Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Lawrence had continued to show a grudging tolerance, mixed perhaps with some degree of envy, toward Oppenheimer’s bohemian lifestyle. The memory of their earlier blowup over the benefit for Spanish Loyalists had long since faded. When his second son was born that January, Ernest named the boy Robert Donald Lawrence in honor of his two closest friends, Oppenheimer and Cooksey.56 Still, Ernest was no less disapproving of Oppie’s devotion to “left-wing” causes.

  It was not only Oppie’s politics but those of the people closest to him that prompted concern. Oppenheimer’s long and tempestuous relationship with Jean Tatlock had finally ended late in 1939.57 A year later, on November 1, 1940, Oppie married Kathryn Puening, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Pittsburgh mining engineer.58

  “Kitty” was the widow of Joe Dallet, a Communist organizer from Youngstown, Ohio, and a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had been killed in battle at Saragossa, Spain, in 1937.59 Kitty herself had joined the Communist Party sometime after marrying Dallet in 1934 but was separated from both the party and her husband by mid-1936. Enrolled shortly after Dallet’s death at the University of Pennsylvania, she had been on a vacation in England, visiting her parents, when she became romantically involved with a former acquaintance, a young British doctor named Richard Stewart Harrison.60 The couple returned to America and were married two months later, in November 1938.61

  Oppenheimer met Kitty the following August during a party at the home of a Caltech physicist, Richard Tolman, and his wife, Ruth.62 Kitty and Harrison had meanwhile moved to Pasadena, where he was interning at a nearby hospital. Oppie invited Kitty to Perro Caliente that next summer.63 After spending six weeks at a dude ranch near Reno to establish Nevada residency, Kitty divorced Harrison and wed Oppie on the same day at a civil ceremony in Virginia City. A county clerk and the courthouse janitor served as witnesses. The Lawrences were the first to congratulate the newlyweds upon their return to Berkeley; Molly was mildly shocked to see the bride already wearing a maternity dress.64

  In a sudden burst of domesticity, Oppenheimer abandoned his rented bachelor quarters on Shasta Road and sublet a modern, rambling house on Kenilworth Court in nearby Kensington from an art department colleague on sabbatical.65 Oppie also sold his beloved “Garuda” and bought Kitty a pearl-gray Cadillac, dubbed “Bombsight.” Their baby—whom Oppie nicknamed “Pronto”—was expected in May.

  * * *

  Perhaps even more troubling than Kitty’s background, from the standpoint of security, was the political worldview of Oppenheimer’s brother. Eight years younger and far more shy and introverted than Robert, Frank shared with his sibling an early interest in science. As a child, Frank understood that he was supposed to treasure the extensive rock and mineral collection he inherited from Robert, but he sometimes felt overwhelmed by the gift. Although Frank dutifully acquired and cataloged his own samples, his collection paled in comparison with his brother’s. As an adolescent, Frank developed an interest in biology after using the microscope he was given as a birthday present to view the wiggly motion of his own sperm.66

  Frank also lacked both the ambition and the direction of his older brother. Until Robert kindled his interest in physics, Frank had been thinking about becoming a professional flutist.67

  Mirroring the relationship between Ernest and John Lawrence, Oppie grew unusually protective of his younger brother—“in some ways perhaps part of a father to him,” as Robert would later observe.68 When Frank went away to study in England, the brothers corresponded regularly, Robert proffering advice from “the fruit and outcome of his erotic labors.”69

  Robert’s letters also waxed philosophical. When Frank complained of a failed romance, Oppie volunteered a perspective that would later seem hauntingly apt to his own situation: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in the times of preparation that determines what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”70

  Forever conscious of laboring in the shadow of his famous brother, Frank, not surprisingly, showed occasional flashes of a rebellious nature. (“Poor laddie, the mark is on you,” Oppie once wrote to Frank in commiseration.)71 Robert attributed his brother’s halting progress toward a physics doctorate at Caltech to the influence of Frank’s fiancée, Jacquenette Quann, an economics major at Berkeley who was active in the campus Young Communist League. Until he met “Jackie,” Frank had only skirted the edge of involvement in politics. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, he remembered attending a Carnegie Hall concert where the orchestra played without a conductor. (“It was a kind of ‘down with the bosses’ movement,” Frank explained.)72

  Robert urged his brother to break off the engagement. Frank, defiant, married Jackie late in 1936, while he was still a graduate student.73 The couple joined the Communist Party together early in 1937, once again in defiance of Oppie’s wishes.74

  As was customary for party members, Frank picked a fictitious last name—Folsom—under which he paid dues to the Pasadena chapter. He and Jackie also socialized and briefly shared a house with several other Communists likewise affiliated with Caltech.75 But Frank’s commitment to communism was apparently neither particularly passionate nor deep. While at Caltech, he and Ruth Tolman organized and performed at a benefit concert for Spain. Frank and Jackie joined the Pasadena chapter’s crusade to racially integrate the municipal swimming pool. Robert, visiting from Berkeley, attended the demonstration and professed to find it “pathetic.”76

  In June 1941, a teaching job that Frank held at Stanford abruptly ended. Oppie told friends that his brother had been fired for radical talk and unionizing. (A Stanford colleague complained to the FBI that Frank had called him “a hopeless bourgeois not in sympathy with the proletariat.”)77 Robert thought Frank’s subsequent, brief period of unemployment “very, very salutary.”78

  At Oppie’s urging, Lawrence agreed to hire Frank at the Rad Lab. To get the job, Frank assured Robert that he was no longer an active Communist, having withdrawn from the party that spring. Robert cautioned his brother that Ernest would fire him “if he was not a good boy.”79

  While Oppie evidently told Lawrence something of Frank’s involvement with politics, he did not disclose his brother’s Communist past.80 As a condition of his employment at the lab, Frank promised Lawrence not to become involved in political causes.81 Ernest assigned him to the team of cyclotroneers converting the 37-inch with the thought that working fourteen- to sixteen-hour days would leave him no time for mischief. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Lawrence put Frank in charge of the night shift building the 184-inch. The boys remembered him nervously chain-smoking, pacing back and forth on the wooden latticework that rose above the big magnet.

  It was no coincidence that Frank’s new job also made it easier for Oppie to keep a watch on his younger brother. Yet Robert’s intervention on Frank’s behalf was a reflection not only of his concern as the older sibling but of true affection. Years later, under much different circumstances, Oppie would say of Frank: “He is a much finer person than I am.”82

  * * *

  By spring 1941, Oppie’s own political dalliances were coming back to haunt him. Jack Tenney, the new chairman of the California legislature’s Committee on Un-American Activities, had recently announced an investigation of hiring practices at the university.83 Tenney was incensed that a teaching assistant in Berkeley’s math department, Kenneth May, was being kept on the university payroll after admitting to being a Communist.84 (May was ultimately not only expelled but disinherited by his father, a Berkeley dean.)85 An earlier investigation by the same committee had focused attention upon the AFT’s Local 349 in Berkeley, with which Oppenheimer and Chevalier were associated.86

  The threat of being hauled before the Tenney Committee passed, and the scare seemed to have little effect upon Oppenheimer’s behavior. That fall, he attended a house-warming party at May’s new home in neighboring Albany.87

  Oppenheimer’s near ru
n-in with Tenney also did not discourage him from further behind-the-scenes unionizing. When Paul Pinsky, a Berkeley alumnus turned organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, encountered difficulty in organizing a chapter of the radical union at the Shell Development Corporation in nearby Emeryville, Oppenheimer brought Pinksy and Shell’s scientists together at his home.88 Pinsky would credit Oppenheimer for the creation of FAECT’s Local 25 at Shell.89

  Later, when Berkeley’s teachers union split over factional differences, Oppenheimer sponsored another union meeting at his house. He hoped this time to organize the Rad Lab.90 Oppie invited two chemical engineers from Shell’s FAECT Local—George Eltenton and Jerome Vinograd—to make the case for joining the union to Berkeley’s physicists and cyclotroneers.91

  The gathering took place at the new home on Eagle Hill that Robert and Kitty had bought that August.92 The modern, Spanish-style house was close by Kenilworth Court and had a sweeping vista of Berkeley and the Bay. The meeting had just begun, Kamen remembered, when it “broke up in some disarray” after Oppenheimer admitted, in response to Kamen’s question, that he had failed to notify Lawrence of his plans.93

  Predictably, Lawrence was enraged to learn of the incident the following day. Before Kamen, Ernest unburdened himself that “Oppie had given him much trouble in the past with his fuzzy-minded efforts to do good.”94 As a result, Lawrence said, he was having difficulties getting Oppenheimer a security clearance.

  Lawrence took Oppie aside a few days later to warn him against any further political activity. Ernest was surprised when his friend turned angry and defiant.95 Oppenheimer defended his actions on the grounds that “underdogs” should be helped by the more fortunate. Lawrence replied with equal heat that the best way to help humanity was by subordinating all political activities, unionizing included, to defeating the Nazis, and the best way to achieve that goal was by attending to the scientific work of the lab. Since he had brought Oppenheimer into the S-1 Project in the first place, Lawrence none-too-subtly reminded him, he was the one who bore the responsibility for getting him access to its secrets. Ernest insisted that Oppie’s “leftwandering” must stop.96

  The confrontation ended on a bitter note. In the coming weeks, its memory rankled with both men.

  * * *

  Robert Oppenheimer officially came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in late March 1941, the date that the FBI opened its file on him. Oppie entered the bureau’s penumbra of suspicion by accident, when he attended a special meeting of his discussion group at Chevalier’s home the previous December.97 Agents had written down the license plate number of Oppie’s Chrysler parked on the street outside. Ironically, it was not Oppenheimer but others at the meeting—specifically, Issac Folkoff and William Schneiderman—who were the real target of the bureau’s surveillance.98

  Schneiderman, a longtime Communist, was the party’s secretary in California.99 “Pops” Folkoff was a sixty-year-old Latvian émigré who owned a clothing repair shop, the Model Embroidery and Pleating Company, in downtown San Francisco.100 Although Folkoff had been in the United States since 1904, he still spoke with a thick guttural accent; a burn he received from a steam press in his youth had left him with a maimed right hand. Folkoff was best known to the FBI as a dogmatic Marxist and the party’s local “bag man,” who collected monthly dues in the Bay Area.

  For almost a year, the bureau had been surreptitiously listening to the telephone calls of both Folkoff and Schneiderman, from wiretaps secretly installed in their homes and at Communist Party headquarters on Market Street. The wiretaps were part of a clandestine FBI program targeted against the Soviet Union’s so-called Comintern Apparatus, and hence known by the shorthand label “COMRAP.”101

  For round-the-clock surveillance, a hidden third wire would be added to the telephone mouthpiece, converting it into an open microphone.102 Conversations picked up either by wiretap or by such “bugs” were recorded on large cellulose-covered metal platters—known as Presto disks—at the bureau’s listening post in Oakland. Because the early taps were not only secret but of questionable legality, information gained from them was puckishly identified in FBI reports as coming from “Informant T-1” or “an informant of known reliability who is not available to testify.”103

  The man in charge of the COMRAP program in San Francisco was Robert King, a young lawyer who had joined the bureau early in 1940, shortly after receiving a law degree from Georgetown University. Following months of fruitlessly driving up and down the West Coast, looking for saboteurs and smugglers, King was reassigned in midyear to the task of identifying political subversives. King boasted that he was the office’s “one-man commie squad.”104

  In the case of the December 1940 meeting at Chevalier’s house, King’s interest had been piqued by Folkoff’s comment, intercepted by the bureau’s bug, that the gathering was to be of “the big boys.”105 Through its technical surveillance—tesur in FBI parlance—the bureau learned of subsequent meetings and conversations that took place between Oppenheimer, Addis, and Folkoff.106

  On Sunday, October 5, 1941, the FBI bug picked up plans for a meeting later that day between Oppenheimer and Steve Nelson, the Bay Area’s top Communist. The rendezvous had been arranged by Folkoff, whom Oppenheimer had promised a donation of $100 for striking California farmworkers. However, at the last minute Folkoff had begged off and telephoned Oppenheimer, asking that he meet with Nelson instead. Nine days later, shortly before leaving for the Schenectady meeting, Oppie had phoned Folkoff and asked that Steve contact him.107

  A mysterious figure to the FBI, Nelson had only recently become a focus of the bureau’s attention in San Francisco. Born Stefan Mesarosh in Croatia in 1903, “Nelson” had entered the United States with fraudulent immigration papers at the age of seventeen and became a naturalized American citizen five years later.108 He joined the Communist Party in 1923, at Pittsburgh. During the early 1930s, Nelson was trained in espionage techniques at Moscow’s Lenin Institute and, in 1933, served as an active agent for the Soviet Comintern in Europe and China. Later volunteering for Spain, Nelson became a political officer, or commissar, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.109 Returning to the United States, he traveled around the country raising money and recruits for the Loyalist cause.

  More than politics had brought Oppenheimer and Nelson together; the two also shared a personal bond. Nelson had been a friend of Kitty’s late husband in Spain and was the one to tell her of Joe Dallet’s death. After Dallet was killed, Kitty had briefly stayed with Nelson at his apartment in Paris, and then later with Nelson and his wife in New York.110

  Oppenheimer first met Nelson at a Spanish war relief party in fall 1939, and the two men and their families had subsequently gone on social outings together. Nelson spent much of 1940 “on the shelf”—hiding out at a cabin in Redwood City under an assumed name, at a time when it appeared that the government was about to declare the Communist Party illegal. He had emerged shortly after America’s entry into the war to become chairman of the San Francisco branch of the Communist Party. He moved the party’s base of operations to a storefront office in Oakland when the big shipyards in the East Bay began recruiting new workers.111

  What was said between Nelson and Oppenheimer in the meetings arranged by Folkoff remained outside the range of the bureau’s microphones. But Oppenheimer’s continuing involvement in progressive causes showed that he had decided to ignore Lawrence’s admonition against left-wandering.

  Since the Schenectady meeting, however, Oppie had apparently begun rethinking his activist role. In mid-November, after failing to catch Lawrence before the latter left for a meeting in New York, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to him, apologizing for the blowup over the union and offering assurance that “there will be no further difficulties.”112

  Still, it was soon evident that Oppie had not completely forsworn political causes. Three weeks later, on December 6, he attended a
benefit for veterans of the Spanish war’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As late as April 1942, Oppenheimer was still giving $150 monthly to Folkoff.113

  Acting on King’s recommendation, on January 26, 1942, the agent in charge of the San Francisco FBI office—N. J. L. “Nat” Pieper—asked bureau director J. Edgar Hoover for permission to extend COMRAP’s technical surveillance to Oppenheimer, Chevalier, and Addis. “This group of individuals is on such a plane that it is unlikely that any confidential Party informant now available to this office will be able to reach them and determine their actual position in the Party,” Pieper wrote Hoover.114

  Ignorant of the S-1 Project and of Oppenheimer’s role in it, Hoover approved only the wiretap on Chevalier—which was subsequently denied by the attorney general. Pieper renewed his appeal to Hoover in March, citing further evidence from existing wiretaps that Addis remained an active party recruiter. On April 15, the FBI director turned down this request as well, chiding Pieper in the process for putting mention of the secret COMRAP program in writing.115

  Just two weeks later, Oppenheimer filled out OSRD’s personnel security questionnaire, his first step in getting a clearance to work on the bomb project. Although Oppie, listing organizations to which he belonged, included the American Federation of Teachers and the left-wing American Association of Scientific Workers, there was no mention either of FAECT or of the “discussion group” that he and Chevalier had organized.*116

  Lawrence’s was the first name that Oppie listed as a reference. While McMillan and Birge would also write glowing letters of recommendation to go in Oppenheimer’s file, Ernest’s was by far the strongest endorsement:

  I have known Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer for fourteen years as a faculty colleague and close personal friend. I am glad to recommend him in highest terms as a man of great intellectual caliber and of fine character and personality. There can be no question of his integrity.117