109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  On a chair facing the six inquisitors ensconced on their dais sat Robert, sprayed by strong lights, a lone figure. I slipped into a seat midway in the hall and purely by chance found myself beside Anne Wilson Marks. I whispered to her, “How can he see his notes with lights in his eyes?” Anne’s answer was, “He has no notes.” I was shocked.

  Dorothy could not stand to watch the witch hunt for long. She left at the lunch break, slipping out as unobtrusively as she had entered. She did not wait to speak to Robert, but dashed off a line telling him she had been there. “Robert,” she added grimly, “that was an experience I won’t forget.”

  Two days later, it was Franks turn, and he did not fare as well. The committee had been sitting on his damning dossier for some time, and since they could not get Oppenheimer, they went after his younger brother instead. Frank was forced to publicly admit that he had lied about his prewar party membership: “My wife and I,” he testified in the grim caucus room, “joined the Communist Party in 1937, seeking an answer to the problems of unemployment and want in the wealthiest and most productive country in the world. We did not find in the Communist Party the vehicle through which to accomplish the progressive changes we were interested in so we left it about three and a half years later and never rejoined.” The next day, the University of Minnesota announced it had accepted Frank’s resignation. Ruined, unable to continue his research in cosmic rays, and an implicit threat to his brother, he fled with his family to his ranch in a remote part of southwest Colorado. It would be ten years before he was able to return to his work as a scientist.

  While Oppenheimer had not been ensnared along with Frank, he could not avoid being dragged back before another tribunal a week later, on June 13. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, feeling empowered by the public hue and cry about security, decided to take a page out of HUAC’s hearings and embarked on his own campaign to discredit the fledgling AEC. He was put up to this by Lewis Strauss, a self-made financier and conservative AEC commissioner, who had been growing increasingly vexed with Oppenheimer. Strauss was a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and, despite being acquainted with the contents of his FBI file, had offered Oppenheimer the plum job in 1947. But now he found himself at cross-purposes with his appointee on the subject of research isotopes. The AEC had been steadily sending these overseas, filling more than two thousand requests in the spirit of Oppenheimer’s international cooperation. Most of these were small samples of nonsecret radioisotopes to be used in pure physics research, but Strauss objected that foreign countries could conceivably apply them to atomic energy for industrial purposes or radioactive warfare and, worse yet, build reactors to build bombs. He had been roundly outvoted on the issue two years earlier, and he now saw a way of discrediting Oppenheimer’s committee and getting his way. Strauss had discovered that a millicurie of iron 59 had been sent to Norway’s Defense Research Establishment for physics experiments, and further, he had information that one of the Norwegians on the research team was a suspected Communist.

  Senator Hickenlooper, who was apparently under the misapprenhension that all this meant fissionable material was being shipped overseas, called Oppenheimer to the stand and tried to get him to admit to the Joint Committee that the shipment of the millicurie of iron was proof of gross mismanagement and a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. Oppenheimer almost laughed him out of the room. “No one can force me to say you cannot use those isotopes for atomic energy,” he began incredulously. “You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part, and in my knowledge no part at all.”

  Oppenheimer was putting on a good show, and there was a titter of amusement in the hearing room. But Strauss, who had come by expecting to gloat, was red-faced with anger, his jaw muscles working furiously. For all his accomplishments, Strauss had never finished high school. He still seethed with insecurity about his lack of formal education, and here was the great Robert Oppenheimer making a public fool of him. Oppenheimer kept up his clever performance, ridiculing several more of Hickenlooper’s blundering questions, leaving the gallery in stitches, and turning the hearings on their head. When it came to the last, routine query about endowing security personnel with more authority, Oppenheimer responded with one word, “Morbid,” as though the entire boorish line of questioning had rendered him almost speechless. Oppenheimer spotted Joseph Volpe, one of the AEC’s lawyers. “How did I do?” he asked. “Too well, Robert, too well,” Volpe told him.

  If Oppenheimer had wanted to eviscerate his inquisitors, he succeeded admirably, but his victory came at a price. The next day, HUAC, with its power to command headlines, exposed Frank. His face and name were splashed across the nations morning newspapers, accompanied by the sordid details of his life as a “closet Communist.” Over the next few weeks, HUAC also leaked bits of Oppenheimer’s secret testimony to the press, revealing that he had acknowledged that a number of prewar friends and associates were radicals or Communists. When the story broke in the Rochester, New York, Times-Union that Oppenheimer had given evidence against his talented former student Bernard Peters in the HUAC hearing, it turned people’s stomachs. It may have been that Oppenheimer felt put upon and harassed, but not only did he not lift a finger to help Peters, he appeared to have betrayed him in an effort to save himself. Many of the old Berkeley crowd, who remembered the old days, found his behavior especially galling. After Bethe and Weisskopf advised him of the intense negative reaction among his peers, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the paper praising Peters’ “high ethical standards” despite his left-wing activities. But the damage was done. Oppenheimer still did not seem to grasp that he was bound by the same laws as everyone else. As he had committed more than a few indiscretions of his own, some considered it only just that he suffer the same fate as those he had so easily condemned.

  Oppenheimer made himself even more of a target by his outspoken opposition to the hydrogen bomb. He had always been skeptical about the feasibility of the thermonuclear bomb, and believed the technical challenges and prohibitive costs involved in the bomb program made it inadvisable. Throughout the fall of 1949, after Russia exploded its first atomic bomb at the end of August and nervous government officials seized on Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence’s proposal to develop hydrogen weapons, Oppenheimer argued America should not deliberately step up the arms race. When Teller had first called him in a state of extreme excitement after news broke of the Soviet test, he had responded brusquely, “Keep your shirt on.” Oppenheimer did not agree that this was a reason to rush the hydrogen bomb into being and engage in the all-out production of dueling doomsday machines. On October 29,1949, he led the General Advisory Committee’s strong recommendation against the crash development of the Super, supported by all seven members present that morning, especially Conant, who memorably declared the thermonuclear weapon would be built “over my dead body.” Oppenheimer commended the group for firmly opposing the weapons development and boasted of their “surprising unanimity,” a claim his critics would later disparage.

  During the three months of fierce debate, Oppenheimer’s statements against the hydrogen bomb program once again brought him into direct conflict with Teller, whose hatred of his old Los Alamos boss had become almost pathological. Teller accused Conant of being “unduly influenced by Oppenheimer”—though in fact the opposite may have been true—and referred to the conspiracy of Los Alamos loyalists as “Oppie’s machine.” This time, however, Teller sensed he had an advantage. Playing on fears of an imminent Cold War showdown, he galvanized support for the Super and won powerful allies in ardent conservatives like Lewis Strauss and Senator Brian McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as well as a militarist wing of the air force, which desperately wanted to protect the millions of dollars promised for the Strategi
c Air Command. With his advisors deadlocked, President Truman stalled. Then word came of Fuchs’ confession, his funneling of atomic secrets to the Russians while he was at Los Alamos, and his presence at high-level meetings in which the fusion weapon had been discussed. There was now no longer any doubt about whether the Soviet Union was in a race for nuclear supremacy. On January 31, 1950, Truman decided that, given the Soviet threat, America had “no choice” and ordered the AEC to pursue “all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”

  In the wake of the president’s decision, Oppenheimer delivered a widely quoted speech before the Council on Foreign Relations warning of a tense, protracted Cold War ahead. “During this period the atomic clock ticks faster and faster,” he lectured. “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at risk of his own life.”

  In the speech, Oppenheimer went out of his way to attack the air force for being more interested in protecting its Strategic Air Command that in any attempt “to protect the country.” Angered by his continued resistance, Oppenheimer’s emboldened critics exacted revenge for his many scornful slights, and articles began to appear describing his persistent campaign to reverse U.S. military strategy, endowing his views with the patina of disloyalty. He was personally blamed for allowing the communists to get ahead. The climate in Washington was so poisonous that on February 14, Conant wrote Oppenheimer, “I hope you are standing up under the strain of these trying times as well as usual,” and enclosed a copy of a letter he had received from a reporter disclosing that a Republican senator was spreading the story that the GAC opposed the H-bomb on “moral grounds.”

  Oppenheimer received a letter of encouragement from Dorothy, who had read the text of his speech in the papers. She wanted him to know that it had the ring of conviction and had reassured her that “there is light ahead.”

  There stand you, the beautiful Robert, the open mind, and your thoughts and suggestions which would quiet the din and still all hatred. Stand Robert, with the clarity and courage the world aches for. You speak, with the power of poetry and music.

  Truman’s announcement to go forward with the hydrogen bomb marked a turning point in Robert Oppenheimer’s life. His stature and influence, after such an obvious rebuff, was sharply curtailed. Both he and Conant considered resigning from the GAC. According to Conant, one consideration that stopped them was not wanting “to do anything that would seem to indicate we were not good soldiers and did not want to carry out orders of the President.”

  It could not have been a complete coincidence that Paul and Sylvia Crouch, former officers of the American Communist Party, chose that moment to inform on Oppenheimer, acting as paid informants for the Justice Department. In May 1950, Sylvia Crouch told the California Committee on Un-American Activities that in the summer of 1941, Oppenheimer had hosted a “session of a top drawer Communist group known as a special section, a group so important that its make-up was kept secret from ordinary Communists.’ She claimed that it had taken place at his house in Berkeley and that she and her husband had been there. The story made headlines in newspapers across the country, and reporters began hounding Oppenheimer at his home in Princeton. Then the FBI paid him a call, returning a second time that same week. Oppenheimer denied the Crouches’ story, and told the FBI that if he ever attended such a gathering—and he did recollect going to one where William Schneiderman, a leading Communist functionary, was present—it would probably have been at the home of his friend Haakon Chevalier. He was quoted in the FBI report as saying he was “greatly concerned with the allegations against him due to their possible effect on his reputation.”

  At the urging of his lawyer, Joe Volpe, Oppenheimer began collecting evidence to disprove the charges, and in the spring of 1952 he wrote Dorothy and asked if she would meet with Volpe and help with the process. Not put off by the taint of scandal, she readily agreed. The difficulty they faced was in trying to reconstruct a series of events that had taken place over a decade earlier, with very little to go on but his own faulty memory. Fortunately, it was a hard summer to forget, a “bad-luck summer,” as Robert Serber later called it.

  Oppenheimer recalled that both he and his wife were unwell that spring of 1941. He was tired and overworked and their son, Peter, was born in May, and Kitty, who was a long time recovering her strength, was still feeling weak in July. It was thus extremely unlikely that they had thrown any large parties at their home. At some point, they went to their ranch in the Pecos to recuperate, and Oppenheimer was able to give Dorothy a number of leads to work with in establishing their movements. He recalled that Hans and Rose Bethe had visited, and they had stopped by to see his old friend Katherine Page at her guest ranch. Around that same time, he was mucking about in the corral when a horse kicked him in the knee, causing a painful enough injury that he was worried the knee might be broken and sought medical attention. Not long afterward Kitty, while driving her Cadillac convertible from Santa Fe to the ranch, had a car accident. She slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a truck that had stopped short in front of her on a sharp curve and collided with the truck, hurting her leg and causing considerable damage to the front of the car.

  Oppenheimer’s assistant, Priscilla Greene Duffield, also did what she could to pin down where he was from late July to early August 1941 and remembered Dorothy’s intrepid detective work on his behalf. “I was impressed by how close they were, and how much he relied on her,” said Greene. “When he got involved in all the security stuff, she started helping him. She went all around Santa Fe asking questions, and getting dates of prescriptions, and even tracked one down at the Capital Pharmacy to prove he had been in New Mexico at a certain point.”

  Dorothy’s weeks of legwork paid off. She was able to establish that the Oppenheimers, accompanied by Frank and Jackie, arrived at Katherine Page’s ranch on the evening of Friday, July 11, and departed the following Tuesday, when they went to Perro Caliente. The local grocery store still had records going back that far, and they showed the Oppenheimers had made purchases on five separate occasions between July 12 and 29. In addition to the pharmacy receipt, she also dug up a receipt for the X-rays that were taken of Oppenheimer’s bruised knee at St. Vincent Hospital on July 25. It turned out that both the Bethes clearly remembered the incident with Oppie’s knee, and Rose had even taken a photograph of the “kicking horse,” which she had marked and dated. It was submitted as evidence, along with another receipt Dorothy dug up from the garage in Pecos that repaired Kitty’s car. Kevin recalled the stacks of yellow notepads that his mother filled with dates, times, and places. “She really threw herself into the detective work,” he recalled. “She would have done anything for him.”

  Dorothy and Oppie were in contact more often during this period. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Kevin had enlisted in the army, and after he was stationed overseas in the winter of 1952, and Robert called often to see how she was doing. It had only been seven years since the “war to end all wars” had concluded, and Dorothy had never imagined she would live to see another one. Now she had sent her only son off to battle. His news from the front filled her with “pangs of dreadful horror,” she wrote Oppie, and she could already see how the experience had “aged and saddened and matured him.” Oppenheimer knew how frightened she was for Kevin, and how much she missed him, and did his best to reassure her. At the time, Kitty was not getting along with their own son, Peter, who was on the brink of adolescence, and because he thought it might do everyone some good, Oppie packed Peter off to Santa Fe to be with Dorothy. “I think she was very worried about me, and he was sort of a substitute for me while I was gone, which was fine,” said Kevin. “She took Peter under her wing a little bit and transferred a lot of mothering to him.”

  In March 1953, Oppen
heimer sent a heartfelt note to Dorothy thanking her for all her assistance and unfailing loyalty. The California committee had assembled quite a dossier on him, but no action had been taken. On a more personal note, he added that he had heard that Kevin had returned safely from Korea and wanted her to know that he was celebrating with her. He wrote he was “thinking, even though I find it hard to say, of all the nobility and simple courage which you have brought to the last years”:

  This is the hour to put on paper, however inadequately, a word of the profound gratitude that Kitty and I have for all that you did last summer on our behalf. You can well think that this has played a decisive part in the course of events: and I must comfort myself with the reflection that anything done so superbly and well must also have brought you a little pleasure….

  Our love, Dorothy, I hope we shall see one another very soon.

  But Oppenheimer’s troubles were far from over. By the end of 1953, McCarthy’s reign of terror had already helped defeat the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 election, and the newly elected Eisenhower did not have the stomach to take on the powerful demagogue. “I just will not—I refuse—to get down in the gutter with that guy,” he repeatedly told his aides. With American boys now fighting Communists in Korea, however, McCarthy’s reckless allegations that the country was at risk because of disloyal government officials had taken on new force. Anti-Communist hysteria was at its height. After a lurid trial, played out before a full gallery of reporters and propagandists, the prosecution, aided by Roy Cohn, soon to be McCarthy’s chief counsel, sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair on June 19, 1953. McCarthy, now in his second term, had become chairman of the Senate Committee on Government, and turned its Subcommittee on Investigations into an instrument of persecution, holding hearings, issuing subpoenas, and hunting down and destroying anyone accused of being a Red, a Communist, an enemy of the state, a fellow traveler, a traitor, or a spy. By the spring of 1954, he had succeeded in embroiling the Department of the Army in an embarrassing inquiry into who was responsible for “coddling Communists” in the rank and file. The case quickly blew up into a major clash between the senator and the administration, with the Republican Senate demanding an investigation of the feud between the army and McCarthy. The atmosphere was one of such unbelievable tension that only those who lived through it can attest to its madness.