The board’s appeal to Lawrence showed the confidence of its members in his ability to see things their way and balance the interests of the emerging security state and the scientists it employed. That confidence paid dividends when the board turned its attention to Robert Serber, who had been Oppenheimer’s right-hand man in theoretical physics at Los Alamos. After the war, Serber had become a valued member of the Berkeley faculty, recruited by Lawrence to succeed Oppie as its chief theoretical physicist. Serber had come under attack because of the leftist associations of his friends and his wife, Charlotte. Both Robert and Charlotte Serber had held security clearances at Los Alamos, where Charlotte served as the lab’s indispensable librarian. That was not good enough for the AEC, which denied her a security clearance to serve in the same capacity at Berkeley and placed her husband under a cloud.
Serber’s character witness before the Neylan board was Lawrence himself, as good a guarantee of clearance as he could have wished. Ernest’s handling of the hearing differed dramatically from Latimer’s, producing a much different outcome. As Neylan recollected, Lawrence said, “ ‘I hope you’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because he is a fine fellow.’ Ernest was betting his life on Serber and was proved to be right.” Ernest had learned how to play the security game. Unlike Latimer, he accepted the rules, focusing his efforts on a defense of the accused rather than an attack on the system.
The carefully orchestrated proceeding faltered only once, when Neylan asked Serber a dangerous hypothetical question alluding to the case of Haakon Chevalier. A member of the Berkeley French faculty and a close friend of Oppenheimer’s, Chevalier had approached Oppie about passing information from the bomb program to the Soviets. Oppenheimer rejected the overture on the spot, though the encounter would create a political problem for him down the line.
Neylan’s question to Serber was: “If somebody sympathetic to Russia were to ask you to get some secret information from Ernest Lawrence and retail it back to a Russian agent, would you put that matter up to Lawrence?”
Serber replied, “Yes, I think so.”
“What?” Lawrence exclaimed.
But Serber had misunderstood the question. With Lawrence’s careful guidance, he explained that he meant he would report the overture to Lawrence as a security breach, not as an invitation to espionage. Neylan accepted the explanation and cleared Serber, declaring him “frank and forthright.”
To Serber, the entire episode was deeply unsettling. He pictured himself like a defendant in a movie court-martial, interrogated by three humorless inquisitors about suspicious acquaintances he barely remembered. He never received a formal notification that he had passed the ordeal, though Oppenheimer later mentioned that in a copy he had seen of the board’s report, Serber had been “glowingly praised.” That was cold comfort, Serber reflected: “I had found the experience humiliating and frightening, and resented having been put through it.”
A year later, Lawrence again had to intercede to protect a Rad Lab colleague. This time Neylan’s target was Melvin Calvin, a future Nobel laureate who had worked at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago and then moved to Berkeley to research peacetime applications of medical radioisotopes with John Lawrence. Ernest stepped in at once, advising Neylan that his own investigation of the charges against Calvin had “strengthened and reaffirmed” his confidence in the chemist’s loyalty. “Quite apart from his great scientific talents,” he told Neylan, “I have always regarded him as a man of fine personal qualities of character, loyalty, and integrity.” Lawrence’s statement took the wind out of the security inquiry, and the board passed Calvin after a brief interrogation.
A more complicated case, though one that unfolded outside the AEC’s security process, involved Frank Oppenheimer, a talented physicist who had received his PhD from Caltech but lacked his older brother’s theoretical profundity. Unlike Robert, Frank had joined the Communist Party with his wife, Jackie, in 1937, when they harbored the impression that the party shared their own goals of social justice. They would resign in disillusionment in 1940. But Frank would not shed his political beliefs; nor was he as willing as Robert to suppress them in the name of career advancement. On accepting a job in the Rad Lab in 1941, however, he promised Lawrence not to embarrass the lab with labor activism or other causes. He had been carefully coached by his brother, who had experienced Ernest’s hostility to politics in the Lab firsthand. “I warned him that Ernest would fire him if he was not a good boy,” Robert recalled later.
Frank played an invaluable role at the lab, including work on the calutrons. But his leftist politics never lay far beneath the surface, posing a continual irritant for Lawrence. “Why do you fool around with these things?” Ernest chided Frank during a train trip to Oak Ridge in 1944. “Good scientists aren’t like people who just want to eat, sleep, and make love. You’re not like people who can’t get anywhere. You don’t need that.” Lawrence’s concern, Frank recalled, was that politics might cause dissension and distraction on the laboratory floor—creating what he called “inhomogeneity” in the lab.
In Ernest’s view, Frank failed to keep his promise to avoid causing political trouble for the lab: shortly after the war’s end, Frank explained to a newspaper reporter that he had moved a speech to a small hall because Negroes had been barred from a larger one. “Now look what you’ve done,” Lawrence upbraided him. “You’ve brought race relations into the lab!” Still, when Frank came under consideration for a tenure-track job at the University of Minnesota after the war, Ernest recommended him glowingly as “one of the most useful members of our staff” and praised his “originality and soundness of scientific thinking.”
Frank got the job. He left Berkeley in 1946 with assurances from Ernest that he would always find the doors of the Rad Lab open. But two and a half years later, everything had changed. In October 1948, as Frank was preparing to accompany physicist John Williams to Berkeley to discuss the construction of an accelerator at Minnesota, Lawrence abruptly informed Williams that Frank would not be welcome. The unexplained refusal shocked Williams, who scurried to find a traveling companion who “meets with your approval,” as he wrote Lawrence. For Frank Oppenheimer, who had been looking forward to the trip as a long-deferred homecoming, it was even more stunning. That very day, he dispatched to Ernest an indignant cri de coeur:
Dear Lawrence:
What is going on? Thirty months ago you put your arms around me and wished me well, told me to come back and work whenever I wanted to. Now you say I am no longer welcome.
Who has changed, you or I? Have I betrayed my country or your lab? Of course not . . . Does anybody think that I ever let any classified information leak out, intentionally or unintentionally? . . . You do not agree with my politics but you never have, and there are no new rumors about my distant past floating around . . .
I am really amazed and sore because of your action.
For all its undoubted sincerity, Oppenheimer’s letter displayed a brazen disingenuousness, perhaps its author’s chief character flaw. In 1949, under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Frank would finally confess publicly to his Communist Party membership. At that point, he was fired by the University of Minnesota. But he knew well at the time of his letter to Lawrence that new rumors about his past had been “floating around”; a Washington Times-Herald reporter had badgered him about them in 1947, prompting him to deny his party membership for the record. The reporter’s source was undoubtedly an FBI file on Robert Oppenheimer, which disclosed Frank’s Communist affiliation. The dossier was being shown around Washington by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa—curiously enough, as part of his case against David Lilienthal’s confirmation to the Atomic Energy Commission. Numerous top-level scientific leaders, including Lilienthal, Conant, and Bush, were familiar with the file. There is some likelihood that Lawrence had heard about it too, in which case he would have known that Frank Oppenheimer’s repeated denials of party membership were false. That could have been eno
ugh to prompt him to bar Oppenheimer from his lab.
In a final indignity, Lawrence asked Edwin and Elsie McMillan to rescind a dinner invitation to Frank. That hurt, for Frank’s friendship with McMillan dated back to the mid-1930s, when they shared many companionable holidays camping and riding with Robert at his ranch in the New Mexico desert. Lawrence’s interference in a private friendship only added to the growing rift between him and Robert and Kitty. “When we ran into Ernest at one of those big parties somebody else was giving [in Berkeley], I said something about it,” Robert recalled. “I don’t think Ernest minded that, but as often was the case, my wife said something sharper, and I think maybe he minded that.”
• • •
The AEC personnel board hearings foreshadowed a conflict over security and politics that would have a historic impact on the Berkeley campus and the Rad Lab. The conflict involved the University of California’s loyalty oath.
In early 1949 Jack Tenney, who had staged the earlier hearing into Rad Lab security, resurfaced with a package of thirteen bills targeting suspected communists at the university and elsewhere in state government. Hoping to head off wholesale interference in university affairs by conservative legislators, Robert Sproul asked the regents on March 25 to amend a 1942-vintage oath of office required of all university appointees, adding a clause stating that the appointee was not a member or supporter of “any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government.” The regents went further, compelling university employees to explicitly disavow the Communist Party.
This was not Sproul’s finest moment. He led the regents to believe that his addition had been approved by the faculty senate, which, in fact, was unaware of the proposed change. In one stroke, his misstep fractured his relations with the regents and alienated the faculty. The resulting mistrust would keep the loyalty oath controversy boiling for more than two years, during which Berkeley’s reputation as an academic sanctuary was immeasurably damaged.
The question of whether to sign the oath split the faculty. A majority opposed the oath but chose to sign nevertheless, especially after the regents decreed that those who refused would face dismissal. But for many faculty members, the significance of the oath went much deeper. Even among those who signed, the experience of being forced to affirm one’s political loyalty was so repugnant that the real issue became whether to stay at Berkeley at all. In that conundrum would lie the deeper injury the controversy caused the university in general and the Rad Lab in particular.
Lawrence’s mentor Jack Neylan was also damaged by the controversy. Neylan originally opposed Sproul’s version of the oath, on the curious grounds that it would simply encourage its targets—the radicals assumed to be swarming over the university—to commit perjury. “I was convinced that a Communist would swear to anything,” he said later. Soon, however, he seized the reins of the affair as leader of the regents bloc pressing for dismissal of nonsigners. As his position became more controversial, Neylan became ever more obstinate. While Sproul may be judged as having started the uproar, it was Neylan who carried it to its institutionally destructive conclusion. On campus, he would be seen as the outstanding villain of the affair, and not without reason: at his behest, the regents would fire thirty-one nonsigners in 1950. Two years later, the California Supreme Court ordered them all reinstated. One of them, David Saxon, an MIT-trained physicist, would become president of the University of California in 1975.
Lawrence’s friendship with Neylan desensitized him to the moral quandary faced by members of the Rad Lab, especially its European-born scientists. Even the most ardent anticommunists among them regarded the oath as an uncomfortable reminder of the impositions on academic freedom they had suffered in their homelands. To Ernest, this attitude was incomprehensible; he dismissed their objections as little more than “byzantine quibbles,” recalled Emilio Segrè. Moreover, he took a firm stand against the holdouts, as in the case of Gian-Carlo Wick, an outstanding Rad Lab theoretician. Learning that Wick had refused to sign, Lawrence summoned him to his office for a bitter interview. Unless Wick changed his mind, Ernest declared, he could “get the hell out of the Rad Lab, as far as I’m concerned.” When Wick stood his ground, Ernest demanded his security pass.
Luis Alvarez took it upon himself to step into the fray. Alvarez had been willing to sign the oath, but he understood that Lawrence had wildly exceeded his authority; at the time of the Wick confrontation, the regents had still not decided whether to dismiss nonsigners. As Alvarez recounted the episode, he hastened to Lawrence’s office to advise him that as long as Wick remained in good standing as a faculty member, Ernest had no authority to fire him. “Ernest grunted and groaned and made a lot of noises for a while,” Alvarez recalled, “and eventually calmed down and agreed that I was right.” Alvarez visited Wick and asked him to forget about the whole encounter, explaining, “Ernest sometimes acts emotionally.” Wick got his pass back, but he could not easily overlook the affront to his intellectual independence. A few months later, he quit Berkeley for a post at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology.
That was the beginning of an outflow of talent from the Rad Lab. Among the others to go was the genial Berlin native Pief Panofsky, a brilliant thirty-year-old particle physicist. Gifted with a quick theoretical mind and an exceptional talent for practical experimentation, Panofsky had been personally recruited from the Manhattan Project by Alvarez, who considered him “my secret weapon at Los Alamos and at Berkeley.” Panofsky, who had risen precociously in his two years at Berkeley to the rank of associate professor, detested the very idea of the oath, but signed—“reluctantly,” as he put it later. He considered himself a hardened veteran of security theater; scientists like himself who held security clearances during the war, he observed, were inured to “the kind of irrationality and lack of privacy inherent in personnel security measures.” But once it became clear that the regents would enforce the oath with the threat of dismissal, he decided that continuing to serve at Berkeley was impossible. Armed with job offers from several elite universities, he informed Lawrence of his decision to resign.
“Don’t do anything until you hear the regents’ side,” Ernest told him, and scheduled a meeting for the physicist with Neylan. Ernest and Pief motored together over the Bay Bridge and down the peninsula to Neylan’s estate in the woodsy enclave of Atherton. There Neylan asked Panofsky superciliously, “Young man, what is bothering you?” Panofsky replied that he was disturbed by the regents’ intolerance. “Now, listen, my boy,” Neylan rejoined, launching into a two-hour monologue about the history of the oath, the duplicity of Robert Sproul, and the faculty’s disrespect for the board of regents. On the return drive, Panofsky told Lawrence that he had not changed his mind. A few weeks later, he accepted a job at Stanford, where he served until the end of his life in 2007.
The exodus continued, fueled by growing dismay in the Rad Lab at Lawrence’s refusal to oppose the oath. The entire episode underscored the fruitlessness of his hostility to politics in the lab, for it was now plain that there never was a way to keep the political world excluded; Lawrence’s maxim that political discussion was irrelevant to the science performed within the lab’s walls sufficed only to widen the political rift on the staff. Berkeley’s physicists, whether in the department or the Rad Lab, ended up divided into two camps. On one side were Lawrence, Alvarez, and a few other supporters of the oath; on the other side were several equally distinguished scientists. Those who spoke out vigorously against the oath eventually felt themselves becoming marginalized: Jack Steinberger, a nonsigning Rad Lab staff scientist, bristled at being “lectured by Alvarez on the evils of the fifth column of communist ‘sympathizers,’ in whose traitorous ranks he probably included me.” Alvarez’s caution to Lawrence about his treatment of Wick had yielded to his intense loyalty to his boss; he barred Steinberger from access to the 184-inch cyclotron, which Steinberger needed to complete an important experiment. Soon after that, S
teinberger was turned down for a faculty post for which he had been nominated by Segrè and McMillan; finally, he found a note on his desk stating that since he had refused to sign the oath, he was no longer welcome at the lab and must leave the premises before nightfall.
By the time the controversy ended, six physicists had departed the lab, including all four of its theorists. “For theory, it was a body blow,” Segrè reflected. What remained behind was a pervasive dismay that the leaders of the lab, who were among Berkeley’s most eminent figures—among them Lawrence, Alvarez, Seaborg, McMillan, and Segrè—had kept aloof throughout the controversy despite repeated efforts by their colleagues to enlist them to fight the oath.
Lawrence was not the only professor whose feelings about the oath as an issue of academic freedom were inextricably bound up with questions of loyalty to his faculty colleagues and his friends on the board of regents. But he was certainly among the most prominent, and his failure to speak out weighed the more heavily for that. Wrote David P. Gardner, the affair’s first historian: “One can only speculate if the Regents would have dismissed, for not signing, men such as these on whose reputations the University’s scientific fame in substantial part lay.”
Some of them sought to rationalize their behavior after the fact, as though fearful that history would judge them for their silence. Segrè, several of whose closest professional friends lost or relinquished their jobs over the matter, deprecated the oath as “meaningless,” one of a sequence of “transient lunacies” he was willing to accept with a mental reservation that made it a nullity. “I calculated that I had sworn my allegiance to king, Mussolini, party, constitutions, and institutions at least fifteen times.” What could one more oath matter?
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