Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  This group, Griffiths writes, ‘met regularly, to the best of my recollection, twice a month, in the evening at Chevalier’s or Oppenheimer’s house’. Griffiths’s job was to deliver party literature to the group and collect membership dues from Chevalier and Brodeur. Presumably alluding to Oppenheimer’s arrangements with Addis, Griffiths writes: ‘I was given to understand that Oppenheimer, as a man of independent wealth, made his contribution through some special channel.’ ‘Nobody carried a party card,’ Griffiths remembers. ‘If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three men considered themselves to be Communists.’

  In the light of this evidence, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret communist unit at Berkeley, very like the one that his brother had helped to set up in Pasadena. It is perfectly possible, however, to square that with Oppenheimer’s repeated denials that he was a member of the Communist Party, if one uses as the criteria of membership the payment of dues and the possession of a membership card. The question of whether Oppenheimer was a communist or not is thus rather like the question of whether he was or was not a German Jew. He did not consider himself to be German, Jewish or communist, and yet, as those words are commonly used, he was ethnically a German Jew and politically a communist. One does not have to accuse either Oppenheimer or common usage of being wrong here; one just has to be careful in distinguishing the sense in which he was and was not German or Jewish or a communist.

  And to say that Oppenheimer was indeed a member of a secret communist unit is not to lend any support to the notion that Oppenheimer was engaged in anything subversive. Not everything secret is subversive. According to Griffiths, this secret group did not do very much ‘that could not have been done as a group of liberals or Democrats’. They encouraged each other to support the Teachers’ Union and the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War and they discussed current events from a broadly Marxist point of view. ‘In short,’ Griffiths concludes, ‘there was nothing subversive or treasonable about our activity.’ It should not be imagined, for example, that this ‘secret unit’ of the Communist Party took its orders from the Soviet Union, or even from the American Communist Party. True, Griffiths collected dues and delivered party literature, but there was no acknowledgement on anybody’s part that the Party could tell these people what to do or what to think. When Chevalier was asked what made this unit a Communist Party group rather than ‘just a group of people who were Left’, he replied: ‘We paid dues.’ Asked whether they received any orders, he answered: ‘No. In a sense we weren’t [regular party members]’.

  Oppenheimer’s silence about the ‘secret unit’ to which he belonged is impressively resolute and unyielding. Never once, in all his subsequent interviews, interrogations and cross-examinations – some of which were conducted by people trained at the highest level in the skills required to prise secrets out of people – did he even hint at its existence. But then, as he himself said: ‘Look, I have had a lot of secrets in my head a long time. It does not matter who I associate with. I don’t talk about those secrets.’ Not revealing things about himself was something he was extraordinarily good at.

  Leaving Oppenheimer’s impressive silence about the ‘secret unit’ aside, there is nothing in what has been revealed about it that does not square with his own statements about his attitudes towards the Communist Party. He himself acknowledged that, because of the groups he joined, the people he was friends with and the financial contributions he made to the Party, he ‘might well have appeared at the time as quite close to the Communist Party – perhaps even to some people as belonging to it’. However, one has to remember, he emphasised, that it was quite common in the 1930s for communists and non-communists to work together: ‘This was the era of what the Communists then called the United Front, in which they joined with many non-Communist groups in support of humanitarian objectives. Many of these objectives engaged my interest.’ But: ‘I never was a member of the Communist Party. I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me.’

  When pressed to confirm that he knew ‘that Communists stood for certain doctrines, and certain philosophies and took certain positions’, Oppenheimer replied:

  . . . it seems clear to me that there were tactical positions on current issues, which might be very sensible-looking or popular or might coincide with the views of a lot of people who were not Communists. There was also the conviction as to the nature of history, the role of the classes and the changing society, the nature of the Soviet Union, which I would assume was the core of Communist doctrine.

  Clearly, it was important to Oppenheimer to distinguish these two kinds of convictions. He might share with the Communist Party views on the Spanish Civil War or the rise of fascism or the unionising rights of workers, but this did not mean that he shared, or even found comprehensible, the general, philosophical views that communists were supposed to hold, such as ‘dialectical materialism . . . the more or less determinate course of history and the importance of the class war’ (which were the three that Oppenheimer named in addition to the ones mentioned above).

  Of course, this still leaves undecided Oppenheimer’s views on a range of issues associated with communism. Did he believe in the inevitable collapse of capitalism? Did he look forward to a revolution that would result in the dictatorship of the proletariat? I think the implied answer to these two questions – implied by the above quotations – is ‘no’. And neither, as far as I know, is there anything in Oppenheimer’s recorded utterances to suggest otherwise. What he did believe in, and is on record as arguing for, is socialism, which he thought was the natural outcome of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In a political tract, published under the auspices of the Communist Party of California, which Oppenheimer is reliably said (by Chevalier and Griffiths) to have written, he quotes with approval a statement about the New Deal: ‘once start such things and you are on the road to socialism; once worry about the food and work and life of your poor, and you can’t stop’. ‘We agreed with that,’ Oppenheimer writes: ‘we regarded it as an argument for the New Deal, not against it.’ ‘We tend to believe,’ he goes on, ‘that any consistent effort to raise the standard of living, to promote the culture and freedom and political responsibility of the people as a whole will lead to socialism.’

  In regarding the Communist Party as an ally of the New Deal, Oppenheimer was very far from being alone. Indeed, this was precisely how the American Communist Party presented itself in the 1930s, as primarily an American party, rather than as an agent of the Comintern. In 1937, its internal structure was reorganised so that it looked more like traditional American political parties. Its leader, Earl Browder, in the words of Maurice Isserman, a historian of the party, ‘wanted to be a leader of a national movement with power and influence of its own’. Under Browder:

  The Communists began to identify themselves as part of the political coalition that supported the New Deal’s domestic programs, while enthusiastically welcoming every move by the Roosevelt Administration that could be interpreted as favoring collective international security. The Communists argued that their own political program corresponded to Roosevelt’s true intentions.

  The slogan that Browder adopted for his party in the period 1936–9 could hardly have been more suited to a man of Oppenheimer’s political outlook: ‘Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.’

  Isserman’s analysis of the effectiveness of this slogan on its target audience during the late 1930s rings very loud bells for anyone familiar with Oppenheimer’s background:

  A significant proportion of those who joined then and stuck with the movement were the children of Jewish immigrants (the percentage of Jewish membership in the CP, about 15 per cent in the mid-1920s, grew to around half the party’s strength in the 1930s and 1940s).

  Like every second generation in the history of American immigration, they hungered for the
full assimilation that had eluded their parents’ grasp. Had they come of age in less unsettled times they might have chosen another route, but in the early 1930s it seemed for a moment as if an American version of the October Revolution offered the quickest and surest path from marginality to influence and integration.

  In his 1936 essay ‘What is Communism?’ Earl Browder responded to the question asked of communists by the editorials in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst – ‘If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?’ – with the following exuberantly patriotic rhetoric:

  The truth is . . . we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country.

  . . . We are determined to save our country from the hell of capitalism. And most of us were born here, so Hearst’s gag is not addressed to us anyway.

  . . . The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says, slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses.

  We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.

  We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century . . .

  Americanism, in this revolutionary sense, means to stand in the forefront of human progress. It means never to submit to the forces of decay and death. It means constantly to free ourselves of the old, the outworn, the decaying, and to press forward to the young, the vital, the living, the expanding.

  This, one feels, is an outlook with considerable appeal to the man who grew up with the sermons of Adler on the meaning of America and the importance of the ‘Americanisation’ of Jewish immigrants, and who lectured, among others, Felix Bloch, George Uhlenbeck and Alfred Stern on the virtues of his home country.

  With regard to the Soviet Union, Oppenheimer later said, ‘the talk that I heard at that time had predisposed me to make much of the economic progress and general level of welfare in Russia, and little of its political tyranny’. But his views on that changed, first by reading about the show trials, and then, more decisively, in the summer of 1938, when three physicists whose opinions he respected – George Placzek, Victor Weisskopf and Marcel Schein – talked to him about their own experiences of Russia. Placzek, Weisskopf and Schein were all from Central European Jewish backgrounds; Placzek from Moravia, Weisskopf from Vienna, and Schein from Bohemia. They were also all first-rate physicists. As life for Jews became unbearable under Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, the United States was not the only country to realise that some of those Jews could make extremely valuable contributions to its universities. The Soviet Union also extended a helping hand to Jewish scientists, and succeeded in attracting Schein and Guido Beck to the University of Odessa, and then, through Beck, persuaded Placzek and Weisskopf to work with the Russian physicist Lev Landau at his new institute in Kharkov, near Kiev.

  By 1938, it had all gone horribly wrong for everyone concerned. Landau was investigated during the Great Purge, arrested and imprisoned; and Beck, Schein, Placzek and Weisskopf were forced to flee, horrified at what they had witnessed. As Oppenheimer put it, the description of the Soviet Union he received from these three very well-respected scientists was of ‘a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people’. ‘It’s worse than you can imagine,’ Weisskopf told him. ‘It’s a morass.’ As Weisskopf later remarked: ‘These conversations had a very deep influence on Robert. This was a decisive week in his life.’ This is confirmed by a letter written a few months later by Felix Bloch to Isidor Rabi. Oppenheimer, Bloch wrote, ‘is fine and sends you his greetings; honestly, I don’t think you wore him out but at least he does not praise Russia too loudly any more which is good progress.’

  Oppenheimer might also have received a fairly clear-eyed picture of what was happening in the Soviet Union from one of his students. George Volkoff, who came to Berkeley to work with Oppenheimer in 1936, was born in Moscow, but brought up in Manchuria, where his father worked as a schoolteacher. Volkoff left Manchuria to study physics at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and never saw his parents again. His mother died in Manchuria, and in 1936 his father returned to Russia, where he was caught up in the purges and sent to Siberia, dying there in 1943. ‘Alone in North America,’ an obituary of Volkoff stated, ‘it did not help George emotionally that many of his associates continued to have rosy views of the Soviet Union.’

  With Volkoff, Oppenheimer wrote one of his most interesting papers, one of a series of three, each written with a different co-author, on a subject with which Oppenheimer had not previously been associated: astrophysics. Though these papers received little attention at the time, they are now generally considered to be his greatest work, free of the mathematical errors that dogged his work on quantum electrodynamics and containing original and prescient insights that have been the basis of much subsequent important work. Many people think that, if he had lived a little longer, Oppenheimer would have received the Nobel Prize for these papers.

  The particular subject of the paper Oppenheimer wrote with Volkoff at the end of 1938 was the physics of neutron stars. The concept of a neutron star had been introduced into physics just five years earlier at a meeting of the American Physical Society in 1933, only a year after the discovery of the neutron, by the Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky and the German astronomer Walter Baade. Both were based in Pasadena, Zwicky at Caltech and Baade at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Zwicky, like many people at Caltech, was interested in cosmic rays, and, via Millikan’s view that these rays were the ‘birth cries’ of matter coming to us from outer space, this led him to a subject that Baade was already interested in: supernovae.

  Supernovae are extraordinarily bright explosions in outer space, which have been observed and recorded at irregular intervals since the second century AD. One of the most famous appeared in AD 1054, when it was recorded by court astronomers in China, who described it as a ‘guest star’ and noted that it was brighter than Venus or any other star. It stayed visible, even in daylight, for twenty-three days, and at night could be seen for two years. In 1572 another supernova was observed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who wrote a book about it, De Nova Stella, in which he showed that this ‘new star’ had to be further away from us than the moon and that therefore the view that the ‘starry heavens’ were immutable was wrong.

  The word ‘supernova’ was introduced in the early 1930s by Baade and Zwicky. Even though their term incorporated from ancient descriptions the word ‘nova’, with its suggestions that these temporary bright stars were ‘new’, they were the first to develop a theory that explained supernovae as the death-throes of a star. A supernova, in their account, is a stellar explosion that marks the ‘cessation of its existence as an ordinary star’. They also ‘tentatively’ suggested what is now the accepted theory, that ‘the super-nova process represents the transition of an ordinary star into a neutron star’.

  To understand what a neutron star is, it is helpful to consider the kind of dying star known as a ‘white dwarf’. In the nineteenth century, a mysterious star named Sirius B was discovered, which was much fainter than its partner, Sirius A. It was assumed that this was because it was cooler, but it was found to be, in fact, much hotter. This could only mean that it was, by comparison, extremely small. It was a star with the mass of our sun, but the volume of a mere planet; in other words, its density was extraordinary – much higher than anything encountered on earth. In the 1920s, these small, dense stars were given the name ‘white dwarfs’ and a theory was developed to explain them. The theory was that ordinary stars, such as our sun, are huge furnaces of hydrogen – the pressure and the heat at their core being sufficient to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium (though how, exactly, that nuclear fusion worked was not
clear until Hans Bethe’s work on the question was published in 1939). After a time, which will be several billions of years, the star runs out of hydrogen, and is no longer able to keep itself stable through thermonuclear reactions. At that stage, gravity takes over, and pulls all the particles that make up the star towards the centre. The star thus gets smaller and smaller and denser and denser. Eventually it gets so dense that there is no longer any room for the atomic electronsfn39 to move about as they do in normal conditions. At this point, the ‘white dwarf’ cannot get any smaller or denser and so achieves stability, the stability being attributable to what is called the ‘degeneracy pressure’ of the atomic electrons – namely, the fact that they are now all pressed together, unable to move.

  In 1931 the Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that the process described above meant that white dwarfs had a maximum mass, which he calculated to be 1.4 solar masses (where a ‘solar mass’ is a mass equivalent to that of our sun). Anything with a mass greater than that, Chandrasekhar demonstrated, would exert a gravitational force too great for even degeneracy pressure to withstand. Most stars (something over 90 per cent) are estimated to fall below the ‘Chandrasekhar limit’, but that still means that a significant number of stars will not end up as white dwarfs. What happens to them is the problem solved by Baade and Zwicky and the notion of a ‘neutron star’.