Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Lawrence hoped Oppenheimer would quietly accept revocation of his clearance, but when Oppenheimer protested and requested a hearing, Strauss insisted that Lawrence testify against his former friend. Lawrence was terrified. A few days before his scheduled testimony in late April, he attended a meeting of national laboratory directors at Oak Ridge. The prime topic of conversation, aside from scientific matters, was the Oppenheimer hearing. Oppenheimer was a close friend of many of those present, and feelings ran high. Angrily confronted at the meeting by Rabi, Lawrence insisted that he was playing no part in any personal vendetta, that he was only concerned about the country’s welfare. Yet he was worried that his pending testimony would be leaked to the press and would therefore harm himself as well as Oppenheimer. The stress that Lawrence felt was so great that he suffered an acute attack of ulcerative colitis. He canceled his scheduled appearance before the Gray Board and returned home to Berkeley.

  Strauss thought Lawrence was using an illness to avoid an unpleasant duty. He pressed Lawrence for a written statement. Lawrence ultimately did as he was told, delivering a short but damning statement to the Gray Board just two days before the hearings ended. In his statement, Lawrence cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty by recalling an incident that had occurred in the fall of 1949:

  I remember driving up to San Francisco from Palo Alto with Luis W. Alvarez and Dr. Vannevar Bush when we discussed Oppenheimer’s activities in the nuclear weapons program. At that time we could not understand or make any sense out of the arguments Oppenheimer was using in opposition to the thermonuclear program and indeed we felt he was much too lukewarm in pushing the overall AEC program. I recall Dr. Bush being concerned about the matter and in the course of the conversation he mentioned that [air force chief of staff] General Hoyt Vandenberg had insisted that Dr. Bush serve as Chairman of a committee to evaluate the evidence for the first Russian atomic explosion, as General Vandenberg did not trust Dr. Oppenheimer. I believe it was on the basis of the findings of this committee that the President made the announcement that the Soviets had set off their first atomic bomb.

  Ernest O. Lawrence 71

  The hearing finally came to an end on May 6, 1954. The board members went home for ten days to consider and to judge. The first thing Gray did was to dictate a memorandum for the record, in which he protested that the proceedings had been as fair as circumstances permitted. When the board reconvened, it voted two to one (Ward Evans dissenting) that Robert Oppenheimer was a security risk and that his clearance should not be renewed.

  Garrison broke the news of the board’s decision to Oppenheimer on May twenty-eighth. Oppenheimer had expected it all along. Even before the hearing began, he had confided to Bethe: “It is impossible for the AEC to find me innocent. After what has happened, they just have to convict me. But nevertheless I have to go through with it.” 72 “Once a thing like that has been started,” he added after it was over, “they couldn’t not go through with it to the end; and they couldn’t let me win.” 73 Although numbed by his recent ordeal and frazzled by the wait for a verdict, Oppenheimer followed Garrison’s advice and agreed to appeal the verdict to the AEC commissioners. But when Garrison asked to argue the case before the AEC, the commission’s general manager, a Strauss appointee, rejected his request. Oppenheimer was dazed by now. He faced persistent requests for comment by newsmen after the board’s verdict broke on June second, which he refused. Yet he did take a call from a reporter in Australia, who quoted him as saying: “Maybe this is the end of the road for me. I have no sympathy for Communism, but I have moral principles from which I will never depart.” 74 Underneath his stoic facade, however, Oppenheimer was steaming. To family and friends he privately described the hearing and the verdict—the “whole thing”—as an “outrage.” “This is an abuse of the power of the state,” he said, “and is a problem [for] everybody, not just [me].” 75

  A majority of AEC commissioners, led by Lewis Strauss, affirmed the Gray Board’s verdict on June twenty-ninth by a four-to-one vote, physicist Henry Smyth being the lone dissenter. Strauss himself undertook the composition of the AEC majority opinion. It found that “Dr. Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the Government and of this Commission because of the proof of fundamental defects in his ‘character’” and emphasized his questionable “associations.” 76

  Strauss released the commissioners’ verdict to reporters, but not to Oppenheimer himself; he learned of the verdict from a journalist who had gotten advance word of it. There was no shock this time; he was reconciled to the inevitable. Three days after the AEC’s verdict was made public, Oppenheimer granted an interview to the Associated Press. He chain-smoked and fidgeted but volunteered little. Did Oppenheimer think he had received a fair hearing? The scientist would only say he hoped “people will study the record of the case and reach their own conclusions.” “I think there is something to be learned from it.” 77

  Since Oppenheimer’s AEC consulting contract was due to expire on June thirtieth, Strauss had vindictively rushed the decision through to get the humiliating denial of clearance on the record. Strauss also released the unflattering transcript of the board hearing to the public, despite Gray’s promise to each witness that the AEC would “not take the initiative” in publishing it. Later that summer, in a final, stunning act of personal vindictiveness, Strauss called a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and vainly tried to force Oppenheimer’s resignation as director. Not satisfied with destroying Oppenheimer’s reputation, Strauss also tried to destroy his livelihood.

  The verdict against Oppenheimer dismayed, angered, and disgusted American physicists. They reacted to the verdict personally—it struck uncomfortably close to home. Szilard considered it a chilling comment on the times. “Unfortunately for all of us, [the Gray Board members] are as good men as they come,” noted Szilard with characteristic dryness, “and if they are affected by the general insanity which is more and more creeping up on us, who can be counted on to be immune?” 78 Szilard disagreed with Teller’s testimony, but he gave Teller the benefit of the doubt: Teller had said what he believed was true. The friendship between the two Hungarians endured.

  The McCarthyite paranoia that Bethe saw in the verdict angered and frightened him. “I was afraid that they might go after all of us” was the way he put it. 79 Bethe’s friendship with Teller went back almost as many years as Szilard’s, but he could not bring himself to forgive Teller. “I did not see Teller for a long time after this, and our relationship was strained from then on,” Bethe said later. “We still encountered each other from time to time, and we were not unfriendly outwardly, but we never discussed this event. There was no question where I stood, however.” 80 Bethe hoped, as he wrote in a letter to Teller in November 1954, “that some day we shall again be in a state where we can again talk about the things we used to talk about—meaning the things we talked about before 1942.” 81

  Lawrence thought Teller had been rightly disturbed by Oppenheimer’s falsehoods about the Chevalier incident. “I can stand a lot,” Lawrence told a colleague that spring, “but when a man lies to security agents, that’s it.” Although Lawrence had helped to bring Oppenheimer down, he took no pleasure in the outcome. He turned down an invitation to attend a dinner in honor of Strauss shortly after the hearing ended, and his ulcerative colitis worsened. Still, there was a bitterness in Lawrence about Oppenheimer that associates could not miss. “I got Oppenheimer that job in the first place,” Lawrence complained with some emotion the summer after the hearing. “Of course, we’ve got a better man around here now.” “Who’s that?” the associate asked. “Teller,” came Lawrence’s reply. 82

  Fermi regretted the whole affair. He detested the emotions provoked by the controversy and these emotions’ negative impact on American science. He also was very sick. At first it took the form of increasing indigestion. Fermi took antacid pills, but he began to lose energy and grow very thin. Doctors told him his sickn
ess was psychological, so he began to read medical textbooks in an attempt to diagnose his own illness. Then doctors examined his esophagus by putting a tube down his throat; the visible tissue looked normal. He continued to grow thinner. Finally doctors performed exploratory surgery. They found stomach cancer that had metastasized so widely that nothing could be done. He was in the very prime of life.

  Knowing he had very little time to live, Fermi resolved to set straight a friend whose behavior he thought had been reprehensible. A visitor to Fermi’s hospital room described his mood:

  When I came into his room we talked for a moment about his condition, he apparently knowing very well that these were his last days. We then discussed the characters of some of the people with whom we had been associated together. The thing, however, that he was most interested in was a visit Teller was to pay him the next day…. Fermi’s principal interest was in talking to Teller in a way that would lead him to mend his ways and restore his own position among his scientific associates. I thought he was far more interested in saving Teller than he was in his own desperate condition. 83

  “What nobler thing for a dying man to do—” Fermi smiled ironically to another friend—“than to try to save a soul?” 84

  Lying in Billings Hospital in Chicago and feeling terribly sick and tired, his condition so grave that he was allowed only a few visitors for brief periods of time, Fermi asked his wife, Laura, to summon Teller. Teller came to his old friend at once. He found Fermi, a man of habit and order whose mind never rested, being fed by a tube that ran directly into his stomach, measuring the flow of the intravenous drip by counting the drops with a stopwatch. Laura, grief stricken, was standing by his bedside.

  Although shockingly thin and weak, Fermi seemed only a little tired and sad. He told Teller very calmly about his condition and wondered objectively how much time he had. He was stoically good-humored as always. He said that he had been blessed by a Catholic priest, a Protestant pastor, and a Jewish rabbi. At different times the three had entered his room and politely asked permission to bless him; he had given it. “It pleased them and it did not harm me,” he said. 85 Then he quipped: “The doctors have played a dirty trick on me.”

  Teller, choking up, tried to be witty in return. “It’s a dirty trick on your friends,” he responded halfheartedly. 86 Teller was crestfallen. As natives of another continent transplanted to the United States, he and Fermi had shared a common culture and many common understandings. They had spent innumerable happy hours in conversations together. Losing Fermi now—at a time when he was so greatly in need of friendly counsel—was particularly hard.

  Fermi got right to the point. He asked his friend how he was doing; even as he lay facing death, he was concerned about others’ problems. Then Fermi told Teller that, in his judgment, Oppenheimer had rendered outstanding service during the war, and that after the war his advice had been given after thorough study and in good faith. If the advice had not been taken, or if it was thought to be wrong—these offered no grounds for impugning Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Fermi told Teller that he considered the AEC hearing—and its verdict—a national disgrace and a disaster for American science. He quietly urged Teller to heal the breach. The emotion of the moment moved Teller to remorse. He spoke more openly than he had ever dared to before. “One usually reads,” Teller said in recalling the occasion, “that dying men confess their sins to the living. It has always seemed to me that it would be much more logical the other way about. So I confessed my sins to Fermi. None but he, apart from the Deity, if there is one, knows what I then told him.” 87 A month later, on November 29, 1954, Enrico Fermi died at the age of only fifty-three.

  Rabi felt sore at the Gray Board—and Oppenheimer, too. Rabi understood his old friend on many levels and was directly honest about him. “I’m a bit angry that Robert let it happen,” Rabi later said. “He should’ve said, ‘I have a record, and I’m not going to be badgered by you’… and just denounce them. Instead, he let it get dragged over all sorts of things. He shouldn’t have stood up there and spilled his guts to those people.” 88 As another physicist who knew both men has said, “Rabi appreciated Robert and when you appreciate the man you tell him, at least when you are courageous which Rabi always was, you tell him what’s wrong with him.” 89 Reflecting on the hearing years later, Rabi felt a sense of both guilt and anger:

  I was one of the few living who could sit down and say [to Oppenheimer], “Now don’t be a fool.”… If I’d been in on it [the defense team]…, I would simply have advised him to stand up and say, “This is what I accomplished for the United States. There is a record. I see no reason for a retrial. If you find it in your hearts to do this, there it is. I hope you have a long life and live to regret it. I will have no part of it.” Period. And walk out. 90

  Yet even if Oppenheimer had taken the hearing more seriously, or if he had followed Rabi’s advice and stormed out, the outcome probably would have been the same. A part of him knew this, and that is why his normally quick and intuitive mind seemed paralyzed by the morbid circumstances. He felt doomed from the start. Months before the Gray Board convened, he confided to Bethe that “no matter what happens during the hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission cannot do anything but find me guilty.” 91 In the existing political atmosphere, he sensed that there could be no other outcome.

  The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer’s Washington career. All of his government connections were severed, and his long service to national security came to an abrupt and ignoble end. After having contributed so much during the war as director of Los Alamos and so much after the war in many different capacities, his contribution was now over. If Oppenheimer had suffered previously because of the weight of his power, he now suffered grievously because of the effect of its absence.

  “He had spent the years after the war being an adviser, being in high places, knowing what was going on,” said a close friend, “To be in on things gave him a sense of importance. That became his whole life. He could run the institute with his left hand. And now he really didn’t have anything to do.” 92 Bethe felt that Oppenheimer “was not the same person afterward.” 93 Rabi said this about his friend’s destruction:

  I was indignant. Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don’t think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn’t pay enough attention to the outward symbols. 94

  Oppenheimer was deeply wounded and hurt. His feelings were raw, his pain so fierce as to be almost physical. The effects of the ordeal began to show. Oppenheimer had always been lithe and vibrant; now he began to age visibly and his body took on a look of frailty. He seemed like a biblical martyr with his sad voice and gaunt, haunted appearance. He even took to quoting biblical scripture: “I cannot sit with anger.” When a friend compared his ordeal to a dry crucifixion, Oppenheimer smiled unhappily and said, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.” 95 There was now pain and hurt in his eyes. The old intellectual impatience, the flashes of arrogance, were gone.

  Oppenheimer disappeared from public view and seemed almost to disappear from the life of his friends. Nearly all of them were scientists engaged in one way or another in government work ruled by security regulations. Their lives revolved around their research, as Oppenheimer’s had, but he and they could not talk to each other about work. They could not talk about the case, or even about the old days, because all that was too painful to discuss. So they were left with nothing to talk about. Oppenheimer was kept under surveillance even after the hearing. A friend ran into him at the airport months later, and while they were chatting Oppenheimer gestured toward three bystanders and explained calml
y but wearily, “They, or others like them, are with me all the time.” They had presumably trailed Oppenheimer out to the airport to ensure he did not flee the country and defect to the Soviet Union. 96

  Oppenheimer maintained a stoic facade. It was his family that suffered the most. The ordeal abode like a permanent ghost at Olden Manor, the Oppenheimers’ Princeton home. Kitty simmered with indignation and remained on a slow, corrosive burn for years to come. She deeply resented the injustice, and partly blamed herself for her husband’s ordeal. Her health deteriorated as she began to drink even more. It was hard for the children, who could not understand what it was all about except that everything seemed unfair. The hearings meant that they were separated from their parents for much of the spring of 1954. Thirteen-year-old-son Peter knew his father was going through some kind of ordeal. He came home from school one afternoon in tears and said a classmate had taunted him: “Your father is a communist!” Peter and Toni both came to resent any intrusion on their father’s life, any reminder of his banishment from government. They tried to spend as much time as they could with their father, but Oppenheimer made this difficult by being a distant parent who had difficulty relating to his children. Still, they remained devoted to him. Peter chalked this on the blackboard in his room: