The Amican Govermerant is unfair to Acuse Certain People that I know, of being unfair to them. Since this true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the U.S. govermeant, should go to HELL.
Yours truly
Certain People 97
Oppenheimer was not the only scientist to suffer as a result of the hearing. Paradoxically, Teller also suffered, for his testimony against Oppenheimer brought down on him a harvest of resentment mingled with cold, angry contempt. Although Teller was aware that he had offended many of his fellow scientists, he had no real idea of what was in store for him. A few weeks after the AEC’s verdict had been announced and the hearing transcript had been published, Teller went to Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer was a living legend, for a conference of physicists from across the country. Gatherings like this one were usually jovial affairs, reunions of old friends as well as serious scientific sessions. A few physicists were glad to see Teller, but others went out of their way to avoid him. The first large gathering was a dinner in the main hall of Fuller Lodge. Just as Teller was about to sit down, he spotted Rabi and Robert Christy, a Caltech physicist who had been a graduate student of Oppenheimer and a close wartime colleague of Teller, at a nearby table. With great bonhomie and nonchalance, Teller walked over to Rabi and Christy’s table and greeted them with a hearty laugh and outstretched hand. As everyone in the crowded dining room looked on, both Christy and Rabi looked icily at Teller and refused to shake his hand. Rabi then acidly congratulated Teller on the “brilliance” of his testimony before the Gray Board and “the extremely clever way” he had phrased his reply concerning Oppenheimer as a security risk. “‘I would personally feel more secure’ without Oppenheimer in the government,” said Rabi caustically and loudly—“a brilliant way of saying, ‘don’t restore his clearance!’” Teller was stunned and speechless, as if Christy and Rabi had punched him. He staggered back to his table, his face red with emotion. He tried as hard as he could to maintain his composure, but the shock and humiliation were too great. In a tight voice he excused himself, abruptly left the hall, and returned to his room, where he broke down and wept. 98 Teller was to endure this kind of rejection again in the years to come because, in the minds of many scientists, he had destroyed Oppenheimer. But no incident was branded on Teller’s soul as deeply as this first, stinging rebuke.
The physicists who shunned Teller were the very people whose respect and friendship he craved most. Twice before he had been forced to relinquish the familiar: first his homeland of Hungary, then the continent of his birth and culture. In America everything had been initially unfamiliar except for the community of physicists, who had afforded him comfort since the day he arrived. Now he lost those closest to him. Teller, who had always cherished his friendships, found the loss very painful and hard to bear. He was more miserable than he had ever been in his entire life. “I am just bewildered and also personally very greatly hurt,” he wrote after returning from Los Alamos, “when I hear a great number of hateful words coming from people who used to be close to me.” 99
Teller’s ostracism provoked intense hostility—even hatred—in him toward his enemies, particularly Rabi. These feelings of childlike hurt and resentment came pouring out in a letter he wrote to a friend:
I came back from Los Alamos a few days ago…. I felt like Daniel in the lions’ den. After some time you learn to distinguish the lions by their growls….
I got so that I can guess what a man is going to say. And I begin to believe that I can guess what he thinks. It is not a nice experience.
The worst of them is Rabi. He was never my friend but now he is terrible….
Last night I dreamed that there was a Raven and I did not dare to go to sleep because he may pick out my eyes. Please translate Raven into German [rabe]. I found this amusing because the Raven started to smile and I slept quite well. 100
Teller was once again in exile, treated like a leper, or—even worse—a modern-day Judas. As long as he remained in the confines of his home at Berkeley, where he had moved from Chicago in 1952, or his office at Livermore, life went along much as usual. But he could never be sure of the reception he would receive whenever he made one of his frequent trips to scientific conferences or public meetings. Lifelong acquaintances began to ignore him and even to pillory him. Many at Los Alamos made it clear that Teller would no longer be welcome there. Teller perceived this all too well, and he did not return there for nearly ten years.
The animosity against Teller, however, went deeper than just defense of Oppenheimer. Teller was regarded not only as having betrayed one of his peers but as having collaborated with—some thought sold out to—the military-industrial complex. As he raced from his lectures at Berkeley to his bomb laboratory at Livermore or to conferences at the Pentagon, Teller grew to be a vivid symbol and an unpleasant reminder to his peers of the captivity of physics. For someone of Teller’s sensitivity—whose feelings always lay just beneath the surface, who enjoyed friendships so much, and who wanted so much to be liked—such treatment was traumatic. He grew physically and emotionally depleted. Like Lawrence, he developed a painful and dangerous form of ulcerative colitis, an ailment closely associated with emotional tension. His gaiety, spontaneity, and teasing nature disappeared. He became bitter, combative, distrustful, and reclusive. Even his children noticed the difference in his personality. He had always been prone to moods of silence, but they now became more frequent. There were times when Mici would warn Paul and Wendy not to disturb their father. At these times Wendy would say, “Don’t bother Daddy, he has black bugs in his head.” 101
Teller’s painful ostracism led him to have second thoughts about his testimony against Oppenheimer. “What else could I do at the hearing?” he began pleading to friends. “What else could I say?” 102 He drafted a public statement saying that his testimony had been misunderstood, that he had not meant to imply that opinions should be punished. Teller sent the desperate statement to Strauss, explaining that he now felt his testimony had been a mistake and revealing his alarm at his own conduct:
I continue to feel that I made a grave mistake when I clearly implied that opinion of a man can make him a security risk. I did not say this, but, rereading my own testimony, I see that I came extremely close to saying it. I therefore would feel very much happier if I could make a statement to the press in which I remedy as much of this damage as I possibly can. After a lot of headache and a waste of much paper, I arrived at this brief statement which I am attaching.
It seems particularly important for me to say something of this kind since my friends among the physicists attach very great importance to this point. If I should lose their respect it would be an extremely hard blow to me. 103
Strauss would have none of this. The last thing he wanted now was a public recantation by his star witness against Oppenheimer. He bucked up Teller by urging him to consult with Roger Robb. To make sure that Teller did so, Strauss sent Teller’s draft statement to Robb. Robb immediately advised Teller to stand by his testimony, which had required “courage and character” and had performed “a public service of great value.” Teller remained silent. 104
Years would pass before Teller would again be tolerated by his peers, but even then he was never really forgiven. And while many conservatives admired Teller for conceiving the superbomb and protecting the state against Oppenheimer, he would remain a pariah to liberals for the rest of his long life. Being a perceptive man with a sensitive ego, Teller saw his fate all too clearly. Questioned about the long-term effects of the Oppenheimer affair nearly twenty years later, Teller replied without hesitation: “I think it made Oppenheimer. I think it destroyed Teller.” 105 When he published his memoirs in 2001—nearly half a century after the affair—Teller was moved to write: “Why did I testify? In retrospect, the answer is simple and obvious: because I was demonstrating my fulsome quantity of that general human property, stupidity….... In retrospect, I should have said at the beginning of my testimony that th
e hearing was a dirty business, and that I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it.” 106
Such expressions of personal regret and suffering were rare. But at unguarded moments, Teller would let the bitterness pour forth. “If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety percent of these then come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect.” 107 And in his final days, during the summer of 2003, he confessed: “In my long life I had to face some difficult decisions and found myself often in doubt whether I acted the right way.” 108 The affair crippled both men: Oppenheimer because he lost, Teller because he won. The poignancy of Teller’s self-awareness about the pariah status to which he relegated himself spoke volumes about the horrible irony of the larger story.
After Strauss retired as AEC chairman in 1958, a review of the Oppenheimer hearing was made by the commission’s general counsel, who found that there was “a messy record from a legal standpoint; that the charges kept shifting at each level of the proceedings; that the evidence was stale and consisted of information that was 12 years old and was known when a security clearance was granted during World War II, and that it was a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system.” 109 But by then it was too late.
Not long after his hearing was over and his security clearance had been revoked, Oppenheimer gave a speech at Amherst College where students asked him why he had not helped his case by showing more repentance for his past left-wing associations. Oppenheimer replied, “It may not be the obligation of a man in a position of responsibility to conform his actions to what the public desires; but if he wishes to play an effective part in politics, it is clear that he must either conform himself to what the public desires, or persuade the public to accept what he is.” 110 Oppenheimer refused to do the former and failed to do the latter.
Freed from the burden of playing the Washington game, Oppenheimer devoted himself to investigating issues raised by modern science and commenting on man’s fate in the nuclear age. Those who encountered him now noticed traces of defeat in his manner. At the same time, they noticed tranquility in his face. He was calmer than he had been since going to Los Alamos. “We did the devil’s work,” he told a visitor in 1956, summing up his experiences during and after the war. “But we are now going back to our real jobs. Rabi for instance was telling me only the other day that he intended to devote himself exclusively to research in the future.” 111 Oppenheimer felt unburdened at last. The hearing made him a martyr among liberals. The Gray Board’s verdict ended their concern that Oppenheimer had surrendered his independence to establish his political influence. The AEC’s action ironically served as a means of his redemption.
Everywhere people wondered, “How could this happen?” Some blamed the unpopularity of Oppenheimer’s views on the superbomb. Others blamed Oppenheimer’s unscrupulous enemies. Still others blamed Oppenheimer’s own arrogance and past evasions. All of them were factors, but all of them would not have been enough had the country not been in the grip of the insecurity and paranoia that expressed itself in anticommunist witch-hunts. In the spring of 1954, when McCarthyism was at its peak, the reigning dogma identified security with superiority in the arms race: the superbomb served as a powerful buttress against expanding communism and kept the peace by means of deterrence, the capacity to wreak sufficient destruction on the enemy so as to discourage any attack. In this climate, it was all too easy to see a physicist with a radical past who disagreed with this view as being a security threat. It was a mood fed by hysterical fear; its chief symptom was the belief that anyone who did not share it was dangerously unreliable.
Of course, because of his association with the bomb, because of the fascinating complexities of his personality, and because of his marvelous eloquence, Oppenheimer had come to represent all physicists in the public mind. To liberals frightened by the arms race and obsessed with avoiding a nuclear war, he was a superb scientist and a selfless public servant who had been sacrificed for his unpopular beliefs. To conservatives frightened by communism and obsessed with national security, he was the man who had cavorted with the Cold War enemy. Robert Oppenheimer touched people—then and now—because he was the most sensitive and reflective individual among all those involved in the creation of the terrible new weapons.
Yet the Oppenheimer affair was not just the story of one man; it was also the story of all of the atomic scientists. His personal tragedy was also his profession’s. It dramatized physicists’ sudden transformation from naive academics into major players in the realm of American national security. The bomb had given once-obscure physicists a new standing akin to the mathematician-astronomer-priests of the ancient Maya, who were both revered and feared as the keepers of the mystery of the seasons and the helpers of the sun and stars. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, became the unofficial high priest. Not just Oppenheimer’s life had been dissected in the hearing room but the lives—with all their subtle pressures and unsolved problems—of the scientists who had ushered in the atomic age. The hearings revealed the new and influential part these men now played in national security politics, their uneasiness in a nuclear world they had helped to create, and above all their anxiety about losing sight of the deeply rooted set of ethical beliefs out of which science—their passion—had grown. How had it happened that men who had tried to find a more comprehensive truth were in the end obliged to spend the best years of their lives in the search for ever more destructive weapons—and then the best among them punished for it? Science had ceased to be seen as something remote and now was looked upon as something terrible. To an extent, then, Oppenheimer and the other atomic scientists whom he symbolized had fallen victim to the very weapon they had created.
CHAPTER 11
Twilight Years
NIELS BOHR HAD returned to Denmark in August 1945, and two months later had turned sixty. The anxieties of the war and the Manhattan Project had strained and saddened him. His thinning gray hair, the jowls that draped over his massive jaw, the heavy eyebrows that shadowed his intelligent and kindly eyes—all had made him a doleful figure. He had spent more and more time during the ensuing years at his summerhouse in Tisvilde, on the northern shore of Sjælland, a two-hour drive from Copenhagen. The thatched, one-story country house stood in a grove of pine trees on heather-covered hills that met the lavender waters of the Baltic in an unbroken harmony In a ramshackle barn in this beautiful and tranquil setting that he loved so much, Bohr had found time to think and reflect. For relaxation he had bicycled in the woods, walked on the beach, and read fairy tales and played games with his many grandchildren. Evenings were spent in the family circle, chatting about issues large or small. These had been happy days for Bohr, yet there had been long thoughts, too, of how the world had been changed by the bomb.
During the war, Bohr had foreseen that the atomic bomb would cause trouble with Russia, unless the Russians were made partners rather than rivals. Now the Iron Curtain had come down, and Bohr had watched the growing quarrel between East and West with grave misgivings. He did not surrender in his struggle. Time he could have devoted to science was now devoted to writing innumerable appeals and statements. Although these had often gone unanswered by the officials to whom they were addressed, Bohr saw them as a means of educating the public at large. What could be done to break the stalemate and make security possible? The answer to which he had come with increasing emphasis was the international control of atomic weapons before other countries acquired the bomb. Otherwise, the next big war could be the world’s last.
In the spring of 1948, while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bohr had met privately with Secretary of State George Marshall in Washington. During their talk, Bohr had reiterated his plea for openness and cooperation between the United States and the USSR on atomic weapons. This was essential, he had stressed in a follow-up letter, “in or
der not to lose the opportunity to forestall a fateful competition in atomic armaments.” He had then pointed, prophetically, to an even more frightening future. “The new and ominous menace to world security presented by employing the results of the latest development of bacteriological and biochemical science as terrible life-destructive means cannot be eliminated by any practicable control and will, therefore, remain a latent danger until such cooperation in openness has been achieved.” Bohr had believed America should take the initiative because it led in the field of atomic energy. “Your country,” he had told Marshall, “possesses the strength required to take the lead in accepting the challenge with which civilization is confronted.” 1 Marshall gave no promise.
By 1950 Bohr had recognized that his efforts had come to naught, so he had written an “Open Letter” to the United Nations in June of that year in which he gave an account of his efforts in broad outline and pleaded with the world’s great powers to begin a dialogue with one another about the bomb. In the letter, he had predicted that the lack of such cooperation would trigger an escalating nuclear arms race and increased tensions between East and West. 2 The Korean War, which broke out three weeks later, had put Bohr’s appeal in the shade, but his predictions turned out to be tragically correct.
Almost everyone who encountered Arthur Compton in his later years noticed his eyes. They had always been deep set, but now they were knowing and penetrating, like an old seer’s. When he was invited to become chancellor of Washington University at the end of the war, he had candidly told its board of trustees that he did not know what students’ and alumni’s attitude toward him would be when they learned of his involvement in the top secret Manhattan Project: either they would think of him as one of the scientists who had saved civilization—or had imperiled mankind. As he wrote a year after Hiroshima, “It is too early to say whether the moral historian, if there be one a thousand years hence, will record the use of the atomic bomb as the work of the world’s guardian angel or as that of the devil bent on man’s destruction.” 3 No one could go through what Compton did and come out quite the same.
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