109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Under Herb Marks’ redirect, Rabi’s voice grew querulous with fury as he argued that he thought Strauss’ suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance was wrong and should not have been done: “He is a consultant, and if you don’t want him to consult, you don’t consult him, period,” Rabi stated. “There is a real positive record. … We have the A bomb and a whole series of it … and what more do you want, mermaids? This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can’t help but be humiliating, I thought [sic] that was a pretty bad show.”

  When Oppenheimer was recalled to the stand near the end of the hearing, Robb walked him through his “tissue of lies” and again got him to admit he had “embroidered” his story of the Eltenton incident when he reported it to security. Oppenheimer made one last attempt to explain his conduct: “I think I need to say that it was essential that I tell this story, that I should have told it at once and I should have told it completely accurately, but that it was matter of conflict for me.” By the end, collapsing in weariness, he said, “I wish I could explain to you better why I falsified and fabricated.”

  The hearing reached its dramatic culmination when Teller lumbered into the gloomy room. Long and dark, it was set up with the tables in a U-shaped configuration, with the witness chair at the open end. In the back, just behind the witness chair, was a sofa where Oppenheimer sat, isolated and alone. Speaking slowly, with his heavy Hungarian accent, Teller first affirmed Oppenheimer’s loyalty and then, in a series of remarks that were no doubt carefully choreographed in advance, vilified him with vague innuendo:

  In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer has acted—in a way that is for me extremely hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

  As Oppenheimer’s friends awaited the AEC’s determination, anger over Robb’s prosecutorial style, Tellers betrayal, and McCarthy’s witch hunts, of which this was certainly a sordid last act, dominated their conversations. The senator from Wisconsin was even then getting his comeuppance at the hands of Joseph Welch in the ongoing Army-McCarthy hearing, and had been subjected to a verbal hiding by Edward R. Murrow on CBS’s See It Now, but this was all coming too late to help Oppenheimer. He had been cornered and had had no choice but to fight and to hope that his many powerful friends and his service to his country would count to his credit. The Gray board had clearly been stacked against Oppenheimer, but in the end, he was his own worst enemy. As Time magazine concluded, “In the list of witnesses against J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most effective was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.”

  Few had thought he would win, including Oppenheimer himself, but the announcement was no less of a shock for being expected. On May 28, 1954, the Gray board voted two to one to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. As soon as it was released, the Gray boards decision was dissected, analyzed, and discussed by scientists everywhere. The three-man panel agreed that out of the twenty-three charges concerning Oppenheimer’s Communist ties, twenty-two were true. Only two judges believed he shared any guilt in the Chevalier case. The panel also found he had been insufficiently enthusiastic about the hydrogen bomb and that, whatever his motivation, “the security interests of the United States were affected.” Two of the judges, Gordon Gray and Thomas Morgan, in a lengthy decision that ran 25,000 words, voted to deny Oppenheimer clearance. Ward Evans, the only scientist on the panel, voted to reinstate him, stating his minority opinion in eight succinct paragraphs. Writing of the shift that Oppenheimer’s attitude toward the hydrogen bomb underwent from 1944 to 1945, when he changed his position from one of favor to one of opposition, Evans wrote: “After 1945 he did not favor it for some years perhaps on moral, political or technical grounds. Only time will prove whether he was wrong on the moral and political grounds.”

  On June 29, the AEC commissioners, by a vote of four to one, confirmed the panel’s conclusion that Oppenheimer was a security risk. The only bone they threw Oppenheimer was that although they agreed that he was, as Strauss had phrased it, unfit to serve his country, they found no evidence that he was “disloyal to the United States.” Once again, the only scientist on the AEC, Henry DeWolf Smyth, dissented, arguing that there was “no indication in the entire record that Dr. Oppenheimer has ever divulged any secret information.”

  At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer’s faithful were devastated. “Our reaction was real fury,” recalled Rose Bethe, “at the waste of people, the terrible waste. Oppie had had a hand in his own undoing. He had been very arbitrary in his treatment of people. But we didn’t know at the time that it was mostly Strauss’ doing.” The trial, in their view, had been a dirty business. There had been a series of revelations in the press about the inequities of the process, from delays in providing his lawyers with documents to General Nicholas’ secret excoriating letter to the AEC prior to their verdict. “Even before the full story was known, the attempt to discredit Oppenheimer was vigorously denounced, not only by his admirers, but by people who had never liked him,” wrote Alice Smith. “He was seen by some observers as a martyr to McCarthyism, by others as a partner to a kind of Faustian bargain.”

  Dorothy did not attend the hearing, but Rabi had related the proceedings in great detail, and he told her that Teller had given a brilliant performance—he had given them everything they needed to hang Oppie. Afterward, when Teller ran into Oppie outside the AEC building, Teller had told him, “Good luck!” Oppenheimer told Rabi that he just looked at Teller and said, “I don’t know what you mean after what you have said.” To Dorothy, Teller’s conduct, as relayed by Rabi, was almost indecent. In July, she wrote Oppenheimer a long, impassioned letter, making it clear that her commitment to him, and acceptance of him, was unaltered: “Have not read all the ‘testimony’ which Rabi gave me because it makes me so sad,” she began, adding in a chastising tone that if he had told her about the hearing in advance, she “would have come on to testify” if he had let her:

  If you had had half a dozen women testify on your behalf I think the result would have been different! We would have injected a touch of humanity into the hearings. Have spoken of gratitude. Has this nation no gratitude for the man who saved it? Could they judge you by performance? What’s wrong with judging you by performance? The miracle of personal achievement which you accomplished has never been equaled in the history of the world.

  Oh Robert, Robert, we who know you grieve. The world is sick. And you are well and strong. And some day not too distant you will lead us again.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Fallout

  AFTER THE HEARINGS, Oppenheimer went back to the Institute for Advanced Study, but he was not the same man. He had built his entire postwar career around his powerful advisory positions in Washington, and now had he been cast out like a thief in the night. “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States Government,” Einstein observed of his Princeton colleague, with whom he was never particularly close.

  Oppenheimer had been humbled, but not destroyed. He was widely regarded as a martyr, and as usual he played his new part well, with an air of saintly resignation and a touch of wry humor. He continued to write and teach in the years that followed, and remained a dignified, if poignant, figure. But to old friends he seemed smaller somehow, shrunken, and profoundly sad. The hearings “hurt his spirit,” said Dorothy. “It absolutely hurt him. He was wounded.” She knew there had been mistakes on his part, but nothing that warranted his being found unworthy. Looking back on what happened, it was hard for her to escape the conclusion that Oppenheimer, a man who spoke “with the power of poetry and music,” was never meant f
or the cold halls of government. He was a scientist and an intellectual, not a statesman. Only in Washington could a man of his mind and spirit, imagination and feeling, fail to be understood and appreciated. “When he wrote that he had been ‘naïve in politics,’ well, he was naïve in politics,” she said. “He wasn’t a sharp politician, or his career would have been quite different.”

  Rabi, like many of the scientists who had rallied to Oppenheimer’s side, felt “a bit angry” that he had “let it happen,” that he had allowed himself be taken for such a ride by the prosecution. Despite his quickness of mind, amazing ability to synthesize ideas, and enormous gifts and capacities of every kind, Oppenheimer appeared strangely defenseless on the stand. Rabi came to agree with Oppenheimer’s own analysis of the problem when he observed after the trial that he had “very little sense of self.” Oppenheimer was a man of many roles, and many faces, and there were too many facets to his complex personality for him to present a coherent picture of himself in the adversarial setting of the hearing room. “Oppenheimer was a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters,” said Rabi. For all his brilliance, he had a flaw, and once his opponents found it, they kept hammering away it. In the end, he shattered.

  In the spring of 1963, nine years after the Gray board debacle, President John F. Kennedy decided to try to undo the great wrong that had been done to one of the country’s foremost scientists. The Cold War hysteria was in decline, Kennedy’s close advisors—McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—admired Oppenheimer, and his lectures and writing had begun to attract considerable attention and praise again. Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the AEC, announced they would be awarding Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award for his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, to the development of the atomic bomb, and to the peaceful applications of atomic energy. In addition to the citation and medal, he would receive a check for $50,000.

  On November 22, it was announced that Kennedy wanted to present the award personally in a ceremony scheduled for December 2, the anniversary of Fermi’s first self-sustaining chain reaction. When Oppenheimer called Dorothy to tell her the news, and asked her to be with him at the White House event in his honor, she was overjoyed. Like most of the old mesa scientists, she felt an honor such as this was long overdue. The evil wind that had blown in with the 1950s had finally begun to shift, and she thought she could foresee a time in the near future when the commission’s 1954 verdict would be overturned and Oppenheimer’s good name would be restored. She immediately sent him a congratulatory telegram: WONDERFUL NEWS ABOUT FERMI AWARD HAPPINESS INEXPRESSIBLE.

  On the afternoon of November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and the country was plunged into mourning. All state occasions were canceled or indefinitely postponed. Given that the announcement of Oppenheimer’s award had met with strong opposition from the right wing, which still demonized him, there was some doubt as to whether it would take place at all. When President Lyndon Johnson decided at the last minute to go ahead with the ceremony as planned, Dorothy was still too devastated by Kennedy’s death to face a trip to the capital. On the day of the ceremony, she sat down and wrote Oppenheimer that she knew she “should be there” and was “truly heartbroken.”

  On December 2, Oppenheimer, Kitty, and a throng of dignitaries and men of great accomplishment in science and government packed the Cabinet Room. Oppenheimer, slightly stooped but elegantly trim as always, his dark crew cut now a thin cap of silver, stepped forward to receive the plaque from Johnson. For several moments, he stood regarding it in silence before speaking. Addressing the crowd in his soft, intimate voice, he said, “In his later years, Jefferson often wrote of the ‘brotherly spirit of science which unites into a family all its votaries.’ … We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly spirit of science. This is in part because we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can … live without war as the great arbiter of history….” Then, turning to Johnson, he added with a hint of a smile, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today.”

  The only thing that marred the occasion was that as soon as people crowded around Oppenheimer to congratulate him, Teller darted forward and grabbed his hand. The moment was caught by all the photographers, and it was Teller’s round, grinning face beside Oppenheimer’s spectral one that made the front page of the papers, and was the first thing Dorothy saw when she got up the next morning. No one had invited Teller, nor had anyone wanted him there. Teller was present because he had won the award a year earlier and all the previous honorees had been invited. Dorothy, appalled that he had dared to show his face, told Kitty the man had no shame. “He couldn’t be out of the picture for anything,” she said with disgust. “I told Kitty, if I’d have been there I would have dropped a brick on his head.” Kitty, who had been beside herself at the thought of being in the same room with Teller, said she would like to have done just that. Like Dorothy, many of the scientists who attended the award ceremony that day never forgave Teller, and several, including Rabi, refused to shake his hand.

  In an interview in June 2003, shortly before his death at the age of ninety-four, Teller said that the hurt and anger of his rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb were still painfully fresh. After calling it “the worst experience of my life,” he became extremely agitated and broke down mid-sentence, saying roughly, “I can’t talk about, I can’t talk about.” In his memoir, published in 2001, he admitted to being stung by Oppenheimer’s “hostile” reaction to his 1949 phone call after hearing about the Soviet atomic bomb, adding that what little contact they had afterward was “superficial and reflected no encouragement of interest in his part.” Teller’s deep resentment of Oppenheimer, compounded by the accumulated slights and runs-ins, does more to explain his testimony than the reason he provides in his book, where he argues that his initial “shock” over the accusations that the Los Alamos director had been asked to pass information to the Soviets, had waited months to report this, and had then lied about it, left him “unsure” that he could “trust [his] convictions about Oppenheimer.” No one who knew Teller ever believed him to be the least bit “unsure” about his opinion of Oppenheimer, and as a consequence, a large part of the scientific community ostracized him.

  Teller never understood how he came to be as much of a casualty of the hearings as Oppenheimer himself, and never got over the cruel “exile” he was subjected to for years afterward. In late June 1954, about a week after the transcripts of the hearings were published by the Government Printing Office, Teller had gone to Los Alamos to attend a meeting. When he walked into Fuller Lodge, old friends turned their back on him or coldly attacked him for his testimony. Teller found it staggering that so many of his fellow physicists regarded him, and not Oppenheimer, as the true villain. His wife, Mici, was so upset by the rough treatment that she spent the rest of the day in their room and became ill. Dorothy reported on the visit to Oppenheimer with grim satisfaction. “Edward and his family arrived Sunday, and his reception has been and is being chill,” she wrote. “I do not want to see him, and if I have to, I am sure my wide mouth will open. I have taken his photograph down from these walls and placed it in the closet with dirty rags, and empty bottles, until I can return it to the Hill.” Teller did not set foot in Los Alamos again for nine years.

  Years later, when asked to compare Oppenheimer and Teller during an interview with an Albuquerque television station, Dorothy was unequivocal as usual. “Why, that’s a charming question,” she said, her eyes taking on a mischievous gleam. “You can’t compare their character any more than you can compare an orchid to a dandelion…. An orchid is more finely designed, and built, and delicate, and subtle, and aromatic. And a dandelion is something you kick up with the heel of your shoe if it’s going to take over your grass.”

  In May 1963, Oppenheimer returned to the Hill for the last time to give a memorial address
for Niels Bohr. The ordeal of the past decade had aged him well beyond his years. He was frail and worn out. The violent, rasping cough that had persisted on and off since his bout with tuberculosis had worsened, and his doctors advised against making the long trip to New Mexico. Oppenheimer went anyway, explaining that it was something he had to do. He stayed with Dorothy, and as they drove up the broad, flat state highway to Los Alamos, they laughed about the days when the road had been formidable, and Miss Warner’s their cherished sanctuary. The little teahouse was long gone, and Dorothy had written to tell him of Edith’s death in the spring of 1951. Miss Warner had been forced to relocate when the new bridge was completed a year after the war ended, and many of the old laboratory staff had gone down to Otowi to help make the adobe bricks for her new house. Afterward, Tilano had complained that he had been forced to redo most of them because “physicists did not know how to make mud bricks.”

  Dorothy, distressed by Oppie’s fragile state, tried to keep him amused with such tales as they approached the mesa, which was now home to the country’s leading nuclear research laboratory and a sprawling suburban community with a population of 15,000, more than a third of them children. The old East Gate was now a relic, the Guard Tower preserved as a reminder of dangerous times, and the new front entrance resembled nothing more than a turnpike toll barrier, as passes had not been required since the AEC opened the site to the public in 1957. Standing apart from the modern stores, restaurants, and office buildings, Fuller Lodge remained as one of the few symbols of preatomic times, before Oppenheimer and his physicists brought momentous changes to the mountain. That night, addressing the huge crowd that jammed the Civic Auditorium, Norris Bradbury introduced Oppenheimer as “Mr. Los Alamos.” He went on to credit him with building the bomb laboratory through “sheer force of personality and character” until he realized his words were being drowned out by the growing swell of applause. It grew louder and louder, spreading across the hall in waves, until a moment later the crowd were on their feet giving a standing ovation to their battered hero.