Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Kitty was likewise delighted to be leaving Berkeley. When a salesman called about renewing their automobile club membership, the FBI agent monitoring the call heard her say that they “would not be gone long—only 15 or 20 years.”111 After dithering for several more weeks about whether to leave California, Oppie finally accepted the institute job that April. At a special meeting of the Berkeley physics department, a tearful Birge described Oppenheimer’s leaving as “the greatest failure of my life.”112

  Lawrence learned of Oppenheimer’s decision from a radio news broadcast. To Rabi, Oppenheimer’s leaving Berkeley a second time amounted, in Ernest’s eyes, to a kind of treason.

  * * *

  At the Rad Lab, the 184-inch Synchrotron finally sparked to life just after midnight on November 1, 1946. In its first week of operation, Lawrence’s machine produced a beam of 200-million-volt deuterons, twice the energy that he had set as the goal for the great cyclotron back in 1939.113

  Despite such successes, Lawrence was worried anew about how the Rad Lab would fare in the transition from the army to the AEC. The cozy personal relationship that he had built up with Groves over the years did not guarantee good relations with Lilienthal, who remained an unknown quantity to Ernest. That winter, Lawrence submitted a last budget request to the army, asking almost $8 million for the coming year.114

  Lawrence bid adieu to Groves at a farewell party in Washington on January 17, 1947, amid talk that there were already warning flags flying for the Rad Lab at the AEC.115 The commission had recently balked at funding John’s biomedical clinic and had approved money for only half of Alvarez’s Linac.116

  Yet there were other, worse shocks to come. Most worrisome to Ernest was the news that James Fisk, the AEC’s recently appointed director of research, opposed using government funds to support further work on particle accelerators.117 The utility of his machines was “indefinite,” Lawrence bristled in a letter to Fisk, and “the value of such information to be obtained does not require justification.”118

  Adding to Ernest’s anxiety was his uncertainty whether Oppie would be an ally or a foe in the coming struggle. When consulted about the Rad Lab budget, the GAC chairman had candidly said that he thought Lawrence’s figure too high. Recently, Oppenheimer had also surprised Ernest—and the AEC—by throwing cold water on the commission’s exaggerated claims concerning the future of civilian atomic power.119 At the same time, what had previously been Lawrence’s trump card—the university’s close ties to the army—was about to be taken out of his hand. Both Contract 36 and Contract 48 were finally scheduled to expire that summer.120

  The university’s much-delayed “roundup and showdown” with the AEC occurred in mid-August, at a meeting of laboratory directors.121 Hoping to undercut commission bureaucrats, Lawrence had invited Lilienthal out to California a week before the meeting for several days of hiking in Yosemite. Lilienthal was facing his own problems at home: his confirmation was still being held up by Senate Republicans, who had attacked his stewardship of the TVA as pro-labor and even “communistic.”122 (“I am so glad to get away. A change of scene should help,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal on the way out west.)123

  From the mountains, the pair drove to the Bohemian Grove, where Lawrence had moved the lab directors’ meeting from Berkeley. Loomis and Gaither had volunteered their respective camps at the Grove for Ernest’s guests.124 (In a letter, Cooksey assured Loomis that the cabins were stocked with “Bourbon, Scotch, vermouth, and gin”—as well as “plenty of red meat.”)125

  The AEC commissioners stayed at Gaither’s “Friends of the Forest” camp. Lawrence, Underhill, and the Berkeley contingent bunked at “The Sons of Toil”—Loomis’s camp. The remaining lab directors slept in a clubhouse alongside the Russian River. Tellingly, Oppenheimer deserted his former Berkeley colleagues to join his new friends in the AEC.

  No formal agenda had been set for the meeting, nor were minutes kept. Informally, however, Fisk had made it clear that the future of government support for the national labs—Lawrence’s lab in particular—was at stake.

  On August 19, 1947, Alvarez and McMillan began the meeting with presentations on the Linac and Synchrotron. In discussions that occupied the morning, Oppenheimer sided with Lawrence, who argued forcefully that the commission should continue the tradition of support for basic research set by Groves and the army.126 A protest by Strauss—who accused the university of “running out of the duty it owed”—was countered by Neylan, who claimed that the AEC contracts put too great a strain on Lawrence.127

  In the course of a walk amid the redwoods with Underhill and Lawrence that afternoon, Neylan sketched the outlines of a deal. Sitting down on a log beside the path, he announced that he planned to introduce a resolution to the regents that would extend the contracts for Los Alamos and the Rad Lab—something Neylan had promised Underhill just weeks earlier he would not do—on the sole condition that Lawrence not bear responsibility for overseeing the agreements but merely serve as a consultant to the government. The long-suffering Underhill could do nothing but silently assent.128

  The details were subsequently sorted out in telegrams and telephone calls between Neylan and Lilienthal.129 In the revitalized alliance between the government and the university, Fisk’s reservations were simply swept away. Observed a university attorney who witnessed the documents signed by Sproul, in wonderment: “This is not a contract. This is a treaty between sovereign powers.”130

  Less than two weeks after the Bohemian Grove meeting, Lawrence received a promise of $15 million from the AEC for his accelerators during the coming year. Even the money for Seaborg’s controversial “hot lab” on campus was reinstated, as was funding for John Lawrence’s medical physics clinic. Cooksey informed Loomis in a letter at the end of August that the meeting at the Grove had proven to be “of inestimable value to the country in the phase of atomic energy.”131

  10

  CHARACTER, ASSOCIATION, AND LOYALTY

  FOLLOWING THE BOHEMIAN Grove meeting, Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss flew back to Washington together. Part of their conversation en route focused on the charges, newly resurfaced, that Oppie was a security risk. Cooksey wrote to Loomis that Oppenheimer and Strauss had “come to a mutual understanding of each other’s problems.”1 But Cooksey’s conclusion was premature; and his sense that Oppenheimer’s troubles were in the past, wholly mistaken.

  Under the McMahon Act, all AEC employees who had received wartime clearances from the army’s Manhattan Project had to be reinvestigated by the FBI. The security checks assumed a new urgency in the wake of the Canadian spy scandal. Prominent among the individuals whose cases needed to be reviewed was Oppenheimer. From the outset, Lilienthal realized that Oppie’s past was likely to set off alarm bells with the commission’s security officials.2

  The previous November, Groves had dumped the problem of what to do about Oppenheimer’s clearance in Lilienthal’s lap. When Lilienthal tried to duck the issue, Groves persisted. In a letter that December, the general suggested that the AEC chairman-designate resolve the matter by simply firing the scientist, removing him from the GAC.3

  At the FBI, the order to reinvestigate Oppenheimer presented Hoover with another opportunity—“since we don’t have to be discreet or cautious in the inquiries that we make when we are conducting an open investigation,” an aide reminded the bureau’s director.4

  During February 1947, FBI agents interviewed almost two dozen of Oppenheimer’s friends and associates. Agents also talked to Willie Higinbotham and Robert Bacher in Washington and Enrico Fermi in Chicago.5 On the Berkeley campus, Sproul, Lawrence, and Kenneth Pitzer were interviewed.

  Sproul told the bureau that Oppenheimer “had been a fool about fifteen years ago due to immature judgment” but was “now thoroughly embarrassed by his past indiscretions.”6 Lawrence said much the same about the physicist—“he has had the rash and is now immune with reference to any similar experiences”—adding that Oppenheimer was “a grand person i
n every way.”

  On February 28, Hoover sent the latest dossier on both Oppenheimer brothers to Truman’s military aide, Harry Vaughan, asking him to pass them along to the president.7 A few days later, the FBI director called Lilienthal at home to say that he would be forwarding the Oppenheimers’ files to the commission. Hoover pointedly asked Lilienthal to give the matter his personal attention.8

  On Saturday morning, March 8, a courier from the bureau delivered the files to the AEC building.9 The twelve pages devoted to Robert Oppenheimer were a compilation of previous FBI reports and contained nothing from the previous month’s investigation.10

  Dutifully, however, the AEC chairman assembled the commissioners around a table in his office on Monday morning to consider the case against the man some of them knew as a friend. That afternoon, James Conant and Vannevar Bush appeared before the commission with assurances that they had heard—and dismissed—the FBI’s charges as far back as 1942. They also warned that denying Oppenheimer a clearance “would have very serious consequences in the attitude of his fellow scientists toward this project.”11

  Lilienthal had tried to get Groves to appear at the impromptu hearing, to explain why he had chosen Oppenheimer as Los Alamos director in the first place. But the general, returning from a vacation in Florida, could not be reached.12 Instead, Bush and Conant asked Patterson to write on Oppie’s behalf. (Groves’s letter arrived in due course, at month’s end. The Manhattan Project director noted that, while he had learned many disturbing things about Oppie since 1942, there was “nothing which, if known to me at that time, would have changed my decision.” However, Groves urged the commission to “exercise its own independent judgment based on current circumstances.”)13

  * * *

  The commissioner most surprised and disturbed by the FBI reports was Lewis Strauss. The AEC’s deputy counsel, Joseph Volpe, later remembered spending several hours with Strauss discussing the materials in Oppie’s FBI file.14 Strauss recalled that when he had offered Oppenheimer the directorship of Princeton’s institute weeks earlier, Oppie had vaguely alluded to “derogatory information” about his past.15 At the time, Strauss had dismissed such concerns with a wave of his hand. Strauss told Volpe that he now wished that he had paid more heed to the warning.

  Lilienthal, on the other hand, found the allegations in the bureau’s file vague, unsubstantiated, and—in some instances—downright ridiculous.16 Little of the information dealt with the period when Oppenheimer was working on the bomb; most of the bureau’s anonymous informants had obviously not known Oppie well.

  But Lilienthal also recognized that his own reputation as well as that of the fledging AEC might be at stake. He remained the target of partisan attacks by two of the most powerful figures in Congress: J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the new Joint Committee on Atomic Energy chairman, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper.17 Moreover, Lilienthal had already infuriated Hoover by refusing to share the AEC’s security files with the FBI.18

  On Tuesday, March 11, Lilienthal, Volpe, and Bush went to the White House to inform the president of the latest charges against Oppenheimer—not realizing that Oppie’s dossier had preceded them. Finding Truman preoccupied with a crisis in the Mediterranean, the trio met instead with aide Clark Clifford, who suggested having a panel of esteemed jurists, including retired Supreme Court justices, evaluate the evidence. Lilienthal was cheered to find Clifford seemingly untroubled by the Oppenheimer case and supportive of his decision to withhold Oppie’s file from Hickenlooper.19

  Hoping to defuse the Oppenheimer matter with Hoover, Lilienthal met with the FBI director at the end of the month. AEC security officials had meanwhile concluded that the case against Oppie was too thin to deny the physicist a security clearance.20

  While conceding that Oppenheimer’s contribution to the atomic bomb project had been “unique,” and that the scientist had “steadily moved away” from former left-wing associates, Hoover insisted—“with some emphasis,” an aide noted—that he was still not “completely satisfied in view of J. Robert’s failure to report promptly and accurately what must have seemed to him an attempt at espionage at Berkeley.”21 When the discussion turned to Oppie’s brother, Hoover warned that he would personally oppose any effort on the commission’s part to renew Frank’s security clearance.22

  Since Lilienthal believed that his meeting with Hoover had put the flap over Oppie behind him, he was alarmed to get another letter just two weeks later from the FBI director, who claimed to have new and even more damaging evidence against Oppenheimer.23

  The commissioners met a final time on Oppenheimer’s clearance in late summer.24 Most found persuasive the testimony of John Lansdale, who “was absolutely certain of the present loyalty of J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite the fact that he doubtless was at one time at least an avid fellow-traveler.”25 Based largely upon the strength of Lansdale’s endorsement, the commissioners—including Strauss—voted on August 11, 1947, to grant Oppenheimer a top-secret “Q” clearance.26 This time Hoover had no choice but to accept the AEC’s verdict.27

  * * *

  By now aware of the storm flags flying, Oppenheimer had taken steps to distance himself from his past. He had already broken with the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the radical organization which had once listed him as vice chairman on its letterhead.28 The FBI knew, from its wiretaps, that Oppie was also refusing entreaties to speak on behalf of controversial causes.

  The physicist had even seemingly given up on what Fermi called “Oppie’s favorite idea”—the international control of atomic energy. Oppenheimer’s disillusionment with the internationalist cause had seemingly been both sudden and complete—the result of the dramatic deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations that followed the peace and heralded the coming of the Cold War.29 That spring, Oppenheimer had held an urgent meeting with Baruch’s replacement at the UN, Frederick Osborn. Oppie’s pressing message—which he had flown out from California to deliver, he told Osborn—was that America should abandon its negotiations with the Russians on the bomb, lest the nation be lured into an unenforceable ban on the weapon.30

  Stymied in his campaign to oust Oppenheimer from the GAC, Hoover meanwhile turned his attention elsewhere. In January, the FBI director had asked Branigan to expand and update his 1946 CINRAD report. Branigan’s latest “memorandum” grew to a document some 400 pages long and included personal details on more than a dozen Berkeley scientists.31

  That March, Hoover forwarded Branigan’s report to the attorney general, along with a request that Clark “furnish the Bureau with a prosecutive opinion on the possible violations of the espionage laws appearing in this summary.”32 Hoover hoped, once again, to prod the Justice Department into indicting those involved in the Bay Area spy ring—in particular, Steve Nelson and Joe Weinberg. But, once again, the attorney general refused to rise to the bait; as Clark pointed out, the evidence behind the charges (gathered mostly by wiretaps and bugs) would likely be inadmissible in any prosecution.33

  * * *

  At Berkeley, the FBI’s investigation was interfering with Frank’s efforts to find a permanent job. Another apprentice at the Rad Lab, Edward Lofgren, had recently gotten a faculty post at the University of Minnesota, where Joseph Weinberg would also soon go. Lawrence sent a glowing letter of recommendation on Frank’s behalf to William Buchta, chairman of the physics department at Minnesota.34 Buchta hired Frank for the spring of 1947.

  At Alvarez’s request, Oppie’s brother agreed to continue as a consultant on the Linac, which remained a classified project at the lab. Before leaving Berkeley, Frank filled out one of the AEC’s new personnel security questionnaires. The “PSQ” was part of the expanded security procedures that the commission had recently adopted. Under organizations to which he had once belonged, Frank listed the Bach Society and the American Federation of Teachers, but not his prior membership in the Communist Party.

  In early March 194
7, Frank, Jackie, and their two children drove out of Berkeley on their way to Minneapolis, stopping off at Death Valley for a brief vacation. The family moved into temporary quarters at St. Paul’s Curtis Hotel while Jackie looked for a house. An FBI wiretap followed them cross-country, to the hotel room and eventually to their new home.35

  Frank’s new career as an assistant professor of physics was initially uneventful—despite the occasional presence of FBI agents in the classroom.36

  But on July 12, 1947, the Washington Times-Herald published a front-page story identifying him as “a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.” The article, by James Walter, a reporter with ties to the bureau, had obviously come from FBI files, since it included such details as Frank’s Communist Party card number and his party alias, Frank Folsom.37 While the newspaper printed a disclaimer that its story on the younger Oppenheimer “in no way reflects on the loyalty or ability of his brother,” Walter noted that Frank, too, had “worked on the Manhattan project and was aware of many secrets of the bomb from the start.”38

  Reached by telephone by Walter in the early morning hours before the story appeared, Frank had emphatically denied ever being a party member. A follow-up story by the Associated Press, which included Frank’s denial, ran in newspapers across the country the following day.39 Wrote Willie Higinbotham to Frank in sympathy: “The sons-o’-bitches are sure going hog wild.”40

  * * *

  That summer at Berkeley, Lawrence and Birge were still trying to find a replacement for Oppie. Hans Bethe, who was first on Lawrence’s list, could not be lured from Cornell. A second candidate, Stanford’s Felix Bloch, was uninterested in cyclotrons and hence unacceptable to Ernest. Birge finally offered the job to Gian Carlo Wick, an Italian theorist and former colleague of Fermi’s. Until Wick arrived on campus early in 1948, Serber continued to teach Oppenheimer’s quantum mechanics class.41

  As his interview with the FBI showed, Lawrence had managed to temporarily submerge his differences with Oppenheimer—if only out of sheer pragmatism. Oppie’s place on the GAC gave the latter a powerful voice on vital questions affecting the Rad Lab, as the Bohemian Grove meeting had shown.42