Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  As the Oppenheimers rose to leave shortly after midnight, Oppie, suddenly in a laconic mood, turned to Hoke and said, “I certainly don’t look forward to the next few months.” Perhaps he had some intimation of trouble ahead. But if so, he made no effort to explain his remark. On their way out, Chevalier decided that his friend was not dressed warmly enough and so he quickly made him a gift of an Italian silk scarf. Neither man suspected that their friendship was about to be put on trial.

  DURING OPPENHEIMER’S absence in Europe, Borden began to write a prosecutor’s brief against Oppenheimer. It was based on information from Oppie’s security file that Strauss had arranged for Borden to remove from the AEC’s vault. Borden was both enthusiastic about his efforts and conscientious about keeping in touch with Strauss. After Borden had lost his position with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in late May 1953, he obtained a job in Pittsburgh with Westinghouse’s nuclear submarine program. Borden had earlier thanked him profusely for his “thoughtfulness.” Studying Oppenheimer’s top secret AEC personnel file in the evenings, Borden had a draft of the letter by mid-October 1953—which he mailed to J. Edgar Hoover on November 7. The FBI summary reports of the same information had been lengthy and convoluted. But Borden crystallized the charges against Oppenheimer in a mere three and a half single-spaced pages with a clear focus. Its conclusion was a shocker. After marshaling the evidence of Oppenheimer’s communist associations, and reviewing the history of his recommendations on nuclear weapons, Borden concluded that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”

  It is not known exactly when Strauss learned that Borden’s letter was completed. He was not informed officially until Hoover forwarded it on November 27 to him, Secretary of Defense Wilson and the president. But as early as November 9 Strauss composed a note for his files that suggests he had read Borden’s letter. “It is my recollection,” he wrote, “that an FBI report dated 27 November 1945 on the general subject of Soviet espionage activities will record that ‘as early as December 1940 surveillance showed that secret meetings of a group were held, including Steve Nelson, Haakon Chevalier, William Schneiderman, the head of the Communist organization in California, and JRO.’ This information was apparently obtained by actual surveillance.”

  On November 30, shortly after formally receiving the letter, Strauss noted in another memo for his files that the key charge against Oppenheimer pertained to the Chevalier affair: “The important point at issue is how long after the event occurred did ‘O’ [Oppenheimer] report it to ‘G’ [Groves] and whether there was any reason to suspect that ‘O’ knew that ‘G’ had learned of it before he reported it.” This was indeed an interesting question, but since there is no evidence that Groves knew anything about Oppie’s conversation with Chevalier before being told about it by Oppie— and there is testimony to that effect by Groves in the FBI files—the most interesting question relates to Strauss’ memo. Was he already preparing what would become the focus of the case against Oppenheimer?

  BY THE AUTUMN of 1953, Washington was a city in the grip of a witch-hunt. The careers of hundreds of civil servants had come to an abrupt end on the flimsiest of charges. No one, least of all the president, seemed willing to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy. On November 24, 1953, the Wisconsin senator gave a blistering speech, carried on both radio and television, in which he charged the Eisenhower Administration with “whining, whimpering appeasement.” The next day, C. D. Jackson told the New York Times’ James Reston that he thought “McCarthy had declared war on the President.” When Reston’s column the next morning used the quote, attributing it to an unnamed White House official, Jackson was roundly criticized by an Eisenhower aide who said such talk would merely make it “more difficult to get McCarthy and his allies to vote for [the] Presidential program.” Jackson was appalled at what he called “disastrous appeasement” in the face of McCarthy’s attacks. “All the vague feelings,” he noted in his diary, “of unhappiness I have had regarding ‘lack of leadership’ over the past many months, which I have always put down, really bounced up this week, and I am very frightened.” He told the president’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, that he hoped McCarthy’s “flagrant performance will at least serve to open the eyes of some of the President’s advisers who seem to think the Senator is really a good fellow at heart.”

  In this poisonous atmosphere, Defense Secretary Wilson phoned Eisenhower on December 2, 1953, and asked if he had seen J. Edgar Hoover’s latest report on Dr. Oppenheimer. Ike said no. Wilson said that it was “the worst one so far.” Wilson said that Strauss had phoned him the previous night to say that “McCarthy knows about it & might pull it on us.” Eisenhower said that he wasn’t going to worry about McCarthy—but the Oppenheimer case should be brought to the attention of Attorney General Herbert Brownell. He told Wilson they “certainly will not assassinate [Oppenheimer’s] character unless we can gain substantiating evidence.” Wilson told Ike (erroneously) that both Oppenheimer’s “brother & wife are Communists; this fact, plus his past relations, make him a bad risk if we have trouble with Communists.”

  After getting off the phone with Wilson—and before reading the document—Eisenhower noted in his diary that the new FBI report “brings forward very grave charges, some of them new in character.” The attorney general would have to judge whether an indictment was warranted, but Ike noted, “I very much doubt that they will have this kind of evidence.” But in the meantime, he was going to cut Oppenheimer off from all contacts with those in government. “The sad fact is that if this charge is true, we have a man who has been right in the middle of our whole atomic development from the very earliest days. . . . Dr. Oppenheimer was, of course, one of the men who has strongly urged the giving of more atomic information to the world”—a suggestion, Eisenhower failed to note in his diary, of which he had approved.

  Early the next morning, Eisenhower met with his national security adviser, Robert Cutler, who advised him to take immediate action against Oppenheimer. At ten o’clock that morning, Eisenhower called Strauss into the Oval Office and asked him if he had read the latest FBI report on Oppenheimer. Strauss, of course, had read the report, and the Borden letter that had prompted it. After a cursory discussion, the president directed that a “complete bar” be immediately “erected between this individual [Oppenheimer] and any information of a sensitive or classified character.”

  Later that day, Eisenhower noted in his diary that in the “brief time” he had to read over the “so-called ‘new’ charges” he had quickly realized that “they consist of nothing more than the receipt of a letter from a man named Borden. . . .” He then correctly assessed its contents: “This letter presents little new evidence. . . .” The president had been told, he confided, that the “vast bulk” of this information had been “constantly reviewed and re-examined over a number of years and that the over-all conclusion has always been that there is no evidence that implies disloyalty on the part of Dr. Oppenheimer. However, this does not mean that he might not be a security risk.”

  Eisenhower understood that Oppenheimer might well be the victim of scurrilous charges. But having ordered an investigation, he was not about to stop the process. Such a move would leave him vulnerable to a charge from McCarthy that the White House was shielding a potential security risk. So, the president sent a formal note to the attorney general, ordering him “to place a blank wall” between Oppenheimer and classified material.

  WASHINGTON WAS a small town, and so it was no surprise that the very next day, on December 4, 1953, Oppenheimer’s old Los Alamos friend and colleague, Adm. William “Deke” Parsons, learned of Eisenhower’s “blank wall” directive. Parsons knew all about Oppie’s left-wing associations, and thought them meaningless. Earlier that autumn, Parsons had written a “Dear Oppy” letter in which he observed, “The anti-intellectualism of recent months may have passed its peak.” Now he knew otherwise. That afternoon he met his wife, Martha, at a cocktail party and she could s
ee that he was “extremely upset.” After telling her the news, he said, “I have to put a stop to it. Ike has to know what’s really going on.” At home that evening he told her, “This is the biggest mistake the United States could make!” When he said he had decided to get an appointment with the secretary of the Navy the next morning, Martha said, “Deke, you’re an admiral, why can’t you go to the president?”

  “No,” he told his wife, “the secretary of the Navy is my boss. I can’t go around him.”

  That night, Admiral Parsons experienced chest pains. The next morning he looked so pale that Martha drove him to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He died that day of a heart attack, which Martha always believed was brought on by the news about Oppie.

  Also on December 4, President Eisenhower left for a five-day trip to Bermuda, and Strauss went with him. When they returned five days later, Strauss began to choreograph the next steps in the government’s case against Oppenheimer. He actually prepared several scripts of what he should say to Oppenheimer, who was scheduled to be back from Europe and in Princeton on December 13. On the following afternoon, Oppenheimer phoned and the two men exchanged mundane pleasantries. Strauss casually said that “it might be a good idea” if Oppenheimer came down to see him in two days. Oppenheimer agreed, but said he had nothing much to report: “Don’t expect anything much.”

  As it turned out, the FBI had not completed its analysis of Borden’s letter. Initially, Hoover had not taken it seriously. Borden’s charges, an agent noted soon after the letter arrived, “are distorted and restated in his own words in order to make them appear more forceful than the true facts indicate.” So the Bureau was now in a catch-up mode, and asked Strauss to postpone his presentation of charges to Oppenheimer. Strauss wired Oppenheimer and rescheduled their meeting for Monday, December 21.

  On December 18, Strauss went to the Oval Office to discuss how he planned to handle the Oppenheimer case. Present were Vice President Richard Nixon, William Rogers, White House aides C. D. Jackson and Robert Cutler and the CIA chief, Allen Dulles. Eisenhower was out of the room, meeting with congressional leaders. Rogers briefly suggested they should simply do what Truman had done to Harry Dexter White—call Oppenheimer before an open congressional committee and grill him about the derogatory information in his security file. White, however, had dropped dead of a heart attack after the ordeal—and now Jackson and everyone else jumped all over the idea. At that, “Rogers smilingly withdrew the suggestion.” Instead, they gravitated toward Strauss’ notion of appointing a panel to conduct an administrative review of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. It would not be a trial in the formal sense. The scientist would be offered a choice: He could quietly leave or he could appeal the suspension of his security clearance before a panel to be appointed by Strauss.

  At 11:30 a.m. on the morning of December 21, 1953, as Strauss prepared to confront Oppenheimer that afternoon, he was startled to hear that Herbert Marks was outside, waiting to see him. Strauss did not believe in coincidence. Why did Oppenheimer’s friend and attorney want to see him on this of all days? When Marks was ushered into his office, the lawyer announced that he urgently needed to talk with Strauss about Oppenheimer. At this, Strauss interrupted him and said that he was expecting to see Oppenheimer that afternoon and that since he was his attorney, Marks should wait until that meeting. Marks brushed this aside and said that he had just learned that the U.S. Senate’s infamous Jenner Internal Security Subcommittee was proposing to investigate Oppenheimer. Pulling an old clip from the New York Times dated May 11, 1950, Marks read the headline—“Nixon Champions Dr. Oppenheimer”—and suggested that Vice President Nixon might be severely embarrassed if the Jenner Committee proceeded to put Oppenheimer in its spotlight. Nonplussed, Strauss calmly asked Marks if this was all that was on his mind. Marks nodded, and then Strauss asked if Oppenheimer knew of Marks’ concerns. Marks said no, he had not spoken with Oppenheimer since before he had left for Europe. Marks soon departed, leaving Strauss with an overwhelming suspicion that Marks had just attempted “a polite form of blackmail.”

  When Oppenheimer arrived that afternoon about 3:00 p.m., Strauss and Kenneth D. Nichols, a former wartime aide to Gen. Leslie Groves and now the general manager of the AEC, were waiting for him. After briefly commenting on Admiral Parsons’ sudden death, Strauss told Oppenheimer of his meeting that morning with Herb Marks. Oppenheimer expressed surprise and said he had no knowledge of the Jenner Committee’s plans.

  Strauss then turned to the hard business at hand. He told Oppenheimer that “we were faced with a very difficult problem pertaining to his continued clearance.” President Eisenhower had issued an executive order requiring the reevaluation of all individuals whose files contained “derogatory information.” When Strauss observed that Oppenheimer’s file contained “a great deal of derogatory information,” Oppenheimer acknowledged that he knew his security case would in due course have to be reviewed. Strauss then informed Oppenheimer that a former government official (Borden) had written a letter questioning Oppenheimer’s security clearance; the president had consequently ordered an immediate investigation. Up to this point, Oppenheimer did not seem particularly surprised. But now Strauss told him that the “first step” of this review would the immediate suspension of his security clearance. And then he explained that an AEC letter had been prepared outlining the nature of the charges against him. The letter, Strauss pointedly said, had been drafted but not yet signed.

  Oppenheimer was allowed to read the letter, and as he scanned through its contents, he commented that “there were many items that could be denied, some were incorrect, but that many were correct.” It all seemed a familiar rehash of the mix of truths, half-truths and outright lies.

  According to Nichols’ notes of the meeting, it was Oppenheimer who first raised the possibility of resigning prior to any security review. However, this option seemed to be suggested by Strauss’ comment that the letter of charges had not been signed—and therefore was not yet an official charge. Thinking out loud, Oppenheimer at first seemed open to this possibility, but he quickly observed that if the Jenner Committee was going to open an investigation of him anyway, a resignation now “might not be too good from a public relations point of view.”

  When Robert asked how long he had to decide, Strauss said he would be at home from 8:00 p.m. on to receive his answer—but that he could not in any case defer action beyond another day. When Oppie asked if he could have a copy of the letter of charges, Strauss refused, saying he could have the letter only after deciding what he was going to do. And when Oppenheimer asked if “the Hill [Congress] knew about this,” Strauss said not to his knowledge, but that he doubted “such a thing could be kept from the Hill indefinitely.”

  Strauss finally had Oppenheimer exactly where he wanted him. Yet Oppie seems to have reacted calmly to the news, politely asking all the right questions, trying to explore his options. Thirty-five minutes after entering Strauss’ office, Oppenheimer rose to leave, telling Strauss that he was going to consult with Herb Marks. Strauss offered him the use of his chauffeur-driven Cadillac and Oppenheimer—distraught (outward appearances to the contrary)—foolishly accepted.

  But instead of going to Marks’ office, he directed the driver to the law offices of Joe Volpe, the former counsel to the AEC who together with Marks had given him legal advice during the Weinberg trial. Soon afterwards, Marks joined them and the three men spent an hour weighing Robert’s options. A hidden microphone recorded their deliberations. Anticipating that Oppenheimer would consult with Volpe, and unconcerned about violating the legal sanctity of client-lawyer privilege, Strauss had arranged in advance for Volpe’s office to be bugged.20

  The hidden microphones in Volpe’s office allowed Strauss, through the transcripts provided to him, to monitor the discussion as to whether Oppenheimer ought to terminate his consulting contract or fight the charges in a formal hearing. Oppie was clearly undecided and anguished. Late that afternoon, Anne Wilson Marks came by and
drove her husband and Robert back to their Georgetown home. On the way, Oppenheimer said, “I can’t believe what is happening to me.” That evening, Robert took the train back to Princeton to consult with Kitty.

  Strauss had expected Oppenheimer’s decision that evening, and when the next morning he still hadn’t heard from him, he ordered Nichols to phone Oppenheimer at noon that day. Oppenheimer said he needed more time to make up his mind. Nichols brusquely replied that he “could not have any more time. . . .” He gave him a three-hour ultimatum. Oppenheimer seemed to agree, but an hour later he called Nichols back and said that he wanted to come to Washington and give his answer in person. He said he would take an afternoon train and see Strauss the next morning at 9:00 a.m.

  Leaving Peter and Toni in the care of his secretary, Verna Hobson, Robert and Kitty boarded a train at Trenton and arrived in Washington in the late afternoon. Heading over to the Marks home in Georgetown, they spent the evening huddled with Marks and Volpe, continuing to debate whether Robert should fight the charges.

  “He was still in the same almost despairing state of mind,” Anne remembered. After hours of strategizing, the lawyers finally drafted a one-page letter addressed to “Dear Lewis.” Oppenheimer strongly implied that Strauss had encouraged him to resign. “You put to me as a possibly desirable alternative that I request termination of my contract as a consultant to the Commission, and thereby avoid an explicit consideration of the charges. . . .” Oppenheimer said he had earnestly considered this option. “Under the circumstances,” he wrote Strauss, “this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government, that I have now served for some twelve years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy I could hardly have served our country as I have tried, or been the Director of our Institute in Princeton, or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of our science and our country.”