Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  By the time he discovered the make-up of the AEC, Oppenheimer himself had already been interviewed by the FBI, in what was both a follow-up to the Bureau’s interviews with Chevalier and Eltenton and, presumably, a precautionary move prior to Oppenheimer’s involvement in the work of Lilienthal’s commission. Given that he knew his phone was being bugged by the FBI, it cannot have come as much of a surprise to Oppenheimer when FBI agents arrived at his Berkeley office to interview him, especially as, by then, he had already heard from Chevalier about his ordeal in June.

  In his book, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, Chevalier describes going to a cocktail party at the Oppenheimers’ house, at which he told Oppenheimer about his FBI interview. He does not give a date, but as he describes it as ‘a kind of house-rewarming’, it is natural to suppose that it took place sometime in August 1946, soon after Oppenheimer’s return to Berkeley from Washington. Chevalier remembers that he and his wife ‘had been asked to come early, so as to have a private visit before the rest of the guests arrived’. The FBI interview was so much on his mind, Chevalier recalls, ‘that after the first exchange of greetings I almost immediately broached the subject. Opje’s face at once darkened. “Let’s go outside,” he said.’

  Out in the garden, away from the FBI’s ‘technical surveillance’, Chevalier gave Oppenheimer a detailed account of the interview. Oppenheimer, he says, ‘was obviously greatly upset. He asked me endless questions. We paced back and forth on the uneven ground.’ Oppenheimer told Chevalier that he had been right to tell the FBI about his 1942 conversation with him concerning Eltenton, and, in turn, sought Chevalier’s reassurance that he had been right to tell the FBI about the same thing. ‘I had to report that conversation, you know . . .’ he told Chevalier. Chevalier was not altogether convinced of the necessity of that, and when he asked Oppenheimer about the alleged approaches to three scientists, Oppenheimer ‘gave no answer. He was extremely nervous and tense.’ When Kitty arrived to tell him that the other guests were arriving, he dismissed her and continued asking Chevalier questions. Then, when Kitty appeared a second time, this time more insistent, ‘Opje let loose with a flood of foul language, called Kitty vile names and told her to mind her goddam business and to get the . . . hell out.’ It was, Chevalier reports, ‘the first time I had seen Opje behave immoderately. I could not imagine what could have provoked his intemperate outburst.’

  It was about a month later, on 5 September, that Oppenheimer himself was interviewed by Bureau agents – the same ones who had interviewed Eltenton in June. However much it had unnerved and disturbed him, his conversation with Chevalier had at least given Oppenheimer some idea of what he might say to limit the damage he had done with his careless interview with Pash back in 1943. The story he told was the one that the FBI had heard from Chevalier and Eltenton. With regard to the part of the story that Chevalier and Eltenton repeatedly and consistently denied – the part about the mysterious three scientists – Oppenheimer now claimed that this was a concoction on his part, designed to protect Chevalier’s identity. How, exactly, it was supposed to do that was something that he failed to explain throughout his life, despite being asked to do so many, many times. Oppenheimer told the agents that he would be reluctant to testify against Chevalier, and that he had not told Chevalier that he had mentioned his name in connection with the alleged espionage incident (which, of course, was not true). He also gave the surely false impression of being surprised that Joe Weinberg was a communist. Meanwhile, in a repetition of the strategy used with Chevalier and Eltenton, Weinberg himself was at the same time being interviewed by the FBI. He too was less than entirely honest, denying ever having met Steve Nelson at Nelson’s house. As the FBI now had documented evidence that both Oppenheimer and Weinberg had provided false statements, Hoover evidently thought there was a case for prosecution and sent copies of these interviews to the Attorney General. To Hoover’s great disappointment, the Attorney General decided against prosecution. As his agents continued their surveillance of Oppenheimer, Hoover bided his time, confident that another chance to use his ‘derogatory information’ about Oppenheimer would present itself.

  As many people noted at the time, the four commissioners chosen to work with Lilienthal on the AEC were an odd selection in that, apart from Bacher, none of them knew very much about atomic energy. How were a banker, a farmer and a businessman supposed to make informed and expert judgements on such things as the development of civilian uses of atomic energy or the nature and size of the USA’s arsenal of atomic weapons? How were they expected to oversee the future development of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford? The answer was to appoint a panel of experts to advise them. This panel was called the General Advisory Committee, and, unlike the AEC itself, it was packed with experts from the very top of the field. Eight people in total were chosen to sit on the General Advisory Committee, and an extremely impressive collection they were: James Conant, Isidor Rabi, Glenn Seaborg, Cyril Smith, Lee DuBridge (the president of Caltech), Hood Worthington of Du Pont (who had built the nuclear reactors at Hanford), Hartley Rowe of United Fruit and, of course, Oppenheimer.

  In December 1946, Lewis Strauss flew to California to meet Oppenheimer. He went not only to discuss AEC business, but also to make Oppenheimer an offer. In his capacity as a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Strauss had been authorised by the other trustees to offer Oppenheimer the job of director of the institute, with effect from October 1947. The English-literature scholar Frank Aydelotte, who had been the institute’s director since 1939, had earlier in the year announced his intention of retiring, and, after a survey of faculty members, it emerged that the most popular choice to replace him was Oppenheimer.

  Rather prematurely, on 23 December, the New York Times reported that Oppenheimer would be joining the Institute as director the following autumn. In fact, Oppenheimer had not yet made up his mind, and, somewhat to Strauss’s annoyance, would not do so for another three months. There are strong signs that uppermost in his mind during this long deliberation was the question of whether or not he could attract exciting young physicists to Princeton. When Strauss reported back to the Institute’s trustees, he told them: ‘Dr Oppenheimer has requested that in addition to administrative duties, he be permitted to devote some of his time to teaching in order that he may remain in direct contact with young scholars.’ As the institute was a research-only establishment and did not actually have any students, this request was met by asking Princeton University to select a handful of graduate students for Oppenheimer to teach.

  It was not only bright graduate students that Oppenheimer wanted contact with, however. He also longed to discuss physics with the brightest young research scientists who, having completed their graduate work, were beginning their careers. As Oppenheimer knew from his own experience as a postdoctoral student, these were the people who would be taking the next big steps in the subject. These young people, however, were always in demand, and, at the end of the war, there was extremely tight competition for the rising stars. One of Oppenheimer’s frustrations with Berkeley was the failure of its physics department to attract, or even to attempt to attract, Richard Feynman, about whom Oppenheimer had written to Birge as early as November 1943. Feynman was, Oppenheimer told Birge, ‘in every way so outstanding and clearly recognized as such, that I think it appropriate to call his name to your attention, with the urgent request that you consider him for a position in the department at the earliest time that that is possible.’ Six months later he wrote again, stressing the urgency of the situation in the light of the fact that Feynman had already been offered a position at Cornell. On 5 October 1944, Oppenheimer wrote rather testily to Birge to tell him that it was too late: Feynman had accepted the position at Cornell. ‘I shall of course,’ he told him, ‘do my best to call to your attention any men who are available and whom we should want to recommend strongly for the department.’

  Feynman’s chief rival as leading young physicist in the United States
was Julian Schwinger, who was at this time the subject of an undignified struggle to secure his services between van Vleck at Harvard and Rabi at Columbia. When Schwinger visited Berkeley at the end of 1946, Oppenheimer could not resist trying to recruit him. ‘Would you like to come to Berkeley?’ Oppenheimer asked him directly. As it happened, Schwinger rather liked the idea of living in California, but he very much did not like the idea of working with Oppenheimer, because of the danger of being overwhelmed by him. As Schwinger later remembered the conversation: ‘And then he said – and this still bothers me – “Would it change your opinion any if you learned that I wasn’t staying here?” He did not tell me that he was going off to Princeton.’

  Schwinger, though tempted (especially after he knew that Oppenheimer would no longer be at Berkeley), turned the offer down and went to Harvard instead. Trying to explain the decision in later life, he said: ‘I still said no, and now I’m not sure why. But I have the feeling that I was shocked by his duplicity.’

  Another rising young physicist at this time, though significantly less well established and less revered than Feynman and Schwinger, was Abraham Pais, a Dutch Jewish physicist who had worked with Bohr in Copenhagen and had been invited to spend the year 1946–7 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. As a young physicist who had earned Bohr’s respect, Pais was in great demand and, within a few months of being in the States, had received job offers from the University of Illinois, UCLA, the University of North Carolina and Columbia. Despite these offers, Pais continued to assume that when his year at Princeton was up, he would return to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen.

  Oppenheimer, however, had other ideas. Pais had met Oppenheimer within a few days of arriving in the US in September 1946, when he gave a paper at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, which that year was held in New York. At the meeting, Pais naturally gravitated towards his fellow Dutchmen, Uhlenbeck, Goudsmit and Kramers, the last of whom, during one of the sessions, scribbled a note, saying: ‘Turn around and pay your respects to Robert Oppenheimer.’ Pais recalls:

  I turned and there, right behind me, sat the great man, who up to that moment had been known to me only from newspaper articles. He grinned pleasantly at me and stretched out his hand, which I shook. Most remarkably – or so I thought – he sat there in a short-sleeved open shirt.

  Pais’s second meeting with Oppenheimer came on the last day of January 1947, when he attended that year’s meeting of the American Physical Society, again in New York, but this time at Columbia. On that occasion Oppenheimer had been invited to give the annual Richtmyer Memorial Lecture, his subject being ‘Creation and Destruction of Mesons’. Pais remembers:

  Oppenheimer spoke before a packed house. He was a rhetor rather than a speaker. Then, as on numerous occasions, I was struck by his priestly style. It was, one might say, as if he were aiming at initiating his audience into Nature’s divine mysteries.

  After the lecture, Pais went to say hello to Oppenheimer, who said that he had something urgent he needed to discuss with him. Would Pais wait until he could disengage himself from the crowd? ‘As I stood waiting,’ Pais later recalled:

  I tried to play back what he had just said, and I recall my thought: What the Hell do I remember about his talk? I had been intrigued, nay moved, by his words, but now I found myself unable to reconstruct anything of substance. I would now say that this was not just a matter of stupidity on my part.

  ‘Let’s walk down Broadway and find a bar,’ Oppenheimer suggested to Pais when he finally succeeded in shaking off the crowd. Having found a bar, Oppenheimer told Pais that he had been offered the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study and pleaded with him to keep open the possibility of remaining there. A few months went by, and then in early April 1947, having decided to accept an offer from Harvard, Pais received a call from Oppenheimer. ‘I have just accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study,’ Oppenheimer told him, ‘and I desperately hope that you will be there next year, so that we can begin building up theoretical physics there.’ Flattered by the personal attention and the pleading tone, Pais changed his mind about Harvard and accepted.

  The job at Princeton held many attractions for Oppenheimer, among which were the small, interdisciplinary nature of the establishment, the chance it gave him – as he had done when he first arrived at Berkeley – to build an important centre of theoretical physics and, not least, the fact that it would relieve him of the necessity to make so many cross-continental air flights. Flying so often from east to west, spending so much of his life on aeroplanes and in airports, was wearing him out. Thus, to a certain extent, his appointment as director of the Institute for Advanced Study and his appointment as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee were linked: accepting the first would enable him to fulfil more easily his duties for the second.

  On 8 January 1947, Oppenheimer was in Washington for the first meeting of the GAC. He arrived late, only to discover that the others had voted him, in his absence, their chairman. For the next few years the GAC was to be, in effect, Oppenheimer’s committee and, given the balance of intellectual power between the two panels, this meant also that his was to be the dominant voice in the AEC. One might have expected him to use that influence to pursue the internationalist perspective that he had inherited from Bohr and that he had worked so hard to push during the previous year. However, the failure of the negotiations at the UN had deeply disillusioned him. True, he had not liked the way that Baruch had modified the proposals or the belligerent way in which he had negotiated for them, but much more disillusioning was the intransigence of the Soviet Union. When Hans Bethe came to Berkeley that January, he was surprised, as Chevalier had been, by the vehemence of Oppenheimer’s anti-Soviet views. The two of them, Bethe remembered, had ‘quite long conversations about the fate of the atomic energy control plan. He told me then that he had given up all hope that the Russians would agree to a plan.’

  Particularly he pointed out how much the Russian plan was designed to serve the Russian interests and no other interests, namely, to deprive us immediately of the one weapon which would stop the Russians from going into Western Europe, if they so chose, and not give us any guarantee on the other hand that there would really be a control of atomic energy, nor give us any guarantee that we would be safe from Russian atomic attack at some later time.

  FBI microphones would have recorded this conversation, as they would have recorded Oppenheimer expressing similar views on very many occasions, none of which dented J. Edgar Hoover’s apparently immovable conviction that Oppenheimer was a communist sympathiser and a potential Soviet spy. His appointment to the GAC gave Hoover the opportunity to launch a renewed investigation into Oppenheimer. Indeed, it presented him with the duty of doing so, it being one of the measures of the McMahon Act that all AEC employees who had previously been cleared to work on the Manhattan Project had to be investigated by the FBI. So, in February 1947, FBI agents interviewed dozens of Oppenheimer’s friends and colleagues and, in the light of the information gathered (none of which gave any new grounds for suspicion), a fresh dossier on Oppenheimer was written. Before sending this to the AEC, Hoover sent it, along with another dossier on Frank Oppenheimer, to General Vaughan, Truman’s military aide. ‘You will note,’ Hoover wrote in his accompanying letter, ‘that both these individuals have a good overall knowledge of the Atom Bomb Project, and that both have been strongly alleged to be members of the Communist Party.’

  About a week later, on Saturday 8 March, Hoover sent the same document to the AEC. The following Monday the commissioners met to discuss what to do about the FBI file. Conant and Bush announced themselves unconcerned; there was nothing in this new dossier, they said, that added to what they had seen, and dismissed, in 1942. When asked for his opinion, the AEC’s lawyer, Joseph Volpe, replied:

  Well, if anyone were to print this stuff in this file and say it is about the top civilian advisor to the Atomic Energy Commis
sion, there would be terrible trouble. His background is awful. But your responsibility is to determine whether this man is a security risk now, and except for the Chevalier incident, I don’t see anything in this file to establish that he might be.

  The commissioner most shocked by the FBI’s revelations was Lewis Strauss, who, Volpe recalls, was ‘visibly shaken’ by them. Oppenheimer had told him the previous December, in connection with the offer of the Princeton job, that there was ‘derogatory information’ about him, but Strauss had not seemed worried. Now he and Lilienthal, as chair of the commissioners, were forced to take this information seriously.

  On 11 March, the AEC members decided to take the issue straight to the top and went to the White House to tell the President about the FBI suspicions of Oppenheimer. Of course Truman already knew about those suspicions and was not very concerned about them. At that particular moment Truman was much more concerned about the crises in Greece and Turkey, both of which looked in danger of falling under communist rule, becoming part of what Churchill had described as ‘the Soviet Sphere’. In response to this threat, on 12 March 1947, Truman announced to Congress what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the policy of lending support to ‘free peoples’ threatened by communism. As it happened, Oppenheimer was in Washington at this time and received from Acheson a preview of the Truman Doctrine. ‘He wanted me to be quite clear,’ Oppenheimer later said, ‘that we were entering into an adversary relationship with the Soviets, and whatever we did in the atomic talk we should bear that in mind.’ Soon after this, Baruch’s successor as US spokesman on atomic energy at the UN, Frederick Osborn, was surprised to hear Oppenheimer say that the US should simply withdraw from talks with the Soviet Union, which, he said, would never agree to a workable plan.