by Gregg Herken
The next day, Eisenhower learned about Borden’s letter from Wilson. (“Worse one so far,” the defense secretary told the president.)31 Ike recalled that early in his administration someone—he thought it was Strauss—had warned him that Oppenheimer was not to be trusted.32 Having recently come under attack by McCarthy for laxness in confronting communism, Eisenhower summoned Wilson, Strauss, and Brownell to the White House to discuss what to do about Oppenheimer. The president also ordered a meeting of top officials in the Oval Office for early the following morning.33
On Thursday, December 3, Eisenhower ordered that a “blank wall” be put between Oppenheimer and atomic secrets, instructing Brownell to investigate the possibility of “further action, prosecutive or otherwise.” Hoover and Strauss feared that Oppenheimer—then traveling in Europe—might decide, upon hearing the news, either to defect to the Soviet Union or to return home and publicly challenge the president’s order. Accordingly, they decided to keep the suspension of Oppie’s Q clearance a secret. The White House meeting adjourned without agreement on what other steps to take against the physicist.34
Indeed, Strauss and Hoover were themselves uncertain about how to proceed. Six months earlier, when McCarthy and his chief counsel had broached with Hoover the possibility of a Senate inquiry focusing on Oppenheimer, the FBI director had discouraged such a step, cautioning that any such hearing would require “a great deal of preliminary spade work.”35 While Strauss told Hoover that he “felt that an inquiry into Oppenheimer’s activities might be well worthwhile,” he, too, “hoped it would not be done prematurely or by a group that did not thoroughly prepare itself for the investigation.”36 Strauss subsequently wrote Senator Robert Taft, a longtime friend and political ally, “[McCarthy’s committee] is not the place for such an investigation, and the present is not the time.”37 Nothing came of McCarthy’s threat.
But Borden’s letter had suddenly resurrected the possibility of an investigation of Oppenheimer. One option that had been raised at the White House meeting was convening, under AEC auspices, a Personnel Security Board hearing. Heretofore only applied on a regional basis, and in cases much less notorious than Oppenheimer’s, a PSB investigation of Oppenheimer’s “character, associations, and loyalty” promised to avoid the klieg-light publicity of an open congressional hearing. The fact that it would be conducted in secret and was not bound by the usual legal rules of evidence—indeed, was “not much more than a kangaroo court,” as former AEC attorney Volpe had observed—made it all the more attractive to Strauss.38
Hoover, however, had his own reasons for wanting to avoid a loyalty hearing. His real worry, the FBI director confided to Brownell, was that an investigation of Oppenheimer might reveal “a lot of information which could not be publicly disclosed”—i.e., the bureau’s illicit wiretaps. Hoover told Strauss that he had “grave doubts as to the wisdom of a hearing.”39
As expected, the FBI’s interview of Borden had yielded no dramatic new evidence to buttress the charges raised in his letter. (Agents found the ex-staffer “quite intelligent, extremely verbose and inclined toward generalities.”40 Borden, for his part, dismissed the interrogation as “a rather futile and diffuse discussion.”)41 An FBI analysis of Borden’s letter, done for Hoover, concluded that it went beyond the evidence in claiming Oppenheimer was a spy.42
Another who opposed a hearing was the AEC’s new general manager, Kenneth Nichols. Strauss had appointed Groves’s former aide to the post just two weeks after becoming chairman.43 Nichols feared that an Oppenheimer hearing might backfire, damaging the nation’s nuclear program by creating dissension within the scientific ranks and making Oppie into a martyr. He proposed that Strauss simply turn Oppenheimer’s files over to McCarthy instead.44
Strauss, too, worried that alienating the nation’s scientists might be too high a price to pay for destroying Oppenheimer’s influence. During a visit to Strauss’s office on the afternoon of December 3, Teller found the AEC chairman anxious and preoccupied with the case—“predicting disastrous consequences should Oppenheimer’s clearance be called into question.”45
* * *
But a long-suppressed secret, finally come to light, would promptly change this calculation. While Strauss was still at the White House on the morning of December 3, Allardice was at FBI headquarters, meeting with Hoover aide Louis Nichols. Allardice had learned from Cole about Borden’s infamous letter and wished to be helpful in the bureau’s investigation. (An apprentice fingerprint classifier at the FBI before the war, Allardice had subsequently tried, but failed, to join the ranks of special agents.) As Nichols wrote, in a rather breathless summary of the meeting:
Allardice told me in confidence he had been informed by a source whom he believed to be extremely reliable that J. Robert Oppenheimer had stated that his contact in the Eltenton–Haakon Chevalier espionage apparatus had been his own brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and that J. Robert had admitted that his brother, Frank, had approached him prior to the time the Bureau had ever interviewed J. Robert and that it was his, Allardice’s, opinion that J. Robert Oppenheimer did not want the Bureau to have this information, but he had also been led to believe the information had been furnished to the Bureau.46
Allardice had further noted that this particular version of events was not in the FBI files held at the Joint Committee, and volunteered that John Lansdale, Groves’s former chief of security, would be “one of the best sources of information about the case.”47
The following week, Hoover ordered the bureau’s Cleveland office to interview Lansdale, who since the war had returned to his private law practice.48 Allardice meanwhile reported that he had also contacted both Groves and William Consodine, Groves’s wartime lawyer, to obtain further details of the story.
Evidently alarmed that the secret was about to come out, Groves telephoned AEC headquarters on the morning of December 10 to assure Strauss and the commission’s head of security, Bryan LaPlante, that he was “checking further” into Allardice’s story.49 Strauss duly informed the FBI that Groves had contacted him and also that Consodine had identified Frank Oppenheimer, not Oppie, as the real “go-between.”50
On December 15, FBI agents interviewed Consodine; a day later it was Lansdale’s turn. While Lansdale’s recollection was “hazy,” he and Consodine independently described the meeting that had taken place ten years earlier in Groves’s office, where the general had admitted being duped by Oppenheimer into participating in a criminal conspiracy to withhold the truth from the FBI.51
On his own, Groves came to FBI headquarters on December 17. There he asked Hoover aide Alan Belmont for access to MED records in the bureau’s custody, in order “to refresh his memory.”52 Groves had actually wanted to see Hoover but was told by Belmont that the FBI director was out of town. “It was apparent that General Groves realized the current interest in Oppenheimer and is examining his personal position in so far as Oppenheimer is concerned in the event he is called on to testify at some hearing,” Belmont wrote in a memo to his boss.53
From FBI headquarters, Groves hurried over to the AEC, where he told LaPlante of his concern “that the agent who interviewed him was not familiar enough with the incident or the subject matter and therefore could not properly evaluate historical data that he (Groves) would give to him.”54
Groves agreed to be interviewed a second time by the FBI, on December 21, at his home in Darien, Connecticut. Recent conversations with Consodine, as well as a letter from Lansdale and his own review of Manhattan Project documents, had “‘clarified’ his recollection,” Groves told the bureau’s agent, Edward Burke.55 Groves admitted that when he had ordered Oppenheimer in 1943 to give up the names of those contacted by Chevalier he had promised “to put it bluntly that it would not get to the FBI.”
Groves told Burke that he had prepared a statement to give to the press in the event that the truth became public. The agent noted that the general still felt some residual loyalty to his onetime friend: “Groves stated that he desir
ed it made a matter of record that even at this time he is not breaching his promise to Oppenheimer and if friends of Oppenheimer should someday see this record it will appear that he only discussed the matter because the facts are already known.”
The following day, Hoover sent Brownell and Strauss a detailed summary of the information that had been given the FBI thus far by Lansdale, Consodine, and Groves. Hoover hardly needed to point out that the testimony of all three implicated not only Oppenheimer but Groves in more than one felony offense—withholding vital information about an espionage contact during wartime and lying to a federal official.*56
The last person to be interviewed in this round of interrogations was Frank Oppenheimer. Because of snowstorms blocking the mountain passes, the Denver FBI agent assigned to the task was not able to reach the ranch at Blanco Basin until December 29. Once there, he got right to the point. “Were you ever approached by Haakon Chevalier or anyone else for information on the Manhattan Project?” the agent asked Oppie’s brother. Frank’s reply was an unequivocal “No.” Frank went on to volunteer that he and his brother had never discussed being approached by Chevalier “or anyone else concerning MED projects.” However, he declined the agent’s request to sign a statement to that effect—lest “‘a false witness’ subsequently appear to contradict it.”57
* * *
As Strauss realized, this latest twist on the Chevalier incident cast the Oppenheimer investigation into a new and altogether different light. Lacking any firm evidence that Oppie had been a member of the Communist Party, Strauss believed that the decade-old approach by Chevalier would be key to any legal case that might be made against Oppenheimer. When he first learned of Borden’s letter, Strauss had gone to Bates to ask how long Oppenheimer had waited before reporting the Chevalier incident to Groves.58
As recently as December 8, when he returned with Eisenhower from a summit meeting in Bermuda, Strauss had seemed to be looking for an alternative to a loyalty hearing. LaPlante had suggested resolving the imbroglio by unilaterally canceling Oppenheimer’s consultancy contract—a simple solution favored, as well, by Murray and Cutler.59 Others had proposed empowering a special presidential commission to decide Oppie’s fate.60 At a tense AEC meeting on Thursday, December 10, only one commissioner—Joseph Campbell, a New York accounting executive whom Strauss had appointed to the post the previous summer—supported the idea of convening a Personnel Security Board investigation.61
Yet that same day, following his telephone conversation with Groves, Strauss took the first step toward a loyalty hearing by instructing William Mitchell, the AEC’s general counsel, to draw up a statement of charges against Oppenheimer over the weekend.62
By Monday, Harold Green, a young attorney in Mitchell’s office, had prepared a draft of the document, based upon Oppenheimer’s AEC security file and Borden’s letter.63 At the last minute, Green decided on his own to add seven more charges to the original thirty-one, all having to do with Borden’s accusations that Oppie had deliberately sabotaged the H-bomb effort. Green based the new charges upon the FBI’s 1952 interviews with Teller and Pitzer.64
Strauss had promised Hoover that the latter could personally vet the letter of charges before it was shown to Oppenheimer, in order to ensure that the bureau’s informants and wiretaps were not compromised.65 Hoover proposed only minor changes—among them, that Frank’s name be added to the charge dealing with the Chevalier incident.66
Elsewhere in the government, doubts about the wisdom of a hearing lingered. Strauss told Bates on December 14 that Brownell was complaining “‘our ducks are not in a row’ regarding Oppenheimer.”67
For those preparing the case against the physicist, however, the long, lingering memory of setbacks and slights suffered at Oppie’s hand finally overcame hesitation. To Strauss, putting his nemesis on trial—whatever the outcome—was likely to forever tarnish Oppenheimer’s reputation in Washington. With the nation’s political climate conditioned by war overseas and an undiminished hunt for “atom spies” at home, there was likely to be little forgiveness for those shown to be careless with secrets about the bomb. Not incidentally, an investigation of Oppenheimer also offered the prospect of sweet revenge for the humiliation that Strauss had suffered over the isotopes fiasco.
For Hoover, a PSB hearing—provided it did not divulge the FBI’s secrets—promised the outcome that the attorney general, HUAC, and the Joint Committee had thus far been unwilling, or unable, to deliver, without implicating the bureau in the process.
Moreover, Groves’s self-incriminating telephone call four days earlier had evidently steeled Strauss’s resolve—as did a visit on December 17 to the AEC by Hoover’s emissary, Belmont, who relayed the story of Groves’s tortured admission concerning the Chevalier incident. Strauss told Belmont that Groves had likewise given him a new version of the story. The possibility of a perjury indictment of Oppenheimer was discussed openly by the two men. “I told Adm. Strauss that the information furnished us at least shows different stories furnished at different times by Oppenheimer,” Belmont reported to Hoover.68
* * *
Oppenheimer returned to the United States from Paris on December 13, oblivious to the storm that was about to break.69 During the past few months, the physicist had done little to counter the rumors and suspicions that once again were growing up around him. In April, just weeks after Weinberg’s acquittal on the charge of perjury, Oppie had written a letter of recommendation for his former graduate student, attesting to Weinberg’s “loyalty, integrity, veracity.”*70
Invited to England to give the BBC’s prestigious Reith lectures that fall, Oppenheimer and Kitty afterward paid a visit to Haakon Chevalier and his new wife, Carol, in Paris. While there, Oppie offered to help his friend with a passport problem. Hoping to visit the United States as a translator for UNESCO, Chevalier was uncertain whether to renounce his American citizenship and travel on his French passport or to seek a visa. Oppenheimer paid a social call on Jefferies Wyman, the science attaché at the American embassy in Paris and Oppie’s former classmate at both Harvard and Cambridge. Oppenheimer advised Wyman that an unnamed friend might soon be contacting him for advice.71
Oppenheimer’s visit to Chevalier did not go unnoticed by American authorities. The London embassy’s legal attaché coordinated surveillance of the Oppenheimers while they were in England and the CIA took up the trail once the couple crossed the Channel. Alerted to Oppie’s imminent return to the United States, Bates assured Strauss that the “FBI will take care of him in their own way.”72 Bureau agents shadowed the couple from the airport to their home in Princeton.
On December 14, Oppie telephoned Strauss at Brandy Rock Farm, the AEC chairman’s retreat in the Virginia horse country, to schedule a visit two days hence. Oppenheimer wished to discuss the appointment of a Swedish scientist to the institute as well as candidates for the Einstein award. Strauss, who recorded the call, informed Bates that Oppenheimer suspected nothing.73
Originally, Strauss had hoped to confront Oppenheimer with the statement of charges at Brandy Rock on December 16. But Hoover’s delay in vetting the letter thwarted this plan.
Instead, the showdown with Oppenheimer occurred in Strauss’s AEC office on the afternoon of December 21. Nichols was also present. (“I had agreed with Strauss that he should do most of the talking.”)74 In a meeting that lasted half an hour, Strauss and Nichols showed Oppenheimer the letter of charges but refused to give him a copy. Having been warned by Mitchell not to offer the physicist any advice, the two demurred when Oppenheimer asked if they thought he should resign.
Obviously shaken by the charges against him, Oppenheimer told Nichols and Strauss that, while he was inclined toward resignation, rumors of a pending Senate investigation of the Kenilworth Court incident had convinced him that such an action “might not be too good from a public relations point of view.”75 Told by Nichols that he had only one day to make a decision on how to respond, Oppenheimer left to consult with the lawyers he
had retained in the Weinberg case, Joe Volpe and Herbert Marks. When Oppie called Nichols at home that night to ask once more whether he should resign, Nichols, fearful that Oppenheimer was recording the call, again declined to give an opinion.76
Goaded by Strauss, Nichols telephoned Oppenheimer at Princeton the next afternoon to demand a decision. Persuading Nichols instead to grant him an extension, Oppie returned to Washington and talked to Volpe, who counseled his friend to fight the charges.
Even before Oppenheimer had notified Nichols of his response, however, Strauss had taken the first step toward collecting evidence for what would be, to all intents and purposes, a trial. On December 21, immediately following his meeting with Oppenheimer, the AEC chairman asked Hoover to install wiretaps on the telephones in Oppie’s home and office at Princeton.77
PART FIVE
ALL THE EVIL OF THE TIMES
[Oppenheimer] does not believe the case will come to a quiet end as all the evil of the times is wrapped in this situation.
—“Summary for May 7, 1954,” FBI wiretap
17
THE GOOD DEEDS A MAN HAS DONE BEFORE
BOTH SIDES SPENT the next two months preparing their case. After Volpe bowed out as Oppenheimer’s counsel, citing a conflict of interest with the AEC, Herbert Marks suggested the physicist retain Lloyd Garrison, a New York trial lawyer and descendant of the famous abolitionist. Garrison was well known for defending civil liberty cases.1
In late January 1954, Strauss and Nichols chose Roger Robb, a former prosecutor with a reputation for combativeness, to present the evidence against Oppenheimer. As an assistant U.S. attorney, Robb had sat in on the Weinberg case. Earlier, Robb had successfully defended Earl Browder, as the court-appointed lawyer in the U.S. Communist leader’s contempt-of-Congress trial.2
