The Last Man Who Knew Everything

by David N. Schwartz

  There were many factors weighing against Oppenheimer. Most of these would have been set aside in a different political environment and some of the allegations against him were simply untrue, but in 1953–1954, with fear of Communist infiltration weighing on the political consciousness, these factors led almost inexorably to a confrontation. Most of those who knew Oppenheimer were at least vaguely aware of his left-wing political leanings, justification enough for a full investigation at the height of the McCarthy period. He had also mishandled a potentially disastrous situation during the war, when an old friend at Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, approached him with an offer to pass along atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He never acted on the suggestion, but he delayed reporting the overture to authorities and initially dissembled when doing so.

  In this context, Oppenheimer’s opposition to proceeding with the Super at the GAC session in October 1949 also counted against him. It was easy to paint him as the person who led the GAC to advise against proceeding with the Super, hence someone whose commitment to the nation’s security was suspect.

  Another factor weighing against Oppenheimer was Edward Teller’s role in stirring up resentment against Oppenheimer. Teller bitterly resented the way that Oppenheimer sidelined him from 1942 onward and was furious over the 1949 GAC recommendation against the Super. The feeling, apparently, was mutual. Oppenheimer gladly took the opportunity of the hearings to roundly criticize Teller’s behavior during the Manhattan Project, explaining that Teller consistently refused to do the work that he was assigned to do and focused full time on the Super. Oppenheimer was correct in deciding that the technical challenges to the Super would not be solved before the war’s end, but Teller never forgave him. Teller’s resentment of his treatment continued well beyond the Manhattan Project and led to his successful campaign to create a rival weapons laboratory in 1952 under the University of California’s auspices in Livermore, California.

  The charges that Los Alamos dragged its feet in the development of the hydrogen bomb continued to circulate. Fermi went public in October 1954 in defense of the Los Alamos leadership, saying that he was “deeply perturbed” at the implication in the book by Shepley and Blair, just published, that Los Alamos stalled the H-bomb project and praising the leadership of Norris Bradbury and the entire Los Alamos team. Fermi’s graduate student Arthur Rosenfeld helped him draft a press release declaring, in part:

  Statements of this kind are bound to produce dissension and to set back the atomic program. It is true, of course, that Edward Teller is the hero of the H-production. But it is equally true that a single person cannot carry alone a job of that kind. A genius needs the support of many other men and organizations. The Los Alamos Laboratory developed and added to his ideas and brought them into practice.

  In late 1953, with this debate over Los Alamos at the boiling point, Teller weighed in against his old Manhattan Project boss.

  A letter in November 1953 from William Borden, a staff member of Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ultimately triggered the AEC action against Oppenheimer. Borden expressed his conviction that Oppenheimer was “in all likelihood” a Soviet spy. President Eisenhower ordered that Oppenheimer be completely cut off from the AEC and its work until the matter could be formally addressed. The FBI stepped up surveillance and tapped Oppenheimer’s phone, recording privileged conversations between Oppenheimer and his lawyers that were then presented confidentially to the AEC. In December 1953, AEC chairman Strauss informed Oppenheimer that his clearances had been suspended and that the commission would hold hearings to allow all the facts to emerge before making a final decision. The hearings were held over several weeks, starting April 12, 1954.

  Oppenheimer hired famed civil liberties lawyer Lloyd Garrison to represent him at the hearings. Garrison reached out to many physicists, including Fermi, encouraging them to support his client at the hearings. The vast majority of those who had worked with Oppenheimer during the war came to his defense and offered to testify on his behalf.

  Fermi did not need persuading. On a personal level he certainly had reservations about Oppenheimer. The two were never particularly close. Hungarian refugee and physicist Valentine Telegdi was with Fermi when the news of the accusations made its way to Chicago. He remembers Fermi remarking over lunch at the faculty club, “What a pity that they took him and not some nice guy, like Bethe. Now we all have to be on Oppenheimer’s side!” Fermi knew that Oppenheimer could be nasty, a trait that Fermi detested. He also knew his duty, believing the charges to be without foundation, and was prepared to act. To the extent that the charges involved Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super in October 1949, Fermi shared Oppenheimer’s views and expressed them even more strongly. He knew Teller well, liked him personally, and enjoyed being his intellectual sparring partner, but he was also irritated at the anti–Los Alamos campaign Teller had promoted. He agreed to serve as a witness on Oppenheimer’s behalf, graciously refusing Oppenheimer’s offer, made through Garrison, to defray Fermi’s travel expenses.

  FERMI HAD ANOTHER, MORE PLEASANT TASK TO ACCOMPLISH BEFORE heading to Washington in defense of Oppenheimer. His term as APS president was coming to an end and he had the pleasure of handing the baton to his old friend, Hans Bethe.

  The APS chose to hold Fermi’s final annual meeting at Columbia University, because the meeting coincided with the university’s two-hundredth anniversary celebration. Fermi was delighted to return to his old haunts at Pupin Hall. As outgoing president, he gave a lecture on the future of particle physics, during which he spoke at length about his work on pion scattering and about the future of accelerators. He predicted ever-increasing accelerator energies and, in a tongue-in-cheek moment, displayed a slide predicting the creation of a huge accelerator circling the globe from outer space. He also gave an informal talk about the beginning of the Manhattan Project at Columbia, regaling the audience with memories of the first experiments with Szilard and the rest of the team. He drew laughter from the audience at several points in this latter talk, including his description of Szilard as “a very peculiar man, extremely intelligent” and his description of climbing on top of the high piles of graphite, observing “I am not a tall man.” The audience loved the talk and for a moment, at least, they could all forget about the crisis looming ahead for the entire physics community.

  IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP TO THE HEARINGS, GARRISON AGAIN reached out to Fermi. His client’s spirits were flagging and Garrison hoped a call from Fermi might cheer up Oppenheimer. No record exists of whether Fermi called, but it is hard to imagine his refusing.

  The hearings took place in closed sessions before the “Personnel Security Panel” of the AEC. The transcript of the hearings, famously entitled In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was initially not made public, but a redacted version was released in response to public pressure later that summer. It comes to almost a thousand densely printed and occasionally gripping pages. Fermi’s testimony is neither the longest nor the most important. Scientists like Bethe and Rabi gave spirited testimony in support of Oppenheimer. Rabi famously testified against the entire proceeding, pointing out, “[His behavior] didn’t seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, [redacted] and what more do you want, mermaids?” A few, notably Edward Teller, testified against Oppenheimer. When pressed, Teller said that “I think I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands that I understand better, and therefore trust more.” This short statement, coming as it did in a situation fraught with significance for Oppenheimer, was enough to ensure that Teller lived out his career isolated from the mainstream physics community.*

  Fermi’s appearance was squeezed in between that of two other witnesses on April 20, 1954. His session was shorter than it might otherwise have been becaus
e a previous witness, former AEC chairman David Lilienthal, had to excuse himself midway through his testimony owing to another commitment. The chairman of the hearing agreed to put Lilienthal back on the witness stand as soon as he returned. A short session with Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant followed, and then the panel turned to Fermi. Fermi spoke for ten to fifteen minutes before Lilienthal returned, at which point Fermi’s testimony came to an abrupt halt.

  In those ten to fifteen minutes, however, Fermi rejected the notion that Oppenheimer somehow influenced the members of the GAC to vote against the hydrogen bomb program in October 1949; rejected the implication that Oppenheimer stifled an open and honest exchange of views; testified that Oppenheimer aggressively pressed for continued work to enhance America’s nuclear arsenal; and talked openly about his own reservations regarding the hydrogen bomb project: “My opinion at that time was that one should try to outlaw the thing before it was born. I sort of had the view at that time that perhaps it would be easier to outlaw by some kind of international agreement something that did not exist. My opinion was that one should try to do that, and failing that, one should with considerable regret go ahead.” After some follow-up questions, Fermi was asked whether the members of the GAC had already made up their minds before the October 29, 1949, meeting. Fermi’s response revealed the general ambivalence he felt about becoming involved in public policy decisions, an ambivalence that led to his 1950 decision not to renew his membership in the GAC:

  I would not know. I had and I imagine that many other people had sort of grave doubts. It was a difficult decision. Even now with the benefit of 5 years of hindsight, I still have doubts as to what really would have been wise. So I remember that I had in my own mind definite doubts. And I presume my ideas and I imagine those of other people, too, must have gradually been crystallizing as the discussions went on. However, I have no way of judging.

  Another panel member finished the questioning by focusing on Fermi’s attitude about scientific secrecy. Fermi had been thinking about secrecy and science for fifteen years, ever since his initial disagreements with Szilard. Fermi explained that in ordinary times scientific work should not be secret but that he joined with Szilard and others in the specific situation of impending war to voluntarily censor his research. Asked whether it is possible to conceal scientific information, Fermi replied that for a short period it could be, but not forever. Finally, Fermi was asked whether he might have “guessed” some of the scientific secrets behind the fission weapon if he had remained in Rome, and Fermi replied, “I think I might possibly have guessed some things, at least.”

  With that, Lilienthal reappeared at the hearing and Fermi was quickly excused. Fermi was never recalled for further testimony. The panel knew it was not going to get Fermi to denounce his old colleague and friend.

  Fermi did what he believed was right. He stood with Oppenheimer and defended him to the extent he could, given the narrow nature of the questions. He was also frank about his own reservations about the hydrogen bomb and revealed his own unresolved concerns some five years after the event. He did not describe the weapon as “evil,” a term he and Rabi used in their minority report in October 1949, but he left the panel with no doubt as to his own views at the time. He also gave the panel a good understanding of the way in which Oppenheimer ran the GAC meetings of that period.

  In the end, however, neither Fermi, nor Bethe, nor Rabi, nor Groves, nor anyone else could save Oppenheimer from his fate. The panel voted 2–1 to revoke his security clearances, with Evans in opposition. The full commission approved the panel’s recommendation by a 5–1 vote. Oppenheimer faced public humiliation and disgrace and retreated to the institute he directed, a broken and dispirited man. In 1963, in a belated effort to atone for its unjust treatment of one of the century’s living legends, the AEC awarded Oppenheimer its highest honor, presented by President Johnson. It was an award named for his late Manhattan Project colleague, Enrico Fermi. Teller attended the ceremony and the two arch-rivals arrived at a measured reconciliation.

  * According to Ulam, Ms. Planck would bring the completed daily spreadsheet to the two of them, place it on the desk, lean over, and ask, “How do they look?” Ulam, gazing up at her bosom, would reply, to Fermi’s great amusement, “They’re marvelous!” Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, 218.

  * Teller led Livermore Labs for several decades and continued to advise US administrations on nuclear weapons policy. In the 1980s, he was a strong advocate of the Reagan administration’s Star Wars program. Though Teller and Oppenheimer reconciled in 1963, Teller remained a pariah to many in the physics community who would neither forget nor forgive his performance at the Oppenheimer hearings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A PATENT FIGHT

  SOON AFTER THE WAR, FERMI’S PERSONAL FINANCES CLASHED with national security policy. The story is a fascinating one, and though it ended reasonably well, it could have soured Fermi’s relationship with the US government. It is perhaps the best example of how the demands of the new national security state came into conflict with traditional ways of doing things. That Fermi, who assiduously avoided any such conflicts throughout his lifetime, found himself in this situation is one of his life’s greater ironies. It can only be appreciated in the context of Fermi’s overall attitude toward financial matters.

  FERMI’S INTENSE CONCENTRATION ON PHYSICS NEVER DISTRACTED him from the state of his bank account. When he was in the process of deciding to move to the United States, he took a careful inventory of his and Laura’s assets and noted them in the back of a ledger he later used for physics. Of the two, Laura—he referred to her as “Lalla,” the affectionate nickname her closest friends used—was by far the wealthier. She had some 120,000 lire worth of bonds and about 1,000 shares of stock in various companies. These holdings alone would have made her a very comfortable, upper-middle-class woman. She also held title to the apartment at Via Belluno and one-quarter of the villa in Tuscany they visited every summer before they moved to the United States. Enrico owned the new apartment at Via Magalotti and the garage in the building next to their home at Via Belluno. He also seems to have owed 10,000 lire to Laura’s father, Augusto Capon. When they left Rome in 1938, the family entrusted all their Italian assets to Enrico’s sister Maria, who carefully protected them and sold them off after the war.

  When he came to the United States, he meticulously recorded his monthly paychecks in his pocket diaries, which increased from an annual rate of $8,000 per year to almost double that by the time he passed away in 1954. At $15,000 per year, this made him one of the highest paid professors at Chicago. He also noted carefully all out-of-pocket expenses for work-related travel, to Los Alamos, to Hanford, to Oak Ridge, and to various universities and summer schools. He noted consulting fees from his association with DuPont and other US companies eager to have his advice on technical matters. He also recorded in detail the various stock and bond transactions he entered into throughout the postwar years. In another life he would have made a world-class accountant.

  Giulio recalls his father as somewhat stingy and gives as an example Enrico’s preference in the winter to keep the heat in the Chicago houses set at a chilly sixty degrees. Whether Enrico was genuinely miserly is debatable. For example, he lent Schrödinger money before the war and graciously wrote off the debt when Schrödinger tried to repay. However, he was certainly no spendthrift. He was always looking for ways to spend less money while, at the same time, always looking for ways to increase his income. Several of those postwar efforts to increase his revenues are noteworthy. One was an ill-fated attempt to replicate in the United States the financial success he achieved with the publication of his Italian physics textbook for high school students. Another was an eight-year effort to get financial compensation from the US government for the use of the slow-neutron patent granted to him and his fellow inventors in July 1940.

  IN NOVEMBER 1946 FERMI APPROACHED MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS with a proposal for a translation of his
Italian textbook Fisica, designed for liceo students. For the head of Macmillan’s education division, R. L. Knowlton, the idea of a high school textbook authored by the famous Manhattan Project veteran must have seemed too good to be true. Macmillan sent a senior editor, Martin Robertson, on December 9, 1946, and by December 16 the two men were outlining terms for the project. Laura was responsible for the translation into English. She was deeply involved in the Italian edition, which took shape at the Tuscan villa owned by her uncle during summers and holidays in the late 1920s. By March 1947, a “competent” high school teacher, Warren Davis, principal and physics teacher at Alliance High School in Alliance, Ohio, was selected to join the project. The choice of Davis is a bit of a mystery, because he had not yet published anything at this point and indeed never published anything during his career. Fermi had certainly never heard of him. However, after meeting him, Fermi agreed to the arrangement and on March 24, 1947, made a note of the division of royalties from the project. Royalties on the book would be split 60/40, with Fermi getting the larger percentage. Royalties for a laboratory workbook written by Davis would be split 60/40 the other way. Macmillan followed up with a detailed letter outlining the terms of the arrangement, including a review by Davis of all existing high school texts and a proposed completion date of November 15, 1948. This would allow for publication in early 1950.

  From the start, the experience was not a happy one. By early October 1947 Laura was translating the second volume, but Fermi had heard nothing from Davis. A letter he sent to Davis at that time must have prompted a package of material, because the next letter in the file is from Fermi to Davis in late January 1948, in which Fermi—clearly unhappy with what he had read—suggests that he mark up the sections on fluid dynamics with a series of editing “codes” for Davis to consider. These codes give a flavor of the difficulties Fermi encountered in Davis’s manuscript. He would mark “1” for grammatical errors, “2” for incorrect physics, “3” for material that was too obscure, “4” for an unnecessary deviation from Laura’s translation, “5” for material that should be deleted, “6” for material that required additional illustrations, “7” to indicate where the use of letters would simplify the text, and “8” for questions in the text that should be changed or deleted. Fermi was not impressed with what he had read, yet he still had the patience to see if the collaboration would work.