by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In his own Senate testimony on October 17, 1945, Oppenheimer confessed that his prepared statement had been written “considerably before” he actually read the bill: “The Johnson bill, I don’t know much about . . . you could do almost anything under that bill.” He just knew that good men like Henry Stimson, James Conant and Vannevar Bush had helped to draft the legislation, and “if they like the philosophy of this bill,” well, that was good enough for him. It was all a matter of finding nine good men who could be trusted to execute the proposed commission’s powers “wisely.” When questioned about the wisdom of allowing military officers to sit on the commission, Oppenheimer responded, “I think it is a matter not of what uniform a man wears but what kind of man he is. I cannot think of an administrator in whom I would have more confidence than General [George C.] Marshall.”
Szilard, watching from the sidelines, thought Oppenheimer’s testimony “a masterpiece. . . . He talked in such a manner that the congressmen present thought he was for the bill but the physicists present all thought that he was against the bill.” The left-wing New York City newspaper PM reported that Oppenheimer had launched an “oblique attack” on the bill.
Frank Oppenheimer argued with his brother. An activist in ALAS, Frank believed it was time to go public and try to educate citizens about the need for international controls. “He said there wasn’t time for this,” recalled Frank, “he’d been in the Washington scene, he saw that everything was moving—he felt that he had to change things from within.” Perhaps Robert was making a calculated gamble that he could use his prestige and contacts to persuade the Truman Administration to take a quantum leap toward international controls—and he really didn’t care if this was done under a civilian or a military atomic regime. Or, perhaps he simply could not bring himself to press for a policy that might lead the Administration to define him as an outsider, a “troublemaker.” He wanted to sit center stage during the first act of the Atomic Age.
ALL THIS WAS too much for Robert Wilson, who rewrote the suppressed ALAS “Document” and mailed it to the New York Times, which promptly published the statement on its front page. “Mailing it was a serious violation of security,” Wilson later wrote. “For me, it was a declaration of independence from our leaders at Los Alamos, not that I did not continue to admire and cherish them. But the lesson we learned early on was that the Best and the Brightest, if in a position of power, were frequently constrained by other considerations and were not necessarily to be relied upon.”
As opposition to May-Johnson grew from scientists outside Los Alamos, ALAS members began to have second thoughts. Victor Weisskopf told his colleagues on the ALAS executive committee that “Oppie’s suggestions [should] be studied more critically.” Within the month, ALAS broke with Oppenheimer and began to mobilize against the legislation. Willy Higinbotham was dispatched to Washington, D.C., with instructions to mount a campaign against the bill. Szilard and other scientists testified against the legislation; this extraordinary lobbying soon commanded the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the country. It was a rebellion—and it succeeded.
To the surprise of many in Washington, the energetic lobbying of the scientists defeated the May-Johnson bill. In its place a new bill was introduced by a freshman senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, which proposed to give control over nuclear energy policy to an exclusively civilian Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC. But by the time the Atomic Energy Act was signed by President Truman on August 1, 1946, it had been so altered that many in the “atomic scientists’ ” movement wondered whether theirs had been a pyrrhic victory. The law included, for example, provisions that subjected scientists working in the field of nuclear physics to a security regime far more draconian than anything they had experienced at Los Alamos. So while many of his peers, including his own brother, were baffled by Oppie’s initial support for the May-Johnson bill, no one held it against him for very long. His ambivalence about the whole issue had been justified. If he had failed to challenge the Pentagon’s agenda, he had nevertheless understood that the truly important problem was achieving effective international controls against the manufacture of atomic bombs.
IN THE MIDST of this congressional debate, Oppenheimer formally resigned his directorship of Los Alamos. On October 16, 1945, at an award ceremony marking the occasion, thousands of people, virtually the entire population of the mesa, turned out to say good-bye to their forty-one-year-old leader. Dorothy McKibbin briefly greeted Oppie just before he rose to give his farewell address. He had no prepared remarks and McKibbin noted that “his eyes were glazed over, the way they were when he was deep in thought. Afterwards, I realized that in those few moments Robert had been preparing his acceptance speech.” A few minutes later, sitting on a dais under a blazing New Mexico sun, Oppenheimer rose to accept a scrolled Certificate of Appreciation from General Groves. Speaking in a low, quiet voice, he expressed his hope that in the years ahead everyone associated with the lab’s work would be able to look back on their achievements with pride. But on a sober note, he warned, “Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
He went on: “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law and in humanity.”
His words reassured many on The Hill that despite his curious support for the May-Johnson bill, he was still one of them. “That day he was us,” wrote one Los Alamos resident. “He spoke to us, and for us.”
Sitting on the dais with him that morning was Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California, Berkeley. Stunned by Oppenheimer’s stark language, Sproul was further unsettled by the private words they exchanged between speeches. Sproul had come with the intention of winning Oppenheimer back to Berkeley. He knew Oppie was disaffected. On September 29, the physicist had written him to say that he was undecided about his future. Several other institutions had offered him tenured faculty positions with salaries ranging from two to three times what he was paid at Berkeley. And, despite his long years in Berkeley, Oppie said he was aware “of a certain lack of confidence on the part of the University for what it must inevitably have regarded as my indiscretions of the past.” By “indiscretions,” Oppenheimer was referring to Sproul’s annoyance with his political activities on behalf of the Teachers’ Union. It would be wrong, he wrote Sproul, to return to Berkeley if the university and the physics department didn’t really want him. And “[i]t would seem wrong to me to return at a salary so out of proportion to those of other institutions.”
Sproul, a rigid and conservative man, had always thought Oppenheimer troublesome, so he had hesitated when Ernest Lawrence proposed that they offer to double Oppie’s salary. Lawrence argued that “how much we pay Professor Oppenheimer really means nothing because the Government will place such large sums at our disposal if Oppenheimer is here, that his salary will be insignificant.” Reluctantly, Sproul acquiesced. But now, as the two men sat on the dais and discussed the matter, Oppenheimer brushed aside Sproul’s offer, repeating in substance what he had said in his letter: He was aware that his colleagues in the physics department and Sproul himself were not enthusiastic about having him return “because of his difficult temperament and poor judgment.” He then abruptly informed Sproul that he had decided to teach at Caltech, but even so, he asked Sproul for a formal extension of his leave of absence—thus leaving the door open to a return to Berkeley at a later date. Though unde
rstandably miffed by the tenor of this conversation, Sproul felt compelled to agree to Oppie’s request.
Oppenheimer’s behavior suggests he was unsure about his next step, but certain that it had to be a significant one. Part of him wanted to re-create the good years he had lived in Berkeley. And yet, increasingly comfortable with his postwar stature, he was also drawn by new ambitions. He temporarily resolved this conundrum by rejecting the offers from Harvard and Columbia in favor of Caltech’s. He could remain in California, while keeping open the option to return to Berkeley. In the meantime, he would spend many exhausting days shuttling aboard propeller-driven airplanes back and forth to Washington, D.C.
Indeed, on October 18, just a day after the awards ceremony in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was back in Washington for a conference at the Statler Hotel. In the presence of a half dozen senators, Oppenheimer outlined in stark terms the perils to the country posed by the atomic bomb. Also in attendance was Henry A. Wallace, vice president during Roosevelt’s third term (1941–45), now serving as Truman’s commerce secretary. Seizing the occasion, Oppenheimer walked up to Wallace and said he very much wanted to talk with him privately. Wallace invited him to take a walk the following morning.
Walking with the former vice president through downtown Washington toward the Commerce Department, Oppie revealed his deepest anxieties about the bomb. He rapidly outlined the dangers inherent in the Administration’s policies. Afterwards, Wallace wrote in his diary that “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.” Oppie complained bitterly that Secretary of State Byrnes “felt that we could use the bomb as a pistol to get what we wanted in international diplomacy.” Oppenheimer insisted that this would not work. “He says the Russians are a proud people and have good physicists and abundant resources. They may have to lower their standard of living to do it but they will put everything they have got into getting plenty of atomic bombs as soon as possible. He thinks the mishandling of the situation at Potsdam has prepared the way for the eventual slaughter of tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people.”
Oppenheimer admitted to Wallace that even the previous spring, well before the Trinity test, many of his scientists were “enormously concerned” about a possible war with Russia. He had thought that the Roosevelt Administration had worked out a plan to communicate with the Soviets about the bomb. This hadn’t happened, he suspected, because the British had objected. Still, he thought Stimson had a very “statesmanlike” view of the whole matter, and he referred approvingly to the secretary of war’s September 11 memo to President Truman which, he said, had “advocated turning over to Russia . . . the industrial know-how as well as the scientific information.” At this point, Wallace interrupted to say that Stimson’s views on this point had never even been introduced at a Cabinet meeting. Obviously disturbed to hear this news, Oppenheimer said that his scientists back in New Mexico were completely disheartened: “. . . all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb.”
At one point, Oppie asked Wallace if he thought it would do any good for him to see the president. Wallace encouraged him to try to get an appointment through the new secretary of war, Robert P. Patterson. On this note, the two men parted. Wallace subsequently noted in his diary: “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”
Six days later, at 10:30 a.m. on October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office. President Truman was naturally curious to meet the celebrated physicist, whom he knew by reputation to be an eloquent and charismatic figure. After being introduced by Secretary Patterson, the only other individual in the room, the three men sat down. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking for Oppenheimer’s help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. “The first thing is to define the national problem,” Truman said, “then the international.” Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, “Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.” He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.”
For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman’s limitations. The “incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him,” recalled Willie Higinbotham. As for Truman, a man who compensated for his insecurities with calculated displays of decisiveness, Oppenheimer seemed maddeningly tentative, obscure—and cheerless. Finally, sensing that the president was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another of those regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. “Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that.” But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, “Never mind, it’ll all come out in the wash.” In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”
An awkward silence followed this exchange, and then Truman stood up to signal that the meeting was over. The two men shook hands, and Truman reportedly said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work something out, and you’re going to help us.”
Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.” Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist” who had come to “my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.”
On this important occasion, the composure and powers of persuasion of the usually charming and self-possessed Oppenheimer had abandoned him. His habit of relying on spontaneity worked well when he was at ease, but, time and again, under pressure he would say things that he would regret profoundly, and that would do him serious harm. On this occasion he had had the opportunity to impress the one man who possessed the power to help him return the nuclear genie to the bottle—and he utterly failed to take advantage of the opportunity. As Harold Cherniss had observed, his facile articulateness was dangerous—a lethal two-edged sword. It was often a sharp instrument of persuasion, but it could also be used to undercut the hard work of research and preparation. It was a form of intellectual arrogance that periodically led him to behave foolishly or badly, an Achilles’ heel of sorts that would have devastating consequences. Indeed, it would eventually provide his political enemies with the opportunity to destroy him.
Curiously, this was neither the first nor the last time that Oppenheimer antagonized somebody in a position of authority. Again and again in his life, he showed himself capable of the greatest consideration; he could be patient, gracious and tender with his students—unless they asked him a patently foolish question. But with those in authority, he was often impatient and candid to the point of rudeness. On this occasion, Truman’s gross misunderstanding and ignorance of the implications of atomic weapons had prompted Oppenheimer to say something that he should have realized might antagonize the president.
Truman’s interactions with scientists were never elevated. The president struck many of them as a small-minded man who was in way over his head. “He was not a man of imagination,” said Isidor Rabi. And scientists were
hardly alone in this view. Even a seasoned Wall Street lawyer like John J. McCloy, who served Truman briefly as assistant secretary of war, wrote in his diary that the president was “a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly—a thorough American.” This was not a great president, “not distinguished at all . . . not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man.” Men as different as McCloy, Rabi and Oppenheimer all thought Truman’s instincts, particularly in the field of atomic diplomacy, were neither measured nor sound—and sadly, certainly were not up to the challenge the country and the world now faced.
BACK ON THE MESA, no one thought of Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist.” On November 2, 1945, a wet and cold evening, the former director returned to The Hill. The Los Alamos theater was again packed to its capacity to hear Oppie talk about what he called “the fix we are in.” He began by confessing, “I don’t know very much about practical politics.” But that wasn’t important, because there were issues to be faced that spoke directly to scientists. What has happened, he said, has forced us “to reconsider the relations between science and common sense.”
