by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
IF OPPENHEIMER was showing the strain of the last few months, so, too, was his immediate family. Although Kitty had given a stellar performance before the security panel, her friends could see that she was visibly distressed. One night at 2:00 a.m., she phoned her old friend Pat Sherr. “We were sound asleep,” Sherr recalled, “and she was obviously quite drunk; her speech was slurred and she was saying things that were sort of disconnected.” In early July, just after the AEC’s decision to uphold the ruling, an illegal FBI phone tap picked up the information that Kitty had just suffered a severe attack of an unidentified illness and had to be attended to by a physician at Olden Manor.
Nine-year-old Toni seemed to take it all in stride. But according to Harold Cherniss, Peter, thirteen, had “a very difficult time in school during Robert’s ordeal.” One day he came home from school and told Kitty that a classmate had said, “Your father is a communist.” Always a sensitive child, Peter now became more reticent. One day early that summer, after watching some of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Peter went upstairs and wrote on the blackboard mounted in his bedroom: “The American Government is unfair to Accuse Certain People that I know of being unfair to them. Since this true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the U.S. government, should go to HELL. Yours truly Certain People”
Understandably, Robert thought a long vacation might be good for everyone. He and Kitty decided to return to the Virgin Islands, but while they were making their plans, Robert told Kitty she shouldn’t send a wire to St. Croix because he thought his communications were still being monitored. Fearing that the authorities might interfere, he said “if that corner isn’t loused up already, it will be by doing that.” Kitty disregarded this advice and sent the cable anyway, reserving a seventy-two-foot sailing ketch, the Comanche, owned by their friend Edward “Ted” Dale.
FBI technical surveillance had been withdrawn in early June. But a month later, after the AEC commissioners released the final verdict against Oppenheimer, Strauss had again pressed the FBI to keep Robert under surveillance. Illegal, warrantless phone taps were reinstalled in early July, and at the same time the Bureau assigned six agents to keep Oppenheimer under tight physical surveillance from 7:00 a.m. to midnight every day. Both Strauss and Hoover feared that he might make a run for it. Strauss had visions of a Soviet submarine surfacing in the warm Caribbean waters and spiriting Oppenheimer off behind the Iron Curtain.
Oppenheimer himself was amused to read a report in Newsweek that “key security officials have been alerted against a Communist effort to get Dr. J. Robert Oppeneheimer to visit Europe and then coax him into doing a Ponti Corvo [sic],” a reference to Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian physicist who had defected to the Soviets in 1950. The FBI’s wiretaps picked up Herb Marks advising Oppenheimer that under the circumstances, he probably ought to write a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, informing him of his vacation plans. “The letter,” the FBI summary of their conversation noted, “will be predicated on the foolish rumors being circulated to the effect that Dr. Oppenheimer may leave the country, may be kidnapped, may be met by a Russian submarine, is planning a European vacation, etc.” Oppenheimer obligingly sent Hoover a letter, informing him of his plan to spend a three-or four-week sailing vacation in the Virgin Islands.
Robert and his family boarded a flight for St. Croix on July 19, 1954, and from there they made their way to St. John, a pristine Caribbean island about the size of Manhattan (21 square miles), with no more than 800 residents—ten percent of whom were “continentals.” In 1954, there might have been a couple of sailing sloops anchored in the bay. The island’s one village and only commercial port, Cruz Bay, had several hundred people, mostly descendants of St. John’s slave population. The only bar in the village, Mooie’s, wouldn’t be built for two years. The largest building, Meade’s Inn, was a one-story West Indian gingerbread cottage. Peacocks and donkeys roamed the unpaved streets.
Stepping off the ferry, the Oppenheimers found a jeep taxi to take them over dirt roads along the island’s northern coast. Seeking anonymity, they passed by Caneel Plantation, the island’s only upscale resort, developed by Laurance S. Rockefeller, and drove to Trunk Bay’s Guest House, a primitive bed-and-breakfast lodge run by a longtime resident, Irva Boulon Thorpe. There were no phones, no electricity, and rooms for no more than a dozen guests. Seeking a solitary refuge, they had come to the right place. “They were sort of in a state of shock,” recalled Irva Claire Denham, the daughter of the proprietor. “It was isolated enough so that people couldn’t get at them. They were being careful about who they even talked to. . . . Kitty was very protective. She was like a tigress when anybody approached him, because he was willing to talk.” When Kitty was in a foul mood, she often threw things—and the next morning Robert would go to see the Boulons and pay handsomely for the damage. Using Cruz Bay as their home port, the Oppenheimers spent the next five weeks sailing the Comanche in the waters around St. John and the neighboring British Virgin Islands.
As late as August 25, 1954, the Bureau was still worried about a communist plot, dubbed “Operation Oppenheimer,” to whisk the Oppenheimers behind the Iron Curtain. “According to the plan,” an FBI report reads, “Oppenheimer will first travel to England, from England he will travel to France, and while in France he will vanish into Soviet hands.”
The FBI found it impossible to keep Oppenheimer under surveillance while he was on St. John. So when he finally flew back to New York on August 29, 1954, FBI agents accosted him and requested that he accompany them to a private room in the airport terminal. Oppenheimer agreed, but insisted that his wife be present. When they got inside the room, the agents bluntly asked if he had been approached by Soviet agents in the Virgin Islands and asked to defect. The Russians, he said, “were damn fools,” but he didn’t think they “were foolish enough to approach him with such an offer.” He volunteered that if this ever happened, he would promptly notify the FBI. After this short interrogation, the Oppenheimers left the airport. Agents followed their car to Princeton, and the next day the FBI once again placed a wiretap on their home phone.
Incredibly, the FBI sent another team of agents back down to St. John in March 1955—six months after Oppenheimer had left. The agents went around asking residents whom Oppenheimer had talked to while he was on the island.
ABROAD, foreign opinion reacted to the trial with incredulity. European intellectuals saw it as further evidence that America was gripped by irrational fears. “How can the independent experimental mind survive in such an atmosphere?” asked R.H.S. Crossman in The New Statesman and Nation, Britain’s leading liberal weekly. In Paris, when Chevalier received his copy of the hearing transcript—shipped to him by Oppenheimer himself—he read portions of the document out loud to André Malraux. Both men were struck by Oppenheimer’s strange passivity in the face of his interrogators. Malraux was particularly troubled that Oppenheimer had freely answered questions about the political views of his friends and associates. The hearing had turned him into an informer. “The trouble was,” Malraux told Chevalier, “he accepted his accusers’ terms from the beginning. . . . He should have told them, at the very outset, ‘Je suis la bombe atomique!’ He should have stood on the ground that he was the builder of the atom bomb— that he was a scientist, and not an informer.”
Initially, Oppenheimer seemed destined to become a pariah, at least in mainstream circles. For nearly a decade, he had been more than just a famous scientist. Once a ubiquitous and influential public figure, now he was suddenly gone—still alive, but disappeared. As Robert Coughlan later wrote in Life magazine, “After the security hearings of 1954, the public character ceased to exist. . . . He had been one of the most famous men in the world, one of the most admired, quoted, photographed, consulted, glorified, well-nigh deified as the fabulous and fascinating archetype of a brand new kind of hero, the hero of science and intellect, originator and living symbol of the new atomic age. Then, suddenly, all the glory was gone and he was go
ne, too. . . .” In the media, Teller replaced Oppenheimer as the face of the archetypical scientific statesman. “The glorification of Teller in the 1950s was accompanied,” Jeremy Gundel wrote, “perhaps inevitably, by the defamation of the man who had been his chief rival, J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
While Oppenheimer was excommunicated from government circles, he nevertheless quickly became a symbol to liberals of everything that was wrong with the Republican Party. That summer, the Washington Post ran a series of articles by the newspaper’s assistant managing editor, Alfred Friendly, which the FBI observed “slanted favorably toward Oppenheimer. . . .” In one article, headlined DRAMA PACKS AMAZING OPPENHEIMER TRANSCRIPT, Friendly called the hearing an “Aristotelian drama,” “Shakespearean in richness and variety,” with “Eric Ambler allusions to espionage,” “a plot more intricate than Gone With the Wind,” and “with half again as many characters as War and Peace.”
Many Americans began to regard Oppenheimer as a scientist-martyr, a victim of the era’s McCarthyite excesses. At the end of 1954, Columbia University invited him to give an address on the occasion of its bicentennial; the lecture was broadcast to a national audience. His message was bleak and pessimistic. Earlier, in his Reith Lectures, he had extolled the virtues of science in communitarian endeavors, but now he dwelled on the solitary condition of intellectuals, embattled by the fierce winds of popular emotions. “This is a world,” he said, “in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing. . . . If a man tells us that he sees differently than we, or that he finds beautiful what we find ugly, we may have to leave the room, from fatigue or trouble. . . .”
A few days later, millions of Americans watched as Edward R. Murrow interviewed Oppenheimer on his national television show See It Now. Robert had not wanted to do the show; at the last minute, he tried to back out. Murrow’s own network had serious misgivings, but the famous broadcaster nevertheless prevailed on Oppenheimer to sit for a taping in his Institute office.
Murrow edited his two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Oppenheimer down to a twenty-five-minute segment that aired on January 4, 1955. Oppenheimer used the occasion to talk about the debilitating effects of secrecy. “The trouble with secrecy,” he said, “is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and resources of the whole community. . . .” Murrow never directly brought up the security hearing—no doubt, because Robert had insisted that it not be raised. Instead, he gently asked Oppenheimer if scientists had become alienated from the government. “They like to be called in and asked for their counsel,” Oppenheimer replied obliquely. “Everybody likes to be treated as though he knew something. I suppose that when the government behaves badly in the field you’re working close to, and when decisions that look cowardly or vindictive, or short-sighted, or mean are made . . . then you get discouraged and you may—may—you may recite George Herbert’s poem I Will Abroad. But that’s human rather than scientific.” Asked whether humanity now had the capability to destroy itself, Oppenheimer replied, “Not quite. Not quite. You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what’s left will be human.”
Just a few weeks after his appearance on See It Now, Oppenheimer’s name again surfaced in the national press, this time in a controversy over academic freedom. In 1953, the University of Washington had offered Oppenheimer a short-term visiting professorship. Because of the security hearing, Oppenheimer had postponed the appointment. But in late 1954, the physics department renewed the invitation—only to have it canceled by the university’s president, Henry Schmitz. When the Seattle Times got wind of Schmitz’ decision, the news stirred a national debate on academic freedom. Some scientists announced that they were going to boycott the University of Washington. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorialized in support of President Schmitz: “The notion that ‘academic freedom’ is involved . . . is emotional and juvenile balderdash.” Those supporting Oppenheimer’s presence on campus, the newspaper insisted, were “apologists for totalitarianism.”
Oppenheimer tried to stay above the fray. When asked by a reporter if the cancellation of his visit was an impingement of academic freedom, he said, “That’s not my problem.” But when the reporter followed up by asking whether the scientists’ boycott would bring some embarrassment to the university, he replied sharply, “It seems to me that the university has already embarrassed itself.”
Such incidents reinforced Oppenheimer’s new image. His public transformation from Washington insider to exiled intellectual was complete. And yet, this did not mean that the private Oppenheimer thought of himself as a dissident. Nor was he inclined to play the role of an activist public intellectual. Gone were the days when he might organize a fund-raiser for some good cause—or even sign a petition. Indeed, some of his friends thought him oddly passive now, even deferential, in the face of authority. His friend and admirer David Lilienthal was struck by a conversation he had with Oppenheimer in March 1955, less than a year after the security hearing. The occasion was a board meeting of the Twentieth Century Fund, a liberal foundation whose trustees included Lilienthal, Oppenheimer and Adolph Berle, as well as Jim Rowe and Ben Cohen—both former assistants to Franklin Roosevelt—and Francis Biddle, FDR’s former attorney general. After their foundation business was concluded, Berle turned the conversation to a discussion of the current crisis between Communist China and Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan over the Formosa Straits. Berle thought war was imminent, and that it might well begin with “little A-bombs, and where does it go from there?” He added that he knew that some generals believed “we should destroy the Chinese with atomic weapons now, before they get any stronger. . . .” This touched off a vigorous discussion about what should be done, and in due course a consensus emerged that they should all sign a public statement warning the country against any precipitate military action.
But then, to Lilienthal’s surprise, Oppenheimer spoke up and “explained that he didn’t think he should sign the statement, though agreeing with it, because of the to-do this would cause.” He went on to throw cold water over the whole notion of protesting the Eisenhower Administration’s drift toward war. After all, he said, a war over Formosa (Taiwan) was not necessarily worse than a peace under any circumstances, and if it came to war, the limited use of tactical A-bombs might not lead inexorably to the wholesale bombings of cities. He even argued that any statement—which he agreed with but would not sign—should not imply that “thoughtful and careful and intelligent attention to the relevant issues was not already being given, in Washington.” Robert had always been persuasive with any audience—and by the end of the meeting, they all agreed that perhaps a public statement was not in order. Lilienthal came away wondering “whether those of us— such as myself—who have been under terrific attack don’t go out of our way to be conservative in discussing the position of our country and our Government, lest we be thought less than pro-American.”
It seems obvious that Robert was determined to prove that he was a reliable patriot, that his critics had been wrong to question his devotion to the country. He was steering clear of all public policy confrontations, especially those that had any relationship to nuclear weapons. He disapproved of self-appointed pundits—like the young Henry Kissinger, who had turned himself into a nuclear strategist. “A lot of nonsense,” he privately told Lilienthal, waving his unlit pipe around in the air. “To think that these are troubles that can be solved by the theory of games or behavioral research!” But he would not publicly condemn Kissinger or any other nuclear strategist.
That same spring, Oppenheimer turned down an invitation from Bertrand Russell to attend the inaugural session of the Pugwash Conference, a gathering of international scientists organized by the industrialist Cyrus Eaton, Russell, Leo Szilar
d and Joseph Rotblat, the Polish-born physicist who had left Los Alamos in the autumn of 1944. Oppenheimer wrote Russell that he was “somewhat troubled when I look at the proposed agenda. . . . Above all, I think that the terms of reference ‘the hazards arising from the continuous development of nuclear weapons’ prejudges where the greatest hazards lie. . . .” Nonplussed, Russell replied, “I can’t think that you would deny that there are hazards associated with the continued development of nuclear weapons.”
Citing this and other exchanges, the science sociologist Charles Robert Thorpe has argued that while Oppenheimer may have been “excommunicated from the inner circle of the nuclear state,” he nevertheless “remained in spirit a supporter of the fundamental direction of its policies.” In Thorpe’s eyes, Oppenheimer was slipping back into his “earlier role as scientific-military strategist of the winnable nuclear war and apologist for the powers-that-be.” It seemed that way to some. Oppenheimer was certainly not willing to throw in his lot with political activists like Lord Russell, Rotblat, Szilard, Einstein and others who frequently signed petitions protesting the American-led arms race. Indeed, his name was conspicuously absent from one such open letter, dated July 9, 1955, and signed by not only Russell, Rotblat and Einstein, but also such former teachers and friends as Max Born, Linus Pauling and Percy Bridgman.
But Oppenheimer was still capable of being a critic; he just wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists. He was consumed with the deep ethical and philosophical dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons, but at times it seemed that, as Thorpe puts it, “Oppenheimer offered to weep for the world, but not help to change it.”
