109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  By then, Conant had long since concluded that Washington had become a “lunatic asylum.” When Eisenhower offered him the job of U.S. High Commissioner to West Germany in 1953, he leapt at the chance to get out of town. The bitter battle over the hydrogen bomb had divided the scientific community and made enemies of old friends, and a disgusted Conant, who had suffered the humiliation of having to withdraw his nomination as the next president of the National Academy of Sciences because of a well-orchestrated right-wing vendetta, washed his hands of the American scientific establishment for good. The prestigious post should have been the crowning achievement of Conant’s scientific career, but instead his enemies used it as an opportunity for vengeance and payback. As George Kistiakowsky later described the double-cross in a letter to Conant’s wife, Patty, a West Coast faction of Manhattan Project chemists had “ganged-up on him behind his back,” and he never saw the knife coming:

  Probably the most painful incident in Jim’s life as science leader occurred without warning to me and without my being able to take any steps to prevent it, an event which I see as a tragedy to American science as well as a disappointment I know to Jim. I refer to Jim’s withdrawal from nomination as the next president of the National Academy of Sciences when suddenly being confronted by a small but secretly well organized group of little men who resented Jim’s wartime leadership. The rest of us were unaware of what was being organized and thus were unable to demonstrate to Jim in good time the strong support which in fact would have been his.

  With Conant gone, Oppenheimer had lost his staunchest ally and was in trouble. It turned out the man who had led the revolt against Conant was Wendell M. Latimer, dean of chemistry at Berkeley, who not only loathed Oppenheimer, but had helped organize the Berkeley contingent—Alvarez, Lawrence, Teller—who had lobbied for the hydrogen bomb. It was a “dirty deal,” as Conant had put it, and there seemed to be nothing the ascending faction of scientists, who had favored the H-bomb, would not do to expel Oppenheimer and his “machine” from their positions of influence over U.S. atomic policy. In 1951, after the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb—a device based on a new design by Teller and Ulam—Oppenheimer finally gave up his opposition to further development. As even he admitted, their new approach was “technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.” Anyway, it had become a hopeless cause. Lawrence, still smarting from Oppenheimer’s decision after the war to choose Princeton over Berkeley, teamed up with Teller to start a second bomb laboratory, called Lawrence Livermore, to rival Los Alamos. Like rejected suitors, the two physicists were determined to prevail over the man who had spurned them and their weapons. In the meantime, with the revelations about Fuchs’ espionage spreading fear and innuendo throughout the entire nuclear establishment, and Oppenheimer’s reputation wounded by reports that it had happened on his watch, McCarthy’s bloodhounds were closing in.

  In December 1953, Oppenheimer, who had just returned home from Europe after delivering the BBC’s illustrious Reith Lectures, received a call from Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the AEC, requesting a meeting in his Washington office. When he arrived at Strauss’ office on the afternoon of Monday, December 21, he was surprised to find AEC general manager Kenneth D. Nichols, one of the generals who had presided over the Trinity test with Groves, waiting for him. After a halfhearted attempt at polite conversation, the two men coolly informed him that the AEC had drafted a letter of charges stating the reason why Oppenheimer’s security status was being questioned and that his clearance would be withdrawn in thirty days unless he requested a hearing.

  Nichols and Strauss went on to provide Oppenheimer with a detailed summary of some two dozen charges or items of “derogatory information,” among them an account of all his left-wing activities in the 1930s, a list of undesirable associates—including his former girlfriend, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law—and documentation of suspicious, contradictory, and misleading statements made by him to security in August 1943 regarding Communist Party members such as Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz and Haakon Chevalier, among others. Oppenheimer must have recognized that the final nail in his coffin was the last charge, which stated that in 1949 Oppenheimer had opposed the hydrogen bomb on “moral grounds,” and that even after the GAC’s vote against the crash program to develop the Super, he had continued to oppose it, was instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on it, and had thereby “definitely slowed down its development.” After Oppenheimer had reviewed Nichols’ notification letter, Strauss laid out his rights under the AEC security procedures, and they discussed the relative merits of his resigning rather than facing a full-scale hearing.

  Oppenheimer walked numbly out of Strauss’ office. He had phoned his former assistant, Anne Wilson Marks, who lived close by on Olive Street in Georgetown, and she came directly and drove him to her house. “I knew something was wrong as soon as I heard his voice,” she said. “He was very upset and shaken, but he wanted to fight it, too.” Her husband, Herb Marks, a trusted friend and lawyer, met them at the house. They had a stiff drink and spent the next few hours huddled in the study as they discussed his predicament, and how best to mount a defense. After dinner, Marks’ partner, Joe Volpe, joined them, as did Kitty, who had come from Princeton, and they talked into the night.

  To everyone’s surprise, Oppenheimer stood up abruptly at ten o’clock and announced he was going to bed. The next thing they heard was a resounding crash, and they rushed upstairs to find that he had passed out cold in the bathroom. “Apparently, Kitty was concerned that Robert get some rest and had given him some of her sleeping pills,” said Wilson. “Well, the combination of the booze and pills did it.” She called a doctor, who told her to make coffee. “He came over and started waking Robert up and kept him walking up and down for an hour. He was absolutely zonked.” The next morning when she went downstairs, the newspapers had already caught wind of the security clearance story and were demanding to talk to Oppenheimer. Anne Wilson stood out on the landing in the pouring rain telling them over and over again that she had no idea where he was.

  Oppenheimer spent the next day with his lawyers, debating whether he should try to clear his name or go quietly and lose his clearance, and with it his consultant’s contract and considerable reputation. Volpe thought Oppenheimer should resign and avoid an embarrassing trial. But both Oppie and Marks felt that he could not take a route that, in Robert’s words, would be conceding that he was “unworthy.” Moreover, McCarthy was now a major power on Capitol Hill. He and Roy Cohn were holding hearings on “Communist influence” in the federal government and had already targeted the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, and the Foreign Service. Because of the damage Fuchs’ spying had done at Los Alamos, it would be easy for McCarthy to attack Oppenheimer and cast him in a sinister light. Oppenheimer’s lawyers advised him that if he did not submit to the AEC hearings, it was more than likely he would be called up before McCarthy’s merciless Red-hunting subcommittee, which they all agreed was a far worse fate.

  Strauss had given him one day to decide. On the morning of December 23, Oppenheimer sent a letter to Strauss saying he wanted to appear before the AEC’s three-man Personnel Security Board. “I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested,” he wrote. “Under the circumstances this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government, that I have now served for some 12 years. This I cannot do.” On Christmas Eve, two representatives from the AEC dropped by Olden Manor to present a letter that amounted to a preemptory strike by the prosecution, directing Oppenheimer to deliver any and all AEC documents in his possession.

  Oppenheimer spent the holidays frantically conferring with lawyers and friends about how to deal with the security investigation. According to the hearing procedures, he had thirty days to decide on his course of action and frame a response. On March 4, 1954, he submitted a formal, forty-three-page reply to the charges. He concluded his deeply
personal letter by saying that in the process of preparing it, he had reviewed two decades of his life. “I have recalled instances where I acted unwisely,” he wrote. “What I have hoped was, not that I could wholly avoid error, but that I might learn from it. What I have learned has, I think, made me more fit to serve my country.”

  In the midst of all the preparations, Senator McCarthy suddenly caught wind of what was going on and weighed in on the closed-door proceedings in a television interview broadcast on April 7, setting the stage for what was to come. “If there were no Communists in our government why did we delay for eighteen months—delay our research on the hydrogen bomb?” McCarthy demanded. “Our nation may well die because of that eighteen months’ deliberate delay. And I ask who caused it? Was it loyal Americans—or traitors in our government?”

  The Personnel Security Board, chaired by Gordon Gray, former secretary of the army, commenced its closed-door sessions on April 12,1954, ten days before Oppenheimer’s fiftieth birthday. The hearing concluded on May 6, after three weeks of grueling testimony, and thirty-nine witnesses had been called, both for and against Oppenheimer. Diana Trilling, who wrote about the hearing in Partisan Review, described the kaleidoscope of characters from Oppenheimer’s past who paraded into room 2022 of AEC Building T-3 to determine his fate:

  The conflict between the H-bomb proponents and the H-bomb opponents is undoubtedly the climax of dissension but we cannot fail to be aware of the multitude of alignments and groupings, commitments and cross-purposes, all of which are unmistakably bound up with Dr. Oppenheimer’s predicament. The scientific “in” versus the scientific “outs,” the friends of Dr. Oppenheimer versus the friends of Dr. Teller, the military versus the academics, the Air Force versus the Army versus the Navy, the Strategic Air Command versus the Air Defense Command, Los Alamos versus Livermore, MIT versus the University of Chicago, Dr. Oppenheimer the individual versus individuals of a dramatically different disposition of mind….

  The only person to be heard from who was devoid of professional interest in or conflict with Oppenheimer’s career was his wife, who was not asked to testify to his character but to her Communist past. Oppenheimer’s oldest friend and associate, Ernest Lawrence, too afraid of the controversial proceedings, and perhaps of what he might say, begged off, citing ill health. Conant, however, was determined to testify on his colleague’s behalf, despite a chilling warning from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that “factors unknown to [him]” made his public involvement “undesirable.”

  Herb Marks had felt strongly that Oppenheimer needed a “big name” to defend him, and he hired Lloyd K. Garrison, an eminent New York lawyer and the great-grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. But while Garrison was a good and principled white-shoe attorney, he was not a veteran of these stealthy security proceedings, as Marks was, and he failed to protect his client from the cutthroat maneuvering of the AEC attorney, Roger Robb.

  Oppenheimer testified first and made a muddle of it. To settle the question of whether the former director of Los Alamos was a threat to the security of the United States, Robb zeroed in on Oppenheimer’s veracity and conduct. The prime piece of evidence being used against him was the Chevalier incident, in which Oppie himself had admitted to Berkeley security officers that he had been approached about a way to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets, that Chevalier had suggested a mutual acquaintance by the name of George Eltenton, that he then failed to report the incident immediately, and that when he did report it, he refused to identify his source, covering for his close friend Chevalier. Worse yet, Oppenheimer had lied about several of the details to the intelligence officer, Colonel Pash. Confronted by the bullying prosecutor and the convoluted record of his tape-recorded interviews with Lansdale and Pash, Oppenheimer stepped into trap after trap, and seemed to come unraveled on the stand. After Robb got him to admit that what Eltenton was doing amounted to treason and that he had “invented a cock-and-bull story,” he asked Oppenheimer why he had lied. Oppenehimer answered, “Because I was an idiot.”

  At the conclusion of the first week of the hearing, which resembled a trial without the same promise of objectivity or fairness, Herb Marks was crushed. He had tried to warn Garrison that Robb would use the Chevalier incident to make Oppenheimer look bad and, in the insidious way these hearings were always conducted, win by planting the suggestion of, rather than proving, his disloyalty. Marks watched as Robb made a fool of Oppenheimer, pulling out every trick in the book to trip him up. He furiously scribbled notes warning Garrison to head off a dangerous line of questioning, which Garrison pocketed without reading. “Herb was just sick,” said Anne Wilson. “He felt he could have saved Robert. He never got over it.”

  The reaction on Capitol Hill that weekend was guarded, as both the nation’s politicians and press waited for the shroud of secrecy surrounding the extraordinary hearings to lift. It was still inconceivable to many that the man on “trial” was the same scientist to whom the country had turned a decade earlier to undertake what the New York Times called “the most awesome mission ever assigned to a private citizen—the mission to open the door to the atomic age.” Most editorial writers adopted a wait-and-see attitude and indicated a hope that the Gray board would find a way to reaffirm Oppenheimer’s fitness for public service. But with congressional elections already under way, the administration’s attitude did not seem to be one of forbearance. One of the few administration officials to comment publicly was Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, who defended the removal of Oppenheimer at a press conference and commented, “I have great sympathy for people who have made a mistake and have reformed, but we don’t think we ought to reform them in the military establishment.’ McCarthy could not resist gloating: “It was long overdue,” he told reporters. “I think it took considerable courage to suspend the so-called untouchable scientist—Oppenheimer. I give Strauss credit for that.”

  The first of the bomb scientists called to testify was Hans Bethe, who spoke glowingly of Oppenheimer’s achievement in creating Los Alamos, concluding that he thought “nobody else could have done this than Dr. Oppenheimer.” Under cross-examination, Robb ruthlessly moved to undercut Bethe’s credibility, asking: ‘Which division was Klaus Fuchs in?”

  Bethe answered, “He was in my division which was the Theoretical Division.”

  Robb, finished with the witness, said, “Thank you. That is all.”

  Few of the prominent scientists called testified more firmly on Oppenheimer’s behalf than Conant, who argued that as they had worked closely together on most of the GAC’s policies, and held the same beliefs, it was something of a paradox that Oppenheimer alone stood accused of disloyalty. Conant opened his testimony in “an aggressive mood,” and his anger at the tenor of the hearings, and the tactics of the AEC attorney, was evident. When asked by Lloyd Garrison what he thought of the commission’s letter containing the derogatory charges that initiated the hearings, the usually restrained Conant did not hold back: “Well, it seems to me that letter must have been carelessly drafted, if I may say so.” He noted that the letter subscribed to:

  an impossible position to hold in this country; namely, that a person who expressed views about an important matter before him, as a member of the General Advisory Committee, could then be ineligible because of a security risk for subsequent work in connection with the government. I am sure that argument would not have been intended. If it did, it would apply to me because I opposed it strongly, as strongly as anybody on that committee, that is, the development of the hydrogen bomb.

  Robb, trying to weaken Conant’s testimony, eventually got him to concede that as he had not heard all of Oppenheimer’s testimony, “the board may be in a better position to judge.” It may simply have been a figure of speech, but in agreeing with the prosecutor, Conant was, in effect, acknowledging that there might be things about Oppenheimer that he did not know and that only the board held all the cards.

  Rabi proved a more wily witness, and try as h
e might, Robb could not get the same admission from him. Stating that the board “may be in possession of information which is not now available to you,” Robb suggested Oppenheimer might have lied to intelligence officers, and therefore Rabi could not pass judgment on his character. Rabi held firm, underscoring the difficulty of judging a man’s behavior back in 1943 and reaffirming the great store he set by Oppenheimer: “I am in possession of a long experience with this man, going back to 1929, which is 25 years, and there is a kind of seat of the pants feeling in which I myself lay great weight. In other words, I might even venture to differ from the judgment of the board without impugning their integrity at all….”

  When Robb tried to shake Rabi’s confidence, telling him to confine his answer to the one incident in question, in which the board had damaging testimony from “Oppenheimer’s own lips,” Rabi was unmoved. “You have to take the whole story,” he said finally. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.”