Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Over the following year, Strauss orchestrated a public campaign of vilification against Oppenheimer, as if to soften him up for the final blows, which would be the termination of his AEC consultantship and the revocation of his security clearance. He forged a close relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, hectoring the FBI director to institute ever more intensive surveillance of Oppenheimer’s movements and telephone calls. Hoover’s fattened dossier on Oppenheimer eventually landed on Eisenhower’s desk, with Strauss near at hand to interpret. His efforts succeeded: in December Eisenhower ordered that a “blank wall” be placed between the physicist and all classified or sensitive government information, pending further investigation. This was the first step in withdrawing Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Meanwhile, through his network of well-connected friends sharing his fear of Communist world domination, Strauss placed articles attacking Oppenheimer in Henry Luce’s Time, Life, and Fortune, and other popular magazines. The articles suited the tenor of the moment established by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s febrile accusations of Communist influence in every corner of government. Robert Oppenheimer was destined to become the most prominent victim of the witch hunt.

  Following Eisenhower’s order, Strauss summoned Oppenheimer to his Washington office for what he expected to be a decisive encounter. He presented Oppenheimer with a lengthy accusation of communist fellow traveling and suspect loyalty, most of it based on warmed-over charges that had been traded wholesale among security officials since the launch of the Manhattan Project. Strauss informed Oppenheimer that his security clearance was suspended and urged him to resign quietly from his AEC position. To his astonishment, Oppenheimer balked. The following day, having weighed the demand with his Washington lawyers, Oppenheimer informed Strauss that he would fight the charges before an AEC review board. The decision, as Oppenheimer’s biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin would observe, “set in motion an extraordinary American inquisition.”

  Strauss stage-managed the AEC hearing into Oppenheimer’s security clearance as he had the campaign of calumny that preceded it. He handpicked the review board’s three members and its chief counsel, Roger Robb, a former federal prosecutor with a reputation for courtroom ferocity and political conservatism. He plied Robb with documents and notes to help him impeach Oppenheimer’s character witnesses, many of whom were scientists who had worked with Oppie for a decade or more, and urged Robb to seek out witnesses who might be inclined to attack his quarry’s trustworthiness from the stand. This quest led, inevitably, to Berkeley. There Robb found a hive of anti-Oppenheimer sentiment, presided over by Ernest Lawrence.

  Robb’s visit to the Rad Lab early in March 1954 could not have been better timed. Lawrence was incensed by an unsavory fact he had picked up at a recent cocktail party: Oppie had carried on an affair in 1947 with the wife of Caltech physicist Richard Tolman, a close friend of Ernest’s who died of a heart attack only a few months after learning of the betrayal—in Ernest’s view, the victim of a broken heart. The news crystallized all the doubts and resentments Ernest had suppressed about Oppenheimer in the years since they had first come together as youthful Berkeley faculty members—Oppie’s “leftwandering,” his arrogant individualism, his bohemian style, and of course his opposition to the Super and skepticism about the second laboratory. Under questioning by Robb’s deputy, C. Arthur Rolander, these all came pouring out with an un-Lawrencian passion. In the heat of the moment, Ernest offered a shocking judgment of Oppenheimer that would come to haunt them both. Oppie, he said, “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy.” Even more momentously, he agreed to come to Washington to testify personally against his old friend.

  Lawrence was not alone among the Berkeley crowd in disparaging Oppenheimer’s character. Before they left town, Robb and Rolander added to their witness list Kenneth Pitzer, who had returned to Berkeley after his stint as the AEC’s research director, and Luis Alvarez and Wendell Latimer. Despite the latter’s objections to Neylan’s security inquiries a few years earlier, Latimer would participate willingly in a process that was tilted even more harshly against its target. Berkeley would be well represented at the trial of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and opinions, and entirely on the side of the prosecution.

  • • •

  The AEC Personnel Security Board hearing into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance convened on April 12, 1954, in the agency’s dilapidated headquarters, a temporary building on Washington’s National Mall left over from wartime. The bill of particulars had been drafted and signed by the AEC’s general manager, Kenneth D. Nichols, who had worked closely with Oppenheimer during the war as Groves’s second in command but had emerged from the experience regarding him as a “slippery sonofabitch.” The document, which read like a criminal indictment, covered Oppenheimer’s associations with liberals, leftists, and supposed Communist front groups, as well as his purported efforts to stifle the Super program.

  Over the next three and a half weeks, almost every aspect of Oppenheimer’s life and career would be picked apart by the AEC’s legal team, acting as prosecutors in a proceeding that lacked even the most rudimentary evidentiary standards. From some of the nation’s leading scientists would come denunciations of Oppenheimer, veiled and overt, among them Edward Teller’s assertion that “I personally would feel more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.” From witnesses on the other side came denunciations of the very effort to humiliate a man who had served his country with distinction. None was as biting as I. I. Rabi’s. Thanks to Oppie, he snapped, “we have an A-bomb . . . and what more do you want, mermaids?”

  Among the hearing’s more sinister features was its preoccupation with an encounter between Oppenheimer and his friend Haakon Chevalier just before work began at Los Alamos. Chevalier was a Berkeley French professor and, along with his wife, a member of the Oppenheimers’ social and intellectual circle. One evening in early 1943—the precise date was never established —the Chevaliers joined Robert and Kitty for dinner at the Oppenheimer home in Berkeley. While Oppie was alone mixing martinis in the kitchen, Chevalier walked in on him to communicate an extraordinary offer. He stated that George Eltenton, a British physicist with leftist sympathies working in the Bay Area for Shell Oil Company, wished to know if Oppenheimer would be willing to pass information about his research to a contact of Eltenton’s at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Later accounts by Oppenheimer, Chevalier, and Eltenton leave no doubt that Oppenheimer instantly and heatedly turned away the offer. “I thought I said, ‘But that is treason,’ but I am not sure,” Oppenheimer would testify at his hearing. “I said, anyway, something, ‘This is a terrible thing to do.’ . . . That was the end of it. It was a very brief conversation.”

  But Oppenheimer’s maladroit handling of the conversation’s aftermath elevated what had seemed at first to be a momentary exchange between friends into something that became known, ominously, as the “Chevalier affair”—an affair in which Lawrence was a peripheral and unwitting figure. As Oppenheimer acknowledged, he should have reported the approach promptly to Manhattan Project security officials. But since Chevalier had agreed on the spot that the offer was inappropriate, Oppie had put it out of his head. As it later transpired, Eltenton had been asked by Peter Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence officer working undercover as a consular official in San Francisco, to develop a pipeline to “three scientists” associated with the Rad Lab. Eltenton identified his targets as Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and a third physicist whose name he did not recall but thought might have been Luis Alvarez. Eltenton was not sufficiently close to any of them to make contact, but he did know Chevalier and asked him to undertake the initial approach to Oppenheimer.

  Nothing ever came of the offer. Oppenheimer plainly did not agree to it, and there is no evidence that Lawrence or Alvarez even knew they had been mentioned until years later. Oppenheimer’s greater problem was that over the course of many years, he had given security officials several variant versions of h
is talk with “Hoke” Chevalier, all aimed ineptly at shielding his friend from the security apparatus. Oppenheimer’s dissembling would be exploited by Strauss and Robb to discredit virtually his every word, becoming a linchpin of the campaign to destroy him.

  The hearing progressed inexorably to the point when Ernest Lawrence would be called to testify. Ernest anticipated the moment grimly, wracked with second thoughts about his commitment to take the stand. Finally, he changed his mind. But quailing at the thought of Strauss’s certain apoplexy at his withdrawal, he chose to put off the uncomfortable conversation until the last minute. As late as Friday, April 23, he assured Nichols by phone that he would be in Washington no later than the following Tuesday, with his appearance at the witness table scheduled for a day or two later.

  Lawrence spent the intervening weekend at Oak Ridge, attending a conference of AEC laboratory directors. If he had had any doubts about how his willingness to testify against Oppenheimer played in the physicists’ fraternity, these were dispelled by the “barely civil” reception he got from his colleagues, among them Henry DeWolf Smyth, one of the AEC commissioners who ultimately would rule on Oppenheimer’s fate, and Rabi, who had delivered his uncompromising defense of Oppenheimer just a few days earlier. As Ernest could not fail to recognize, much of the physics community was lined up behind Oppenheimer. The Rad Lab stood alone.

  From Oak Ridge, Lawrence telephoned Berkeley to pour out his misgivings to Alvarez. As he explained over the long-distance line, he dreaded that his testimony, combined with the distinctly anti-Oppenheimer mind-set of the other Berkeley witnesses and of the Livermore-based Edward Teller, “would seem to reflect a sort of cabal.” There could be no upside for the Rad Lab if it got dragged into the controversy over Oppenheimer’s past and behavior. The lab’s experience with the loyalty oath had been bruising enough; its involvement in this even more explosive battle would inextricably identify the lab with one side of the most fraught political issue of the day.

  Alvarez tried to strengthen Lawrence’s spine. “I sort of thought Ernest buckled under to pressure that he shouldn’t have,” he recounted later. As the emotional conversation drew to a close, Lawrence pleaded with Alvarez to follow his lead for the good of the lab and refuse to testify. Alvarez had spent nearly his entire professional career in Lawrence’s thrall, following his orders without question. “I wasn’t about to change now,” he reflected later, and reluctantly agreed to his boss’s request.

  On Monday morning, Lawrence telephoned Strauss from Oak Ridge. By then, his body had given him a painful yet plausible pretext for backing off: a severe attack of ulcerative colitis, a medical condition from which he had suffered for years—though perhaps brought on at this moment by emotional tension. But the infuriated Strauss dismissed Lawrence’s plea of illness and delivered a vicious tongue-lashing, capping it bluntly with an accusation of cowardice. Lawrence rang off. Visibly shaken, he summoned his fellow Oak Ridge guests to bear witness that he was not feigning illness by showing them his toilet, filled with bright red blood. The next day he flew home.

  Alvarez, disturbed by the abject misery he had heard in Lawrence’s voice—“I had never seen Ernest intimidated before,” he reflected—telephoned Nichols that same day to withdraw. A few hours later, Strauss called him back, determined to prevent Lawrence’s “illness” from spreading. Despite his loyalty to Lawrence, Alvarez proved to be more pliable to the AEC chairman’s haranguing. “If you don’t come to Washington and testify, you won’t be able to look yourself in the mirror for the rest of your life,” Strauss growled. Torn between his incompatible loyalties to Lawrence and to Strauss, Alvarez finally opted to serve the latter, and booked a seat on the red-eye flight to Washington.

  Alvarez would write later of his uneasiness about giving testimony “that might hurt a friend.” From the witness stand, he attested to his own “admiration and respect for Robert,” as well as his certitude that while Oppenheimer’s judgment about the Super was “faulty,” it was “in no way related to his loyalty to the country, of which I had no doubt.”

  The record, however, discloses Alvarez’s testimony to be an ill-disguised act of score settling. Contemptuous of Oppenheimer’s arguments against the Super, he depicted Oppenheimer as a Svengali ruthlessly hypnotizing some of the world’s most sophisticated scientists into joining his opposition campaign. “Every time I have found a person who felt this way,” he testified, “I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer’s influence on that person’s mind.”

  Yet some of his examples plainly arose from his own misconceptions. He testified that Fermi’s opposition to the Super had surprised him, because he knew Fermi was “one of two men who had signed an appendix to the [October 30, 1949, General Advisory Committee] report expressing views somewhat different from those of the majority group led by Dr. Oppenheimer.” He seemed to think that Fermi had favored the Super. But this was exactly wrong, for the appendix by Fermi (and Rabi) had expressed the same iron opposition to the Super as the majority statement.

  Alvarez also spoke of his perplexity that Rabi had “changed his mind so drastically after talking with Dr. Oppenheimer.” Rabi’s initial position regarding the Super, Alvarez testified, “was one of enthusiasm.” This was flatly untrue, as Rabi had already informed the hearing board at considerable length. To the contrary, he had tried to bring the maniacally optimistic Alvarez and Lawrence down to earth from the moment they first approached him about joining the H-bomb program. His “enthusiasm” for the weapon was a figment of Alvarez’s imagination.

  Alvarez did deliver one genuine bombshell. He swore that one day in October 1949, while driving from Stanford University back to Berkeley in company with Lawrence and Vannevar Bush, he heard Bush state that President Truman had asked him to chair a committee to assess the evidence that Russia’s Joe-1 explosion had been an atomic bomb. Bush said he thought it odd that he should be chairman, since he was not a physicist; Oppenheimer, the best choice, already had been named to the committee. As Alvarez related Bush’s explanation, “I think the reason the president chose me is that he does not trust Dr. Oppenheimer.” Alvarez claimed that “this was the first time I had ever heard anyone in my life say that Dr. Oppenheimer was not to be trusted.”

  Yet Bush had mentioned no such conversation during his testimony only six days earlier. (Instead, he had crisply reproached the board for attacking Oppenheimer “because he expressed strong opinions,” adding, “When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state.”) Summoned back to the stand by Oppenheimer’s lawyer, Lloyd K. Garrison, to rebut Alvarez’s revelation, Bush firmly denied having said any such thing. “I am quite sure I didn’t say to him that the president had doubts about Dr. Oppenheimer simply because it was not true,” he testified.

  It fell to Ernest Lawrence, purportedly the only other witness to the conversation, to break the deadlock. He did so via an affidavit notarized in Berkeley on May 4, the day of Bush’s return appearance. Lawrence’s statement had the curious effect of undermining both the other witnesses, while placing his own credibility at the service of a smear of Oppenheimer. “I remember driving up from Palo Alto to San Francisco with L. W. Alvarez and Dr. Vannevar Bush when we discussed Oppenheimer’s activities in the nuclear weapons program,” he stated. “In the course of the conversation, [Bush] mentioned that Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg had insisted that Dr. Bush serve as chairman of a committee to evaluate the evidence for the first Russian atomic explosion, as General Vandenberg did not trust Dr. Oppenheimer.”

  Attributing the supposed mistrust of Oppenheimer to Vandenberg rather than Truman made superficial sense, for it was Vandenberg, commander of the air force, and not Truman who had assembled the committee and appointed both Bush and Oppenheimer. But Lawrence’s recollection only added more fog to the picture, for Bush also had been asked if it might have been Vandenberg who had doubted Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness—and he had denied that with the same vehemence. As he observed, if Vandenberg truly harbored doubts about Opp
enheimer, why would he have appointed him to the committee in the first place? A clear version of the mysterious conversation never did emerge.

  Despite his failure to testify in person, Lawrence’s voice did not otherwise go unheard at the hearing. Before closing the hearing record, Robb inserted the transcript of the interview Ernest had given Rolander in Berkeley some two months earlier. Lawrence’s words, which remained safely immune to cross-examination by Lloyd Garrison through this tactic, were withering. He described Oppie as arrogant, naïve, and suspiciously hostile to a thermonuclear program that was manifestly in the nation’s best interests. His conclusion that J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man with whom he had shared the triumphs and setbacks of conjoined personal and professional lives for twenty-five years, “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy” reverberated in the record with devastating finality.

  Ernest Lawrence’s enmity left Oppenheimer deeply perplexed. In 1963, four years before his death, Oppie still found the subject difficult to understand and painful to discuss. “I think there was probably warmth between us at all times, but there was bitterness, which I think became very acute in ’49 and which was never resolved before his death,” he told Herbert Childs, who had been commissioned by John and Molly Lawrence to write Ernest’s official biography. “He disapproved of my leftward course and told me so. There was never anything there that would have led to any great bitterness.”

  Oppenheimer recognized that Lawrence’s politics had evolved to reflect those of the people who had become his patrons and friends, men like Alfred Loomis and Jack Neylan. They were not individuals inclined to soft-pedal their views about national politics and national security or, in Neylan’s case, about Robert Oppenheimer, whom Neylan described as “a man so conceited he just shoved God over.” Continuing in this vein, Neylan conjectured, “Ernest’s very modesty angered him . . . I think he hated Ernest because Ernest was so kind to him.”