by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
DAVID LILIENTHAL
OPPENHEIMER RETURNED TO OLDEN MANOR tired and irritable. He knew things had gone badly, and there was not much he could do but wait for the Gray Board’s judgment. He thought it would be weeks before it reached a decision. The FBI wiretap overheard him telling a friend that even then, “he believes he will never be through with the situation. He does not believe the case will come to a quiet end as all the evil of the times is wrapped in this situation.” A few days later, the FBI reported that Oppenheimer was “very depressed at the present time and has been ill-tempered with his wife.”
As they awaited the panel’s judgment, he and Kitty spent hours in front of their black-and-white television set, watching the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings. This extraordinary drama had begun on April 21, 1954, in the middle of Oppenheimer’s own ordeal, and as the hearings dragged on through May, an estimated 20 million Americans tuned in each day to watch as Senator McCarthy and the Army’s counsel, Boston lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, traded barbs. Like many Americans, Oppenheimer was transfixed by this live television drama; but for him it must have been a painfully personal reminder of the star chamber nature of the hearings he had just endured. Could he have helped but think that things might have gone better for him if he had been represented by Welch, or someone like him?
GORDON GRAY thought things had gone splendidly. The day after the proceedings ended, he dictated a private memo for his files summing up his initial reactions: “It is my present conviction that up to this point the proceedings have been as fair as circumstances permit. My reason for the qualification is that, of course, Dr. Oppenheimer and his counsel are not privileged to see certain documents such as FBI reports and other classified material. . . .” Gray also confessed that “I was mildly uncomfortable about Mr. Robb’s cross-examination and his piecemeal and surprise references to and quotations from documents.” But in the end, he rationalized to himself, “that there was no damage to Dr. Oppenheimer’s interests if the proceedings are viewed as a whole.”
From Gray’s informal discussions with his fellow panel members, there seemed little doubt of the outcome. Oppenheimer, in his view, was certainly guilty of putting “loyalty to an individual above loyalty or obligation to Government.” Or, as Gray had told Morgan and Evans one morning earlier that week, Dr. Oppenheimer had a “repeated tendency to put his own judgment about a situation ahead of the considered and official judgment in many cases of people whose responsibility and duty it was to have such judgments.” Gray cited the Chevalier affair, Oppenheimer’s defense of Bernard Peters, the hydrogen bomb debate and several of Oppenheimer’s other atomic policy positions. Morgan and Evans indicated their agreement—and Dr. Evans specifically commented that “Oppenheimer certainly was guilty of very bad judgment.”
Upon his return from a ten-day recess, therefore, Gray was shocked to learn that Dr. Evans had penciled a draft dissent supporting Oppenheimer. Gray had thought Evans disposed “from the beginning” to rule that Oppenheimer’s clearance should not be reinstated. Evans had told him privately that in his experience “almost without exception those who turned up with subversive backgrounds and interests were Jewish.” Bluntly put, Gray thought Evans’ anti-Semitism would prejudice his judgment. Throughout the month-long proceedings, Gray noted, “my impression grew that both of my colleagues were pretty well committed to a view.” But now, upon his return from Chicago, “Dr. Evans clearly had undergone a complete reversal of view.” Evans said he had simply reviewed the record and decided that there was nothing new in the charges. The FBI thought “someone had ‘gotten to’ him.”
Strauss became frantic when he learned of this development. He and Robb had wiretapped Oppenheimer’s lawyers, they had blocked Garrison’s attempt to get a security clearance, they had ambushed witnesses with classified documents, they had prejudiced the Gray panel with hearsay evidence from the FBI files—and despite all their efforts to assure a guilty verdict, now it seemed possible that Oppenheimer would be exonerated.
Fearing that Evans might influence one of the two other panel members, Strauss called Robb. The two men agreed that something had to be done and Robb, with Strauss’ approval, called the FBI and asked for Hoover’s intercession. Robb told Bureau agent C. E. Hennrich that he thought “it extremely important that the Director discuss this matter with the Board. . . . Robb said that he feels it will be a tragedy if the decision of the Board goes the wrong way and that he considers this a matter of extreme urgency.” Almost at the same moment, Strauss was on the phone to A. H. Belmont, one of Hoover’s personal assistants, begging him to get the director to intervene. He said things were “touch and go” and that “a slight tip of the balance would cause the Board to commit a serious error.”
Agent Hennrich observed: “This all boils down, it seems to me, to a situation where Strauss and Robb, who want the Board to make a finding that Oppenheimer is a security risk, are doubtful that the Board will find so at this point. . . . It is my feeling that the Director should not see the Board.”
Any such intervention on Hoover’s part would have been considered highly prejudicial if it ever became public—and Hoover knew it. He told his aides, “I think it would be highly improper for me to discuss [the] Oppenheimer case. . . .” He would not see the Gray Board.
Years later, when Robb was confronted with an FBI memo documenting his attempt to get Hoover’s intercession, he denied that he had tried to get the FBI director to influence the board’s judgment. He told the filmmaker and historian Peter Goodchild, “I specifically and categorically deny that I ever encouraged a meeting between the Board and the Director for the purpose of having the Director influence the Board. . . . I also deny that I ever told Hennrich that I considered this ‘to be a matter of extreme urgency’ because unless the Board talked with Mr. Hoover it might decide in favor of Oppenheimer.” But the documentary record is clear—he was lying.
Ironically, Gray thought Evans’ brief so badly written that he asked Robb to rewrite it. “I didn’t want ‘Doc’ Evans’ opinion to be too vulnerable,” Robb explained. “If it was, it would look as though he was just a plant on the Board, do you follow me, it would look as though we put a nincompoop on the Board.”
ON MAY 23, the Gray Board returned its formal verdict. By a vote of two to one, the board deemed Oppenheimer a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk. Accordingly, Chairman Gray and board member Morgan recommended that Oppenheimer’s security clearance not be restored. “The following considerations,” Gray and Morgan wrote, “have been controlling in leading us to our conclusion:
We find that Dr. Oppenheimer’s continuing conduct and association have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system.
We have found a susceptibility to influence which could have serious implications for the security interests of the country.
We find his conduct in the hydrogen bomb program sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt as to whether his future participation, if characterized by the same attitudes in a Government program relating to the national defense, would be clearly consistent with the best interests of security.
We have regretfully concluded that Dr. Oppenheimer has been less than candid in several instances in his testimony before this Board.
Their reasoning was tortured. They did not accuse Oppenheimer of violating any laws or even security regulations. But his associations gave evidence of a certain indefinable ill-judgment. His studied lack of deference to the security apparatus was particularly damning in their eyes. “Loyalty to one’s friends is one of the noblest of qualities,” Gray and Morgan wrote in their majority opinion. “Being loyal to one’s friends above reasonable obligations to the country and to the security system, however, is not clearly consistent with the interests of security.” Among other deviations, Oppenheimer was guilty of excessive friendship.
Evans’ dissent on the other hand, was a clear, unambiguous critique of his fellow board members’ verdict. “Most of the deroga
tory information,” Evans observed in his dissent, “was in the hands of the Committee when Dr. Oppenheimer was cleared in 1947.”
They apparently were aware of his associations and his left-wing policies: yet they cleared him. They took a chance because of his special talents and he continued to do a good job. Now when the job is done, we are asked to investigate him for practically the same derogatory information. He did his job in a thorough and painstaking manner. There is not the slightest vestige of information before this Board that would indicate that Dr. Oppenheimer is not a loyal citizen of his country. He hates Russia. He had communistic friends, it is true. He still has some. However, the evidence indicates that he has fewer of them than he had in 1947. He is not as naïve as he was then. He has more judgment; no one on the Board doubts his loyalty— even the witnesses adverse to him admit that—and he is certainly less a security risk than he was in 1947, when he was cleared. To deny him clearance now for what he was cleared for in 1947, when we must know he is less of a security risk now than he was then, seems hardly the procedure to be adopted in a free country. . . .
I personally think that our failure to clear Dr. Oppenheimer will be a black mark on the escutcheon of our country. His witnesses are a considerable segment of the scientific backbone of our Nation and they endorse him.
Whether Evans’ dissent was written entirely by his own hand or edited by Robb, it is a remarkable document. In the two short paragraphs quoted, it demolishes points 1, 2 and 4 of the “considerations” above that Gray and Morgan presented as the basis for their verdict. Nonetheless, it fails to confront point 3, the issue that precipitated this “train wreck,” as Oppenheimer later referred to his ordeal. “We find his conduct on the hydrogen bomb program sufficiently disturbing . . . ,” Gray and Morgan wrote.
Why was his conduct with respect to the hydrogen bomb program disturbing? Oppenheimer had opposed a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb, but so had seven other members of the GAC; and they all had explained their reasons clearly. What Gray and Morgan were actually saying was that they opposed Oppenheimer’s judgments and they did not want his views represented in the counsels of government. Oppenheimer wanted to corral and perhaps even reverse the nuclear arms race. He wanted to encourage an open democratic debate on whether the United States should adopt genocide as its primary defense strategy. Apparently, Gray and Morgan considered these sentiments unacceptable in 1954. More, they were asserting in effect that it was not legitimate, not permissible, for a scientist to express strong disagreement on matters of military policy.
Strauss was relieved that the panel had narrowly handed down the equivalent of a guilty verdict—but now he feared the possibility that Evans’ dissent could persuade the AEC commissioners to reverse it. The verdict, after all, was only a recommendation, which the AEC commissioners had the option of confirming or rejecting. Oppenheimer’s lawyers assumed that standard procedures would be followed and the AEC’s general manager, Kenneth Nichols, would merely pass to the commissioners the Gray Board’s report. But Nichols—who viewed Oppenheimer as a “slippery sonuvabitch”—sent the commissioners a letter that was actually a fullfledged brief. Nichols’ letter written under the guidance of Strauss, Charles Murphy (the Fortune magazine editor), and Robb, put an entirely new spin on the panel’s report.
The Nichols letter presented an entirely new argument for why Oppenheimer’s security clearance should not be reinstated. His speculations went far beyond the Gray Board’s verdicts. Drawing on Strauss’ research in Oppenheimer’s FBI dossier during the three months he had kept it in his office, Nichols argued, first, that Oppenheimer was not merely a “parlor pink” fellow traveler. “His relations with these hardened Communists were such that they considered him to be one of their number.” Citing the cash contributions that Oppenheimer had passed through the Communist Party, Nichols concluded, “The record indicates that Dr. Oppenheimer was a Communist in every respect except for the fact that he did not carry a party card.”
Although the Gray Board’s verdict had emphasized Oppenheimer’s opposition to a crash program to develop the H-bomb, Nichols dismissed this politically awkward part of the indictment and astutely added that it was not the intention of the AEC to question the right of a scientist like Dr. Oppenheimer to express his “honest opinions.”
Instead, Nichols shifted the emphasis to the Chevalier affair. But he embraced an interpretation of this murky business quite different from the one presented by the Gray Board. The panel had accepted Oppenheimer’s admission that he had lied to Colonel Pash in 1943 when he first spoke of the Chevalier-Eltenton incident. Nichols rejected this conclusion and, in an astonishing and perhaps even extralegal maneuver, completely reinterpreted the incident. In effect, Nichols retried Oppenheimer, dismissed the Gray Board’s majority opinion, and presented the AEC commissioners with an entirely new basis for removing Oppenheimer’s security clearance.
After reviewing the sixteen-page transcript of that fateful encounter between Oppenheimer and Colonel Pash on August 26, 1943, Nichols argued, “it is difficult to conclude that the detailed and circumstantial account given by Dr. Oppenheimer to Colonel Pash was false and that the story now told by Dr. Oppenheimer is an honest one.” Why, asked Nichols, would Oppenheimer “tell such a complicated false story to Colonel Pash?” Rejecting Oppenheimer’s quite plausible explanation, that he had sought to divert attention from both Chevalier and himself, Nichols pointed out that Oppenheimer “did not give his present version of the story until 1946, shortly after he had learned from Chevalier what Chevalier himself had told the FBI about the incident. . . .” Withholding from the commissioners the critical fact that Eltenton’s interview with the FBI—conducted simultaneously with the FBI’s interview with Chevalier—had irrefutably confirmed the 1946 Chevalier–Oppenheimer version of the Chevalier affair, Nichols concluded that Oppenheimer had lied in 1946 to the FBI and again in the 1954 hearings.
Nichols had unearthed no additional facts; indeed, he had suppressed facts. He merely asserted that Oppenheimer lied to protect his brother, a theory that, as we have seen, has scant evidence to support it. Curiously, the Gray Board made no effort to obtain testimony from Frank Oppenheimer— nor, for that matter, from the two principals, Haakon Chevalier and George Eltenton. (Chevalier was then living in Paris and Eltenton had long since returned to England, but both men could have been interviewed abroad.)
Nichols’ letter contained only a supposition, a personal interpretation, and one that had not been raised by the Gray Board. Why at this late date was he introducing another theory? The answer is obvious: Arguing that Oppenheimer had lied in 1954, to the hearing board, was far more damning than the claim that he had lied eleven years earlier to a lieutenant colonel.
Since it is impossible to imagine that Nichols presented this radical interpretation without Strauss’ approval, it is clear that Strauss feared that the ambiguities in the majority’s decision, combined with the clarity of Evans’ dissent, might lead the AEC commissioners to overrule the Gray Board.
Oppenheimer’s lawyers knew nothing of Nichols’ letter. Garrison might have learned of it if he had been given the opportunity to present an oral argument before the AEC commissioners. The one commissioner sympathetic to Garrison’s request, Dr. Henry D. Smyth, warned, “If we give Dr. Oppenheimer’s attorneys no opportunity to comment on Nichols’ letter, we will be open to grave criticism when the letter is published.” But once again, Strauss prevailed, and Garrison’s request was flatly turned down without explanation.
OPPENHEIMER’S LAWYERS briefly hoped that the five AEC commissioners would reverse the Gray Board’s recommendation. There were, after all, three Democrats (Henry De Wolf Smyth, Thomas Murray and Eugene Zuckert) and only two Republicans (Lewis Strauss and Joseph Campbell) on the Commission. Initially, Strauss himself feared a three-to-two vote in Oppenheimer’s favor. But as chairman, Strauss was in a position to influence his fellow commissioners. He understood how power worked in Washington, and he h
ad no qualms about offering his colleagues tangible rewards for seeing things his way. He treated them to lavish lunches and talked to Smyth about lucrative employment opportunities in private industry. At one point, Smyth wondered whether Strauss was trying to buy his vote. Harold P. Green, the AEC lawyer who had been called upon to write the original letter of charges against Oppenheimer, thought Strauss was playing hard-ball. Green knew that Zuckert was initially inclined to find Oppenheimer innocent. In fact, on May 19, Strauss was informed that, “Gene Zuckert would welcome the opportunity not to stand up and be counted on the vote making final disposition of the security case.” But at some point, Zuckert flipped. He was scheduled to resign his post as a commissioner of the AEC on June 30—the day after signing on with the majority decision against Oppenheimer—to start a private law practice in Washington. Green firmly believed that something untoward was happening, especially after he learned that Strauss subsequently transferred a lot of his legal business to Zuckert. Green didn’t know it, but Zuckert also signed a contract with Strauss to serve as the latter’s “personal adviser and consultant.”
By the end of June, Strauss had the votes of all but one commissioner. The only scientist on the Commission, Professor Smyth had made it clear that he thought Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be restored. As the author of the 1945 “Smyth Report,” an unclassified scientific history of the Manhattan Project, Smyth was familiar with both Oppenheimer and the security issues at stake. On a personal level, he didn’t particularly care for Oppenheimer; they had been Princeton neighbors for ten years, and Oppenheimer had always struck him as a vain and pretentious man. What mattered was that Smyth didn’t find the evidence convincing. In early May, he and Strauss had lunch and proceeded to argue about the verdict. At the end of their lunch, Smyth said, “Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.”
