by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
What was the source of these specific allegations? These individuals had not talked to the authorities. When summoned before HUAC, Nelson and others always had refused to name names. Obviously, these charges were based on illegal FBI wiretaps that were transcribed in those black binders stacked on the table before the hearing panel judges. Not admissible in a court of law, these unevaluated transcripts would be used with impunity in the Gray Board’s “inquiry.” All three Board members had read the FBI’s summary of these ten-year-old conversations—yet Oppenheimer’s lawyers were barred from seeing them and therefore were unable to challenge their contents.
Garrison and Marks should have realized that, presented as it was, this charge of secret membership in the Communist Party in the indictment made it impossible to mount a defense. Oppenheimer denied the allegations. “Your letter,” he wrote, “sets forth statements made in 1942–45 by persons said to be Communist Party officials to the effect that I was a concealed member of the Communist Party. I have no knowledge as to what these people might have said. What I do know is that I was never a member of the party, concealed or open. Even the names of some of the people mentioned are strange to me, such as Jack Manley and Katrina Sandow. I doubt that I met Bernadette Doyle, although I recognize her name. Pinsky and Adelson I met at most casually. . . .” In a court of law, such evidence would be unacceptable and dismissed as double hearsay—third parties recounting what they heard from others about a defendant. But in this “inquiry,” Oppenheimer’s judges would always believe that the FBI had recorded the voices of well-informed communists whose claims that Oppenheimer was one of their own were valid.
Some of the information in those binders was even manipulated to appear more damaging to Oppenheimer. The source of one key allegation was two FBI informants, Dickson and Sylvia Hill, who had infiltrated the Montclair branch of the Communist Party in California. In November 1945, this husband-and-wife team walked into the FBI office in San Francisco and reported on a CP meeting they had attended shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima. Sylvia Hill said she heard a Communist Party official, Jack Manley, refer to Oppenheimer as “one of our own men.” Mrs. Hill, however, went on to say that “Manley’s statement concerning the subject [Oppenheimer] did not necessarily mean to her that the subject was a card-carrying member of the CP. She believed her impression at the time was that the subject was probably not an actual member but went along with Communist ideas.” Put in this context, Sylvia Hill’s information did not buttress the AEC charge that known communists had been overheard calling Oppenheimer a Party member. But this level of nuance was lost when the FBI highlighted Hill’s information in its summaries of Oppenheimer’s file. What amounted to hearsay thus rose to the level of “derogatory” information.
HAVING READ THE INDICTMENT and Oppenheimer’s reply, Chairman Gray asked Oppenheimer if he wished to “testify under oath in this proceeding?” He did, and Gray administered the standard oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth required by any court of law. The inquiry had begun. Oppenheimer took the witness chair and spent the rest of the afternoon being questioned gently by his defense counsel.
ON THE NEXT MORNING, Tuesday, April 13, 1954, the New York Times broke the story in a front-page exclusive written by James Reston. The headline read:
DR. OPPENHEIMER SUSPENDED BY A.E.C. IN SECURITY REVIEW; SCIENTIST DEFENDS RECORD; HEARINGS STARTED; ACCESS TO SECRET DATA DENIED NUCLEAR EXPERT—RED TIES ALLEGED
The newspaper published the full text of both General Nichols’ letter of charges and Oppenheimer’s response. Reston’s story was picked up by newspapers around the country and abroad. Millions of readers were exposed for the first time to intimate details of Oppenheimer’s political and private life.
The news had an instant polarizing effect; liberals were aghast that such an eminent man could be attacked in such a manner. Drew Pearson, the liberal syndicated columnist, noted in his diary: “Strauss and the Eisenhower people are certainly getting petty. I can conceive of no move more calculated to bolster McCarthy and to encourage witch-hunting than this throw-back to the prewar years and this attempt to search under the bed of Oppenheimer’s past to see whom he was talking to or meeting with in 1939 or 1940. . . .” On the other hand, conservative commentators like Walter Winchell had a field day with the story. Just two days earlier, Winchell had announced on his Sunday telecast that Senator McCarthy would soon reveal that a “key atomic figure had urged that the H-bomb not be built at all.” This famous atomic scientist, Winchell claimed, has been “an active Communist Party member” and the “leader of a Red cell including other noted atomic scientists.”
Chairman Gray was furious over Reston’s report. Addressing Garrison, he said, “You said you were late yesterday because you had your ‘fingers in the dike.’ ” Garrison explained that Reston had known of Oppenheimer’s security suspension since mid-January. But Gray brushed this aside and grilled Garrison on when he had given the reporter copies of the AEC letter of charges. Oppenheimer interrupted to say, “These documents were given to Mr. Reston by my counsel Friday night, I believe. . . .” This only heightened Gray’s anger: “So that you knew when you made the statement here yesterday morning that you were keeping the finger in the dike that these documents . . . were already in the possession of the New York Times?”
“Indeed we did,” Oppenheimer replied.
Clearly annoyed with both Oppenheimer and his lawyers, Gray blamed them for the leaks. He never knew that his ire should have been directed at Lewis Strauss. The chairman of the AEC had known all along about Reston’s phone calls to Oppenheimer, and it was Strauss, not Garrison, who had given the New York Times the green light to publish. Fearing that McCarthy would release the news first, Strauss calculated that it was time for the story to come out—particularly if he could blame the leak on Oppenheimer’s lawyers. Eisenhower’s press secretary, James C. Hagerty, agreed. So on April 9, Strauss called the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and released him from their previously arranged agreement to keep a lid on the story.
Strauss also feared that there was a danger now of the whole case “being tried in the press,” and that a lengthy hearing would work to Oppenheimer’s advantage. The longer it dragged on, he calculated, the more time Oppenheimer’s allies would have to “propagandize” the scientific community. A quick decision was essential. So later that week, he sent a note to Robb urging him to expedite the hearing.
A FEW DAYS earlier in Princeton, Abraham Pais had learned that the New York Times was about to break the story. Knowing that reporters would pester Einstein for a comment, he drove over to the physicist’s house on Mercer Street. When Pais explained his mission, Einstein chuckled loudly, and then said, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government. . . . [T]he problem was simple: All Oppenheimer needed to do was go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then go home.” Privately, Pais may have agreed, but he felt this would not serve as a statement to the press. So he persuaded Einstein to draft a simple statement in support of Oppenheimer—“I admire him not only as a scientist but also as a great human being”—and got him to read it to a United Press reporter over the phone.
On Wednesday, April 14, day three of the hearing, Oppenheimer began the morning in the witness stand, answering questions posed to him by Garrison about his brother, Frank. Oppenheimer was very concerned that the AEC letter of charges included language stating that “Haakon Chevalier thereupon approached you either directly or through your brother, Frank Friedman Oppenheimer, in connection with this matter.” So when Garrison asked him whether Frank was involved with the Chevalier approach, he replied, “I am very clear on this. I have a vivid and I think certainly not fallible memory. He had nothing whatever to do with it. It would not have made any sense, I may say, since Chevalier was my friend. I don’t mean that my brother did not know him, but this would have been a peculiarly roundabout and unnatural t
hing.” This made perfect sense, but Strauss, Robb and Nichols believed it was a lie and, without any proof, they would insist that Oppenheimer had lied to the hearing board.
GARRISON’S DIRECT EXAMINATION of Oppenheimer thus concluded as it had begun: as a reinforcement of his responses to the AEC’s letter of charges. It had gone well, Oppenheimer and his lawyers believed. But as Robb began his cross-examination, it became clear that he had a carefully worked out strategy to reverse that good impression. Having spent nearly two months immersed in the FBI files, he was well prepared. “I had been told that you can’t get anywhere cross-examining Oppenheimer,” Robb later said. “He’s too fast and he’s too slippery. So I said, ‘Maybe so, but then he’s not been cross-examined by me before.’ Anyway, I sat down and planned my cross-examination most carefully, the sequences to it and the references to the FBI reports and so on, and my theory was that if I could shake Oppenheimer at the beginning, he would be apt to be more communicative thereafter.”
Wednesday, April 14, was perhaps the most humiliating day in Oppenheimer’s life. Robb’s interrogation was relentless and exacting. It was the sort of grilling that Oppenheimer had never experienced and was totally unprepared for. Robb began by leading Oppenheimer to admit that close association with the Communist Party was “inconsistent with work on a secret war project.” Robb then asked him about former members of the Communist Party. Would it be appropriate, Robb asked, for such a person to work on a secret war project?
Oppenheimer: “Are we talking about now or then?”
Robb: “Let us ask you now, and then we will go back to then.”
Oppenheimer: “I think that depends on the character and the totality of the disengagement and what kind of a man he is, whether he is an honest man.”
Robb: “Was that your view in 1941, 1942, and 1943?”
Oppenheimer: “Essentially.”
Robb: “What test do you apply and did you apply in 1941, 1942, and 1943 to satisfy yourself that a former member of the party is no longer dangerous?”
Oppenheimer: “As I said, I knew very little about who was a former member of the party. In my wife’s case, it was completely clear that she was no longer dangerous. In my brother’s case, I had confidence in his decency and straightforwardness and in his loyalty to me.”
Robb: “Let us take your brother as an example. Tell us the test that you applied to acquire the confidence that you have spoken of?”
Oppenheimer: “In the case of a brother you don’t make tests, at least I didn’t.”
ROBB’S INTENTIONS were twofold: first, to catch Oppenheimer in contradictions with the written record to which Robert and his lawyers had been denied access; second, to place those things that Oppenheimer admitted into a context which implied that Robert had directed Los Alamos irresponsibly at best—or, worse, that he had hired communists consciously and purposefully. Robb’s aim at every turn was to humiliate the witness, often merely by making him repeat what he had already admitted. “Doctor, I notice in your answer on page 5 you use the expression ‘fellow travelers.’ What is your definition of a fellow traveler, sir?”
Oppenheimer: “It is a repugnant word which I used about myself once in an interview with the FBI. I understood it to mean someone who accepted part of the public program of the Communist Party, who was willing to work with and associate with Communists, but who was not a member of the party.”
Robb: “Do you think that a fellow traveler should be employed on a secret war project?”
Oppenheimer: “Today?”
Robb: “Yes, sir.”
Oppenheimer: “No.”
Robb: “Did you feel that way in 1942 and 1943?”
Oppenheimer: “My feeling then and my feeling about most of these things is that the judgment is an integral judgment of what kind of man you are dealing with. Today I think association with the Communist Party or fellow-traveling with the Communist Party manifestly means sympathy for the enemy. In the period of the war, I would have thought that it was a question of what the man was like, what he would and wouldn’t do. Certainly fellow-traveling and party membership raised a question and a serious question.”
Robb: “Were you ever a fellow traveler?”
Oppenheimer: “I was a fellow traveler.”
Robb: “When?”
Oppenheimer: “From late 1936 or early 1937, and then it tapered off, and I would say I traveled much less fellow after 1939 and very much less after 1942.”
While preparing for the hearing, Robb had seen numerous references in the FBI files to Oppenheimer’s 1943 interview with Lt. Col. Boris Pash. The files indicated this interview had been recorded. “Where are those recordings?” Robb asked. The FBI soon retrieved the ten-year-old Presto disks and Robb listened to Oppenheimer’s first description of the Chevalier incident. It differed markedly from what he had told the FBI in 1946. Obviously Oppenheimer had lied in one of these interviews, and so Robb came prepared to exploit the contradictory stories. Oppenheimer, of course, had no idea that his conversation with Pash had been recorded. So when Robb turned to the Chevalier incident, he knew the details far better than Oppenheimer could now recall them.
Robb began by reminding Oppenheimer of his brief interview with Lieutenant Johnson in Berkeley on August 25, 1943.
Oppenheimer: “That is right. I think I said little more than that Eltenton was somebody to worry about.”
Robb: “Yes.”
Oppenheimer: “Then I was asked why did I say this. Then I invented a cock-and-bull story.”
Unfazed by this startling admission, Robb focused on what Oppenheimer had told Lt. Col. Boris Pash on the following day, August 26.
Robb: “Did you tell Pash the truth about this thing?”
Oppenheimer: “No.”
Robb: “You lied to him?”
Oppenheimer: “Yes.”
Robb: “What did you tell Pash that was not true?”
Oppenheimer: “That Eltenton had attempted to approach members of the project—three members of the project—through intermediaries.”
A few moments later, Robb asked, “Did you tell Pash that X [Chevalier] had approached three persons on the project?”
Oppenheimer: “I am not clear whether I said there were 3 X’s or that X approached 3 people.”
Robb: “Didn’t you say that X had approached 3 people?”
Oppenheimer: “Probably.”
Robb: “Why did you do that, Doctor?”
Oppenheimer: “Because I was an idiot.”
“An idiot”? Why did Oppenheimer say such a thing? According to Robb, Oppenheimer was in a state of anguish, cornered, as it were, by the clever prosecutor. After the hearing, Robb dramatized the moment to a reporter, saying that as Oppenheimer said these words he was “hunched over, wringing his hands, white as a sheet. I felt sick. That night when I came home I told my wife, ‘I’ve just seen a man destroy himself.’ ”
This description was nonsense, self-serving publicity designed to promote Robb’s courtroom image, and his humanity (“I felt sick . . .”). It is a measure of how cleverly Robb and Strauss manipulated the aftermath of the Oppenheimer hearings that journalists and historians have heretofore accepted Robb’s interpretation of this moment. But contrary to what Robb claimed, Oppenheimer’s “I was an idiot” comment was simply meant to eliminate the ambiguities surrounding the Chevalier incident. He was making it clear that he had no rational explanation as to why he had said that X (Chevalier) had approached three people. Robert knew that everyone knew he was not an idiot. He was using a colloquial phrase in a self-deprecating attempt to disarm his interrogator. Within minutes, however, it would become clear to him that he had not succeeded in disarming anyone—he was facing an adversary bent on destroying him.
Robb had only begun. Oppenheimer had admitted lying. Now Robb was going to confront him with the evidence and in painful detail dramatize the lie. Pulling out a transcript of Colonel Pash’s encounter with Oppenheimer on August 26, 1943, Robb said, “Doctor . .
. I will read to you certain extracts from the transcript of that interview.” He then read a portion from the eleven-year-old transcript in which Oppenheimer asserted that someone in the Soviet Consulate was ready to transmit information “without any danger of a leak or scandal. . . .”
When Robb asked if he recalled saying this to Pash, Oppenheimer said he certainly didn’t recall saying such a thing. “Would you deny you said it?” Robb asked. Realizing, of course, that Robb had in his hand a transcript, Oppenheimer replied, “No.”
Robb melodramatically announced, “Doctor, for your information, I might say we have a record of your voice.”
“Sure,” Oppenheimer replied. But he went on to say that he was fairly certain that Chevalier had not mentioned someone from the Soviet Consulate when he told him about Eltenton’s idea. But he had given this detail to Colonel Pash and had also told Pash that there had been “several”—not one—approaches to scientists.
Robb: “So you told him specifically and circumstantially that there were several people that were contacted?”
Oppenheimer: “Right.”
Robb: “And your testimony now is, that was a lie?”
Oppenheimer: “Right.”
Robb continued reading from the 1943 transcript: “Of course,” Oppenheimer had told Pash, “the actual fact is that since it is not a communication that ought to be taking place, it is treasonable.”
“Did you say that?” Robb asked.
Oppenheimer: “Sure. I mean I am not remembering the conversation, but I am accepting it.”
Robb: “You did think it was treasonable anyway, didn’t you?”
Oppenheimer: “Sure.”
Robb, quoting the transcript again: “But it was not presented in that method. It is a method of carrying out a policy which was more or less a policy of the Government. The form in which it came out was that couldn’t an interview be arranged with this man Eltenton who had a very good contact with a man from the Embassy attached to the Consulate who is a very reliable guy and who had a lot of experience in microfilm or whatever.”
