by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
When, later that summer, Frank informed Robert that he intended to marry Jackie, Robert tried to talk him out of it. Jackie and Robert did not get along. She recalled that “he was always saying things like, ‘Of course, you’re much older than Frank’—I’m eight months older, actually—and saying that Frank wasn’t ready for it.”
This time, however, Frank ignored his brother’s advice, and married Jackie on September 15, 1936. “It was an act of emancipation and rebellion on his part,” wrote Robert, “against his dependence on me.” Robert continued to disparage Jackie by referring to her as “the waitress my brother has married.” On the other hand, he continued to “arrange things” for his brother and his new wife. “The three of us saw each other a great deal in Pasadena, Berkeley and Perro Caliente,” recalled Frank, “and between my brother and me there was the continuing sharing of ideas, enterprises and friends.”
Jackie had always been a political firebrand. “She could drive you crazy with her political rants,” recalled a relative. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, she had joined the Young Communist League, and later she worked for a year in Los Angeles for the Communist Party newspaper. Frank was quite comfortable with her politics. “I had been close to sort of slightly left-wing things starting in high school,” he recalled. “I remember once I went with some friends to hear a concert at Carnegie Hall that didn’t have a conductor. It was a kind of ‘down with the bosses’ movement.”
Like Robert, Frank was a product of the Ethical Culture School, where he had learned to debate moral and ethical issues. At sixteen, he had worked, together with some of his school friends, on Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. At Johns Hopkins, many of his peers were to the left of the Democratic Party. But at the time, Frank disliked long-winded political discussions. “I used to tell people,” he recalled, “unless I meant to do something about it, I didn’t want to talk about it.” He recalled being “dismayed” in 1935 by what he heard at a Communist Party meeting in Cambridge, England. “It sounded to me sort of empty,” Frank recalled. During a visit to Germany, however, he quickly acquired an appreciation of the fascist menace: “The whole society seemed corrupt.” His father’s relatives had told him “some of the terrible things” that were happening in Hitler’s Germany, and he was inclined to support any group determined to “do something about it.”
Upon his return to California that autumn, he was deeply moved by the deplorable condition of local farm laborers and Negroes. The Depression was taking a terrible toll on millions of people. Another graduate student in physics at Caltech, William “Willie” Fowler, used to say that the reason he was a physicist was that he didn’t want to have to worry about people—and now he was upset because he was being forced by the Depression to do just that. Frank felt the same way. He began reading up on labor history and eventually read a great deal of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
One day early in 1937, Jackie and Frank saw a membership coupon in the local Communist newspaper, People’s World. “I clipped it out and sent it in,” recalled Frank. “We were really quite overt about it—completely overt about it.” But it was some months before anybody from the Party responded. Like many professionals, Frank was asked to join the Party under an alias, and he chose the name Frank Folsom. “When I joined the Communist Party,” he later testified, “for some reason which I did not understand at the time and have never understood since, they requested that my right name and another name be written down. This seemed to me ludicrous. I never used any name but my own, and at the same time, because of the fact that it seemed so ludicrous, I wrote down the name of a California jail [Folsom].” In 1937 his Communist Party “book number” was 56385. One day he absent-mindedly left his green-colored Party card in his shirt pocket when sending it to the laundry. The shirt came back with the Party card neatly preserved in an envelope.
By 1935, it was not at all unusual for Americans who were concerned with economic justice—including many New Deal liberals—to identify with the Communist movement. Many laborers, as well as writers, journalists and teachers, supported the most radical features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism.
Frank’s attachment to communism had deep American roots. As he later explained: “The intellectuals who were drawn toward the left by the horror, the injustices and fears of the thirties did, in varying degrees, identify with the history of protest in America. . . . John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and even with movements such as the abolitionists, the early AFL and the IWW.”
Initially, the Party assigned Frank and Jackie to what was called a “street unit” in Pasadena; most of their comrades were local neighborhood residents, and quite a few were poor, unemployed Negroes. Their Party cell membership fluctuated between ten and as many as thirty people. They had regular, open meetings attended by both communists and members of various organizations connected with the New Deal, such as the Workers’ Alliance, an organization of unemployed laborers. There was a lot of talk and not much action, which frustrated Frank. “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated.
A little later, Frank agreed to try to organize a Party unit at Caltech. Jackie remained with the street unit for a while, but she too eventually joined the Caltech group. She and Frank recruited about ten members, including fellow graduate students Frank K. Malina, Sidney Weinbaum and Hsue-Shen Tsien. Unlike the Pasadena street unit, this Caltech group “was essentially a secret group.” Frank was the only member who remained open about his political affiliation. Most of the others, he explained, “were scared of losing their jobs.”
Frank understood that his association with the Party offended some people. “I remember a friend of my father’s, an old man, saying he wouldn’t send his son to a college at which I was teaching.” The Stanford physicist Felix Bloch once tried to persuade him to quit the party, but Frank wouldn’t hear of it. Most of his friends, however, cared little one way or the other. Party membership was just one aspect of his life. By then, Frank was devoted to his studies in beta-ray spectroscopy at Caltech. Like his brother, he stood on the edge of a promising career. But his politics—if not necessarily his Party membership—were both an open book and an extracurricular activity. One day Ernest Lawrence ran into Frank, whom he liked very much, and asked him why he wasted so much time with “causes.” It baffled Lawrence, who saw himself as a man of science above politics, even though he spent much of his own time ingratiating himself with the businessmen and financiers on the Board of Regents who directed the policies of the University of California. In his own way, Lawrence was as much of a political animal as Frank; he just owed his allegiance to different “causes.”
Frank and Jackie opened their home to regular Tuesday evening CP meetings. According to one “reliable confidential” FBI informant, Frank continued to host these meetings until about June 1941. Robert attended at least once—which he later claimed was the only time he participated in a “recognizable” Communist Party meeting. The topic was the ongoing concern of racial segregation at Pasadena’s municipal swimming pool. Robert later testified that the meeting “made a rather pathetic impression on me.”
Like his brother, Frank was active in the East Bay Teachers’ Union, the Consumer’s Union and the cause of migratory farm workers in California. One evening he gave a flute recital in Pasadena, with Ruth Tolman on the piano, in a local auditorium; proceeds from the event went to the Spanish Republic. “We spent a lot of time at meetings, political meetings,” Frank later said. “There were many issues.” “He frequently spoke,” a Stanford colleague told the FBI, “of instances of economic oppression which he seemed to resent.” Another informant claimed that Frank “continually showe
d a great admiration for the Soviet Union in its internal and external policies.” On occasion, Frank could be strident. He assailed one colleague—who reported the conversation to the FBI later—as a “hopeless Bourgeois not in sympathy with the Proletariat.”
Robert later made light of his brother’s communist associations. Although a Party member, Frank did a lot of other things: “He was passionately fond of music. He had many wholly non-Communist friends. . . . He spent his summers at the ranch. He couldn’t have been,” Robert summed up, “a very hard working Communist during those years.”
Soon after Frank joined the Party, he made a point of driving up to Berkeley, where he spent the night with his brother and told him the news. “I was quite upset about it,” Robert testified in 1954, without explaining just why he was unhappy over Frank’s taking this step. Party membership, to be sure, was not without its risks. But in 1937 there was little stigma attached to it among Berkeley liberals. “It wasn’t regarded,” Robert testified, “perhaps foolishly, as a great state crime to be a member of the Communist Party or as a matter of dishonor or shame.” Still, it was clear that the University of California administration was hostile to anyone affiliated with the CP, and Frank was in the process of trying to build an academic career. And, unlike Robert, Frank didn’t have tenure. If Robert was upset with Frank’s decision, perhaps he thought his younger brother was being unwisely head-strong in making such a commitment, or was too much under the influence of his radical wife. Despite Robert’s own political awakening, he felt no compulsion to join the Communist Party as a matter of principle. Frank, on the other hand, evidently felt an emotional need to make a formal commitment. The brothers may have shared common political instincts, but Frank was proving himself to be far more impetuous. He still very much idolized Robert, but with his marriage, and his politics, he was trying to stake out his own persona and step out of Robert’s shadow.
In 1943 a colleague of Frank’s during his two years at Stanford University told an FBI agent that “in his opinion Frank Oppenheimer had followed the lead and dictates of his brother, J. Robert Oppenheimer, on all of his political attitudes and affiliations.” This anonymous source had it mostly wrong—Frank had joined the Party independently, against his brother’s advice. The informant had one thing right, however: he assured the FBI that he believed both Oppenheimers were “basically loyal to this country. . . .” In the eyes of their friends (and of the FBI), the Oppenheimer brothers were extraordinarily close. What Frank did would always reflect on Robert. And, try as he might to arrange things for his brother, Robert would never quite be able to protect Frank from the glare of his own fame.
COMPARED WITH HIS GUILELESS BROTHER, Robert was an enigma. All of their friends knew where his political sympathies lay—but the exact nature of his relationship to the Communist Party remains to this day hazy and vague. He later described his friend Haakon Chevalier as “a parlor pink. He had very wide connections with all kinds of front organizations; he was interested in left-wing writers . . . he talked quite freely of his opinions.” The description might easily have been applied to Oppenheimer himself.
Without question, Robert was surrounded by relatives, friends and colleagues who at some point or other were members of the Communist Party. As a left-wing New Dealer, he gave considerable sums of money to causes championed by the Party. But he always insisted that he was never a card-carrying member of the CP. Instead, he said, his associations with the Party were “very brief and very intense.” He was referring to the Spanish Civil War period, but afterwards he continued to participate in meetings in which dues-paying Communist Party members discussed current events. These meetings, encouraged by the Party, were specifically designed to involve independent intellectuals like Oppenheimer and blur the boundaries of Communist Party identity. But never having been a formal, card-carrying member left Oppenheimer the option of deciding for himself how he wished to define his relationship to the Party. For a brief time, he may well have thought of himself as an unaffiliated comrade. There is no doubt that in later years he minimized the extent of his associations with the Party. Quite bluntly, any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a Party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years.
In fact, his associations with Communists were a natural and socially seamless outgrowth of his sympathies and his station in life. As a professor at the University of California in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer lived in a politically charged environment. Moving in such circles, he inevitably left the impression with many of his friends who were formal Party members that he was one of them. Robert, after all, wanted to be liked and he certainly believed in the social justice goals the Party espoused and worked for. His friends could think what they wanted. Not surprisingly, some in the Party did think he was a comrade. And naturally, when the FBI used wiretaps to monitor the conversations of these people talking about Oppenheimer, they occasionally heard bona fide Party members discuss him as one of their own. And yet again, other FBI wiretaps record Party members complaining about Oppenheimer’s aloofness and unreliability. Most importantly, there is no evidence that he ever submitted himself to Party discipline. Given his strong personal alignment with much if not most of the Party program, where he did disagree he never trimmed his views to conform to the Party line. Tellingly, he expressed qualms about the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime. He openly admired Franklin Roosevelt and defended the New Deal. And while he was a member of various Popular Front organizations dominated by the Communist Party, he was also a staunch civil libertarian and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union. In short, he was a classic fellow-traveling New Deal progressive who admired the Communist Party’s opposition to fascism in Europe, and its championing of labor rights at home. It is neither surprising nor revealing that he worked with Party members in support of those goals.
All this ambiguity is compounded by the fact that during these years of the Popular Front, the Communist Party’s very organizational structure, particularly in California, led to a blurring of the distinction between casual affiliation and actual membership. As Jessica Mitford wrote in her irreverent memoir of her experiences in the San Francisco branch of the Party, “In those days . . . the Party was a strange mixture of openness and secrecy.” The conspiratorial-sounding “cell” of three to five members had been replaced by “branches” or “clubs”—“a nomenclature deemed more consistent with American political tradition.” Hundreds of people might belong to these “clubs,” in which Party business was conducted in a fairly open and informal manner; everyone was welcome and people, often including FBI informers, attended weekly meetings in rented halls without too much attention paid as to whether their party dues were up-to-date. On the other hand, Mitford reports that she and her husband “were at first assigned to the Southside Club, one of the few ‘closed’ or secret branches, reserved for government workers, doctors, lawyers, and others whose occupations could have been jeopardized by open affiliation with the Party.”
Many left-of-center, pro-union, anti-fascist intellectuals in the late 1930s never affiliated with the Communist Party. And yet, many who did join the Party chose to hide their affiliation even if, like Oppenheimer, they were politically active on behalf of causes supported by the Party. So numerous were the Party’s secret members that Communist Party chief Earl Browder griped in June 1936 about too many prominent figures in American society hiding their Party identity. “How shall we dissipate the Red Scare from among the Reds?” he asked. “Some of these comrades hide as a shameful secret their Communist opinions and affiliations; they hysterically beg the Party to keep as far away from their work as possible.”
Years later, Haakon Chevalier insisted that Oppenheimer was one such secret Party member. But when closely questioned about the unit Robert allegedly belonged to, Chevalier described an innocuous gathering of friends more akin to the “discussion group” he reported in his 1965 memoir than the sort of official “closed unit” des
cribed by Mitford. “We/he initiated it,” Chevalier, referring to Oppenheimer, told Martin Sherwin. “It was a closed unit and unofficial. There’s no record of it. . . . It was not known to anyone except one person. I don’t know who he was, but [he was] in the top echelon of the party in San Francisco.” This “unofficial” group known only to “one person” initially contained just six or seven members, though at one point as many as twelve were participating in its discussions. “We discussed things that were going on locally and in the state and in the country and in the world,” recalled Chevalier.
It is Chevalier’s version of this story that is reflected in the FBI files. The FBI first opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941. His name had come to the Bureau’s attention quite by accident the previous December. For almost a year the FBI had been wiretapping the conversations of William Schneiderman, the California Communist Party’s state secretary, and Isaac “Pops” Folkoff, the state treasurer. The wiretaps were not authorized by any court or by the Attorney General, and were therefore illegal. But in December 1940, when one of the Bureau’s agents in San Francisco overheard Folkoff referring to a 3:00 p.m. appointment at Chevalier’s house as a meeting of “the big boys,” an agent was sent to jot down license plate numbers. One of the cars found to be parked outside Chevalier’s home was Oppenheimer’s Chrysler roadster. By the spring of 1941, the FBI was identifying Oppenheimer as a professor “reported from other sources as having Communistic sympathies.” The FBI noted that he served on the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union—which the Bureau labeled “a Communist Party front group.” Inevitably, an investigative file was opened on Oppenheimer which would eventually grow to some 7,000 pages. That same month, Oppenheimer’s name was put on a list of “persons to be considered for custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency.”
