by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In 1963 President Lyndon B. Johnson (below) awarded Oppenheimer (left, with Kitty and Peter) the $50,000 Fermi Prize. David Lilienthal thought the whole affair “a ceremony of expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer.”
Right, Edward Teller, who had testified against Oppenheimer in 1954, approached to offer his congratulations. Oppenheimer grinned and shook Teller’s hand, while Kitty stood stone-faced beside her husband.
In the summer of 1966 Oppenheimer greets two beachcombers outside his waterfront cottage on St. John. He was already dying of throat cancer.
A pensive Toni inside the cottage. “Everybody loved her,” June Barlas said, “but she didn’t know that.”
In happier days, Toni, Inga Hiilivirta, Kitty, and Doris Jadan drinking cocktails on St. John.
1 Kennan was deeply moved by Oppenheimer’s emphatic reaction. In 2003, at Kennan’s hundredth-birthday party, he retold this story—and this time there were tears in his eyes.
2 The Oppenheimers spent a small fortune on these works of art. In 1926, for instance, Julius paid $12,900 for Van Gogh’s First Steps (After Millet).
3 Decades later, Robert’s classmate Daisy Newman recalled: “When his idealism got him into difficulties, I felt this was the logical outcome of our superb training in ethics. A faithful pupil of Felix Adler and John Lovejoy Elliott would have been obliged to act in accordance with his conscience, however unwise his choice might be.” (Newman ltr. to Alice K. Smith, 2/17/77, Smith correspondence, Sherwin collection.)
4 And indeed, he did not forget. Decades later, Oppenheimer arranged an appointment for Fergusson at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
5 More than two decades later, another physicist, John Wheeler, tried to talk with Oppenheimer about his old work on spent neutron stars. But by then, he expressed no interest in what was rapidly becoming the hottest topic in physics.
6 Oppenheimer was quite obviously moved by this ancient existential epic. But when his old friend from Zurich days, Isidor Rabi, passed through Berkeley and learned that Oppie was studying Sanskrit, he wondered, “Why not the Talmud?”
7 Phil Morrison recalled helping Oppenheimer mail a pamphlet he had written analyzing the Soviet attack on Finland in the autumn of 1939. That pamphlet has not been found.
8 More than a year after the April 1940 pamphlet was published, he wrote his old friends Ed and Ruth Uehling: “My own views could, im Kleinem, hardly be gloomier, either for what will happen locally & nationally, or in the world. I think we’ll go to war—that the Roosevelt faction will win over the Lindbergh. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere near the Nazis. Later I think the Hearst-Lindbergh side will kick the administration ‘humanitarians’ out. I see no good for a long time; & the only cheerful thing in these parts is the strength & toughness & political growth of organized labor.”
9 When Serber later ran into difficulties in retaining his security clearance, he found it prudent to destroy this correspondence. how he had acquired this facility for handling people. Those who knew him well were really surprised.” Bethe agreed: “His grasp of problems was immediate—he could often understand an entire problem after he had heard a single sentence. Incidentally, one of the difficulties that he had in dealing with people was that he expected them to have the same faculty.”
10 The few documents available from Soviet archives suggest that NKVD officials knew that Oppenheimer was working on “Enormoz”—their code-name for the Manhattan Project. They thought of him as a possibly sympathetic fellow-traveler or even a secret member of the American Communist Party—and so they were particularly frustrated that he seemed to be so unapproachable.
The notion, however, that Oppenheimer could have been recruited as a spy is simply far-fetched. There is no credible evidence linking him to espionage. Two Soviet-era intelligence documents mention Oppenheimer’s name. An October 2, 1944, memorandum written in Moscow by NKVD deputy chief Vselovod Merkulov and addressed to his boss, Lavrenty Beria, seems to implicate Oppenheimer as a source of information about “the state of work on the problem of uranium and its development abroad.” Merkulov claims, “In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, professor Oppenheimer unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder informed us about the beginning of work. At the request of Comrade Kheifets . . . he provided cooperation in access to the research for several tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder.” [See Jerrold L. & Leona P. Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History, Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002.] But there is no evidence to support any of these claims and no evidence that Grigory Kheifets, the NKVD agent stationed in San Francisco, ever met Oppenheimer. On close examination, however, it quickly becomes clear that Merkulov was making this claim only to inflate the credentials of his San Francisco agent and save Kheifets’ life. In the summer of 1944 Kheifets had been suddenly “recalled for inactivity” back to Moscow. Facing allegations that he was a double agent, Kheifets understood that his life was in danger. By floating the claim that he had developed Oppenheimer as a source of information on the American bomb project, Kheifets saved his position and his life.
Furthermore, another Soviet-era document directly contradicts the October 1944 Merkulov memo. Notes taken in the Soviet archives by a former KGB agent, Alexander Vassiliev, report that in February 1944 Merkulov received a message describing Oppenheimer. “According to data we have, [Oppenheimer] has been cultivated by the ‘neighbors’ (GRU-SOVIET military intelligence) since June 1942. In case Oppenheimer is recruited by them, it is necessary to have him passed to us. If the recruitment is not realized, we must get from the ‘neighbors’ all the materials on [Oppenheimer] and begin his active cultivation through channels we have . . . brother, ‘Ray’ [Frank Oppenheimer], also a professor at the University of California and a member of the compatriot organization but politically closer to us than [Robert Oppenheimer].”
This document demonstrates that by early 1944 Robert Oppenheimer had not been recruited by the NKVD to serve as a source, an agent or a spy of any sort. And, of course, by 1944 Oppenheimer was living behind barbed wire in Los Alamos and it was well-nigh impossible for him to be recruited while Groves and the U.S. Army’s Counter-Intelligence had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
11 Little Boy, the world’s first combat atomic bomb, weighed 9,700 pounds when it was dropped on Hiroshima from a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay.
12 During the 1954 security hearing, these words were attributed to Oppenheimer.
13 Harvey probably had the date wrong.
14 Over the years, such thoughtful historians as Richard Rhodes, Gregg Herken and Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl have suggested that Frank Oppenheimer was somehow involved in the Eltenton scheme.
15 In 1995, Joseph Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear disarmament.
16 Laurence, the New York Times reporter, later said that he would never forget the “shattering impact” of Oppenheimer’s words. But curiously, he didn’t use the Gita quotes in his 1945 Times stories—or in his 1947 book, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb. A 1948 Time magazine article used the quote, and Laurence himself published it in his 1959 book Men and Atoms. But Laurence might have picked it up from Robert Jungk’s 1958 history Brighter Than a Thousand Suns.
17 Jackson in turn influenced the neoconservatives who in 2003 shaped the Bush doctrine on preventive war. Richard Perle, who served as Jackson’s top foreign policy adviser between 1969 and 1979, told Kaufman, “His [Jackson’s] enthusiasm for building missile defense, his skepticism about détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), all stemmed from his previous experiences and the lessons he drew from it: that had we listened to the scientists who had opposed the Hydrogen Bomb, Stalin would have emerged with a monopoly and we would have been in deep trouble.”
18 The prosecutor in the case, William Hitz, was equally outrageous. He told members of the grand ju
ry that had indicted Weinberg, “We got enough evidence to hang the son-of-a-bitch; but it’s illegal and we can’t present it.” In fact, the evidence of spying was ambiguous.
19 In the end, Oppenheimer’s judgment was fully vindicated: Browder had a distinguished career, and in 1999 President Bill Clinton honored him with a National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest award for science and engineering.
20 That same afternoon, Strauss called the FBI and repeated his December 1 request to Hoover to place telephone taps on Oppenheimer’s home and office in Princeton. The phone tap was installed in Olden Manor at 10:20 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1954.
21 When the FBI asked Frank Oppenheimer about this, he categorically denied that Chevalier had ever approached him, or that he had ever talked with his brother about a query from Eltenton.
22 Nor was Teller the only prosecution witness to be so prepped by Robb. One night Garrison’s assistant, Allan Ecker, was working late in the hearing room when he was distracted by loud voices across the hallway. “I could hear a tape being played,” Ecker said. And then he saw Robb and a number of people who were later to be witnesses leaving the room. “Mr. Robb had brought in people who were afterwards to be witnesses, and they had listened to a tape of an interrogation [Colonel Pash’s August 1943 interrogation of Oppenheimer].”
23 In 1957, Alsop was confronted by Soviet secret police with photographic evidence of a homosexual tryst. Strauss made sure that letters documenting the incident were preserved in CIA director Allen Dulles’ personal safe.
24 Nash was portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar, and later in a film by the same title.
25 Stern’s book remains the most complete account of the Oppenheimer security hearing. Other good treatments include John Major, The Oppenheimer Hearing (New York: Stein & Day, 1971); Barton J. Berstein, “The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered,” Stanford Law Review 42 (July 1990): 1383–1484; and Charles P. Curtis, The Oppenheimer Case: Trial of a Security System (New York: Chilton, 1964).
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
Kai Bird is the author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms. He coedited with Lawrence Lifschultz Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
Martin J. Sherwin is the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University and author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, as well as the American History Book Prize. He and his wife live in Boston and Washington, D.C.
ALSO BY KAI BIRD
The Chairman: John J. McCloy,
The Making of the American Establishment (1992)
The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy,
Brothers in Arms (1998)
Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History
and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998),
edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz
ALSO BY MARTIN J. SHERWIN
A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (1975, 1987, 2003)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this work previously appeared in a slightly different form in The Nation.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Bird, Kai.
American Prometheus: the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer /
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967. 2. Physicists—United States—Biography.
3. Atomic bomb—United States—History. 4. Science—Political aspects—United
States—History—20th century. 5. United States—History—20th century.
I. Sherwin, Martin J. II. Title.
QC16.O62B57 2005
530’.092—dc22 2004061535
Author photograph © Claudio Vazquez
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42473-0
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