That judgment may say more about Neylan than about Oppenheimer. Friends and colleagues of Ernest and Oppie typically sought an explanation of their break in their divergent personalities, rather than the character of either man. But they found it no easier to pinpoint the cause. James Brady, who had worked with Lawrence and Oppenheimer almost from the time of their arrival at Berkeley, tried to get to the bottom of it one day while he and Ernest were together in the Rad Lab during the Oppenheimer hearings.
“How does this happen, that all the other physicists except the group here in Berkeley are defending Oppie?” he asked.
“There’s a very good reason for it,” Ernest snapped. “We’re the only ones around here who really know that man.” Brady, shocked at Ernest’s vehemence, tried to delve deeper. Ernest seemed to be especially scandalized that Oppenheimer had lied to the Manhattan Project’s security officials about Haakon Chevalier. “I got Oppenheimer that job in the first place,” he complained, as though Oppie’s blunder reflected poorly on his own judgment. “I could excuse almost anything except lying to the security people. This I can’t believe, I can’t understand. A man can’t even be a good physicist, if you’ll lie that way.” Even that answer seemed to leave too much unsaid, Brady thought. “It seemed to me to be personal,” he recollected.
Yet Oppenheimer almost always gave Ernest the benefit of the doubt. He refused to accept that Ernest might have participated in Strauss’s campaign against him or engaged in any of the rumormongering about his Communist tendencies that periodically swept the Berkeley campus. “I never heard anyone attribute that to Ernest,” he said.
There was one thing that hurt, however. After the Soviet Union’s first reported H-bomb test in August 1953—a relative fizzle known to US intelligence as “Joe-4”—“Ernest said, I think to DuBridge, ‘Well, it’s sure lucky that some people’s advice wasn’t taken.’ ” That thinly veiled reference to himself, Oppenheimer said, was the “harshest thing that I heard.”
By then, their break was complete. After the loyalty hearing, Oppenheimer said, “we saw almost nothing of each other.” All that would survive of their friendship was the scientific legacy they had built together, and the very distinct legacies that would outlive them both.
Chapter Twenty
* * *
The Return of Small Science
On June 29, 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission voted 4 to 1 to revoke J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, one day before it would have expired anyway. The majority opinion was written by Lewis Strauss, who spared no effort to paint Oppenheimer as a weak-minded perjurer whose behavior had materially undermined national security. “The work of Military Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Atomic Energy Commission—all, at one time or another have felt the effect of his falsehoods, evasions, and misrepresentations,” Strauss wrote. He cited “the proof of fundamental defects in [Oppenheimer’s] ‘character’ ” developed during the hearing and declared that “his associations with persons known to him to be Communists”—a category that encompassed at one time or another not only Haakon Chevalier but also Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and his brother, Frank—“have extended far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint which are to be expected of one holding the high position that the Government has continually entrusted to him since 1942.”
The lone holdout on the commission was Henry DeWolf Smyth, who had telegraphed his distaste for the inquiry to Ernest Lawrence at Oak Ridge. In his dissent, he observed that the “massive dossier” assembled by the personnel board had failed to unearth a single indication “that Dr. Oppenheimer has ever divulged any secret information . . . In spite of all this, the majority of the Commission now concludes that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk. I cannot accept this conclusion or the fear behind it.”
Smyth’s concern about the “fear” underlying the Oppenheimer verdict was widely shared in the research community. It had become disturbingly clear that in the supercharged political atmosphere of the time, scientists could be placed on trial for their personal views, with their careers and reputations hanging in the balance. The government’s immense financial sway over research funding gave its interests—including its political interests—immense weight. Thus did the economics of Big Science create a double-edged sword.
Under the circumstances, scientists’ fealty to military and political orthodoxy trumped their honest scientific judgment. The result was a sea change in the relationship between scientists and the Atomic Energy Commission. At the agency’s inception, scientists had hoped it would serve as a civilian bulwark against military monopolization of nuclear research. Now, under Lewis Strauss, it had become even more security-obsessed than the colonels and generals the scientists had worked with during the war, in purposeful if somewhat prickly companionability. In the words of the AEC’s official historians, “It was not likely that an agency that had destroyed the career of a leader like Oppenheimer could ever again enjoy the full confidence of the nation’s scientists.”
The Oppenheimer case did more than heighten the conflict between scientists and bureaucracy; it also caused a deep rift within the scientific community that would not be healed for years. A great deal of obloquy fell on Lawrence and his colleagues at the Rad Lab, who had stood united, and virtually alone, against Oppenheimer. Compounded by Lawrence’s campaign for the Super, a project that many physicists considered technically and morally dubious, this record undermined his reputation as a scientist’s scientist driven by the quest for knowledge alone. But Ernest was not the only physicist whose judgment was clouded by politics; almost everybody’s was, for it had become almost impossible to take a stand for or against the pursuit of thermonuclear technology on purely technical grounds. James Franck had been correct when he wrote after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that scientists could no longer “disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries.”
The Oppenheimer case left Lawrence with a horror of overt dabbling in the security politics of the time. Among his longtime friends and colleagues, he had seen those who supported Oppenheimer get ritually humiliated by the personnel board, while those who doubted Oppie, like himself, were stigmatized by the scientific community. Now every security inquiry posed similar risks. These were nothing like the Berkeley security cases of 1948, which Ernest could manage smoothly via his friendship with Jack Neylan; they were ferocious inquisitions conducted by ruthless anticommunists, before whom a man’s life and reputation counted for little.
One such case involved the Rad Lab’s former staff chemist Martin Kamen, who had been fired by Ernest during the war in response to an unproved—and groundless—charge of disloyalty. Kamen had struggled to remake his career, survived a suicide attempt, and finally succeeded in gaining a high-level faculty appointment at Washington University in St. Louis, thanks to Arthur Compton, its chancellor. In 1954 he brought a libel suit against the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune, which had identified him as a Russian spy on the strength of a vague accusation made by the right-wing Iowa senator Bourke Hickenlooper. Kamen reached out to Lawrence for a deposition attesting to his loyalty, of which Lawrence in fact had no doubt. To Kamen’s surprise, Lawrence agreed—but on condition that he not be subjected to cross-examination. Kamen could not fathom how Lawrence expected to be immune from courtroom questioning; he supposed, undoubtedly correctly, that Ernest was “not prepared to undergo the trauma of an adversary confrontation.” Ernest’s response contrasted sharply with that of Compton, who sat for a blistering daylong deposition by the Tribune’s lawyers without wavering for a moment in his defense of Kamen. In the end, Kamen won his lawsuit and $7,500 in damages.
• • •
Ernest’s health had deteriorated toward the end of the war and grown even worse after the armistice. Now, as he felt weighed down by his failure to keep the Rad Lab above the turmoil of the Oppenheimer case, illness began to get the better of him. He was gray, tired, and distracted,
to the point that he received a rare tongue-lashing from Luis Alvarez for his inattention to Rad Lab business. His most troubling conditions were a strangely recurrent viral pneumonia, chronic sinusitis, and the ulcerative colitis that had laid him low the weekend before his scheduled testimony against Oppenheimer. In the view of his brother, John, who had long played the role of his medical advisor, Ernest’s basic problem was overwork. Through the thirties and into early wartime, his natural vigor had kept these maladies at bay, but the sheer magnitude of the demands on his time and energy finally had caught up with him. There was more to do and less time for relaxation—not that Ernest could ever keep still for long—and a weaker constitution to hold it all together.
The end of the war brought an unceasing parade of high-profile visitors to Berkeley—military men, foreign dignitaries, important scientists from abroad—and a stream of invitations to join government commissions and corporate boards. Jack Neylan and Rowan Gaither steered him away from most of these, including a lucrative invitation to join the Monsanto Company board. Neylan’s concern was that the offer was too rich: “I knew that any time Ernest took that amount of money, he would break his neck to earn it,” he recalled. But Neylan and Gaither found it harder to stop him from accepting invitations to join public committees and boards, with the result that he was constantly shuttling between Berkeley and Washington to attend one government function or another.
John and Molly tried to steer Ernest toward rest and relaxation, but he had a habit of transforming even innocuous holiday pursuits into physical challenges. During a 1946 visit to his in-laws on Balboa Island, a resort spot south of Los Angeles, he conceived the idea of renting a home on the island for the summer. Learning that the house he coveted was unavailable for rent but up for sale, he bought it on the spot. Molly’s dream of a quiet summer evaporated, for the house was desperately in need of rehabilitation—“an old wreck, one of the oldest around, and built without benefit of architect” she recollected. Worse, Ernest decided that he should manage the renovation work personally. “The remodeling was a true Ernest venture,” recalled his daughter Margaret, who turned ten that summer watching the builders tear off the front of the house and rebuild the structure room by room. Yet once the project was finished, the press of business kept him from visiting his refurbished vacation home for more than a few weekend days at a time.
What consumed him in this period mostly was something new: his first purely commercial venture, built around his first invention totally unconnected with the work of the Rad Lab. He was creating a tube for color television.
Ernest’s interest in color TV dated back to 1949, when he and Luis Alvarez were invited to a demonstration of a rudimentary tube. The very idea of a color broadcast was so implausible that Alvarez secreted a small magnet in his pocket to verify that the picture was actually produced by electrons striking a phosphor screen. So it was, though the picture was hopelessly blurry. The device did, however, start Ernest thinking about how to produce a higher-quality display.
The technical challenge was right up his alley: it involved the electromagnetic focusing of a stream of charged particles and its synchronization with an oscillating electric current—in other words, the basic elements of the cyclotron. The project returned him to the milieu of small science he had left behind after his first few handmade cyclotrons. He now was fashioning a device by himself, without an army of technicians and engineers, working on a laboratory bench at home. Within a few months, he had rigged up an improved tube, which he showed to Alfred Loomis, who contributed a few minor technical suggestions, and to Alvarez and McMillan, who reacted with unease to Ernest’s enthusiasm for what they considered a most unprepossessing project. “Ed and I were embarrassed by the tube’s poor picture quality and its even poorer commercial potential,” Alvarez recalled. But Ernest “dismissed our doubts with a wave of his hand. There were technical problems that had to be solved, he said, but the tube was certain to do the job.”
Greater encouragement came from Rowan Gaither, whose businessman’s soul was stirred by a device he thought might have great commercial possibilities. An impeccably groomed and proper San Francisco lawyer with extensive connections on Wall Street and in Washington, Gaither was a habitué of the worlds of finance and of technology. After the war, he had helped the Pentagon reorganize its research and development arm, known as Project RAND, into the independent RAND Corporation. Then he assisted Henry Ford II with restructuring the Ford Foundation, of which he would later serve as president. Gaither’s relationship with Ernest had broadened from that of financial and legal counselor to one of personal friendship. After the new project had been effectively blessed by Alfred Loomis, the two Loomis protégés formed a partnership to transform Lawrence’s tinkering on color TV into a business. Their only disagreement involved the division of ownership: Gaither proposed an eighty-twenty split in Lawrence’s favor, and Lawrence insisted on fifty-fifty. They sought a tie-breaking ruling from Loomis, who supported Lawrence. On those lines, Chromatic Television Laboratories was incorporated on March 31, 1950.
Color TV was an embryonic technology, but the size of its perceived market already had triggered a furious rush to develop a consumer product. The contestants included RCA, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and General Electric, all seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for mutually incompatible technologies. Hollywood was also interested, and Gaither soon lined up financial backing from Paramount Pictures. Over the next six years, its investment would run to millions of dollars.
In the thrall of his usual optimism, Ernest Lawrence began recruiting workers for the venture, installing them in a garage laboratory in a vacation home he had acquired in Diablo, a resort community less than an hour’s drive from Berkeley. The Diablo house had been another failed effort at a relaxation hideaway. Ernest had bought it on the spur of the moment in 1950 as “a place where he could get away from the telephone and the pressures of his regular work,” Molly recalled. It was a smallish bungalow, not really spacious enough for their family of eight, though it was located near a country club with a swimming pool for the children. The house never appealed much to Molly, for the inland summers were beastly hot, and Ernest himself never seemed to be around—to him, the inactivity defined by “rest and relaxation” meant boredom. But now the house acquired a new purpose. Ernest equipped the garage with bunk beds and a kitchenette for Chromatic technicians, and soon doubled its size to accommodate a full-scale electronics shop.
The staff swelled with scientists and technicians recruited from Livermore and the Rad Lab. One of the first was Don Gow, a former military engineer who had worked with Alvarez on the linear accelerator and the MTA. Gow was swept into Lawrence’s magnetic field and held there by the boss’s “sense of urgency, his willingness to try ideas rapidly and drop them when a better idea came along.” He and his fellow Chromatic employees became accustomed to receiving calls from Lawrence at dinnertime with the message, “I’ve got a new idea—let’s stop what we’ve been doing and look at it tonight.” They would all speed out to Diablo as if in a caravan, not to return home to Berkeley until dawn.
Lawrence worked on the tube design with an intensity he had not shown since the Alpha racetrack project. The blue notebooks he always carried filled up with notes and designs scribbled at all hours of day and night and all circumstances: on the drive from Balboa to Berkeley, on the train to Chicago, during a Bohemian Grove retreat, on a flight to New York. In mid-1951 he developed a radically new design based on placing microscopically thin wires just behind the tube’s glass viewing surface. These were to focus the electron beam onto colored phosphors behind the screen. The Diablo shop built a prototype, and the result was stunning: a much brighter picture than the RCA and CBS tubes, with cheaper components. On the strength of a demonstration, Paramount agreed to build a manufacturing plant to turn out prototype tubes in Oakland.
Paramount also stepped up its involvement in Chromatic’s management. Suddenly there
were production managers and financial executives looking over Ernest’s shoulders. The essential contradiction between the operational methods of research laboratories and industrial factories became excruciatingly clear. Production engineering, Gow reflected, “is a very expensive game and none of us, including Ernest, had the faintest notion what it meant.” Lawrence had run the Rad Lab frugally—for a laboratory. But the cost of experimental equipment had always been secondary to the goal of the research, especially during the war, when the urgency of the Manhattan Project made profit-and-loss calculations irrelevant. “We were all used to building one of something, and when it contributed to a million-dollar experiment, you hardly noticed the cost,” Gow said. Lawrence’s efforts at Chromatic similarly were aimed at producing a single working prototype, but Paramount’s goal was to mass-produce tubes to be marketed at a nominal price of $50 or $75. The demands of mass manufacturing and mass marketing began to overwhelm Ernest’s resolutely sunny disposition.
Adding to the pressure were the many other demands on his time. The debate over the Super had not let up, resulting in frequent summonses to Washington. Livermore was undergoing its transition from the MTA project to its role as the second bomb laboratory. And of course the Rad Lab was running at full bore, with the Bevatron back on track. “Ernest was probably the busiest man in the country,” Gow observed. “There were very important people with respect to defense matters and very important people with respect to basic science and basic research, and very important people with respect to color television, and very important people with respect to God knows what else, in and out of the office in an absolutely steady string.” Lawrence’s hands were on everything, and everything required decisions, sometimes split-second decisions.
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