Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Following the precepts of his youth and the training of the Ethical Culture School, Oppenheimer had elected to do “the noble thing.”

  * * *

  Robb’s cross-examination later that day focused upon Oppie’s graduate students who had worked on the Manhattan Project: Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm, and Friedman. In the afternoon, the prosecution turned to the Chevalier incident. Some weeks earlier, Bates had located in bureau files the Presto disk of Pash’s interview with Oppenheimer. At the FBI, Nichols, Robb, and Rolander had listened transfixed to the decade-old recording of Oppenheimer telling Pash about three colleagues being contacted by an unnamed intermediary to spy for the Russians.49

  Prodded by Robb to “begin at the beginning and tell us exactly what happened” with Chevalier, Oppenheimer told the version he had given the FBI in 1946—that he had been the only one approached by the French literature professor.*50 Surprised to learn that his long-ago interview with Pash had been recorded, Oppenheimer quickly volunteered that what he had told the army security man was a “cock-and-bull story.”

  “Hunched over, wringing his hands, white as a sheet,” Robb later recalled—Oppie, having admitted that he lied, waited almost helplessly for the trap to be sprung.51

  “Why did you do that, Doctor?” Robb asked.

  “Because I was an idiot,” Oppenheimer replied.52

  The physicist went on to venture a further explanation—that he had invented the tale of three contacts in order to protect Chevalier. But Robb pointed out that this new story made no sense, since an approach to others showed his friend to be even more “deeply involved” in espionage. Robb also forced Oppenheimer to admit to having paid a friendly visit to Chevalier—the man he had just implicated as a wartime spy—only months earlier in Paris.53

  Finally, producing the telegram that Groves had sent Nichols in December 1943, Robb challenged Oppenheimer to account for its reference to three contacts: “You think General Groves did tell Colonel Nichols and Colonel Lansdale your story was cock and bull?”54

  “I find that hard to believe,” conceded Oppenheimer in a quiet voice.

  “So do I,” Robb shot back.55

  * * *

  That evening, at the AEC building, Groves was coached by Robb and Rolander on the testimony he would give the following day.56 In the witness chair on April 15, Groves made no mention of his December 1943 meeting at Los Alamos with Oppie. Instead, Robb’s questions—and Groves’s answers—were what the general and Strauss had gone over nearly two months before.57

  Although Lansdale, in his own later testimony, vaguely remembered telling the FBI that Frank was the actual contact, he told Robb that he could no longer recall how he came by that information: “My memory is a complete blank.”58 Nor did Robb decide to call any of those who might have shed light on the Chevalier incident—Consodine, Frank Oppenheimer, or Chevalier himself, who denied, the following day in the International Herald-Tribune, ever approaching Oppie for secrets of any kind.59

  Robb chose not to pursue the gaps and inconsistencies in Groves’s story.60 He and Strauss saw little advantage to having Oppenheimer portrayed as a hero for sacrificing himself to save his brother.

  Following Oppie’s admission of lying and the hand-washing testimony of Groves, Garrison’s strategy of relying upon notables to make a proxy case for the physicist went up in smoke—a fact as evident to the prosecution as it was to the defense.

  A day after Oppenheimer’s ordeal on the stand, Strauss, exultant, wrote Eisenhower: “The counsel who have been in attendance feel that an extremely bad impression toward Oppenheimer has already developed in the minds of the board.”61 Bates informed Hoover that Strauss was “most happy with the way that the Oppenheimer hearing was going.”62

  But a reminder from Rabi of the effect that a protracted hearing was likely to have upon the morale of the nation’s scientists prompted Strauss to direct Robb “to make every effort to speed up the hearing.”63 Ever since an article about the supposedly secret proceedings had appeared in the New York Times on April 13, Strauss recognized the danger that the hearings might spin out of control.64 Strauss also worried that Congress might “try to get into the act.”65

  * * *

  The hearings continued, nonetheless, into a second and then a third week. FBI agents stationed outside the Georgetown house where the Oppenheimers were staying—the home of Garrison’s law partner—reported that the physicist was up late into the night, pacing the floor. At the AEC and the FBI, Hoover, Strauss, and Robb were still looking for the final piece of evidence that would unequivocally seal Oppenheimer’s fate: convincing proof that Oppie, contrary to his repeated assurances, had once secretly belonged to the Communist Party.

  Bureau agents spent countless hours pouring over airline and railroad timetables to see if the Oppenheimers could have returned to Kenilworth Court from Perro Caliente in time to host the clandestine party meeting alleged by the Crouches.66 The results were inconclusive.67

  Hoover and Strauss became personally involved in the hunt for new leads and the tying up of loose ends. The FBI director ordered his agents to interview for a second time a former Army private who had been on garbage duty at wartime Los Alamos and remembered seeing copies of the Daily Worker and New Masses in Oppenheimer’s trash.68 Strauss asked Nichols to ascertain whether the consular official who had tipped the FBI off to Oppenheimer’s visit to the Paris embassy would testify that Oppie had tried to help Chevalier reenter the United States (He would not.)69 When the propriety of wiretapping Oppenheimer’s conversations with Garrison once more came under question at the FBI, Hoover ordered the taps continued, again at Strauss’s request.70

  Nor was the dragnet only out for Oppenheimer. Following testimony on April 22 by physicists Norman Ramsey and Isidor Rabi, Nichols asked the FBI for any derogatory information it might have on others whom Garrison intended to call to the stand in Oppie’s defense—“in order that AEC can use the information against the potential witness if desired.” Included on the list of two dozen names that Nichols gave the bureau were both of Strauss’s predecessors at the AEC: Lilienthal and Dean.71

  Yet it was becoming clear that a drawn-out hearing might be a mistake for the prosecution. Vannevar Bush’s testimony on Friday, April 23, was particularly strong. (He had warned Strauss in advance, Bush wrote Conant, “that I was going to sail into him and I proceeded to do so.”)72 Unintimidated by Robb, Bush vigorously defended his attempt to postpone Mike—“I still think we made a grave error in conducting that test at that time, and not attempting to make that type of simple agreement with Russia”—and attacked the board for “placing a man on trial because he held opinions.”*73

  Conant, too, proved a surprisingly outspoken witness for the defense. The former Harvard president, now high commissioner to Germany, had defied the wishes of Secretary of State Dulles in order to appear at the hearing; afterward, Conant spoke to Eisenhower about the case.74 Garrison’s tack since Groves’s testimony—to argue that Oppenheimer’s service to the nation outweighed any personal shortcomings—even seemed to be gaining ground with the judges.

  Fear that the tide might be turning against him drove Strauss to increasingly desperate measures. While Bush was still on the witness stand, FBI agents acting on an anonymous tip were interviewing an Office of Naval Research employee who had once been Oppenheimer’s graduate student. The bureau questioned Harvey Hall about an alleged homosexual affair between Hall and his mentor. Hall denied it.75

  Even Hoover and his aides were becoming tired of Strauss’s ceaseless demands—and worried by their ally’s growing recklessness. Informed that Strauss and Teeple wanted Ike’s national security adviser put under FBI surveillance—Cutler had last met with Oppenheimer at a gathering of Harvard overseers in March—Belmont finally drew the line: “No. I see nothing to be gained. We have given them all we have. They are making a mountain out of nothing.”76

  Gray, too, was becoming uncomfortable with the direction the hearing was taking.
The head of the Personnel Security Board asked Robb, anxiously, whether the proceedings could be speeded up. They could not, the lawyer replied. The most powerful witnesses for the prosecution had yet to be heard.

  As if anticipating Robb’s next move, the board inquired on Friday, April 23, when it would hear from Oppenheimer’s former colleagues at Berkeley.77 Strauss and Robb already knew from FBI wiretaps that Oppie considered Lawrence and McMillan “encamped against him.”78

  That same day, Nichols telephoned four of those previously interviewed by Rolander and Robb—Lawrence, Alvarez, Pitzer, and Latimer—to confirm that each would be in Washington to testify during the coming week.79 On Saturday, Nichols reached Teller in Berkeley. “He said he would be glad to testify,” wrote Nichols in his diary.80

  * * *

  Lawrence had also recently spoken with Teller, having summoned him to his Rad Lab office on April 14 to discuss what the two would say at the hearing. As they talked, Lawrence grew more animated and angry at Oppie—a generation’s worth of personal slights and suspicions coming to the fore.*81 Lawrence accused Oppenheimer of trying to shut down Los Alamos and Oak Ridge at the end of the war, and of later attempting to sabotage the hydrogen bomb, the long-range detection program, and Livermore.

  However, stopping off in Oak Ridge on April 24 to attend a weekend meeting of laboratory directors on his way to Washington, Lawrence began to rethink the promise he had made to Strauss and Nichols. Angrily confronted at the meeting by Rabi, who asked what he would say about Oppenheimer, Ernest began to get an inkling of the high emotion that surrounded the case. (In his own testimony a week earlier, Rabi, growing frustrated at Robb’s assault upon Oppie, had finally blurted out: “We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it.… what more do you want, mermaids?”)82

  Beyond the cost to his own reputation, Lawrence worried about the price that Livermore and the Rad Lab might have to pay for his testimony. Rabi and Smyth—“barely civil” to him at Oak Ridge—held the decisive votes on whether a new AEC-funded particle accelerator would be built at Berkeley.83 The Oppenheimer hearing also dominated discussions at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C., earlier that week, where Oppenheimer, celebrating his fiftieth birthday, had sat silent at the speaker’s table, an honored guest.84

  Lawrence nonetheless called Nichols on Monday morning, April 26, to say that he would be arriving in Washington the following evening.85 That night, Ernest suffered his most severe colitis attack yet. Telephoning Strauss early Tuesday morning, Lawrence told the AEC chairman that he was returning home at his brother’s orders and would not be testifying after all.

  Strauss was apoplectic. Failing at length to change Lawrence’s mind, he abruptly ended the call by branding him a coward.86 (Fearing that others might accuse him of malingering, Ernest summoned another physicist at the Oak Ridge meeting into the bathroom to witness the blood in the toilet bowl.)87 Before leaving for the airport, Lawrence telephoned Alvarez and implored Luie not to testify either, for the sake of the Rad Lab.

  But Alvarez’s ambition, and his eagerness to settle scores with Oppenheimer, proved even stronger than his long allegiance to Lawrence. Hectored by Strauss in another late-night telephone call—“Lewis’s emotional intensity increased as he ran out of arguments,” Alvarez later remembered—Luie agreed to ignore Ernest’s order and boarded the next flight to Washington.88

  Latimer had already testified, as scheduled, that afternoon. Speaking in a low and barely audible voice, he told of how Oppenheimer’s “astounding” and “extraordinary” influence with other scientists had persuaded them not to work on the hydrogen bomb.89

  Pitzer testified to much the same effect on Wednesday, April 28. But with Lawrence hors de combat, there was no scientist of Oppenheimer’s stature to speak about the physicist—save Teller. Until almost the eve of Edward’s testimony, moreover, there was no certainty as to what he would say about the man that he had known for more than twenty years.

  Ironically, Oppenheimer had originally thought of asking Teller to testify as a witness for the defense. Encountering Edward at a scientific conference in Rochester, New York, earlier in the year, Oppie had asked him if he believed that Oppenheimer had ever done anything “sinister.”90 When Teller averred that he did not, Oppenheimer suggested he speak with Garrison about testifying. But Teller’s meeting with the defense lawyers proved unproductive.91

  Despite his obvious dislike of Oppenheimer, Teller also had reservations about Strauss which he had earlier expressed to Thomas Murray. “[Strauss] has one blind spot and that is security,” Edward had confided to Murray the previous January, citing the flap over Oppenheimer as “a case … in point.”92

  Indeed, only a few days before his scheduled testimony—on April 22, when Teller was interviewed by Charter Heslep, a speechwriter for Strauss—Edward’s views had seemed to change once more. Heslep had come to Livermore to sound Teller out on the AEC’s Atoms for Peace program but found him “interested only in discussing the Oppenheimer case.”93 Believing that Teller was—“consciously or otherwise”—rehearsing what he planned to say at the hearings, Heslep wrote Strauss that Edward had spoken with intensity of the “Oppie machine,” lamenting, “Oppie is so powerful ‘politically’ in scientific circles that it will be hard to ‘unfrock him in his own church.’” (The phrase was Heslep’s, but Teller agreed it was “apt.”)

  When Nichols telephoned Teller on April 24 to confirm the date for his testimony, Teller had clearly made up his mind about what he was going to say: “He said he would be very glad to repeat the statement he had given earlier to Rolander and Robb if I thought it would be of any use,” wrote Nichols in his diary.94

  On Tuesday morning, April 27, Teller spent another forty-five minutes in Nichols’s office discussing his testimony and the hearing. Teller also met with Murray in the afternoon and that evening with Robb, who showed him the portion of the transcript containing Oppenheimer’s abject reply to Robb’s question about the Chevalier incident. Teller told Robb—“with some heat,” the lawyer later recalled—that Oppenheimer had lied to him as well. (“He felt that by leaving out important and relevant facts in his statement to Dr. Teller about his past associations, Dr. Oppenheimer had deceived and misled Dr. Teller,” Robb later wrote to Strauss.)95

  Possibly with Robb’s prompting, Teller agreed to make one important change to his planned testimony. Whereas in past interviews with the FBI he had always dismissed the idea that Oppenheimer might be a security risk, Teller told Robb that, in light of Oppie’s recent admission of lying, he felt he could no longer give such an assurance. For Teller, as for Alvarez, the prospect of finally “unfrocking” Oppenheimer proved too tempting to resist.96

  On Wednesday afternoon, April 28, Teller was sworn in and had barely given the board some brief details of his career when Robb asked him, “Do you or do you not believe Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?

  Teller’s carefully worded reply was a subtle variation on what he had told Robb and Rolander in Berkeley six weeks earlier, when he had expressed concern that Oppie’s clearance might be “lifted for a mere mistake of judgment”:

  In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.97

  Lest there be any doubt about what Teller meant, Gray repeated Robb’s question in the cross-examination, to which Teller replied, “If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”*98

  * * *

  Earlier in the day, Robb had announced at the hearing that Lawrence would not appear after all, because of illness.99 Alvarez’s testimony on Thursday afternoon, April
29, continued into Friday morning, as Robb and the board quizzed Luie about the diary he had kept during the H-bomb debate. But neither Alvarez’s testimony nor the brief, notarized affidavit that Lawrence submitted to the board a few days later would affect the outcome.100

  On May 3, Rolander informed Bates that the prosecution was finished with its witnesses. Robb said he hoped to wrap things up in another two days.101 On May 6, following a three-hour summation by Garrison, the hearings finally ended. Oppie and Kitty returned home to Princeton that evening.

  Four days later, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark office once more asked for permission to discontinue the Oppenheimer wiretaps.102 Strauss again requested that they be kept in place, since further testimony might be given when the board reconvened in Washington on May 18. There was, moreover, Hoover wrote the conscience-stricken Newark agent, another reason to continue the wiretaps on the physicist: “Since his testimony under oath, investigation may now be directed with a view toward possible prosecution provided legally admissible evidence can be developed to corroborate the [Crouches’] allegations.”103

  18

  LIKE GOING TO A NEW COUNTRY

  BELIEVING THAT THE Gray board would take from four to six weeks to reach a decision, Garrison and Oppenheimer began work almost immediately on a rebuttal, should the AEC declare Oppie a security risk. The FBI’s bugs picked up their efforts. Hoover reported to Strauss that two problems were bothering the defense. One—a question that had been “pressed at the hearing,” and which Oppenheimer considered “wholly messy”—was presumably the Chevalier affair. The other was the disarmament panel’s discussion in 1952 about the possible postponement of Mike. Rolander requested the panel’s minutes from the State Department so that he might be able to counter Garrison’s arguments in advance.1