by Ray Monk
Oppenheimer. Because I was an idiot.
Robb. Is that your only explanation, Doctor?
Oppenheimer. I was reluctant to mention Chevalier.
Robb. Yes.
Oppenheimer. No doubt somewhat reluctant to mention myself.
Robb. Yes. But why would you tell him that Chevalier had gone to three people?
Oppenheimer. I have no explanation for that except the one already offered.
To make matters worse for Oppenheimer, Robb then took him through all the details of his conversation with Pash, highlighting each one of his false and unnecessary elaborations on his story about Eltenton – his mention of a contact at the Soviet consulate, of the possibility of microfilming documents, of their being two people working at Los Alamos who had been approached, and so on – all of which Robb got Oppenheimer to admit were not true. ‘Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr Oppenheimer,’ Robb summed up, ‘that according to your testimony now you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?’ ‘Right,’ Oppenheimer replied. From that moment onwards his ‘veracity’ lay in ruins.
But Robb was still not finished. Turning to Oppenheimer’s secret rendezvous with Jean Tatlock in 1943, Robb had another damaging confession (previously quoted) to wring out of him:
Robb. You spent the night with her, didn’t you?
Oppenheimer. Yes.
Robb. That is when you were working on a secret war project?
Oppenheimer. Yes.
Robb. Did you think that consistent with good security?
Oppenheimer. It was, as a matter of fact. Not a word – it was not good practice.fn69
Though there were another three weeks of the hearing to go, the decision was never in doubt after this merciless exposure by Robb of Oppenheimer’s repeated dishonesty and of his poor judgement. On the evening after this exchange, when Robb got home, he told his wife: ‘I’ve just seen a man destroy himself on the witness stand.’
Now, it did not matter how many people Garrison produced to vouch for Oppenheimer’s loyalty, or how eminent they were. All Robb had to do was tell the witness about the Chevalier Affair and ask, for example, whether they would have reported the incident sooner than Oppenheimer had done, or whether they considered what Oppenheimer had said about the affair to be indicative of an honest and reliable character, or some other variation on that theme. Oppenheimer had lied, and he had lied several times, and he had admitted that he had lied several times, after which Robb’s task was simply to keep reminding the hearing of these palpable facts.
The appearance of Groves on the fourth day should have provided an important boost to Oppenheimer’s camp, but Robb was able to undermine all the supportive things Groves had to say about Oppenheimer with one simple question: ‘General, in the light of your experience with security matters and in the light of your knowledge of the file pertaining to Dr Oppenheimer, would you clear Dr Oppenheimer today?’ To which Groves felt obliged to tell the truth, which was: ‘I would not clear Dr Oppenheimer today if I were a member of the Commission.’
The following day, John Lansdale, by this time a practising lawyer no longer in the army, appeared for Oppenheimer and showed himself ready, able and willing to stand up to Robb. When Robb drew attention to the fact that the other security officers at Los Alamos, including Peer de Silva, were more suspicious of Oppenheimer than Lansdale, he tried further to maintain that their view was somehow more authoritative than Lansdale’s. To this, Lansdale reacted firmly and combatively:
Robb. He [de Silva] was certainly more of a professional than you were, wasn’t he, Colonel?
Lansdale. In what field?
Robb. The field he was working in, security.
Lansdale. No.
Robb. No?
Lansdale. No.
Robb. He was a graduate of West Point, wasn’t he?
Lansdale. Certainly. I am a graduate of VMI [Virginia Military Institute], too. You want to fight about that?
Robb was, however, able to nullify Lansdale’s support for Oppenheimer in one crucial exchange. Prompted by Garrison, Lansdale stated that, in spite of the Chevalier Affair, he still maintained his belief in Oppenheimer’s general truthfulness: ‘I don’t believe that he lied to us except about this one incident – my general impression is that his veracity is good. I don’t know of any other incident.’ Robb’s response to this was as effective as it was cunning:
Robb. Colonel Lansdale, as a lawyer are you familiar with the legal maxim, ‘Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus’?
Lansdale. Yes, I am. Like all legal maxims, it is a generalization, and not of particular significance when applied to specifics.
Robb. When you are trying a jury case and the veracity of a witness is in question, do you request the court to give an instruction on that subject?
Lansdale. Oh, certainly; don’t you?
Robb. Certainly, I want to know what you do.
Lansdale. The instruction usually is that the jury may, but does not have to, take that as an indication, and the judgment is to be exercised in the particular case.
Robb. And when you are trying a jury case and you examine a witness on the opposite side and you demonstrate that he has lied, don’t you argue to the jury from that that they should disregard his evidence?
Lansdale. You are speaking now as to what I as an advocate do?
Robb. Yes.
Lansdale. It depends on circumstances; usually I do.
Robb. Sure. Any lawyer worth his salt would.
The following week saw a procession of pro-Oppenheimer witnesses: Gordon Dean, Hans Bethe, George Kennan, James Conant, Enrico Fermi, David Lilienthal, Isidor Rabi, Norris Bradbury, Hartley Rowe, Lee DuBridge and Vannevar Bush. By this time, however, a pattern had been established that rendered their testimony all but useless: first, they would be led by Garrison or Marks through their avowals of Oppenheimer’s loyalty and truthfulness, then Robb would use the Chevalier Affair to re-establish Oppenheimer’s lack of truthfulness. So established did this pattern become that, sometimes, the members of the board would raise the matter of the Chevalier Affair, as it were, on Robb’s behalf. When Conant appeared, for example, it was Ward Evans who asked him: ‘Dr Conant, if you had been approached by someone for security information, wouldn’t you have reported it just as quickly as you could?’ To which, of course, Conant had to reply: ‘I think I would have, yes.’ Perhaps feeling that Evans had not done it properly, Robb then added: ‘When you did report it, Doctor, you would have told the whole truth about it?’ ‘I hope so,’ replied Conant. ‘I am sure you would,’ concluded Robb.
The hero of the second week was Rabi, who took the opportunity to express his feelings about the hearing. ‘I never hid my opinion from Mr Strauss that I thought that this whole proceeding was a most unfortunate one,’ Rabi said.
That the suspension of the clearance of Dr Oppenheimer was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done. In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you don’t want to consult the guy, you don’t consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance and go through all this sort of thing, he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it. So it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids? This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can’t help but be humiliating, I thought it was a pretty bad show. I still think so.
While the hearing was going on, it was reported and commented upon in the newspapers, often with the assumption that McCarthy had something to do with it. ‘McCarthy has few partisans and enjoys little prestige in the Deep South,’ commented The Southeast, ‘and the Oppenheimer ouster has done little, if anything, to raise his stock.’ During Oppenheimer’s security hearing, in fact, McCart
hy’s ‘stock’ sank to an all-time low, owing to his unwise decision to take on the US army. For five weeks, beginning on 22 April 1954, the entire country was gripped by the televised Army–McCarthy hearings, which marked the beginning of the end of McCarthyism.
Not that the media lost interest in the Oppenheimer case. On 26 April, the first day of the third week of the Oppenheimer hearing, Life magazine carried a story about it, which began with the following vivid and evocative description of Oppenheimer’s arrival at the hearing:
Silently and impassively, a thin, thoughtful man wearing a porkpie hat and accompanied by a policeman and three lawyers walked with hurried step last week through the shabby backdoor courtyard of a Washington office building.
The article was non-committal in its sympathies, but was clear about one thing: ‘Whatever the truth of the charges and whatever the outcome of the inquiry, the situation which involved one of the nation’s most brilliant scientific minds was in itself a national tragedy.’
The third week of the hearing saw the appearance of the anti-Oppenheimer witnesses, though none of them did anything like as much damage to his case as he himself had done on the third day. Wendell Latimer, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley with a long-standing dislike of Oppenheimer, testified to Oppenheimer’s ‘astounding’ ability to influence people and his use of that ability to persuade young physicists to become pacifists and dissuade them from joining the H-bomb programme. General Wilson from the air force testified to Oppenheimer’s opposition to strategic bombing as being ‘not helpful to national defense’. Kenneth Pitzer, another chemistry professor at Berkeley with a grudge against Oppenheimer, talked without any great authority or conviction about Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and David Griggs cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty on the grounds of the ‘pattern’ of his post-war activities, which seemed to Griggs to point to a desire to undermine the defence of the US.
The two most significant witnesses called by Robb were Luis Alvarez and Edward Teller, both of whom spoke rather cautiously. Alvarez was careful to stress that what he had to say did nothing to impugn Oppenheimer’s loyalty and indeed did very little other than provide, in his own words, ‘corroborative testimony’ to the fact that Oppenheimer was opposed to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, too, stated: ‘I have always assumed, and I now assume that he [Oppenheimer] is loyal to the United States.’ When asked a slightly different question, however – namely, whether he thought Oppenheimer was a ‘security risk’ – Teller answered:
In a great number of cases I have seen Dr Oppenheimer act – understood that Dr Oppenheimer acted – in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent, I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense, I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
When he was asked by Gordon Gray, ‘Do you feel that it would endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Dr Oppenheimer?’ Teller replied:
I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance. If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.
Apart from these two statements from Teller, which, though tentatively expressed, were, in the context of the hearing, extremely powerful, there was very little in the testimony from Robb’s chosen witnesses that would do the Oppenheimer case much damage. Right to the end Robb scored more blows against Oppenheimer in cross-examining Garrison’s witnesses than he did in examining his own. The last pro-Oppenheimer witness was John McCloy, the chairman of Chase National Bank, who had got to know Oppenheimer when they served together on a Soviet–US relations study group. After McCloy had expressed his opinion that Oppenheimer was emphatically not a security risk, Robb developed the following variation on his reliably effective ruse of mentioning, or alluding to, the Chevalier Affair at every turn:
Robb. As far as you know, Mr McCloy, do you have any employee of your bank who has been for any considerable period of time on terms of rather intimate and friendly association with thieves and safecrackers?
McCloy. No, I don’t know of anyone.
Robb. I would like to ask you a few hypothetical questions, if I might, sir. Suppose you had a branch bank manager, and a friend of his came to him one day and said, ‘I have some friends and contacts who are thinking about coming to your bank to rob it. I would like to talk to you about maybe leaving the vault open some night so they could do it,’ and your branch manager rejected the suggestion. Would you expect that branch manager to report the incident?
McCloy. Yes.
Robb. If he didn’t report it, would you be disturbed about it?
McCloy. Yes.
Robb. Let us go a little bit further. Supposing the branch bank manager waited six or eight months to report it, would you be rather concerned about why he had not done it before?
McCloy. Yes.
Robb. Suppose when he did report it, he said this friend of mine, a good friend of mine, I am sure he was innocent, and therefore I won’t tell you who he is. Would you be concerned about that? Would you urge him to tell you?
McCloy. I would certainly urge him to tell me for the security of the bank.
Robb. Now, supposing your branch bank manager, in telling you the story of his conversations with his friend, said, ‘My friend told me that these people that he knows that want to rob the bank told him that they had a pretty good plan. They had some tear gas and guns and they had a car arranged for the getaway, and had everything all fixed up,’ would you conclude from that it was a pretty well-defined plot?
McCloy. Yes.
Robb. Now, supposing some years later this branch manager told you, ‘Mr McCloy, I told you that my friend and his friends had a scheme all set up as I have told you, with tear gas and guns and getaway car, but that was a lot of bunk. It just wasn’t true. I told you a false story about my friend.’ Would you be a bit puzzled as to why he would tell you such a false story about his friend?
McCloy. Yes; I think I would be.
Robb. That is all.
From the chair, Gordon Gray evidently found this analogy too attractive to leave alone and was tempted to contribute his own elaboration:
Gray. Mr McCloy, following Mr Robb’s hypothetical question for the moment, let us go further than his assumption. Let us say that ultimately you did get from your branch manager the name of the individual who had approached him with respect to leaving the vault open, and suppose further that your branch manager was sent by you on an inspection trip of some of your foreign branches, and suppose further that you learned that while he was in London he looked up the man who had made the approach to him some years before, would this be a source of concern to you?
McCloy. Yes; I think it would. It is certainly something worthy of investigation, yes.
The last two witnesses, Boris Pash and William Borden, were the two most convinced of Oppenheimer’s disloyalty. When asked whether he would consider Oppenheimer a security risk, Pash was unequivocal: ‘Yes, I would.’ Borden, meanwhile, stood by his judgement that ‘more probably than not’ Oppenheimer was an agent of the Soviet Union, to which Gray felt obliged to point out:
I would say to you that the board has no evidence before it that Dr Oppenheimer volunteered espionage information to the Soviets or complied with a request for such information; that he has been functioning as an espionage agent or that he has since acted under Soviet directive.
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In the light of this statement from Gray, Garrison chose not to cross-examine Borden.
The hearing ended on Thursday 6 May, with a summary statement from Garrison, in which he reiterated his ‘whole man’ approach. ‘In the Commission’s own view of the matter,’ he said:
it is the man himself that is to be considered, commonsense to be exercised in judging the evidence, and that it is appropriate to consider in the final reckoning the fact that our long-range success in the field of atomic energy depends in large part on our ability to attract into the program men of character and vision with a wide variety of talents and viewpoints.
He conceded that Oppenheimer took a good deal of understanding: ‘But this man bears the closest kind of examination of what he really is, and what he stands for, and what he means to the country. It is that effort of comprehension of him that I urge upon you.’
After Garrison had finished his summation the hearing was brought to a close, and the three members of the board, Gray, Morgan and Evans, were given a ten-day break before returning to Washington on 17 May to consider their findings.
In the meantime, Oppenheimer and Kitty returned to Olden Manor, where FBI microphones continued to record their every conversation. On 7 May, Oppenheimer was reported to have told a friend despairingly that ‘he will never be through with the situation’, since ‘all the evil of the times’ was wrapped up in it. Exhausted from the hearing and nervously awaiting the result, he was described a few days later as ‘very depressed at the present time and has been ill-tempered with his wife’.
On 27 May, after considering the evidence put before it, the three-member board presented its findings to General Nichols. On the question of whether Oppenheimer’s clearance should be reinstated, the board was split, with Gray and Morgan recommending that it should not, and Evans recommending that it should. The majority report, signed by Gray and Morgan, repeatedly emphasises that none of them doubted Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country. ‘We have,’ they state, ‘come to a clear conclusion, which should be reassuring to the people of this country, that he is a loyal citizen.’
