by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Another FBI document, citing the investigative documents of “T-2, another Government agency,” claimed that Oppenheimer was a member of a “professional section” of the Communist Party. One of these “T-2” documents found in Oppenheimer’s FBI file included a two-page excerpt from a longer unidentified report listing the membership of various branches of the Communist Party. Names and addresses are provided for the “Longshoreman’s Branch,” the “Seaman’s Branch” and the “Professional Section.” Nine members are listed for this “Professional Section”: Helen Pell, Dr. Thomas Addis, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier, Alexander Kaun, Aubrey Grossman, Herbert Resner, George R. Andersen and I. Richard Gladstein. Oppenheimer clearly knew some of these individuals (Pell, Addis, Chevalier and Kaun), and it is equally clear that at least some of them were in fact Communist Party members. But it is impossible to evaluate the credibility of this undated document.
According to Chevalier, who spoke with Martin Sherwin at length and in detail, each member of this alleged “closed unit” paid dues to the Communist Party—except for Oppenheimer. “Oppenheimer paid his separately,” Chevalier speculated, “because he probably paid a lot more than he was supposed to.” Or, as Robert always insisted, he made contributions to causes, but never paid dues at all. “But the rest of us paid to one member who was also a known member, an open member [of the Party],” Chevalier continued. “I’m not supposed to say, but it was Philip Morrison.” Otherwise, according to Chevalier, the group took no “orders” from the Party and functioned simply as a group of academics who met to share ideas about international affairs and politics. Morrison, of course, has long acknowledged that he joined the Young Communist League in 1938 and the CP itself in 1939 or 1940. When asked about Chevalier’s recollection, Morrison flatly denied that he had been in the same Party unit as Oppenheimer. As a student, he pointed out, he would never have been assigned to a unit with faculty members.
When asked by Sherwin in 1982, “What made you a member of the Communist Party as opposed to just a group of people who were Left?” Chevalier replied, “I don’t know. We paid dues.” When Sherwin pressed him again, “Did you receive any orders from the Party?” Chevalier said, “No. In a sense we weren’t [regular Party members].” At the time, he explained, it was possible for men like himself and Oppenheimer to think of themselves as politically committed intellectuals who were nevertheless free from Party discipline. Members of this group contributed money to the Party’s causes; they gave speeches at Party-sponsored events; and they drafted articles and pamphlets for Party publications. And yet, explained Chevalier, “We both were and were not. Any way you want to look at it.” Pressed further to explain this ambiguity, Chevalier said, “It had a kind of shadowy existence. It existed, but it wasn’t identified, and that had some influence because we had our views about certain things that were happening which were transmitted to the center, and we were consulted about certain things. . . . Apparently, the same thing happened in many other parts of the United States, closed units for professionals or people who didn’t want to be identified in any way.”
The ambiguous nature of Oppenheimer’s relationship to the CP, as described by Chevalier, is corroborated by Steve Nelson, a charismatic Communist Party leader in San Francisco and a friend of Oppenheimer’s in the years 1940–43. Nelson saw Oppenheimer socially, but it was also his job to serve as one of the Party’s liaisons to the university community. “I met socially with this group,” Nelson explained in a 1981 interview, “that included some Party members and some non-Party people where they discussed freely what’s ahead of us. . . . This group was discussing questions of foreign policy. The general mood, which included Oppenheimer’s mood, was that it would be tragic if the United States, England and France do not form some kind of alliance against Italy; it would be tragic. I don’t remember now whether it was Chevalier or Bob [Oppenheimer] or any other member who expressed himself along these lines. But this was the tone of the meeting.”
Nelson reinforced Chevalier’s ambiguous description of Oppenheimer’s party membership. “I don’t know that I could prove or disprove the point,” Nelson said. “So I’ll just leave it at that—that he was a close sympathizer. I know that to be a fact because we had a number of discussions of policies of the left. . . . Now that doesn’t mean that he was a member of the Party. I think he was a close friend of a number of Party members on campus.”
Nelson himself left the Communist Party in 1957. In 1981 he published a memoir in which he briefly discussed his relationship to Oppenheimer. When he showed the manuscript to one of his old California comrades, still a Party member, this old communist thought he had been “too easy” on Oppenheimer—Nelson should have attacked Oppenheimer for having denied his affiliation with the Party. “My own estimate of Oppenheimer,” Nelson remarked, “was that he had this association with the left. Whether one had a Party card or not didn’t matter. He was associated with the causes of the left, and that was enough to murder him politically. . . .”
All the members of this allegedly closed Party unit are dead. But one of them left behind an unpublished memoir. Gordon Griffiths (1915–2001) joined the Communist Party in Berkeley in June 1936, just before leaving for Oxford. Upon his return in the summer of 1939, Griffiths quietly renewed his Party membership. But because his wife, Mary, had become disillusioned with the Party, Griffiths asked for a low-profile assignment. Eventually, he was given the job of “liaison with the Faculty group at the University of California.” Griffiths took the assignment in the autumn of 1940 and left it in the spring of 1942. In his memoir, he writes that out of the several hundred faculty members in Berkeley, only three were members of this “faculty Communist group”: Arthur Brodeur (an authority on Icelandic sagas and Beowulf in the English department), Haakon Chevalier—and Robert Oppenheimer.
Griffiths acknowledges Oppenheimer’s denial of ever having been a Party member. Oppenheimer’s defenders, Griffiths points out, have always explained Oppenheimer’s fellow-traveling with the assertion that he was politically naïve. “A great deal of energy was spent by well-intentioned liberals who felt that this was the only way to defend his case. Perhaps at the time—at the height of the McCarthyite period—it was. . . . But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put the question as it should have been put: not whether or not he had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.”
Griffiths’ memoir adds few details to Chevalier’s description of what he called the “closed unit.” Understandably, Griffiths clearly believes that the mere fact of Oppenheimer’s attendance in these meetings qualified him as a Communist. He writes that the group met regularly, twice a month, either at Chevalier’s house or at Oppenheimer’s house. Griffiths usually brought along recent Party literature to distribute, and he collected dues from Brodeur and Chevalier, but not from Oppenheimer. “I was given to understand that Oppenheimer, as a man of independent wealth, made his contribution through some special channel. Nobody carried a party card. If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three men considered themselves to be Communists.”
The faculty group, Griffiths recalls, didn’t actually do very much “that could not have been done as a group of liberals or Democrats.” They encouraged each other to devote their energies to such good causes as the Teachers’ Union and the plight of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. “There was never any discussion of the exciting developments in theoretical physics, classified or otherwise, let alone any suggestion of passing information to the Russians. In short, there was nothing subversive or treasonable about our activity. . . . The meetings were devoted mainly to the discussion of events on the world and national scene, and to their interpretation. In these discussions, Oppenheimer was always the one who gave the fullest and most profound explanations, i
n the light of his understanding of Marxist theory. To describe his attachment to left-wing causes as the result of political naïveté, as many have done, is absurd, and diminishes the intellectual stature of a man who saw the implications of what was happening in the political world more deeply than most.”
Kenneth O. May, the Berkeley CP functionary who assigned Griffiths to this group, later told the FBI that Haakon Chevalier and other Berkeley professors attended its meetings, but that he “did not consider the people who participated in these gatherings to consist of a CP group.”
Once a graduate student in Berkeley’s math department, Ken May was a friend of Oppenheimer’s. May joined the Communist Party in 1936, and he visited Russia for five weeks in 1937 and again in 1939 for two weeks. He returned enamored of the Soviet political and economic model. During local elections in Berkeley in 1940, May gave a speech before the school board defending the right of local Communist Party candidates to hold a meeting on the grounds of a public school. When the speech drew coverage in the local press, his father, a conservative UC Berkeley political scientist, publicly disinherited him and the university canceled his teaching assistantship. The next year, May campaigned as a Communist for a seat on the Berkeley city council while still a graduate student in the math department. His affiliation with the Communist Party was thus no secret when he first met Oppenheimer. May was a friend of Jean Tatlock’s, and the two men were probably introduced at a meeting of the Teachers’ Union sometime in 1939.
Years later, after he had left the Party, May told the FBI he had visited Oppenheimer’s home on several occasions to talk politics and recalled seeing him at “informal gatherings . . . which were held for the purpose of discussing theoretical questions concerning Socialism.” He added that he did not consider Oppenheimer to be either a Party member or someone “under CP discipline.” Oppenheimer was an independent intellectual, and, May explained to the FBI, “the CP tended to distrust intellectuals as a group in the management of CP affairs, but at the same time, the Party was anxious to influence the thinking of such people along CP lines and to gain the prestige and support of Communist objectives which they would lend to the Party. For this reason, May would keep in touch with the subject [Oppenheimer] and other professional people; he would discuss Communism with them and would provide them with CP literature.”
Oppenheimer, May explained to the FBI agents, was the kind of man who was quite willing to “agree with CP aims and objectives at any particular time if he had decided in his own mind that they had merit. He would not, however, condone those objectives with which he did not agree.” May observed that the “subject openly associated with whomever he pleased, Communists or not.”
The FBI would never resolve the question of whether or not Robert was a CP member—which is to say that there was scant evidence that he was. Much of the evidence in the FBI files on this issue is circumstantial and contradictory. If a few of the FBI’s informants claimed that Oppenheimer was a Communist, most of its informants merely painted a portrait of a fellow traveler. And some emphatically denied that he was ever a Party member. The Bureau had only its suspicions, and the conjectures of others. Only Oppenheimer himself knew—and he always insisted that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.
CHAPTER TEN
“More and More Surely”
This was a very decisive week in his life, and he told me so. . . . That weekend started Oppenheimer’s turning away from the Communist Party.
VICTOR WEISSKOPF
ON AUGUST 24, 1939, the Soviet Union stunned the world by announcing that on the previous day it had signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. One week later, World War II commenced when Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously invaded Poland. Commenting on these momentous events, Oppenheimer wrote his fellow physicist Willie Fowler: “I know Charlie [Lauritsen] will say a melancholy I told you so over the Nazi Soviet pact, but I am not paying any bets yet on any aspect of the hocuspocus except maybe that the Germans are pretty well into Poland. Ca stink.”
No issue of the day was more vigorously debated within left-intellectual circles than the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Many American Communists resigned from the Party. As Chevalier put it with marked understatement, the Soviet-German pact “confused and upset many people.” But Chevalier remained loyal to the CP and defended the pact as a necessary strategic decision. In August 1939, he and four hundred others signed an open letter, published in the September 1939 issue of Soviet Russia Today, which attacked the “fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike.” Oppenheimer’s name did not appear on the letter. According to Chevalier, it was in the fall of 1939 “that Opje proved himself to be such an impressive and effective analyst. . . . Opje had a simple, lucid way of presenting facts and arguments that allayed misgivings and carried conviction.” Chevalier claimed that, at a time when communists were suddenly extremely unpopular even among Californian intellectuals, Oppenheimer patiently explained that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not so much an alliance as a treaty of necessity motivated by the West’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich.
Chevalier was deeply alarmed by the wave of war hysteria that seemed to be turning “seasoned liberals into reactionaries and peace-lovers into war-mongers.” One evening after midnight, on his way home from a meeting of the League of American Writers, Chevalier dropped by Oppenheimer’s home. Robert was still awake, working on a physics lecture. After Robert offered him a drink, Hoke explained that he needed his help in editing an antiwar pamphlet, sponsored by the League. Obliging his friend, Robert sat down and read the manuscript. When he had finished, he stood up and said, “It’s no good.” He told Hoke to sit before his typewriter and then he proceeded to dictate new language. An hour later, Hoke left with “a completely new text.”
Robert was not himself a member of the League of American Writers, so his editing of the pamphlet was simply a favor to his friend. As redrafted, the pamphlet made an impassioned argument for keeping America out of the European war. Robert may have similarly helped to write or edit two other pamphlets in February and April 1940, respectively. Both were titled Report to Our Colleagues, and were signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Their purpose was to explain the consequences of the war in Europe. More than a thousand copies were mailed to individuals at various universities on the West Coast.
According to Chevalier, Oppenheimer not only drafted the reports but also paid for their printing and distribution. Not surprisingly, their discovery—combined with Chevalier’s claim—has made them part of the debate as to whether or not Robert was a member of the CP.7 Gordon Griffiths corroborates Chevalier’s assertion of Oppenheimer’s involvement with the production of these pamphlets. “They were printed on expensive bond, no doubt paid for by Oppie. He was not their sole author, but he took special pride in them. . . . Free of jargon, these letters were stylistically elegant and intellectually cogent.”
“The outbreak of war in Europe,” the pamphlet dated February 20, 1940, states, “has changed profoundly the course of our own political development. In the last month strange things have happened to the New Deal. We have seen it attacked, and more and more surely we have seen it abandoned. There is a growing discouragement of liberals with the movement for a democratic front and red-baiting has grown to a national sport. Reaction is mobilized.”
Chevalier, in an interview, insisted that the language here is distinctively Oppenheimer’s. “You can recognize his style. He has certain little mannerisms, using certain words. ‘More and more surely.’ That’s very characteristic of him. You wouldn’t ordinarily find use of ‘surely’ in such a context.” Chevalier’s claim is too thin a reed on which to rely for a positive identification of Oppenheimer as the author of the pamphlet, but it does suggest that Robert might have had a hand in editing a draft of it. While “more and more surely” does sound like Oppenheimer, much else in the pamphlet decidedly does not.
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p; But what do these “reports” propose? More than anything else, a defense of the New Deal and its domestic social programs:
The Communist Party is being attacked for its support of the Soviet policy. But the total extermination of the Party here cannot reverse that policy: it can only silence some of the voices, some of the clearest voices, that oppose a war between the United States and Russia. What the attack can do directly, what it is meant to do, is to disrupt the democratic forces, to destroy unions in general and CIO unions in particular, to make possible the cutting of relief, to force abandonment of the great program of peace, security and work that is the basis of the movement toward a democratic front.
On April 6, 1940, the College Faculties Committee of the Communist Party of California issued another Report to Our Colleagues. Like the first pamphlet, this report carried no by-line. But again Chevalier insisted that Oppenheimer was among the pamphlet’s anonymous authors.
The elementary test of a good society is its ability to keep its members alive. It must make it possible for them to feed themselves and it must protect their persons from violent death. Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.
