by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Lewis Strauss remained Oppenheimer’s most dangerous political enemy. He had not forgotten how Oppenheimer had ridiculed his recommendations at a congressional hearing the previous summer. “These are not happy days for me,” Strauss wrote a friend in July 1949. Having repeatedly dissented inside the AEC over various policies, Strauss felt on the defensive. With Oppenheimer and his friends in mind, he complained privately “that I have been guilty in their eyes of lèse majesté in having the effrontery to disagree with my colleagues.” He believed that Oppenheimer’s close friends Herbert Marks and Anne Wilson Marks were spreading stories “to the effect that I am an ‘isolationist.’ . . .” When a friend observed that some people seemed to think it “effrontery for anyone to differ with Dr. Oppenheimer on a scientific matter,” Strauss wrote a memo for his files on the “theme of omniscience” in which he noted that Oppenheimer had once proposed “denaturing” uranium—a process that had since been proven impossible.
Strauss also convinced himself that Oppenheimer was consciously trying to slow work on the thermonuclear bomb. He thought of Oppenheimer as “a general who did not want to fight. Victory could hardly be expected.” Early in 1951, Strauss, though no longer an AEC commissioner, went to AEC Chairman Gordon Dean and, reading from a carefully drafted memo, accused Oppenheimer of “sabotaging the project.” He said “something radical” must be done, strongly implying that Oppenheimer should be fired. And, as if to underscore the political risks of taking on the scientist, Strauss ended the meeting by melodramatically throwing the memo into the fire in Dean’s fireplace. Consciously or not, it was a metaphorical gesture; the security of the country demanded that Oppenheimer’s influence be reduced to ashes.
Back in the autumn of 1949, just as the internal debate over the Super was heating up, Strauss was apprised of top secret information that further fueled his suspicions of Oppenheimer. In mid-October, the FBI informed him that decrypted Soviet cable traffic indicated that a Soviet spy had been operating out of Los Alamos. The crypts seemed to implicate a British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who had arrived at Los Alamos in 1944 as a member of the British Scientific Mission. In the weeks ahead, it would become clear to Strauss and others that Fuchs had had ample access to classified information about both the atomic bomb and the Super.
While the FBI and the British investigated Fuchs, Strauss began his own investigation of Oppenheimer. He phoned General Groves and, referring to information in Oppenheimer’s FBI file, asked about the Chevalier affair. In response, Groves wrote Strauss two long letters trying to explain what had happened in 1943 and why he had accepted Oppenheimer’s explanation of Chevalier’s activities. In his first letter, he was emphatic in his belief that Oppenheimer was a loyal American. In his second, he tried to convey the complexity of the Chevalier affair.
Groves also made it clear that he did not think that Robert’s behavior in the incident was incriminating. “It is important to realize,” he wrote Strauss, “that if we had eliminated promptly every man who had in the past had associations with friends who were communistically inclined, or who had been sympathetic to the Russians at one time or another, that we would have lost many of our most able scientists.”
Finding Groves’ defense of Oppenheimer unsatisfactory, Strauss continued his search for incriminating information. By early December he was in communication with Groves’ former aide, Col. Kenneth Nichols, who loathed Oppenheimer. Over the next several years, Nichols would become one of Strauss’ assistants and confidants. The two men bonded in their hostility to Oppenheimer. Now Nichols gladly provided Strauss with a copy of Arthur Compton’s September 1945 letter to Henry Wallace in which Compton, allegedly speaking also for Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi, had stated they would “prefer defeat in war” over a victory won by use of a genocidal weapon like the Super bomb. This view outraged Strauss, who saw in Compton’s letter further evidence of Oppenheimer’s dangerous influence; that Compton had written the letter, and had noted that Lawrence and Fermi supported his argument, made no difference to Strauss.
ON THE AFTERNOON of February 1, 1950, the day after Truman’s endorsement of the Super, Strauss received a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief informed him that Fuchs had just confessed to espionage. Although Oppenheimer had had no hand in Fuchs’ transfer to Los Alamos, Strauss nevertheless held it against him that Fuchs’ spying had occurred on his watch. The next day, Strauss wrote Truman that the Fuchs case “only fortifies the wisdom of your decision [on the Super].” To Strauss’ way of thinking, the Fuchs case also vindicated his obsession with secrecy and his opposition to sharing nuclear technology and research isotopes with the British or anyone else. And for both Strauss and Hoover, the Fuchs revelation also demanded renewed scrutiny of Oppenheimer’s left-wing past.
The day Oppenheimer learned of Fuchs’ confession, he happened to be having lunch with Anne Wilson Marks in Grand Central Station’s famed Oyster Bar. “Have you heard the news about Fuchs?” he asked his former Los Alamos secretary. They agreed that Fuchs had always seemed like such a quiet, lonely, even pathetic character at Los Alamos. “Robert was stunned by the news,” recalled Wilson. On the other hand, he suspected that Fuchs’ knowledge about the Super was probably confined to the less-than-practical “oxcart” model. That same week he told his Institute colleague Abraham Pais that he hoped Fuchs had told the Russians all he knew about the Super, because that “would set them back several years.”
Just days before Fuchs’ confession became public knowledge, Oppenheimer testified in executive session before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Asked for the first time specifically about his political associations in the 1930s, Oppenheimer calmly explained that he had naïvely thought the Communists possessed some answers to the problems facing the country in the midst of the Depression. At home, his students had found it difficult to find employment, and abroad, Hitler was a menace. While never a Party member himself, Oppenheimer volunteered that he had maintained friendships with some communists right through the war years. Gradually, however, he had discerned a “lack of honesty and integrity in the . . . Communist Party.” By the end of the war, he said, he had become “a resolute anti-Communist, whose earlier sympathies for Communist causes would give immunity against further infection.” He harshly criticized communism for its “hideous dishonesty” and “elements of secrecy and dogma.”
Afterwards, a young staff member of the Joint Committee, William Liscum Borden, wrote Oppenheimer a letter politely thanking him for his appearance: “I . . . think it was right that you appear[ed] before the Committee and I think it did lots of good.”
Borden, a product of St. Albans prep school and Yale Law School, was bright, energetic—and obsessed with the Soviet menace. During the war, he was piloting a B-24 bomber on a nighttime mission when a German V-2 rocket flashed by him on its way to London. “It resembled a meteor,” Borden later wrote, “streaming red sparks and whizzing past us as though the aircraft was motionless. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time until rockets would expose the United States to direct, transoceanic attack.” In 1946, he wrote an alarmist book on the future risk of a “nuclear Pearl Harbor,” There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy. Borden predicted that in years to come, America’s adversaries would possess large numbers of intercontinental rockets tipped with atomic bombs. At Yale, Borden and other conservative classmates bought a newspaper ad urging President Truman to issue a nuclear ultimatum to the Soviet Union: “Let Stalin Decide: atomic war or atomic peace.” After spotting the incendiary ad, Senator Brien McMahon hired the twenty-eight-year-old Borden as his aide on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. “Borden was like a new dog on the block who barked louder and bit harder than the old dogs,” wrote the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who met him in 1952. “Wherever he looked, he saw conspiracies to slow down or derail weapons development in the United States.”
BORDEN HAD first met Oppenheimer in April 1949 at a GAC meeting, where he listened silently as Oppie op
enly disparaged Project Lexington, the Air Force’s proposal to build a nuclear-powered bomber. As if that weren’t controversial enough, Oppie also criticized the AEC’s plan to push ahead with a program of civilian nuclear energy plants: “It is a dangerous engineering undertaking.” Unconvinced, Borden left thinking that Oppenheimer was a “born leader and a manipulator.”
In the wake of Fuchs’ confession, however, Borden began to wonder if Oppenheimer might be something more dangerous than a mere “manipulator.” Not surprisingly, his suspicions along these lines were encouraged by Lewis Strauss. By 1949, Strauss and Borden were on a first-name basis, and Strauss continued, even after leaving the AEC, to cultivate the staff director of the Senate committee responsible for oversight of AEC activities. They quickly realized that they had similar concerns about Oppenheimer’s influence.
On February 6, 1950, Borden was present when FBI Director Hoover testified before the Joint Committee. Ostensibly, Hoover had come to brief the Committee about Fuchs—but he dealt at length with Oppenheimer. Sitting on the Committee that day were Senator McMahon and Congressman Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.).
Scoop Jackson’s district in Washington State was home to the Hanford nuclear facilities. He was a hard-line anticommunist and a strong proponent of nuclear weapons. He had met Oppenheimer the previous autumn, during the debate over the Super, and had invited him to dinner at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There he had listened in disbelief as the physicist argued that building the H-bomb would only fuel an arms race and make America less secure. “I think he had a guilt complex because of his role in the Manhattan Project,” Jackson would say years later.
Now, for the first time, Jackson and McMahon learned from Hoover about Haakon Chevalier’s 1943 approach to Oppenheimer in which Chevalier had suggested that perhaps there was scientific information that ought to be shared with their wartime Soviet ally. Hoover reported that Oppenheimer had rejected the overture, but to Borden’s suspicious mind, the incident still sounded incriminating. He began to wonder if Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super bomb was motivated by a nefarious loyalty to the communist cause.
A month later, Edward Teller told Borden that Oppenheimer had wanted to close down Los Alamos after the war. He claimed that Oppie had said, “Let’s give it back to the Indians.” As the historian Priscilla J. McMillan has documented, Teller worked assiduously to cultivate Borden against Oppenheimer. According to McMillan, Teller made a point of seeing Borden “every time he came to Washington.” Teller flattered the younger man in their frequent correspondence and “fueled Borden’s doubts by telling him repeatedly that the thermonuclear program was lagging, and Oppenheimer was to blame.” Borden was also told that a Los Alamos security officer believed Oppenheimer had once been a “philosophical Communist.” And finally, for the first time he learned that Kitty Oppenheimer had once been married to a communist who had fought and died in Spain.
Borden, McMahon and Jackson also were appalled to learn that Oppenheimer had recently begun to use his influence to make the case for battlefield, tactical nuclear weapons. To the Air Force and its congressional allies, Oppenheimer’s initiative was viewed as a transparent effort to undermine the dominant role of the Strategic Air Command. Jackson and his colleagues considered SAC’s ability to deliver a devastating atomic attack America’s trump weapon. “Until now,” Jackson said in a speech, “our atomic superiority has held the Kremlin in check. . . . Falling behind in the atomic armaments competition will mean national suicide. The latest Russian explosion means that Stalin has gone all out in atomic energy. It is high time we go all out.” In the atomic era, Jackson felt America had to have absolute military superiority over any conceivable enemy. Thus, if a hydrogen bomb could be built, America should be the first to build it. His biographer, Robert Kaufman, wrote that “[h]e never forgot the experience of well-meaning but naïve scientists arguing against building the H-bomb. . . .”17
WHILE POLITICIANS like Congressman Jackson thought Oppenheimer naïve and guilty of poor judgment, Borden, as noted, was beginning to suspect him of far worse. On May 10, 1950, Borden read on the front page of the Washington Post that two former Communist Party members, Paul and Sylvia Crouch, had testified that Oppenheimer had once hosted a Party meeting in his Berkeley home. In testimony before the California State Senate Un-American Activities Committee, the Crouches claimed that Kenneth May had driven them to Oppenheimer’s home at 10 Kenilworth Court in July 1941. Hitler had recently invaded the Soviet Union, and as chairman of the Alameda County Communist Party, Paul Crouch was supposed to explain the Party’s new stand on the war. Some twenty to twenty-five people were present. Sylvia Crouch described the alleged meeting at Oppenheimer’s home as a “session of a top-drawer Communist group known as a special section, a group so important that its makeup was kept secret from ordinary Communists.” She said that she and her husband were not introduced to anyone in the room. She only later identified her host as Oppenheimer when she saw him in a 1949 newsreel. The Crouches further claimed that after being shown photographs by the FBI, they could place David Bohm, George Eltenton and Joseph Weinberg at the same meeting. Sylvia named Weinberg as “Scientist X,” the individual labeled by the House Un-American Activities Committee as someone who gave atomic bomb secrets to a communist spy during the war. The California papers played these allegations as a “bombshell.” Paul Crouch was described as a “West Coast Whittaker Chambers,” a reference to the Time magazine editor and former communist whose testimony had led, on January 21, 1950, to the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss.
Oppenheimer immediately issued a written statement denying the allegation: “I have never been a member of the Communist Party. I never assembled any such group of people for any such purpose in my home or anywhere else.” Oppenheimer said he didn’t recognize the name “Crouch.” And then he went on to say, “I have made no secret of the fact that I once knew many people in left-wing circles and belonged to several left-wing organizations. The Government has known in detail of these matters since I first started work on the atomic bomb project.” His denials were widely reported in the press and seemed to put the matter to rest. His friends offered their reassurances. Having read about the “nasty thing” in the California papers, David Lilienthal wrote Oppenheimer of the Crouches’ testimony, “How utterly nauseating—but this is like a puff of wind against the Gibraltar of your great standing in American life.”
Lilienthal, however, was underestimating the effect of this testimony on less sympathetic minds. William Borden wrote a memo saying he found the Crouches’ allegations “inherently believable.” Paul and Sylvia Crouch had been extensively interviewed by the FBI weeks before their May 1950 testimony in California. By then, they were paid informants, on the payroll of the Justice Department, and testifying regularly against alleged communists in security cases around the country.
The son of a North Carolina Baptist preacher, Paul Crouch had joined the Communist Party in 1925. That same year, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, he wrote a letter to CP officials boasting that he had “formed an Esperanto Association as a front for revolutionary activity.” The Army intercepted the letter and concluded that he had been organizing a communist cell at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Court-martialed on the charge of “fomenting revolution,” Crouch was sentenced to an extraordinary forty years in prison. At his trial he testified, “I am in the habit of writing letters to my friends and imaginary persons, sometimes to kings and other foreign persons, in which I place myself in an imaginary position.”
Curiously, Crouch was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge after serving only three years of his forty-year sentence in Alcatraz. It is not clear whether this was the result of being turned into a double agent, as his subsequent behavior would suggest, or just incredibly good luck. But upon his release, the Communist Party hailed him as a “proletarian hero.” For a short time he worked alongside Whittaker Chambers as an editorial assistant on the Daily Worker. And then, in 1928, the P
arty sent him to Moscow, where, he later claimed, he had lectured at the Lenin School and been awarded the honorary rank of colonel in the Red Army. He also asserted that he had met with Soviet Army Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, who had given him plans “they had formulated for the penetration of the American armed forces.” Actually, his Soviet hosts thought his behavior so unhinged that they soon sent him packing. Back in America, however, the Communist Party sent him on a tour of his native South, where he sang the praises of the socialist state and Comrade Stalin. Settling in Florida, he found work as a newspaper reporter and CP organizer.
Inexplicably, one day he crossed a picket line and worked as a strike-breaker on a Miami newspaper; when his comrades discovered what he had done, Crouch fled to California, where, by 1941, he was serving as secretary of the Communist Party in Alameda County. He proved to be an unpopular comrade and an incompetent leader. “He spent a lot of his time drinking alone in bars,” wrote Steve Nelson. In December 1941—or, at the latest, January 1942—local Party members demanded his dismissal when he proposed activities that many felt would invite violence at street meetings. Had he moved from double agent to agent provocateur? Perhaps, but in any case, at this point his Party career came to an end, and by the late 1940s he and his wife had made a remarkably smooth transition, emerging as professional witnesses against their former comrades. By 1950, Crouch was the most highly paid “consultant” on the Justice Department’s payroll, and would earn $9,675 in the following two years.
Despite his bizarre career, initially Paul Crouch appeared to be a credible witness against Oppenheimer. Crouch was able to describe the interior layout of Oppenheimer’s Kenilworth Court home. He told the FBI that the man he later identified as Oppenheimer had asked him several questions, and that after the formal meeting ended he and Oppenheimer had spoken privately for ten minutes. As he and Kenneth May were driving home from the meeting, May told him, according to Crouch, that he “had been talking to one of the nation’s leading scientists.” Crouch’s story had enough details to sound plausible—and highly damaging.
