Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  On the other hand, they add: ‘We have, however, been unable to arrive at the conclusion that it would be clearly consistent with the security interests of the United States to reinstate Dr Oppenheimer’s clearance, and, therefore, do not so recommend.’ They give four reasons for this recommendation. The first is ‘that Dr Oppenheimer’s continuing conduct and associations have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system’, by which they seem to mean Oppenheimer’s ‘current associations with Dr Chevalier’, to which, they say, they attach ‘a high degree of significance’. The second is that Oppenheimer had shown ‘a susceptibility to influence’. What they seem to have in mind here is Oppenheimer’s willingness to write letters on behalf of Lomanitz and Peters after he had been urged to do so by Ed Condon. Their third reason is the most controversial. ‘We find,’ they write, ‘his conduct in the hydrogen-bomb program sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt as to whether his future participation, if characterised by the same attitudes in a Government program relating to the national defense, would be clearly consistent with the best interests of security’. What they mean by this is not entirely clear, but it seemed to many – particularly to many scientists – to amount to saying that Oppenheimer was to be judged on the basis of his beliefs, which was a very dangerous path to tread. Their fourth and final reason for denying Oppenheimer clearance is that he had been ‘less than candid in several instances in his testimony before this Board’. In their report, Gray and Morgan do not elaborate or support this, but its basis seems to be their conviction that Oppenheimer had lied to the hearing about the Chevalier Affair.

  In his minority report, Ward Evans, noting that all three members of the panel were agreed that Oppenheimer was loyal to his country, recommended the reinstatement of Oppenheimer’s clearance on several grounds. First: ‘To deny him clearance now for what he was cleared for in 1947, when we must know he is less of a security risk now than he was then, seems to be hardly the procedure to be adopted in a free country.’ Second, Oppenheimer ‘did not hinder the development of the H-bomb and there is absolutely nothing in the testimony to show that he did’. And, finally: ‘His witnesses are a considerable segment of the scientific backbone of our Nation and they endorse him.’ At the end of his report, Evans adds, in the manner of a man protesting too much: ‘I would like to add that this opinion was written before the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists came out with its statement concerning the Oppenheimer case.’

  The May 1954 issue of the Bulletin was a special issue, largely devoted to the Oppenheimer case, in which, after printing Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer’s reply to it, the editors published a collection of statements they had received during the first week of the hearing from notable scientists. Included in the collection are statements from Samuel Allison, Harold Urey, F.W. Loomis, Linus Pauling, Julian Schwinger, Albert Einstein and Victor Weisskopf, several of whom pointed out the injustice and the danger involved in declaring a man a security risk because, when asked for his opinion, he says something the government of the day does not want to hear. The Bulletin also published a statement condemning the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance by the executive committee of the Federation of American Scientists, and a petition signed by twenty-seven physicists at the University of Illinois disputing the charges brought against Oppenheimer and stating their collective wish, as people ‘closely associated with Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer’, to reassure the public that ‘there can be no reasonable doubt of his loyalty’. It was very clear from this issue of the Bulletin that the scientists who had testified against Oppenheimer – Alvarez, Latimer, Pitzer and Teller – belonged to a very small minority, and evidently not one that Ward Evans was particularly keen to join.

  On 28 May, the findings of the board, including Ward’s minority report, were sent by Nichols to Oppenheimer. A few days later, Garrison responded to those findings on Oppenheimer’s behalf. He began by noting that the recommendation not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance ‘stands in such contrast with the Board’s findings regarding Dr Oppenheimer’s loyalty and discretion as to raise doubts about the process of reasoning by which the conclusion was arrived at’. Garrison also complained that, despite what Oppenheimer had said in his autobiographical letter to Nichols, the findings of the board were not ‘considered in the context of Dr Oppenheimer’s life as a whole’.

  Garrison assumed that Nichols would forward the board’s findings to the AEC, together with a recommendation based upon them. In fact, in submitting the board’s findings to the AEC, Nichols also submitted his own recommendations, which, while loosely based upon the recommendations of the board, differed significantly in content and in emphasis. For example, the general tone of Nichols’s memo is a good deal less friendly to Oppenheimer, and, unlike both the majority and the minority reports, he does not repeatedly stress Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country, confining himself simply to the statement: ‘The record contains no direct evidence that Dr Oppenheimer gave secrets to a foreign nation or that he is disloyal to the United States.’ Neither does Nichols endorse the majority report’s suggestion that Oppenheimer’s ‘disturbing’ conduct during the hydrogen-bomb programme offered a reason not to reinstate his clearance. On the contrary, Nichols is very careful to emphasise that his finding against Oppenheimer ‘is not based on Dr Oppenheimer’s opinions’, and that ‘the evidence establishes no sinister motives on the part of Dr Oppenheimer in his attitude on the hydrogen bomb, either before or after the President’s decision’.

  In the memo, Nichols is at pains to make clear that his recommendation not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance is based squarely on the consideration of Oppenheimer’s veracity. In connection with this, Nichols gives far more weight to the ‘Chevalier incident’ than the board had done. It is this, above all else, Nichols’s memo suggests, that establishes that Oppenheimer is not to be trusted. After all:

  if his present story is true then he admits he committed a felony in 1943. On the other hand, as Dr Oppenheimer admitted on cross-examination, if the story Dr Oppenheimer told Colonel Pash was true, it not only showed that Chevalier was involved in a criminal espionage conspiracy, but also reflected seriously on Dr Oppenheimer himself.

  Nichols is very clear which version of the story he thinks is true:

  . . . it is difficult to conclude that the detailed and circumstantial account given by Dr Oppenheimer to Colonel Pash was false and that the story now told by Dr Oppenheimer is an honest one. Dr Oppenheimer’s story in 1943 was most damaging to Chevalier. If Chevalier was Dr Oppenheimer’s friend and Dr Oppenheimer, as he now says, believed Chevalier to be innocent and wanted to protect him, why then would he tell such a complicated false story to Colonel Pash? This story showed that Chevalier was not innocent, but on the contrary was deeply involved in an espionage conspiracy. By the same token, why would Dr Oppenheimer tell a false story to Colonel Pash which showed that he himself was not blameless? Is it reasonable to believe a man will deliberately tell a lie that seriously reflects upon himself and his friend, when he knows that the truth will show them both to be innocent?

  In thus emphasising the importance of the Chevalier Affair, Nichols was reflecting more accurately than the board members had done the case that had been presented by Robb at the hearing and also the views of Lewis Strauss. He was, moreover, closing the gap that Garrison had mentioned between the board’s recommendations and its comments on Oppenheimer’s loyalty and discretion. What had been murky in the panel’s majority report was made abundantly clear in Nichols’s memo: the reason for recommending that Oppenheimer’s clearance should not be reinstated was first and foremost that he had been shown to be a liar on a matter of national security.

  If Nichols thought he could bury the admiring comments about Oppenheimer’s character, loyalty and service to the country that had been made in the panel’s reports, he was shown to be mistaken on 1 June 1954, when Garrison leaked the text of those reports to the press. In retaliation,
Strauss took a somewhat desperate step. Despite the fact that the witnesses at the hearing had been promised that their testimony would be treated in confidence, Strauss persuaded the AEC to publish the entire proceedings. On 15 June, before the AEC had even announced its decision in the Oppenheimer case, the transcript, entitled In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was released in book form to the press, and the following day it was available to the general public.

  Two weeks later, the AEC finally announced its decision. By a vote of four to one, the commissioners voted not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance. The majority report, signed by Strauss, Campbell and Zuckert, followed the lines of Nichols’s letter, in emphasising that the reasons for denying clearance to Oppenheimer rested not on his opinions, or on any alleged disloyalty, but rather on his ‘associations’ with communists and, above all, on the flaws in his character demonstrated by the ‘whole fabrication and tissue of lies’ that he had, by his own admission, told Pash about the Chevalier incident. Commissioner Murray also voted to deny Oppenheimer clearance, but his reasons were rather different and so he wrote his own report, in which he did not shy away from accusing Oppenheimer of disloyalty. In an echo of the split among the panel members, the only commissioner to vote for the reinstatement of Oppenheimer’s clearance was also the only scientist on the AEC, namely Henry DeWolf Smyth, who, in his own report, wrote that he agreed with the Gray board that Oppenheimer was ‘completely loyal’ and that ‘I do not believe he is a security risk.’ The Chevalier incident, Smyth conceded, was ‘inexcusable’, but ‘that was 11 years ago; there is no subsequent act even faintly similar’.

  The AEC announced its decision not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance on 29 June. The following day, Oppenheimer’s one-year contract as a consultant to the AEC was due to expire anyway. In effect, what had been achieved by a hearing lasting three and a half weeks, followed by several more weeks of deliberation, was that Oppenheimer’s employment as an AEC consultant came to an end a day earlier than originally contracted.

  * * *

  fn68 The title is an allusion to the Latin phrase, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means ‘false in one, false in all’. In law the phrase is used to indicate that, if a witness has been shown to lie once, then his or her entire testimony cannot be trusted.

  fn69 See footnote 49 on p.360

  19

  An Open Book?

  HAAKON CHEVALIER FIRST learned of his leading role in the Oppenheimer case on 13 April 1954, when the New York Times published Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer listing the charges against him, together with Oppenheimer’s autobiographical reply. Chevalier found Nichols’s letter ‘repulsive’, but Oppenheimer’s reply ‘even more distressing’, because, with its talk of ‘intermediaries’ between Eltenton and scientists working on the bomb, it seemed to paint a picture of something much more elaborate than the simple and short conversation that Chevalier remembered.

  Then, on 16 June, just after the AEC published the entire transcript of the hearings, Chevalier, still living in Paris, saw a headline in the Paris-Presse that read: ‘Oppie confesse: “J’étais un idiot.”’ When he bought a copy of the paper, Chevalier saw that it contained extracts from the transcript, including the exchange between Robb and Oppenheimer during which Oppenheimer admitted to having told a ‘tissue of lies’. Reading it made Chevalier realise what, or rather who, had been the source of the story that had dogged him all those years:

  The one who had invented that highly damaging story about me was none other than my own friend, Oppenheimer, himself. It was unbelievable. It made no sense – but there it was, in black and white. More than ten years before, he had fabricated a story which had wrought havoc with my life and my career, and during all those years he had continued to give every show of an unaltered friendship. Why? What had ever led him to do this?

  On 28 June, Time magazine ran a long article on the Oppenheimer case, reporting on the board’s findings, but not yet on the AEC’s decision, which was announced the following day. ‘In the list of witnesses against J. Robert Oppenheimer,’ the piece said, ‘the most effective was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. His testimony showed that he had lied repeatedly in the past about important security matters.’ ‘The most telling example of Oppenheimer’s past capacity for untruths was drawn out in cross-examination about his relationships with his good friend Haakon Chevalier.’

  The rest of the article is taken up mostly with the testimony of the anti-Oppenheimer witnesses, such as Alvarez, Griggs, Latimer and Teller, and it ends with an account of Robb’s cross-examination of the banker John McCloy. It concludes: ‘The majority of Gordon Gray’s security committee wound up feeling about Oppenheimer the way McCloy felt about Roger Robb’s hypothetical bank manager.’

  On 7 July, Chevalier wrote to Oppenheimer:

  Dear Robert,

  I have been shattered by the revelations in the June 28th issue of Time Magazine.

  I need not tell you what this means to me – the light it casts on the past, the implications for the present and the future.

  Before making any decisions, which must in the nature of the case be irrevocable, I would like to hear directly what you have to say. And I suspend, as best I can, any final judgment. But I must hear soon.

  Haakon

  Oppenheimer’s reply was dated 12 July, and read:

  Dear Haakon,

  Your letter of July 7th has just come. In answer I am sending to you by airmail today a set of documents. These will tell you all that I have to tell.

  These documents are public, and they are the whole of the public record. Some I made public myself: General Nichols’s letter of December 23rd, my answer of March 4th, the report of the Gray Board, and the letters and arguments of counsel. The transcript was made public by the Atomic Energy Commission. There are substantial deletions. These have mostly to do with military or technical matters.

  With every good wish,

  Robert Oppenheimer

  When Chevalier read the whole transcript, he was struck by how unfamiliar the Oppenheimer that emerged from the hearings seemed: ‘This was not the Oppenheimer I knew.’

  The Oppenheimer I knew was brilliant, incisive, measured, resourceful, imaginative, challenging, always in command of the situation, and everything he said had the unmistakable stamp of his personality. The Oppenheimer of the Transcript is completely depersonalized . . . Not once in the course of the whole three-week hearing does he come out with a statement that reflects his inner self – his ideals, his purpose, his sense of destiny.

  On 27 July, Chevalier wrote again to Oppenheimer, ‘hoping – without believing – that in a burst of confidence he might reveal something that would in some measure justify the inexplicable violation of friendship’. After telling Oppenheimer that the documents he had received failed to explain what he felt needed explaining, Chevalier went on:

  For the subjective observer – myself – the picture is this: I have regarded you as my very dear friend for upward of 15 years. I have loved you as I have loved no other man. I placed in you an absolute trust. I would have defended you to the death against malice or slander. Now I learn that eleven years ago, according to your own admission, you wove an elaborate fabric of lies about me of the most gravely compromising nature. During all these years you continued to show me the signs of an unaltered friendship. In 1948, after my interview with the FBI, I told you, in the garden on Eagle Hill, of my being grilled about those three scientists I was supposed to have approached. You gave me no indication that you knew of what was involved.

  During all these years that story, without my knowing it, has hounded me, plagued and blocked me and played untold havoc with my career and my life. With what today looks like the most consummate cynicism, you wrote me on February 24th 1950, ‘As you know, I have been deeply disturbed by the threat to your career which these ugly stories could constitute’ – referring to stories that were as fairy tales compared to the ones you had already put into the record seven y
ears before.

  . . . I do not subscribe to the naïveté theory, nor to the ‘idiocy’ theory. I believe that that story, and the consciousness of it that you have carried about with you for eleven years, and your awareness of what it was doing to me, represent for you something rational and coherent, that hangs together and makes sense, and that you can explain and perhaps in a measure justify.

  Before I finally make up my mind about the several matters involved in all this I am asking you, as perhaps the last act of friendship, to explain what the mind conceived and to what the heart consented.

  It seems somehow typical of the nightmare in which Chevalier now found himself that this deeply personal letter, crying out for an intimate, emotional response, should have been opened and read not by Oppenheimer himself, but by his secretary, Katharine Russell, who, after making several copies of it, sent it to Lloyd Garrison, who in turn wrote to Chevalier explaining that Oppenheimer and his family were away on the Virgin Islands, ‘on a desperately needed rest’. ‘I appreciate the fact that it calls for a personal response by Dr Oppenheimer,’ Garrison told Chevalier, but ‘I am taking the liberty of referring you to a few passages from them [the transcripts] which you may not have noticed and which seem relevant to the subject-matter of your letter.’ Copies of the letter were sent to Herb Marks, Katharine Russell and Oppenheimer himself, to whom Garrison wrote that he hoped ‘that this might suffice to hold the fort until you get back’.

  On 5 August, Chevalier replied to Garrison, telling him: ‘There is much in this whole case that is strange and baffling.’

  One extraordinary thing about this case is that, since I seem to occupy such an important role in it, no one has seen fit to ask me to contribute my two-bits’ worth. It is, to me, a striking weakness in your defense of Oppenheimer as his attorneys that you made no attempt to use me as an asset rather than a liability, and throughout the hearings allowed me and my name to hover somewhere backstage as a vague and disreputable ghost.