Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Garrison, meanwhile, was unable to study the FBI file since he did not have clearance. In January he applied for clearance on behalf of himself and his two colleagues, Herb Marks and Sam Silverman. When the AEC replied that they were willing to clear Garrison but not Marks and Silverman, Garrison responded by withdrawing his application for clearance. It was a fatal error, Garrison’s justification for which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what he and Oppenheimer were up against. ‘We thought,’ Garrison said:

  that if we had clearance, the Personal Security Board might more readily be drawn into an examination of the technical pros and cons of proceeding with H-bomb development and with other aspects of defense related to it. They could thereby lose the main point, which is that if Dr Oppenheimer’s motives were honourable, his technical recommendations were irrelevant.

  From the start, Garrison’s defence of Oppenheimer took the ‘whole man’ approach, which sought to rise above the ‘dredging up of all these little incidents from his past’ by relying on the testimony of ‘men of the highest integrity and reputation’, who would vouch that Oppenheimer – considered, as it were, in the round – could be entrusted with atomic secrets. If he had known what Robb’s strategy was going to be, Garrison would have realised that this ‘whole man’ approach was useless, and that the possibility of ‘an examination of the technical pros and cons of proceeding with H-bomb development’ was the least of his worries.

  For, although Borden in his letter to Hoover makes much of Oppenheimer’s post-war doubts about the hydrogen bomb, and despite the fact that it was Oppenheimer’s attitude to the hydrogen bomb that had aroused the suspicion and hostility of most of the people Robb would call upon to testify against Oppenheimer – Griggs, Teller, Alvarez, and so on – it was never Robb’s intention to rest his case on those doubts. Indeed, concentrating on Oppenheimer’s views about the hydrogen bomb might be counterproductive; it might give the impression that Oppenheimer was being attacked for his opinions, which might arouse sympathy for him.

  No, Robb’s case against Oppenheimer would centre squarely upon the Chevalier Affair as a cast-iron demonstration of Oppenheimer’s lack of veracity. There was an obvious drawback to this approach, which was that Oppenheimer had been cleared several times after it had been known that he had delayed reporting the Chevalier Affair and that he had lied about it. However, between them, Strauss and Robb developed a way of overcoming this drawback, based on the claim that, since Oppenheimer had been cleared, the rules for granting and maintaining security clearance had been changed.

  This is why the letter from Nichols mentions Executive Order 10450 of 27 April 1953, which, the letter claims, ‘requires the suspension of employment of any individual where there exists information indicating that his employment may not be clearly consistent with the interests of the national security’. The issues at stake here have been discussed very illuminatingly in print by Harold Green, who was a legal officer with the AEC at the time of the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance and who, in fact, drafted the letter that was signed by Nichols. In an article he published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1977 entitled ‘The Oppenheimer Case: A Study in the Abuse of Law’, Green emphasises the importance of what he describes as ‘the ideological struggle over the concept of security’ that was being fought at the time of Oppenheimer’s suspension.

  The struggle was between upholders of two different concepts of security: the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept and the ‘whole man’ concept. The phrase ‘Caesar’s wife’ comes from the motto ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’, which dates from the time that Julius Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, was suspected of adultery. Caesar divorced her, not because he believed her to be guilty, but merely because the question of her guilt had been raised. ‘My wife,’ he famously declared, ‘ought not even to be under suspicion.’

  The ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept of security, in Green’s words, held that ‘if there was any significant derogatory information at all that might be true, clearance should not be granted; and there was no need to waste time and money in trying to find out whether or not the information was true’. The ‘whole man’ approach, on the other hand, held that ‘it was unfair to those enmeshed in the security net and to the atomic energy program itself to deny security clearance merely on the basis of derogatory information without giving the individual an opportunity to set the record straight and without considering favourable information that might outweigh the blemishes, as well as the importance of the individual to the nuclear program’.

  Among the upholders of the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept were J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss, but, despite this, it was the ‘whole man’ concept that prevailed at the AEC, which is how Oppenheimer ‘and others with blemished backgrounds’ (in Green’s words) were granted clearance. Executive Order 10450, however, was, according to Green, ‘widely interpreted as requiring agencies to use the “Caesar’s wife” approach’. The AEC, though, was an exception to this requirement, as was made explicitly clear in a letter to the AEC from the Deputy Attorney General, William P. Rogers, dated 8 June 1953, in which he reassured the AEC that, as its pre-existing security programme ‘exceeds the minimum standards of Executive Order 10450’, no change was required in the AEC’s approach to security. In other words, the claim that the rules had changed since Oppenheimer had previously been cleared was spurious. There was no requirement on Strauss and Nichols to apply to Oppenheimer the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept of security that was widely believed to be embodied in Executive Order 10450.

  When it came to choosing the members of the Security Board, Strauss and the lawyer acting on his behalf, William Mitchell, ignored Harold Green’s advice to go for people with experience of AEC Personal Security Boards and instead selected people on the basis that their hostility to Oppenheimer could more or less be assumed. Indeed, says Green: ‘My knowledge that a “hanging jury” was being chosen was one of the reasons that I asked to be relieved of any further role in the case.’ (The other reason was his shocked disapproval of the tactic of bugging Oppenheimer’s conversations with his defence team and then making those conversations available to Robb.) The first man to be selected for the board, and the man chosen to chair it, was Gordon Gray, the politically conservative president of the University of South Carolina. The other two members were the equally conservative Thomas Morgan, chairman of the Sperry Corporation, and Ward Evans, a retired chemistry professor, who had served on AEC security panels before and had a record of repeatedly voting to deny clearance.

  During the first two months of 1954, Oppenheimer, Garrison and Marks worked on their ‘whole man’ defence, which had two main strands. The first was an autobiography written by Oppenheimer that would serve as his reply to Nichols’s letter, arguing that the derogatory information listed in this letter ‘cannot be fairly understood except in the context of my life and my work’. Second, Garrison would call a series of eminent witnesses to vouch for Oppenheimer’s character and loyalty. The list of witnesses assembled for this purpose was indeed impressive, including as it did ten present or former members of the GAC, five former AEC commissioners, two Nobel Prize-winning physicists and a third who would win it some years later, two Los Alamos security officers and the head of the Manhattan Project himself, General Groves. The list of witnesses on the other side was much less impressive, consisting of four scientists from the University of California, two air-force officers, an air-force scientist, one security officer and William Borden.

  Apart from the security officer, Boris Pash, all the witnesses in the anti-Oppenheimer camp were restricted to giving testimony that related to the post-war period – concerning Oppenheimer’s alleged retardation of the hydrogen-bomb project, his attempts to undermine the policy of massive retaliation, his opposition to the Livermore laboratory, and so on – none of which had a very large role to play in Robb’s strategy. Besides the reasons detailed above for not giving prominence to Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydr
ogen bomb, a new and powerful reason for not doing so was provided on 1 March 1954, when the Bravo test at Bikini Atoll seemed to provide a vivid and lethal demonstration that Oppenheimer and Conant had been right all along: a hydrogen bomb was simply too powerful to be considered as a weapon of war.

  The device tested at Bikini, under the supervision of Los Alamos rather than the new Livermore laboratory, was a Ulam–Teller design H-bomb, using enriched lithium as its fuel. Like the Soviet device tested the previous August, this was a usable bomb, but, like the Mike blast of November 1952, its yield was measured in megatons rather than kilotons. Indeed, at fifteen megatons, its yield was more than twice what had been predicted, and to this day it remains the largest explosive ever detonated by the United States. It was this test that alerted the world in dramatic fashion to the awe-inspiring power of the H-bomb, and, in particular, to the dangers of radioactive fallout.

  More than seventy miles away from Bikini at the time of the blast, a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru (‘Lucky Dragon’), was trawling for tuna when its crew reported seeing ‘flashes of fire, as bright as the sun itself, rising to the sky’. Six minutes later they heard the sound of the explosion, ‘like the sound of many thunders rolled into one’. Then they saw a cloud rise in the sky, and about two or three hours later a fine white ash began to fall. Within a few days the entire crew of twenty-three fishermen was feeling unwell, and when they arrived back in Tokyo they were diagnosed with severe radiation sickness. In September, one of them was to die of the radiation poisoning. Already in March, six months earlier, Life magazine was reporting the incident under the heading ‘First Casualties of the H-Bomb’: ‘The scientists had warned of the power of the hydrogen bomb, but in abstract language that did not fully register with Americans until last week when fantastic news came filtering across the Pacific.’ A subsequent editorial asked: ‘Is the strategy of retaliation as realistic as it seemed before March 1?’ Clearly, this was not a good time to advance an argument based on the assumption that the H-bomb was self-evidently a good thing that made the United States safe, or to suggest that to doubt the wisdom of the policy of massive retaliation was evidence of being dangerously disloyal.

  The day after the Bravo test, Garrison and Marks went to see Strauss to offer a deal that would make the security hearing unnecessary: if Strauss and Nichols would withdraw the letter of charges and restore Oppenheimer’s clearance, Oppenheimer would resign his consultancy. Strauss, having rigged the process to the point where he could hardly lose, was having none of it. What they had proposed, he told Garrison and Marks, was ‘out of the question’. Either Oppenheimer offered his resignation now, or the hearing would go ahead.

  So, on 4 March, Oppenheimer put the finishing touches to his long autobiographical letter to Nichols, in which he formally requested a hearing. After detailing his involvement in communist front organisations in the 1930s, his personal connections with communists, his work at Los Alamos and his post-war work as a government advisor, Oppenheimer’s letter ended:

  In preparing this letter, I have reviewed two decades of my life. I have recalled instances where I acted unwisely. What I have hoped was, not that I could wholly avoid error, but that I might learn from it. What I have learned has, I think, made me more fit to serve my country.

  The letter was delivered to the AEC the next day, and shortly thereafter a date for the hearing was announced: 12 April 1954.

  The hearing was to last three and a half gruelling weeks, during which events in Oppenheimer’s past were subjected to excruciatingly intense scrutiny. Because of this, and because Oppenheimer had chosen to reply to the original charges with an autobiography, the hearings were sometimes regarded as laying bare his life. He himself, however, always reacted strongly against this notion. He said towards the end of his life: ‘The records printed in so many hundred pages of fine print in 1954. My big year, I’ve heard people say, and my life story complete in those records. But it isn’t so. Almost nothing that was important to me came out there, almost nothing that meant anything to me is in those records.’

  He also reacted angrily to the suggestion that the hearing was a ‘tragedy’. It was, he said, much more of a farce. He had a point. There were indeed several farcical features to the proceedings. For example, because his counsel never received the emergency clearance that had been granted to Robb, whenever – as happened frequently – Robb read from classified documents, Garrison and Marks had to leave the room. Moreover, because Robb had access to documents that Garrison had never seen, and could never see, and as he had foreknowledge of everything Garrison and Marks planned to do, whereas they had no knowledge at all of what he intended to do, the element of surprise was always on his side. There was, in addition, the farcical situation that Oppenheimer’s side had prepared their defence in ignorance of the rules of the game. They thought they had to show that, considered as a whole, Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen of the United States and a valuable person to consult on atomic matters, not that he was, as Caesar’s wife should have been, above suspicion.

  The first day of the hearing, Monday 12 April, was taken up mainly by the reading out first of Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer and then of Oppenheimer’s long, autobiographical reply, at the end of which the chairman, Gordon Gray, reminded everyone that ‘this proceeding is an inquiry and not in the nature of a trial’. During the second day, Oppenheimer, prompted by gentle questions from Garrison, gave a detailed account of his work with the GAC and the development of his views on the hydrogen bomb. When Robb had a chance to cross-examine Oppenheimer on the third day, 14 April, he revealed that his interests lay elsewhere. Throughout the morning he fired questions at Oppenheimer, not about the hydrogen bomb, but about his connections with communists, with Frank, Lomanitz, Bohm and Peters; then, at the end of the morning, just before lunch, he moved in for the kill. ‘Doctor,’ he began:

  on page 22 of your letter of March 4, 1954, you speak of what for convenience I will call the Eltenton–Chevalier incident. Would you please, sir, tell the board as accurately as you can, and in as much detail as you can, exactly what Chevalier said to you, and you said to Chevalier, on the occasion that you mention on page 22 of your answer?

  Oppenheimer then offered the following account:

  One day, and I believe you have the time fixed better than I do, in the winter of 1942–3, Haakon Chevalier came to our home. It was, I believe, for dinner, but possibly for a drink. When I went out into the pantry, Chevalier followed me or came with me to help me. He said, ‘I saw George Eltenton recently.’ Maybe he asked me if I remembered him. That Eltenton had told him that he had a method, he had means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists. He didn’t describe the means. I thought I said, ‘But that is treason,’ but I am not sure. I said anyway something, ‘This is a terrible thing to do.’ Chevalier said or expressed complete agreement. That was the end of it. It was a very brief conversation.

  After lunch, Robb, following a few more questions about Lomanitz, returned to the ‘Eltenton–Chevalier incident’, asking Oppenheimer about his initial approach to Lieutenant Johnson in Berkeley, in which he told Johnson that Eltenton was a man to watch. When he was asked by Johnson how he knew Eltenton to be involved in suspicious activities, Oppenheimer volunteered to the hearing, ‘I invented a cock-and-bull story.’ Robb, however, refused to pick up on this straight away; he wanted the story to unfold at his pace. Ignoring, for the moment, Oppenheimer’s ready confession of having lied, Robb led him slowly through the order of events. The day after Oppenheimer had spoken to Johnson, Robb established, he spoke to Boris Pash:

  Robb. Did you tell Pash the truth about this thing?

  Oppenheimer. No.

  Robb. You lied to him?

  Oppenheimer. Yes.

  Robb. What did you tell Pash that was not true?

  Oppenheimer. That Eltenton had attempted to approach members of the project, three members of the project, through intermediaries.

  Robb. What else
did you tell him that wasn’t true?

  Oppenheimer. That is all I really remember.

  Robb. That is all? Did you tell Pash that Eltenton had attempted to approach three members of the project?

  Oppenheimer. Through intermediaries.

  Robb. Intermediaries?

  Oppenheimer. Through an intermediary.

  Robb. So that we may be clear, did you discuss with or disclose to Pash the identity of Chevalier?

  Oppenheimer. No.

  Robb. Let us refer, then, for the time being, to Chevalier as X.

  Oppenheimer. All right.

  Robb. Did you tell Pash that X had approached three persons on the project?

  Oppenheimer. I am not clear whether I said there were three Xs or that X approached three people

  Robb. Didn’t you say that X had approached three people?

  Oppenheimer. Probably.

  Robb. Why did you do that, Doctor?