Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Henry Wallace, who had been Vice President during Roosevelt’s third term and was now Truman’s Commerce Secretary, recorded in his diary that at the dinner Oppenheimer told him he wanted to speak to him privately. They agreed to meet the following morning to walk together through downtown Washington up to Wallace’s office at the Department of Commerce, before Oppenheimer went on to Capitol Hill to give evidence to the House of Representatives. ‘I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer,’ Wallace wrote. ‘He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent . . . He thinks the mishandling of the situation at Potsdam has prepared the way for the eventual slaughter of tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people.’ Seeing that Oppenheimer obviously wanted to have a personal and direct influence on US policy, Wallace advised him to contact the new Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, asking for an appointment with the President.

  After leaving Wallace, Oppenheimer went to give evidence to the House Committee on Military Affairs, the meeting chaired by Andrew May himself. A number of other scientists had also been invited, including Ed Condon and Leo Szilard. May opened proceedings at 10 a.m. with a short speech in which he denied that his committee was trying to rush the bill through and promised to give ‘patient consideration’ to the scientists who had come to give evidence. Then he called his first witness, ‘a Dr Sighland’ – that is, Leo Szilard. In his testimony Szilard outlined his own proposal for the control of atomic energy, which involved dividing the task into three – 1. the production of fissile materials; 2. the organisation of scientific research; and 3. the design and production of bombs – each to be administered by a government-owned, civilian corporation. Under his plan there would also be a commission, consisting of cabinet members, which would coordinate national and foreign policy relating to atomic energy. In the question period that followed Szilard was asked very few questions about his proposal and a great many about his nationality and his disputes with the army. He was followed by Herbert Anderson, who read out a statement from scientists at Oak Ridge and Chicago that expressed their criticisms of the May–Johnson Bill.

  After a break for lunch, Compton and Oppenheimer gave their testimonies. Oppenheimer’s, Szilard later said, was a ‘masterpiece’. What he meant, it seems, is that it was a masterly piece of equivocation. ‘He talked in such a manner that the congressmen present thought he was for the bill but the physicists present all thought that he was against the bill.’ For example, when asked if he thought it was a good bill, Oppenheimer replied:

  The bill was drafted with the detailed supervision of Dr Bush and Dr Conant, with the knowledge and agreement of the former Secretary of War, Mr Stimson . . . I think if they liked the philosophy of this bill and urged this bill it is a very strong argument.

  ‘To the congressmen,’ Szilard said, ‘this might mean that Oppenheimer thinks this is a good bill, but no physicist believes that Oppenheimer will form an opinion on the basis of his good opinion of somebody else’s opinion.’

  It seems possible that Szilard (assuming he was not being sarcastic) was crediting Oppenheimer here with too much subtlety. It may be that, realising the May–Johnson Bill was a lost cause, Oppenheimer shifted his emphasis away from defending the bill and towards flattering the people who, whatever the fate of the bill, would help to determine the atomic policy of the United States. When he was asked whether he was bothered by the fact that the May–Johnson Bill allowed military men to act as commissioners, he replied: ‘I think it is a matter not what uniform a man wears but what kind of man he is.’ He added: ‘I cannot think of an administrator in whom I would have more confidence than General Marshall.’

  In connection with the issue at stake in the dispute between himself and Curtis, Oppenheimer endeavoured to put some distance between science and bomb-making. Producing the bomb, he said, was ‘an enormous technological development’, but: ‘It was not science, and its whole spirit was one of frantic exploitation of the known; it was not that of the sober, modest attempt to penetrate the unknown.’ His chief concern, it seems, both on this occasion and during the previous day’s meeting, was to make what he described as ‘a plea for leaving much of the scientific strength of the country in the universities and technical schools, the small institutions in which scientists have worked in the past and in which they will have the leisure and privacy to think those essential, dangerous thoughts which are the true substance of science’.

  The plea was well made, and revealing of Oppenheimer’s own desire at the time to leave the bomb-making of Los Alamos behind him in favour of a return to the purity of theoretical physics, but, as an argument in favour of the May–Johnson Bill, it was, to say the least, unconvincing. Indeed, the proposers of that bill might well have thought that, with supporters like Oppenheimer, they had little need of enemies. In any case, the bill was rejected and a Senate special committee on atomic energy was set up, with Brien McMahon as its chairman, to consider the issues afresh and propose alternative legislation. The first round in what would be an ongoing battle between the scientists and the military for control of atomic-energy policy had thus been won by the scientists. Oppenheimer, in his efforts to play the part of an ‘insider scientist’, had succeeded – for the time being anyway – only in being pushed a little further away from the centre.

  A golden opportunity to reverse this and to gain access to the very top of US policy-making came on 25 October, just a week after his ineffective testimony to Congress, when, having followed Wallace’s advice, Oppenheimer was granted an interview with the President. The meeting, however, went badly, resulting in Truman telling his Undersecretary of State, Dean Acheson: ‘I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.’ Evidently Oppenheimer’s remarkable ability to charm just the right person at just the right time – which had worked so well with Max Born in 1926 and General Groves in 1942 – had, on this occasion, deserted him.

  No doubt part of the problem was that Oppenheimer’s view of Truman was clouded by the conviction he had expressed to Wallace: that Truman had made a terrible mess of things at Potsdam. By not being open with the Russians and gaining their trust in preparation for international collaboration on atomic weapons, Truman, Oppenheimer believed, had missed a chance – perhaps the only chance – to avert a nuclear arms race, thereby exposing humanity to the possibility of a war fought with atomic bombs and the consequent slaughter of hundreds of millions of people. He was therefore not inclined, as he would have been if he had met Roosevelt, to treat the President with deferential respect. So when Truman began the conversation by telling Oppenheimer, in reference to the debates then going on about the May–Johnson Bill and its alternatives, ‘The first thing is to define the national problem, then the international’, Oppenheimer did nothing to disguise or conceal his disagreement. He sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time, and then, when Truman looked at him impatiently for a response, simply contradicted him. ‘Perhaps,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘it would be best first to define the international problem.’

  The interview went from bad to worse when Truman asked Oppenheimer when he thought the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. Oppenheimer replied, as he had when asked the same question in Congress, that he did not know. Truman then said that he did know. The answer, he said confidently, was ‘never’. Obviously Truman had not understood what Oppenheimer had said in his final Scientific Panel report and what the Los Alamos scientists had tried to tell him in their ALAS document: that the technology of using the energy released from nuclear fission to make a bomb was not something that could be kept a secret; it was something that scientists everywhere, including Russia, would be able to work out for themselves. Two days after this meeting with Oppenheimer, Truman showed his lack of understanding of this point again, this time in public, when in his Navy Day address given in New York he spoke of keeping the destructive power of atomic bombs in the possession of the US as a ‘sacred trust’.

 
; ‘I saw him [Oppenheimer] pretty often around that time,’ William Higinbotham has recalled. ‘From the way he looked, I think I could tell that Truman’s statement and the incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him.’ In the interview with Truman, Oppenheimer’s dejection must have been visibly manifest, since Truman – shocked at the gap between Oppenheimer’s reputation as a suave, brilliant, articulate high achiever and the hesitant, mumbling figure in front of him – was moved to ask what the matter was. ‘Mr President,’ said Oppenheimer slowly, ‘I feel I have blood on my hands.’ The remark infuriated Truman and effectively put an end both to the meeting and to Oppenheimer’s chances of being treated by the President as a trusted insider. ‘I told him,’ Truman said afterwards, ‘the blood was on my hands – to let me worry about that.’ Six months after the meeting, Truman was still railing against the ‘cry-baby scientist’ who had come to his office ‘and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of his discovery of atomic energy’. Truman’s final words to Oppenheimer were: ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to work something out, and you’re going to help us.’ As he left the Oval Office, however, Oppenheimer would have been only too aware that he was not, and never would be, someone the President would turn to if he wanted help.

  Oppenheimer left Washington a chastened man. His attempts to insinuate himself into the top levels of US politics had failed, and in making them he had alienated the politically active scientists whom he had hoped to lead. A chance to win back the trust of some of those scientists came at the beginning of November, when he was invited back to Los Alamos to give a speech to ALAS. It was a chance that he seized. His return to Los Alamos was a triumph. Five hundred people crammed into the largest movie theatre on the Hill to hear him, and, according to Alice Kimball Smith: ‘Years later, when former ALAS members were asked about post-war political activity, the answer invariably began (and sometimes ended) with “I remember Oppie’s speech.”’

  In content and tone the speech contrasted sharply with the testimony Oppenheimer had given in Washington. Indeed, in several places, it flatly contradicted what he had said in Washington. For example, whereas he had told the House of Representatives that making the bomb had been ‘an enormous technological development’, but ‘it was not science’, in his speech to ALAS he emphasised that it was science and that was precisely the motivation for doing it. There were many motives for being involved in making the bomb, Oppenheimer said in his speech. There was the fear that the enemy would get there first, there was the sense of adventure, there were various political considerations. ‘But when you come right down to it,’ Oppenheimer told the members of ALAS, ‘the reason we did this job is because it was an organic necessity.’

  If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.

  Similarly inconsistent with what he had said in Washington were the remarks in the speech about secrecy. Whereas in his appearance before the Senate he had defended the May–Johnson Bill’s concern with secrecy, to the scientists at Los Alamos he declared that ‘the almost unanimous resistance of scientists to the imposition of control and secrecy is a justified position’, since ‘secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is’.

  Again whereas in Washington he had been respectful to the point of being deferential to those in power, in this speech he was openly critical of the President, remarking that ‘the views suggested in the President’s Navy Day speech are not entirely encouraging’. In particular, he took issue with Truman’s US-centric view of the issue: the idea that the world could, and had to, look to the US to keep possession of atomic bombs as a ‘sacred trust’. This ‘insistent tone of unilateral responsibility for the handling of atomic weapons,’ Oppenheimer told his audience, ‘is surely the thing which must have troubled you, and which troubled me, in the official statements.’

  In place of Truman’s insistence on putting America’s interests first, and domestic concerns before international ones, Oppenheimer outlined a robustly international perspective. What he proposed was agreement between nations, first to set up an international atomic-energy commission that, without any interference from the heads of any particular state, had control over the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy, and second to ‘say that no bombs be made’. In every respect the speech echoed the views of the scientists at Los Alamos, and they left the theatre feeling that Oppenheimer had spoken for them. He may have failed to win the President round to his way of seeing the issues, but he had at least re-established himself as the voice, the heart and the conscience of the Los Alamos scientists.

  Oppenheimer had begun his ALAS speech with a rueful remark about himself. He would like, he said, to speak to them as a fellow scientist, adding: ‘If some of you have long memories, perhaps you will regard it as justified.’ It felt like a long time had passed since he was able to concentrate on the kind of pure, disinterested, theoretical physics that he loved, and he was anxious to return to that way of thinking. That is why he had resigned his directorship of Los Alamos so quickly; he wanted to return to academic life. Though he was flattered by the offers from the east – Harvard, Princeton, Columbia – what he wanted most of all was to return to either Berkeley or Caltech, or both. As he explained in a letter to Conant, rejecting the Harvard offer, ‘I would like to go back to California for the rest of my days’ because ‘I have a sense of belonging there which I will probably not get over.’

  Nevertheless, as his letters of August to Deutsch, Lawrence and Lauritsen had revealed, he had serious misgivings about both Berkeley and Caltech. In letters to Sproul and Birge written at the end of September, he asked them to say frankly whether, in the light of the quarrels he had had with officials from the University of California during his war work, he would be entirely welcome at Berkeley. Both assured him that he would find an extremely warm welcome there, but he remained unconvinced. His doubts about Caltech were more easily overcome and on 16 October, the day he resigned from Los Alamos, he wrote to William Houston, the chair of the physics department at Caltech, formally accepting the offer of a professorship of physics and promising to arrive in Pasadena during the first week of November. For the moment, nothing was decided about Berkeley. He had not actually resigned his position there, so the door remained open for him to return. For the time being, his leave of absence was extended, giving him more time to decide whether he wanted to return.

  In the meantime, after giving his ALAS speech, he and Kitty drove to California. Leaving Kitty in Berkeley, Oppenheimer went on to Pasadena, where he stayed as a guest of the Tolmans. For the following term this was to be the pattern: Oppenheimer spending one or two nights a week in Pasadena, while Kitty and the children remained in Berkeley. At Caltech, he later claimed: ‘I did actually give a course, but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.’ Indeed, it is difficult to see how he could possibly have given a course. As well as arriving late, he was called back to Washington several times to give evidence to McMahon’s Senate special committee. ‘I was sort of reluctant to do it,’ he later said, ‘on the ground that I hoped to stay put. But I came back.’

  What compelled him to keep going back to Washington, despite the strong urge to ‘stay put’, was the hope that he might have some influence in directing US policy away from the unilateralism of Truman’s public utterances and towards the internationalism espoused by most scientists. The gulf between scientists and politicians, and the horror with which scientists contemplated military control over scientific research, were increased at the end of November 1945, when newspapers reported that US forces in Japan had seized and destroyed five cyclotrons that belonged to Japanese universities. The machines were cut to pieces with welding torches and then the fragmented parts
were buried deep in the Pacific Ocean. The brutality, the incomprehension and the naked stupidity of this act filled scientists everywhere with revulsion and ended for ever any chance of atomic scientists in the States agreeing to allow the US army any role in directing and organizing their research.

  In his efforts to push forward an internationalist perspective on atomic energy, Oppenheimer discovered that he had an extremely welcome ally. Isidor Rabi, it turned out, had been thinking along exactly the same lines. Rabi was then living in Riverside Drive, where Oppenheimer grew up, and, when Rabi was on the East Coast Oppenheimer would often stay with him. ‘Oppenheimer and I met frequently and discussed these questions thoroughly,’ Rabi later told Jeremy Bernstein. ‘I remember one meeting with him, on Christmas Day of 1945, in my apartment. From the window of my study we could watch blocks of ice floating past on the Hudson.’ By the end of that evening Rabi and Oppenheimer had arrived at a plan for taking control of atomic-energy policy out of the hands of individual governments and giving it to the international community as a whole.

  In the New Year of 1946, Oppenheimer was provided with an opportunity of putting his and Rabi’s plan into effect when he was appointed on to a Board of Consultants advising a special committee drawn up by Secretary Byrnes. The committee was charged with the task of drawing up a proposal for international control of nuclear weapons and was chaired by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. He appointed as chair of the Board of Consultants a liberal New Dealer, David Lilienthal. From Oppenheimer’s point of view, Lilienthal turned out to be a perfect choice, not least because he developed a respect for Oppenheimer that bordered on hero worship.