by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Condon told his wife that he had heard from people in Princeton that “Oppie has been in a very high state of tension in the last few weeks . . . he seems to be in a great state of strain for fear he himself will be attacked. Of course he knows that he has so much of a record of leftist activities as is involved in what is brought out against the others from Berkeley. . . . It appears that he is trying to buy personal immunity from attack by turning informer. . . .”
The disheartened Condon then wrote Oppie a scathing letter: “I have lost a good deal of sleep trying to figure out how you could have talked this way about a man whom you have known so long, and of whom you know so well what a good physicist and good citizen he is. One is tempted to feel that you are so foolish as to think you can buy immunity for yourself by turning informer. I hope that this is not true. You know very well that once these people decide to go into your own dossier and make it public that it will make the ‘revelations’ that have been made so far look pretty tame.”
Some days later, Frank Oppenheimer took Peters to see his brother, who was visiting Berkeley. Peters later described the meeting in a letter to Weisskopf: “My talk with Robert was dismal. At first he refused to tell me whether the newspaper report was true or false.” When Peters insisted on the truth, Oppie confirmed the newspaper account of his testimony. “He said it was a terrible mistake,” Peters wrote. Oppie tried to explain that he had not been prepared to answer these questions, and only now, seeing his words in print, did he realize that what he had said was so damaging. When Peters asked why he had misled him in their meeting in Princeton, Oppenheimer “got very red” and said he had no explanation. Peters insisted that Oppie had misunderstood him. While Peters confirmed that he had indeed attended open-air communist rallies in Germany, he swore that he had never actually joined the Party.
Oppie agreed to write a letter to the editor of the Rochester newspaper correcting his HUAC testimony. In the letter, published on July 6, 1949, Oppenheimer explained that Dr. Peters had recently given him “an eloquent denial” that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party or had advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. “I believe this statement,” Oppenheimer said. He went on to make a spirited defense of freedom of speech. “Political opinion, no matter how radical, or how freely expressed, does not disqualify a scientist for a high career in science. . . .”
Peters considered the letter “a not very successful piece of double-talk.” Nonetheless, it managed to salvage his job at the University of Rochester. He soon realized, however, that without access to classified research and government research projects, his career in America was at a dead end. Late in 1949, the State Department refused to issue him a passport when he expressed the intention of going to India. The following year, the State Department relented and Peters accepted a teaching position at Bombay’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. But in 1955, after the State Department refused to reissue his passport, Peters finally took German citizenship. In 1959, he and Hannah moved to Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where he spent the rest of his career.
Peters had it easy compared to Bohm and Lomanitz. More than a year later, they were both indicted for contempt of Congress; after Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 (and released on $1,500 bail), Princeton suspended him from all his teaching duties and even barred him from setting foot on the campus. Six months later, he was tried and acquitted. Even so, Princeton decided not to renew Bohm’s teaching contract when it expired that June.
Lomanitz’ fate was even worse. After his HUAC testimony, he was fired by Fisk University; he then spent two years working as a day laborer, tarring roofs, loading burlap bags and trimming trees. In June 1951 he was tried for contempt of Congress. Even after his acquittal, the only job he could find was repairing railroad tracks for $1.35 an hour. He didn’t get another teaching job until 1959. Remarkably, Lomanitz never seemed to harbor resentment toward Oppenheimer. He didn’t blame him for what the FBI and the political culture of the times had done to him. And yet, there was a lingering disappointment. Lomanitz had once thought of Oppenheimer as “almost a god.” He didn’t think Oppenheimer had been “malicious.” But years later he would say that he had come to feel “sad personally about the man’s weaknesses. . . .”
While there was little Oppenheimer could have done to protect his former students, he sometimes behaved as if he was truly frightened of any association with them. Their company represented a link to his political past and therefore a threat to his political future. He was clearly scared. After Bohm lost his job with Princeton, Einstein suggested that he be brought to the Institute for Advanced Study to work as his assistant. The great man was still interested in revising quantum theory, and he was heard to say that “if anyone can do it, then it will be Bohm.” But Oppenheimer vetoed the idea; Bohm would be a political liability to the Institute. By one account, he also reportedly instructed Eleanor Leary to keep Bohm away. Leary was subsequently heard telling the Institute’s staff, “David Bohm is not to see Dr. Oppenheimer. He is not to see him.”
As a matter of expediency, Oppenheimer had every reason to distance himself from Bohm. On the other hand, when Bohm heard of a teaching opportunity in Brazil, Oppenheimer wrote him a strong letter of recommendation. Bohm spent the rest of his career abroad, first in Brazil, then in Israel and finally in England. He had once deeply admired Oppenheimer, and though over the years those feelings had turned to ambivalence, he never held Oppie responsible for his banishment from America. “I think he acted fairly to me as far as he was able to,” Bohm said.
Bohm knew Oppenheimer was under a great deal of strain. Shortly after the news broke about his HUAC testimony against Peters, Bohm had a candid conversation with Oppie. He asked why he had said such things about their friend. “He told me,” Bohm recalled, “that his nerve just gave way at that moment. That somehow the thing was too much for him. . . . I can’t remember his words, but that’s what he meant. He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things. He said he couldn’t understand why he did it.” Of course, it had happened before—in his interview with Pash in 1943 and his meeting with Truman in 1945—and it would happen again during his security hearing in 1954. But, as Bernard Peters observed to Weisskopf, “He [Oppenheimer] was obviously scared to tears of the hearings, but this is hardly an explanation. . . . I found it a rather sad experience to see a man whom I regarded very highly in such a state of moral despair.”
JUST SIX DAYS after his HUAC testimony in early June 1949, Oppenheimer returned to Capitol Hill to testify under klieg lights before an open session of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The issue at hand was exports of radioisotopes for purposes of research in foreign laboratories. In a contentious four-to-one decision, the AEC commissioners had approved the exports. The lone dissenting commissioner, Lewis Strauss, was convinced that such exports were dangerous because, he believed, radioisotopes could be diverted for use in military applications of atomic energy. Shortly before, in an effort to reverse the AEC decision, Strauss had publicly testified against the exports in a hearing before the Joint Committee.
So when Oppenheimer entered the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building, he was aware of Strauss’ concerns. But he did not share them, and he now made it clear that he thought these concerns foolish. “No one can force me to say,” he testified, “that you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact, you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact, you do.” At this, the audience murmured with laughter. A young reporter, Philip Stern, happened to be sitting in the hearing room that day. Stern had no idea who was the target of this sarcasm, but “it was clear that Oppenheimer was making a fool of someone.”
Joe Volpe knew exactly who was being made a fool. Sitting next to Oppenheimer at the witness table, he glanced back at Lewis Strauss and was not surprised to see the AEC commissioner’s face turning an angry beet-red. More laughter greeted Oppenheime
r’s next statement: “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins, somewhere in between.”
Afterwards, Oppenheimer casually asked Volpe, “Well, Joe, how did I do?” The lawyer replied uneasily, “Too well, Robert. Much too well.” Oppenheimer may not have set out to humiliate Strauss over what he regarded as a minor policy disagreement. But for Oppie, condescension came easily—too easily, many friends insisted; it was part of his classroom repertoire. “Robert could make grown men feel like schoolchildren,” said one friend. “He could make giants feel like cockroaches.” But Strauss was not a student; he was a powerful, thin-skinned, vengeful man easily humiliated. He left the hearing room that day very angry. “I remember clearly,” said Gordon Dean, another AEC commissioner, “the terrible look on Lewis’ face.” Years later, David Lilienthal vividly recalled, “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.”
Oppenheimer’s relationship with Strauss had been in steady decline since early 1948, when Oppie had made it clear that he would resist Strauss’ attempts to meddle in his directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to this hearing, they had weathered several other AEC-related disagreements. But now Oppenheimer had made for himself a dangerous enemy who was powerful and influential in every field of Robert’s professional life.
After their clashing testimonies before the Joint Committee, one of the Institute’s trustees, Dr. John F. Fulton, said that he expected Strauss to resign from the Institute Board. “I don’t think Robert Oppenheimer will ever feel comfortable as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study,” Fulton wrote another trustee, “as long as Mr. Strauss continues on our Board of Trustees.” But Strauss had allies who had recently engineered his election as president of the Institute’s Board of Trustees, and he now made it clear he had no intention of resigning just because he had had the “effrontery . . . to differ with Dr. Oppenheimer on a scientific matter.” Strauss was angry, and he would stay angry until he had settled the score.
THE VERY NEXT DAY, June 14, 1949, Frank Oppenheimer appeared as a witness before HUAC. Two years earlier, he had denied to a newspaper reporter that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He had not planned to lie about his Party membership, but a reporter for the Washington Times-Herald had called him late one night and explained that his paper was running a story the next morning. After reading him the article over the phone, the reporter asked for his immediate comment. “The story was full of all other kinds of allegations that were false,” Frank said. “The pre-war party membership was the only true thing in it. They asked me for a statement and I simply said the whole thing was false—which was stupid of me to do. I should have just said nothing.” When the story was published, authorities at the University of Minnesota pressured Frank to give them the same denial in writing. Fearing for his job, Frank had a lawyer draft a statement swearing that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.
But now, after talking it over with Jackie, Frank decided he had to tell the truth. That morning he testified under oath that he and Jackie had been members of the Communist Party for some three and a half years—from early 1937 until late 1940 or early 1941. He acknowledged that during these years his Party alias had been “Frank Folsom.” On advice of his counsel, Clifford Durr, he refused to testify about the political views of others. “I cannot talk about my friends,” he said. Again and again, HUAC’s counsel and various congressmen pressed Frank to name names. When Congressman Velde—the ex–FBI agent—repeatedly asked him to restate his reasons for refusing to answer their questions, Frank said he would not talk about the political affiliations of his friends “because the people whom I have known throughout my life have been decent-thinking and well-meaning people. I know of no instance where they have thought, discussed or said anything which was inimical to the purposes of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.” In stark contrast to his brother, Frank stood his ground; he would not name names.
He and Jackie found the whole experience surreal. Jackie had not lost her righteous anger. As she sat in the House Committee anteroom waiting to testify, she looked out the window and was startled by the contrast between Capitol Hill’s marble government buildings, surrounded by manicured grounds, and the rows of tumbledown houses occupied by the city’s Negro population. The children were barefoot and dressed in rags. “They all looked rachitic and most seemed undernourished. All they had to play with was junk they found in the street. As I sat there reading and listening and looking out the window, I found myself alternately worrying what the Committee was going to try to do to me and getting madder and madder at the fact that I had been called down here so that some fellow could question me about being Un American.”
Afterwards Frank told reporters that they had joined the Party in 1937 “seeking an answer to the problems of unemployment and want in the wealthiest and most productive country in the world.”
But they had left the Party in 1940, disillusioned. He had no knowledge, he said, of atomic espionage, either in Los Alamos or in Berkeley’s Rad Lab: “I knew of no Communist activity, nobody ever approached me to get information and I gave none, and I worked very hard and I believe I made a valuable contribution.” Barely an hour later, Frank learned from reporters that his resignation as an assistant professor of physics had been accepted by the University of Minnesota. He had lied two years earlier, and from the perspective of the university that was reason enough for his dismissal from academic life. He had literally been three months away from being awarded tenure, but in a final meeting with the president of the university, it was made clear that he was finished. Frank left the president’s office in tears.
Frank was devastated. The full import of what had happened only hit him when he tried to go back to Berkeley. Naïvely, he had thought Lawrence would provide him haven, and he was shocked when Ernest turned him down.
Dear Lawrence,
What is going on? Thirty months ago you put your arms around me and wished me well. Told me to come back and work whenever I wanted to. Now you say I am no longer welcome. Who has changed, you or I? Have I betrayed my country or your lab? Of course not. I have done nothing. . . . You do not agree with my politics, but you never have . . . so I think that you must be losing your head to the point where anybody who disagrees with you about anything is not to be tolerated. . . . I am really amazed and sore because of your action.
Sincerely,
Frank
A year earlier, Frank and Jackie had bought an 800-acre cattle ranch near Pagosa Springs, high in the Colorado mountains. They had planned to use it as a summer vacation home. In the autumn of 1949, to the surprise of many of their friends, they retreated to this spartan internal exile. “No one has offered me a job,” Frank wrote Bernard Peters, “and so we are definitely planning to spend the winter here. My Christ, but it is beautiful. I think only if you have been here does staying seem to make any sense.” The ranch was perched at an altitude of 8,000 feet, and the winters were unbearably cold. “Jackie would sit in the cabin,” recalled Philip Morrison, “with binoculars and watch cows ready to give birth in the snow. They’d have to run out to keep the newborn calves from freezing.”
For the next decade, Robert Oppenheimer’s likable and brilliant younger brother eked out a living as a working rancher. They were twenty miles from the nearest town. As if to remind them of their status, FBI agents periodically showed up to question their neighbors. Occasionally they’d visit the Oppenheimer ranch and ask Frank to talk about other people in the CP. Once an agent specifically told him, “Don’t you want to get a job in a university? If you do, you have to cooperate with us.” Frank always turned them away. In 1950, Frank wrote: “Finally, after all these years, I have gotten wise to the fact that the FBI isn’t trying to investigate me, it is trying to poison the atmosphere in which I live. It is trying to punish me for being left
wing by turning my friends, my neighbors, my colleagues against me and make them suspicious of me.”
Robert visited the ranch almost every summer. And while Frank had resigned himself to his situation, Robert chafed at the thought that his brother was living this kind of life. “I really felt like a rancher,” Frank said, “and was a rancher. But he didn’t believe I could be a rancher and was very anxious for me to get back into the academic world, although there wasn’t anything he could do about it.” Over the next year, Frank received tentative job offers to teach physics abroad in Brazil, Mexico, India and England— but the Department of State steadfastly refused to issue him a passport. And there were no job offers in America; he had been blacklisted. Within a few years, Frank felt compelled to sell one of his Van Goghs—First Steps (After Millet)—for $40,000.
In his frustration over his brother’s fate, Robert talked with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard overseer Grenville Clark and other legal scholars about what the Institute might be able to do by way of organizing an intellectual critique of the Truman Administration’s loyalty and security programs that were supporting the sort of treatment Frank and Oppie’s students were getting. He told Clark that he thought the Presidential Loyalty order, the AEC’s security clearance procedures and HUAC’s investigations “all lead in many individual cases to unwarranted hardship and make for an abrogation of the freedoms of inquiry, opinion and speech.” Soon afterwards, Oppenheimer recruited his old friend Dr. Max Radin, dean of Berkeley’s Law School, to come to the Institute for the academic year 1949–50 and write an essay on California’s loyalty oath controversy.
