle physics; I liked to invite people in a wide variety of specialities.’

  Two people they did agree on, however, were the Chinese physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Yang came to the institute in 1949, after taking his PhD in Chicago under Edward Teller. In 1950, he was awarded a five-year institute membership, and when that came to an end he was made a full professor. Lee had also taken his PhD at Chicago, which is where he and Yang met. In 1951, after a year at Berkeley, Lee came to the institute on a two-year membership, during which time he and Yang became close collaborators, a partnership that continued after he left the institute for Columbia in 1953. Oppenheimer did not work closely with Yang and Lee, nor was he particularly close to them personally, but he did take great pride in their achievements. By the mid-1950s, Yang, in collaboration with Lee, was the greatest physicist of which the institute could boast. As Dyson puts it, he and Oppenheimer ‘rejoiced together as we watched them grow over our heads and into great scientific leaders’.

  Just a month after Oppenheimer’s reappointment as director, Ed Murrow, the television journalist who fronted the programme See It Now, came to Princeton with his producer Fred Friendly to discuss the possibility of devoting an episode of their programme to the institute. What they had in mind was a general introduction to the place where, in Murrow’s words, ‘you find a Nobel Prize winner every time you open a door’, featuring interviews with Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr (who happened to be visiting at the time) and whoever else they could find. As it turned out, Einstein refused to be involved, and though Bohr agreed to be interviewed, he seemed incapable of saying anything that would be intelligible to a general audience. This left Oppenheimer, who gave a mesmerising performance, talking about his childhood, the institute, quantum physics, but not the security hearing, about which neither Murrow nor Oppenheimer said a single word during three hours of filming.

  On their way back to New York it was clear to Murrow and Friendly that what they had recorded in Princeton was not a programme about the institute (‘There isn’t one foot of usable film in all that stuff we did with Bohr and all the others,’ Murrow said to Friendly), but a first-rate interview with Oppenheimer. He needed a great deal of persuading to allow the programme to go ahead on this new basis, but Murrow was so convinced of the quality of the interview, and that it could not possibly do anything but good for both Oppenheimer and the institute, that he finally gave his consent.

  The programme went out on 4 January 1955 and fully lived up to Murrow’s expectations. It was hugely popular, offering as it did a glimpse of Oppenheimer that was many times more interesting and engaging than the saint depicted by the Alsops or the sinner condemned by Shepley and Blair. The charisma that had enchanted Born in the 1920s, Oppenheimer’s graduate students in the 1930s and Groves and the Los Alamos team in the 1940s had finally been captured on film and made available for everyone to see. Key to the charm of the programme was that Oppenheimer was relaxed in Murrow’s company, both of them smoking heavily and each clearly trusting and admiring the other. Not that Oppenheimer’s performance was entirely without artifice. Pais recalls that on the day of the filming he and Rabi ‘tiptoed into Robert’s office and sat silently in a corner, watching the proceedings. When it was over and Murrow had left, Rabi turned to Oppenheimer and said: “Robert, you’re a ham.”’

  The conversation, as broadcast, began with Oppenheimer talking about the institute and some of its members, including the mathematician Hassler Whitney and the psychologist Jean Piaget. ‘And Professor Einstein is still here too, isn’t he?’ Murrow says. ‘Oh, indeed he is,’ replies Oppenheimer with a smile. ‘He’s one of the most lovable of men.’ Turning to the subject of Oppenheimer himself, Murrow asks: ‘Well, sir, apart from running the institute, what do you do here?’ ‘I do two kinds of things,’ Oppenheimer replies:

  One is to write about what I think I know, hoping that it will be understandable in general, and one is to try to understand physics and talk and work with the physicists and sometimes . . . try to have an idea that may be helpful.

  ‘The part I really get excited about,’ he continued, ‘is just what is called particle physics or atomic physics in its modern sense.’ He then goes up to his blackboard and gives a mini-lecture on physics.

  Turning from physics to politics, Oppenheimer is asked about the dangers of secrecy and replies: ‘The trouble with secrecy isn’t that it doesn’t give the public a sense of participation. The trouble with secrecy is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and resources of the whole community.’ In any case, he insists, ‘there aren’t secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesn’t like to know what he’s up to if he can avoid it.’

  Though there was no mention of the security hearing or of the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance, the Murrow programme achieved precisely what Lloyd Garrison had hoped to achieve at the hearing: it presented the public with the ‘whole man’, and, in doing so, put the charges against him in perspective. The press reviews of the programme were uniformly enthusiastic, most critics being captivated by, as the New York Times put it, Oppenheimer’s ‘lean, almost ascetic face and his frequent poetic turn of phrase’. Friendly and Murrow received 2,500 letters in response to the programme, only thirty-five of which were critical of Oppenheimer, an ‘approval rating’ of more than 98 per cent.

  After his appearance on See It Now, Oppenheimer was no longer the ‘controversial figure’ he had been six months earlier: he was a celebrity. Wherever he went, the press followed and crowds gathered. On 31 January to 2 February, Oppenheimer attended the fifth Rochester Conference, at which he chaired a session on K-mesons, his presence prompting one journalist to describe him with what Robert M
arshak has called a ‘brilliant non sequitur’: ‘Dr Oppenheimer, who is the world’s greatest nuclear theorist despite Federal withdrawal of his top security clearance . . .’

  When Oppenheimer gave public lectures now, the audiences were huge. In April 1955, he was invited to give the Condon Lectures at Oregon State University. His subject was ‘The Sub-Nuclear Zoo: The Constitution of Matter’, and he attracted 2,500 listeners, most of whom, as a newspaper report of the time put it, ‘didn’t know a meson from a melon’. The Eugene Register-Guard reported that the audience for the first of these lectures ‘was several hundred larger than the previous peak crowd’. ‘Listeners sat on the floor, stood in the hallways, and filled the coffee bar and a lounge downstairs where the scientist’s voice was carried by the public address system.’ ‘Not one in 50 could really understand what he was talking about,’ the reporter estimated. ‘So why did they stay?’ His answer was: ‘The great nuclear physicist turned out to be a very appealing, human guy.’

  They also saw a man so obviously in love with his work. As he warmed up to his subject and talked about protons and neutrons and the other creatures of his sub-nuclear zoo, he became quite excited. The audience, not knowing what he was talking about, became excited too.

  It was on this trip out west that Oppenheimer learned (from a newspaper reporter) of the death of the only physicist whose fame and popularity exceeded his own. ‘For all scientists and most men,’ Oppenheimer said on hearing the news, ‘this is a day of mourning. Einstein was one of the greats of all ages.’

  Before returning to Princeton, Oppenheimer went to Iowa State College to give the first John Franklin Carlson Lecture. Frank Carlson, who had done his PhD under Oppenheimer at Berkeley and had published a joint paper with him, had been a professor of physics at Iowa State from 1946 to 1954, when he committed suicide. Oppenheimer’s memorial lecture, the text of which was published in Physics Today, was entitled ‘Electron Theory: Description and Analogy’. It began with an eloquent and heartfelt tribute to Carlson: