Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Next to jump on the internal security bandwagon was California’s “little HUAC”—the Tenney Committee. Even before HUAC’s Oppenheimer story broke, Tenney had notified the FBI that he planned to subpoena Haakon Chevalier to appear before his own committee hearings, in Oakland, the following week.98

  Like Thomas, Tenney had spent the previous year dealing with public ridicule and a hostile press. (His committee’s investigation into sex education at Chico High School was interrupted by picketing students holding signs that read: “The Birds and the Bees; Mr. Tenney, please!”)99

  For the past month, Tenney’s reclusive chief investigator, attorney Richard Combs, had planned hearings on links between the Communist Party and the CIO-affiliated Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Combs also intended to expose Communist ties to the California Labor School in San Francisco.100 Following HUAC’s revelations, however, Tenney and Combs hurriedly expanded the Oakland hearings to include charges of Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory.101

  Tenney’s latest investigation opened on November 1, 1947, the day after Thomas’s closed. Amid name-calling between government informers and hostile witnesses, the question of wartime spying at Berkeley was largely ignored. Instead, Combs told of his own recent nocturnal visit to the Rad Lab, where, equipped with a flashlight, he had climbed under a security fence and approached the giant cyclotron undetected.102

  Almost a week passed before Chevalier was finally called to the stand. But the drama quickly turned anticlimactic when Chevalier was dismissed without ever being questioned about his approach to Oppenheimer.103 Like Thomas’s Hollywood hearings, Tenney’s investigation ended abruptly and without resolution.

  As subsequent events would show, moreover, neither event clouded the aura that surrounded Oppenheimer, who continued to be lionized by the press as well as the public. So well known and admired a figure was Oppie that when the inaugural issue of Physics Today appeared the following May, the editors needed only to put a porkpie hat on the cover for their lead article on recent trends in American science. That July, Oppenheimer spoke defiantly about his left-wing past in a cover story for Time magazine. “The Thomas Committee doesn’t like this, but I’m not ashamed of it,” Oppie boasted. “I’m more ashamed of the lateness.… If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education, I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos at all.”104

  Lilienthal thought it a telling sign of the times that Oppenheimer’s security file—now 1 foot high and weighing some 12 pounds—was once again back on his desk at the AEC later that summer. Wrote the AEC chairman of the prevailing mood: “Suspicion, suspicion, suspicion. And what an opportunity to gouge a man you don’t like, one who has disagreed with you. Godalmighty!”105

  * * *

  With the exception of Tenney’s abortive hearings, Lawrence’s laboratory had thus far escaped the security mania that seemed to be sweeping the country.

  But an early warning sign had been the government’s denial of a security clearance for Charlotte Serber. Refused the job of Rad Lab librarian, she was eventually given another post at the lab that did not require a clearance.106

  Although security at the Berkeley lab had been described as “poor” in a 1946 army report, the only physical changes imposed since then was a new fence around the giant cyclotron—erected at the AEC’s insistence following Combs’s nighttime raid. Lawrence had successfully resisted the installation of additional barriers as “giving the laboratory area an industrial appearance.”107

  Behind closed doors and out of the headlines, however, another kind of security investigation was about to get under way at Berkeley. Caught between the need to grant hundreds of new Q clearances on the one hand and congressional charges of lax security on the other, the AEC in April 1948 had issued an “Interim Procedure” containing guidelines for the investigation of suspected security risks.108

  The new rules created regional Personnel Security Boards staffed by locally prominent citizens. Each board was asked to decide whether prospective AEC employees and contractors deserved a security clearance based upon three so-called fields of inquiry: “character, association, and loyalty.”109 Since the PSB was not a court of law, the usual rules of evidence did not apply. Subjects might not even be informed of specific charges against them; nor were they allowed to confront their accusers. There was usually only forty-eight hours’ advance notice of a hearing, and no appeal of the board’s ruling outside the commission was possible.110 As the AEC’s Joseph Volpe frankly admitted to the Joint Committee, the PSB was “not much more than a kangaroo court.”111

  The University of California’s Personnel Security Board held its first hearing that summer. At Lawrence’s request, Neylan agreed to head Berkeley’s PSB. Its other members were two war heroes: Admiral Chester Nimitz and Major General Kenyon Joyce.112

  The first person to be investigated by the board was a young Los Alamos chemist who had come to Berkeley to work with Wendell Latimer. A pall of suspicion had fallen over Robert Hurley because he and his Latvian-born wife had opposed U.S. entry into the war while graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.113

  Summoned to Neylan’s law office on August 4, 1948, Hurley faced the board in the company of his sole defender: Latimer.114 Three hours later, Neylan handed down the verdict in longhand notes written on a yellow legal pad. The board found Hurley “lacking in frankness and, in many instances, evasive in relation to substantive issues.” He was declared “not a justifiable risk” and denied a clearance.115 Fired by the university, he was subsequently rehired by a defiant Latimer, and promptly fired again at Neylan’s direct order.116

  The next scientist to appear before Berkeley’s board was Robert Serber, who, like Hurley, found himself in trouble because of his wife’s political associations. Unlike the unfortunate Hurley, however, Serber had the active support of Ernest Lawrence, who attended the August 5 hearing to speak on his behalf.117 Lawrence’s endorsement left Neylan’s verdict a foregone conclusion. Excusing Serber’s failure to publicly criticize the Soviet Union as “consistent with a retiring nature,” the board welcomed the physicist back into the fold.118

  No such reception awaited Frank Oppenheimer. Hoping to spend the summer in California, Frank had written Lawrence from Minnesota, expecting the usual pro forma invitation extended to Rad Lab alumni. Instead, Ernest’s reply was quick, brusque, and negative, prompting this wounded response from Oppie’s brother:

  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?119

  Frank came to Berkeley anyway. Risking Ernest’s wrath, Ed and Elsie McMillan invited the outcast to dinner at their home.120 When Oppie and his wife, visiting from Princeton, encountered Ernest at a faculty cocktail party, an inebriated Kitty loudly scolded him in front of the other guests for banishing Frank from the lab. Oppie simply looked on in silence, bemused at Ernest’s discomfort.121

  Lawrence never gave a reason for his edict banning Frank. But his Scandinavian temper had flared upon learning that Frank lied about not being a member of the Communist Party. Ernest was no less angry at Oppie for hiding the truth about his brother.122 At the time of the Tenney hearings, when Ernest had quizzed Oppenheimer about the Chevalier affair, Oppie had cavalierly dismissed the question with an impatience that seemed to imply that Lawrence was too thickheaded to understand the answer.

  * * *

  Baited by Hoover, the trail being followed by Red-hunting investigators was leading inexorably closer to Berkeley. In July 1948, Thomas’s HUAC began a series of hearings whose star witnesses, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, promised to expose Communists at top levels of the U.S. government. Almost in passing, Bentley’s testimony identified Louise Bransten—a former Vassar classmate—as someone she had encountered at Communist Party meetings in New York during the late 1930s.

&n
bsp; Alert reporters got a hint of the direction that HUAC’s next inquiry would take when the committee “inadvertently” released an executive session transcript containing testimony by Harold Zindel, one of the army agents who had shadowed Martin Kamen to his wartime rendezvous with Soviet diplomats at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.123 Both Zindel and a former bureau agent, Larry Kerley, were currently working for HUAC.124 Another former army agent, David Teeple, a colleague’s of Zindel’s, had meanwhile quit his high school principal’s job to join Hickenlooper’s personal staff. Retired FBI agent Harold Velde, who had been a member of King’s expanded “commie squad” in San Francisco during the war, was now a congressman from Illinois and a member of HUAC.

  In mid-August, Louis Russell tipped off the bureau that HUAC’s next target would be Berkeley and Chicago scientists suspected of stealing wartime atomic secrets.125

  Thomas’s hearings on Soviet espionage at the wartime Rad Lab began a few weeks later in executive session at the House Office Building. Excluded from the hearing room, reporters waited impatiently outside in the hall. First to be called was Kamen, who, up to a few days before, had been living the quiet life of a junior professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. Kamen’s subpoena had arrived on the same day that his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, broke the story of his 1944 dinner with Kheifets and Kasparov.126

  Brandishing the FBI’s still-classified transcript of the recorded conversation, Stripling questioned Kamen for three hours about the rendezvous at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto. Throughout, Kamen denied passing any secret information to the Russians.

  Steve Nelson was next to testify. HUAC’s subpoena had reached him in New York, where he was serving on the Communist Party’s National Board. Invoking the Fifth Amendment, Nelson refused to answer any of the committee’s questions. Later, outside the hearing room, he branded his interrogators “political pyromaniacs.”127

  Louise Bransten, next in the lineup, also pleaded the Fifth upon the advice of her attorney. Joseph Weinberg, the last witness to be called for the day, denied for a second time ever having met or even talked to Steve Nelson.

  More than two dozen other witnesses, including Groves and Lansdale, would testify before the closed hearings concluded in late September. At the end of the month, a twenty-three-page HUAC report on Soviet atomic espionage featured excerpts from Kamen’s testimony and urged the “immediate prosecution” of both Nelson and Bransten for espionage and contempt of Congress. Since the committee said it was considering perjury charges against him, Weinberg was identified in the publication only as “Scientist X.”128

  Defying the wishes of his own party, Thomas vowed to resume the spy hearings following the presidential election, little more than a month away.129

  11

  A RATHER PUZZLED HORROR

  TRUMAN’S UPSET VICTORY in the 1948 election and Parnell Thomas’s removal from Congress—on a conviction for payroll padding—promised a changed setting in Washington for the coming year. HUAC’s new chairman, John Wood, a moderate Democrat from Georgia, announced that the committee’s spy hunt was temporarily suspended.

  But HUAC was no longer the only committee in Congress with an interest in pursuing “atom spies.”

  Shortly after regaining the helm at the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Brien McMahon had appointed a twenty-eight-year-old recent Yale Law School graduate—William Liscum Borden—the committee’s executive director. Smart and driven—to the point of obsessiveness—Borden had come to McMahon’s attention for placing a newspaper ad that called upon America’s leaders to issue a nuclear ultimatum to Russia: “Let Stalin decide: atomic war or atomic peace.” Borden and his like-minded conservative friends called the ad their “Incendiary Document.”

  While still at Yale, Borden had also authored a grim but foresighted book on the possibility of a “nuclear Pearl Harbor,” titled There Will Be No Time.1 The young staffer and McMahon dedicated themselves to ensuring that the nation would achieve what Borden called “atomic abundance.”2

  Inevitably, their attention soon turned as well to the Super, and the security of the nation’s atomic secrets.3 One result of the Thomas hearings had been to persuade Lilienthal to open the AEC’s personnel security files to the Joint Committee.4

  Borden took a personal interest in the dossier on Robert Oppenheimer, about whom he had heard rumors from the day he joined the Joint Committee. The two men met for the first time on April 6, 1949, in the committee’s suite of offices at the Capitol. After introducing the GAC to the Joint Committee’s new members, Oppenheimer had outlined the scientists’ case against proceeding with Project Lexington, the air force’s proposed nuclear-powered bomber.*5 He also warned about the danger of accidents at civilian nuclear power plants, which the AEC was busy promoting. (“It is a dangerous engineering undertaking. I was astonished to know that many people were wishing for this proving ground in their state.”)6

  Although McMahon and Borden fervently supported both nuclear power and the air force project, they remained silent at this meeting. Borden’s impression of Oppenheimer was that of “a born leader and a manipulator.”7

  * * *

  Six months after the Thomas hearings, Lawrence had reason to hope that the Rad Lab would avoid being dragged into the morass of Washington politics. In late April, he attended the weeklong Joint Orientation Conference for AEC laboratory directors at the Pentagon. Participants in the conference toured an aircraft carrier at Norfolk, Virginia, watched a flyover of air force jets at Eglin Field in Florida, and witnessed a practice airborne assault by army paratroopers at Fort Benning, Georgia. Lawrence returned to Berkeley sunburned and relaxed, bearing a souvenir photograph of the sailfish he caught in Florida.8

  Just two days later, on April 22, 1949, HUAC’s long-postponed spy hearings resumed. In an executive session at New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Chairman Wood, acting as a subcommittee of one, questioned a thirty-two-year-old chemist who had been a technician at the Rad Lab back in 1943. Like many students of the day, Russell Davis had been drawn to the Communist Party as a way of making new friends. (He was disappointed, Davis admitted, to find “mostly girls with thick glasses and empty faces, who looked like psychology students.”)9 Davis and his wife later testified to seeing various Berkeley scientists at party meetings, including Rossi Lomanitz and Max Friedman.

  Wood next summoned Lomanitz, who had meanwhile gotten a job teaching physics at Tennessee’s Fisk University. Also called upon to testify were the other three in the picture taken at Sather Gate. David Bohm was then an assistant professor at Princeton. Max Friedman, who had changed his name to Ken Manfred after the war, was back at Berkeley on sabbatical from the University of Puerto Rico when HUAC’s subpoena reached him. Lomanitz, Friedman, and Bohm all pled the Fifth in response to Wood’s questions. Joe Weinberg—brought face-to-face with Steve Nelson in the hearing room—denied under oath having previously met him.10

  The dramatic highlight of the three-month hearings occurred on June 7, when Robert Oppenheimer was called before HUAC in executive session. The committee was only asking for the physicist’s help in its investigation of the Radiation Laboratory, Wood explained. Indeed, other committee members took pains to point out that Oppie was not the subject of the hearing, since his loyalty had been “vouched for by General Groves.”11

  Asked about the Chevalier incident, Oppenheimer gave the same version of the story he had told the FBI in 1946: he was the sole person who had been approached. It was only when Wood’s queries shifted to Frank that Oppie grew evasive, asking HUAC’s chairman “not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg you not to ask me these questions.” Wood, unexpectedly, demurred.12

  Oppie emerged from the hearings unscathed. Before the session was adjourned, HUAC member Richard Nixon even warmly thanked Oppenheimer for his testimony, adding, “I think we all have been tremendously impressed with him and are mighty happy we h
ave him in the position he has in our program.” The entire committee descended from the dais to shake the physicist’s hand.

  Frank Oppenheimer received very different treatment when he and Jackie appeared before HUAC’s executive session a week later.13 After consulting with their lawyer, Clifford Durr, the couple had decided to admit to their own previous membership in the Communist Party but not to answer questions about the political views of others. Following an afternoon break, Wood opened the hearing room to reporters, and Frank’s testimony admitting that he had lied about his party membership was released to the press.14

  Earlier that day, Oppie’s brother had testified in detail about his brief and somewhat haphazard career as the Communist known as Frank Folsom. (He had once absentmindedly left his party identification in a shirt he sent to the cleaners. The laundry returned the pale green card in “a little envelope,” Frank remembered.) But neither he nor Jackie would identify any others they knew as Communists, despite Wood’s insistent prompting. “I cannot talk about my friends,” Frank told the committee.

  On the question of whether he had been asked to spy during the war, Frank’s reply was direct and unequivocal: “I knew of no Communist activity, nobody ever approached me to get information and I gave none, and I worked very hard and I believe made a valuable contribution.”15

  That evening, the headline of the Oakland Tribune read, “Ex-U.C. Bomb Worker Reports Early Ties with Communists.” Frank learned from reporters that he had been fired by the University of Minnesota while he was still on the witness stand. The school accepted his resignation, which he had submitted beforehand as a pro forma gesture, less than an hour after he admitted to lying about being a Communist.

  Oppie’s former students met a similar fate. Bohm was suspended from teaching by Princeton while his trial for contempt of Congress wound its way through the courts; his contract would not be renewed when it expired the following year.16 Lomanitz’s contract at Fisk was likewise allowed to lapse even though he, like Bohm, had received enthusiastic praise from colleagues, students, and peers. Bernard Peters—whom Robert Oppenheimer had identified in his HUAC testimony as “quite a Red”—was forced to leave the University of Rochester after portions of Oppie’s executive session testimony were leaked to the Rochester Times-Union.17 Oppenheimer’s efforts to get the school to renew Peters’s contract were unavailing.18