by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
LEWIS STRAUSS had prevailed. The nuclear secrecy regime would remain in place and nuclear weapons would be built in dizzying numbers. Oppenheimer had once thought Strauss merely an annoyance, a man not likely to “obstruct things.” Now, with a Republican administration in control of Washington, Strauss was in the driver’s seat, and his right foot was pressing his political accelerator to the floor.
Oppenheimer and many of his friends were now certain that Strauss was gunning for him. In July, soon after Strauss moved in as AEC chairman, Oppenheimer’s close friend and lawyer Herb Marks received a phone call from an AEC employee: “You’d better tell your friend Oppy to batten down the hatches and prepare for some stormy weather.”
“I knew he was in trouble,” I. I. Rabi recalled. “He had been so for a couple of years . . . he was living under this shadow . . . I knew he was being hounded.” So one day Rabi told him, “Robert, you write a piece for the Saturday Evening Post, tell them your story, your radical connections and so on, get well paid for it—and that will kill it.” Rabi thought if the story came from Robert, and it appeared in a respectable publication, the public would understand. As a matter of public relations, a frank confessional essay might well have immunized Oppenheimer from further political attacks. But as Rabi recalled, “I couldn’t get him to do it.”
Oppenheimer had other plans. Early that summer, Robert, Kitty and their two children all boarded the SS Uruguay in New York, bound for Rio de Janeiro. Traveling as a guest of the Brazilian government, Oppenheimer was scheduled to give several lectures and then return to Princeton in mid-August. While he was in Brazil, the FBI had the U.S. Embassy monitor his contacts.
While Oppenheimer enjoyed a leisurely trip to Brazil, Strauss spent the summer of 1953 feverishly preparing to finally put an end to his influence. On June 22, he visited FBI headquarters for another private meeting with Hoover. Well aware of the FBI director’s extraordinary power in Washington, Strauss wanted to be sure that they maintained a “close and cordial relationship.” Almost immediately, “Admiral” Strauss turned the conversation to Oppenheimer. “He stated,” Hoover wrote in a memo, “that he was aware of the fact that Senator McCarthy contemplated investigating Dr. Oppenheimer and that while he, the admiral, felt that inquiry into Oppenheimer’s activities might be well worth while, he hoped it would not be done prematurely.”
Indeed, the Wisconsin senator and his aide Roy Cohn had visited Hoover on May 12. McCarthy said he wanted to know what Hoover’s reaction would be if his Senate committee began an investigation of Robert Oppenheimer. Hoover now explained to Strauss that he had tried to divert McCarthy. Oppenheimer, he said was “quite a controversial figure,” and popular among the country’s scientists. He said that he had warned McCarthy that “a great deal of preliminary spade work” would have to precede any public investigation of such a formidable figure. McCarthy indicated that he had gotten the message and that he would back off from the Oppenheimer case, at least for the moment. Hoover and Strauss agreed that “this was not a case which should be prematurely gone into solely for the purpose of headlines.”
Strauss now advised Hoover, “in the closest of confidence,” that the syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop had recently delivered to the White House a seven-page letter urging the Eisenhower Administration to block an investigation of Oppenheimer by McCarthy. Strauss knew, of course, that Alsop was a friend of Oppenheimer’s—and he wanted to be sure that Hoover understood that the scientist had influential allies. It was a good meeting between like-minded men, and Strauss left believing that he had forged an alliance with the powerful FBI chief. The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering.
After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be “a mistake,” he wrote. “In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up. In the second place, the McCarthy committee is not the place for such an investigation and the present is not the time.” Strauss would orchestrate his own investigation.
ON JULY 3, 1953, Strauss formally assumed the office of AEC chairman, taking charge, the New Republic reported, “as if he were flag officer on the bridge of a battleship.” When he discovered that Gordon Dean, the retiring AEC chairman, had acquiesced to Oppenheimer’s request that his consulting contract be renewed for another year (to enable him to lobby on behalf of greater candor), Strauss manned the battle stations. His first maneuver was to request that Hoover send him by special messenger a copy of the FBI’s latest summary report on Oppenheimer. By then, Oppenheimer’s FBI file ran to more than several thousand pages. The June 1953 summary alone was sixty-nine single-spaced pages, and without delay Strauss began to study it with the zeal of a prosecutor.
During the Eisenhower transition, Strauss had stayed in contact with William L. Borden, the young staff director for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy who shared Strauss’ deep suspicions of Oppenheimer. Borden was a Democrat, and had lost his job when the Republicans won control of the Senate. Yet his obsession with Oppenheimer had kept Borden working on a sixty-five-page report tracing Oppenheimer’s influence in Washington. No other individual in America, he wrote, had more “detailed, precision data” about the nation’s military and foreign policies than this scientist. After reviewing a résumé of Oppenheimer’s postwar activities, Borden tried to convey a sense of his daily influence over Washington policy-makers.
During a single seven-day period recently . . . Dr. Oppenheimer had talked with Dr. Charles Thomas, President of the Monsanto Chemical Corporation, concerning atomic power for industrial purposes; Dr. Oppenheimer had lunched with the Secretary of State at the latter’s Maryland farm and discussed foreign policy in relation to the 1952 Fall testing operations at Eniwetok; Dr. Oppenheimer had met with the Secretary of the Air Force to discuss, among other topics, the relative merits of strategic versus tactical bombing; Dr. Oppenheimer had met with a delegation of visiting French officials to discuss international control; Dr. Oppenheimer had talked to the President and gone to see the two 1952 presidential candidates, General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson; and Dr. Oppenheimer, alone among Americans, may have learned from Dr. W. C. Penney, director of the British weapons laboratory equivalent to our Los Alamos, the details of Britain’s bomb development. . . . It is almost universally agreed that Dr. Oppenheimer is a man of dynamic and magnetic personality, superbly articulate, and that with these qualities fortified by the prestige he enjoys among other scientists, he tends to dominate meetings in which he takes part.
In 1952, Borden hadn’t come to any definite conclusions, but he couldn’t get over the fact that the security file of such an influential man contained so much information that he considered derogatory. Strauss, of course, shared Borden’s suspicions, and he had encouraged him to pursue them. In December 1952, just a month after Borden wrote his investigative report, Strauss sent him a four-page letter outlining his own view that the H-bomb had been delayed by three years. Not only had Oppenheimer’s GAC dragged their feet on the Super, but it was now clear that the Russians had benefited from atomic espionage. “In sum,” Strauss told Borden, “I think it would be extremely unwise to assume that we enjoy any lead time in the competition with Russia in the field of thermonuclear weapons.” And there was no doubt in either of their minds that Oppenheimer was largely responsible for this dangerous situation.
In late April 1953, Borden visited Strauss’ office to discuss their mutual concerns about Oppenheimer. According to Priscilla McMillan, Borden gave Strauss a mysterious document, “probably a compilation of Borden’s suspicions about Oppenheimer.” This document has never surfaced, but their subsequent activities suggest that during this meeting, they agreed on a plan—a conspiracy, really—to end Oppenheimer’s influence. Borden would do the dirty work and Strauss would provide him a
ccess to the information he needed.
Within two weeks of their discussion, Borden had permission to check out Oppenheimer’s security file from the AEC’s security vault. Even though he left his government job on May 31, 1953, Borden was able to keep the file until August 18. On July 16, Strauss talked on the phone with Borden who was reading the file in the isolation of his vacation retreat in upstate New York. Within hours of its return, Strauss had Oppenheimer’s dossier on his desk. He kept it for nearly three months, returning it to the AEC security vault on November 4. A few hours after Strauss returned the file, the AEC’s assistant security officer, Bryan F. LaPlante, checked it out. LaPlante, a confidant of Strauss’, didn’t return the report until December 1.
This sequence of withdrawals and returns of Oppenheimer’s file by Borden, Strauss and LaPlante was surely coordinated; it could not have been a coincidence. Clearly, Borden was working with Strauss’ knowledge and encouragement to compose an indictment of Oppenheimer. When Borden completed his work and returned the dossier, Strauss retrieved it, perhaps to study the evidence himself. And when he was finished with it, he ordered LaPlante to review the report for further analysis.
Thus, during the seven months between April and December 1953, Lewis Strauss—with considerable help from William Borden—accomplished the “great deal of preliminary spade work” that he and J. Edgar Hoover had agreed was necessary before a successful assault could be launched against Oppenheimer. They had diverted Senator McCarthy from the attack, knowing that he was too unreliable to prepare the case carefully. In July 1953, according to AEC staff lawyer Harold Green, “Strauss had promised Hoover that he would purge Oppenheimer.” In this instance, it appears that the AEC chairman was a man of his word.
ONE DAY in late August 1953, after Oppenheimer’s return from Brazil, he phoned Strauss to say that he was going to be in Washington on Tuesday, September 1, and he wondered whether he might see him that morning. When Strauss said he was free only in the afternoon, Oppenheimer said he had an important appointment at the White House that afternoon and so couldn’t make it. This news so alarmed Strauss that he immediately called the FBI and requested that the Bureau put a blanket surveillance on Oppenheimer during his visit. “The Admiral is extremely anxious,” one FBI official reported, “in view of Oppenheimer’s background, to find out where he will be in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, and whom he will see.” Hoover authorized the surveillance, and Strauss later learned that Oppenheimer had not been to the White House; instead, he had spent the entire afternoon in a bar in the Statler Hotel with the syndicated columnist Marquis Childs. Relieved to learn that Oppenheimer was not seeing the president but only cultivating a columnist, Strauss wrote Hoover that “he was still extremely concerned about Oppenheimer’s influence in the atomic energy program; and was watching the matter closely and hoped to be able in the near future to terminate all AEC dealings with Oppenheimer” (emphasis added).
AS STRAUSS and Borden prepared their case against Oppenheimer, Oppie spent the early autumn writing four long essays on science. Earlier in 1953, the British Broadcasting Corporation had invited him to give the prestigious Reith Lectures, a series of four talks broadcast to millions of people around the world. He and Kitty planned to stay in London for three weeks in November and then go to Paris in early December. The invitation was a considerable honor; previous Reith lecturers had included Bertrand Russell, who spoke on “Authority and the Individual,” and, just the past year, Arnold Toynbee, who had lectured on the grand topic of “The World and the West.”
Robert labored over his chosen theme, “to elucidate what there is new in atomic physics that is relevant, helpful and inspiriting for men to know.” Most BBC listeners were probably overwhelmed by Oppenheimer’s studied ambiguity. “His glittering rhetoric,” wrote one critic, “held his listeners in a web of absorption that was often less attentive than trance-like.” His performance was nothing if not mystical. “For all my trouble,” he later admitted, “I was told I was impossibly obscure.”
The Cold War was not his topic, but in an aside, he spoke briefly about the nature of communism: “It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word, ‘communism,’ which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men learning [to be] content with anonymity. But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.”
Having flirted with the communist promise in the 1930s, Oppenheimer had no illusions about its reality in 1953. Like Frank, he had been attracted in those years by the vision and rhetoric of social justice promoted by the American Communist Party. Integrating public swimming pools in Pasadena, arguing for better working conditions for farm laborers, organizing a teachers’ union—these were all intellectually and emotionally liberating experiences. But much had changed. Now, in pleading for a different “brave new world,” he was reconstituting on an intellectual level the deepest instincts and the highest values he had been committed to as a young man. His call for an open society was, to be sure, connected to his concerns about the dangerous and stultifying effects of secrecy on American society. But it was also connected to the cause of social justice in America, a goal he had worked for before Hiroshima, before Los Alamos and before Pearl Harbor. Communism’s role in America had changed; Robert’s role as a responsible American citizen had changed; but his deepest values were unaltered. “The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance,” he said in one of his Reith Lectures, “these are what may make a vast, complex, ever-growing, ever-changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world nevertheless a world of human community.”
WHILE IN LONDON, Kitty and Robert had dinner one evening with Lincoln Gordon, a classmate of Frank’s at the Ethical Culture School, and someone whom Robert had met in 1946 when Gordon served as a consultant to Bernard Baruch. Gordon would always remember the dinner conversation that evening. Robert was in a somber, reflective mood and when Gordon gingerly mentioned the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer spoke at some length about the decision to use the bomb. He acknowledged that he had supported the Interim Committee’s decision—but he confessed that he “didn’t understand to this day why Nagasaki was necessary. . . .” He said this with sadness in his voice, not anger or bitterness.
After recording the Reith Lectures in London, the Oppenheimers crossed the English Channel and went to Paris where Kitty phoned Haakon Chevalier at his Montmartre flat only to learn that Hoke was attending a conference in Rome. Informed that he might be back in a few days, Robert and Kitty took a train to Copenhagen where they visited with Bohr for three days. When they returned to Paris, Chevalier was there and he insisted that they have dinner at his apartment on their last evening in the city. It was an invitation that would have dire consequences. At Strauss’ request, security officers in the U.S. Embassy in Paris followed Oppenheimer’s movements about the city and obtained a list from his hotel of every phone call he made. The Paris embassy reported that, “Chevalier, who is very unfavorably known and is suspected of being a Soviet agent, is on the watch list of the French police and intelligence services.”
BY DECEMBER 7, 1953, Chevalier and Oppenheimer hadn’t seen each other for more than three years. Their last reunion had been at Olden Manor in the autumn of 1950, when Hoke came for solace and an extended visit following a painful divorce from Barbara. But the two old friends had maintained a warm correspondence which even included a letter of recommendation of sorts in which Robert wrote
, at Hoke’s request, a summary of what he had told HUAC about the Eltenton episode. The letter had not retrieved Chevalier’s position at Berkeley, but he was grateful nevertheless. In November 1950, Chevalier had moved to Paris, traveling with a French passport since the U.S. State Department had refused to issue him his American passport. In Paris, he had gradually made a life for himself, working as a translator for the United Nations and writing fiction. When he married Carol Lansburgh, a thirty-two-year-old native of California, the Oppenheimers sent them a mahogany salad bowl from the Virgin Islands as a wedding gift.
Now both men looked forward to a pleasant reunion. When Robert and Kitty arrived at Chevalier’s flat at 19, Rue du Mont-Cenis, near the foot of the Sacré Coeur Cathedral, they clambered into an aged elevator cage and rose to the fourth floor. Hoke and Carol greeted them warmly, and soon the two couples were toasting each other in the small living room lined with bookcases. Chevalier cooked another of his fine dinners, and this one included a sumptuous salad tossed in the mahogany salad bowl. Over dessert, Chevalier opened a bottle of champagne and after many toasts, Oppie and Kitty autographed the champagne cork.
Oppenheimer seemed relaxed, and told wry stories about his encounters with such Washington personalities as Dean Acheson. They briefly discussed the execution earlier that year of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of conspiracy to commit atomic espionage. And Chevalier told Oppenheimer about his current worries over his employment as a translator for UNESCO. He explained that because he had not renounced his American citizenship, it appeared he might be compelled to submit himself to a U.S. government security clearance. Oppenheimer suggested he should get some advice from Jeffries Wyman, Robert’s friend from Harvard who was in Paris that year as the American Embassy’s science attaché.
