109 East Palace (57 page)

Conant and Bush both put their reputations on the line for Oppenheimer and quietly obtained similar endorsements from Groves and Secretary of War Robert Patterson. The AEC chairman, on the basis on these assurances, agreed that there appeared to be “no immediate hazard” requiring an official inquiry and, on August 6, 1947, formally ruled that Oppenheimer’s security clearance could continue. But even as Oppenheimer squeaked by, his brother, Frank, was collared. A month before the AEC decided to overlook Oppenheimer’s past, the
Washington Times-Herald
ran a front-page story on July 12 under the headline
U.S. ATOM SCIENTIST’S BROTHER EXPOSED AS COMMUNIST WHO WORKED ON A-BOMB
. Frank denied the story, but he stood publicly accused of being a former party member, and HUAC now had him in its sights.

A year later, the raging controversy over Hiss’s alleged espionage sent nervous tremors through government as people waited to see who would be brought down in HUAC’s next purge. As part of its widening investigation, HUAC, and its chairman, J. Thomas Parnell, were now on a mission to discover the “Alger Hiss of science.” They began looking into rehashed charges and old Manhattan Project security memos concerning leftist physicists on Berkeley’s campus who might have spilled atomic secrets and posed a security risk during the war. No one with any Communist ties was safe, and many of Oppenheimer’s old friends and campus colleagues fell under suspicion. Robert Serber was fingered in July 1948 and subjected to an AEC Personnel Security Board hearing after an investigation into his “character, associations and loyalty” had raised doubts about the continuance of his security clearance at the Rad Lab. After accusing both his brother-in-law and father-in-law of being Communists, and attempting to grill him on all his subversive Berkeley associates, including Oppenheimer and Chevalier, the AEC board excused him. Months later Oppenheimer told Serber he had seen the final report and assured him that he “passed with glowing colors.”

Picking through old intelligence files, HUAC subpoenaed a group that had been identified as Berkeley campus radicals, including Frank Oppenheimer, Joe Weinberg, David Bohm, Bernard Peters, and Rossi Lomanitz. The latter four names were part of that same element that Oppenheimer, at both Lawrence’s and Lansdale’s urging, had distanced himself from after being named director of Los Alamos. Mistakenly believing his record would show that, Oppenheimer appeared before HUAC on June 7,1949, and confirmed much of what was in the files, acknowledging that he had once characterized Peters as “quite Red” and a “dangerous man” and that Haakon Chevalier had told him about Eltenton. He also confirmed the substance of his interviews with Berkeley security officers. When asked about his brother, Oppenheimer replied firmly that Frank was not currently a party member, but then turned his blue eyes on the chairman and, with a look of exquisite suffering, appealed to him to stop his line of questioning. “I will answer, if asked,” he said, “but I beg you not to ask me these questions.” It was vintage Oppenheimer, and the embarrassed committee counsel quickly withdrew the question.

The committee was so under his spell that at the end of his testimony, they all rose to come forward and shake his hand. One of the committee members, a young Richard Nixon, gushed with admiration: “Before we adjourn, I would just like to say—and I am sure this is the sense of all who are here—I have noted for some time the work done by Dr. Oppenheimer and I think we all have been tremendously impressed with him and are mighty happy we have him in the position he has in our program.”

Among the many former colleagues who crowded into the HUAC hearing that spring morning was Dorothy, who was in town visiting friends. She had seen the Oppenheimers only a few days earlier and had been aghast to hear that he had been called before the committee. She decided that Monday morning to cancel her plans and attend the hearing in a show of support. In her memoir she recorded her horror at the circuslike proceedings in the Senate caucus room:

On a chair facing the six inquisitors ensconced on their dais sat Robert, sprayed by strong lights, a lone figure. I slipped into a seat midway in the hall and purely by chance found myself beside Anne Wilson Marks. I whispered to her, “How can he see his notes with lights in his eyes?” Anne’s answer was, “He has no notes.” I was shocked.

Dorothy could not stand to watch the witch hunt for long. She left at the lunch break, slipping out as unobtrusively as she had entered. She did not wait to speak to Robert, but dashed off a line telling him she had been there. “Robert,” she added grimly, “that was an experience I won’t forget.”

Two days later, it was Franks turn, and he did not fare as well. The committee had been sitting on his damning dossier for some time, and since they could not get Oppenheimer, they went after his younger brother instead. Frank was forced to publicly admit that he had lied about his prewar party membership: “My wife and I,” he testified in the grim caucus room, “joined the Communist Party in 1937, seeking an answer to the problems of unemployment and want in the wealthiest and most productive country in the world. We did not find in the Communist Party the vehicle through which to accomplish the progressive changes we were interested in so we left it about three and a half years later and never rejoined.” The next day, the University of Minnesota announced it had accepted Frank’s resignation. Ruined, unable to continue his research in cosmic rays, and an implicit threat to his brother, he fled with his family to his ranch in a remote part of southwest Colorado. It would be ten years before he was able to return to his work as a scientist.

While Oppenheimer had not been ensnared along with Frank, he could not avoid being dragged back before another tribunal a week later, on June 13. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, feeling empowered by the public hue and cry about security, decided to take a page out of HUAC’s hearings and embarked on his own campaign to discredit the fledgling AEC. He was put up to this by Lewis Strauss, a self-made financier and conservative AEC commissioner, who had been growing increasingly vexed with Oppenheimer. Strauss was a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and, despite being acquainted with the contents of his FBI file, had offered Oppenheimer the plum job in 1947. But now he found himself at cross-purposes with his appointee on the subject of research isotopes. The AEC had been steadily sending these overseas, filling more than two thousand requests in the spirit of Oppenheimer’s international cooperation. Most of these were small samples of nonsecret radioisotopes to be used in pure physics research, but Strauss objected that foreign countries could conceivably apply them to atomic energy for industrial purposes or radioactive warfare and, worse yet, build reactors to build bombs. He had been roundly outvoted on the issue two years earlier, and he now saw a way of discrediting Oppenheimer’s committee and getting his way. Strauss had discovered that a millicurie of iron 59 had been sent to Norway’s Defense Research Establishment for physics experiments, and further, he had information that one of the Norwegians on the research team was a suspected Communist.

Senator Hickenlooper, who was apparently under the misapprenhension that all this meant fissionable material was being shipped overseas, called Oppenheimer to the stand and tried to get him to admit to the Joint Committee that the shipment of the millicurie of iron was proof of gross mismanagement and a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. Oppenheimer almost laughed him out of the room. “No one can force me to say you cannot use those isotopes for atomic energy,” he began incredulously. “You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part, and in my knowledge no part at all.”

Oppenheimer was putting on a good show, and there was a titter of amusement in the hearing room. But Strauss, who had come by expecting to gloat, was red-faced with anger, his jaw muscles working furiously. For all his accomplishments, Strauss had never finished high school. He still seethed with insecurity about his lack of formal education, and here was the great Robert Oppenheimer making a public fool of him. Oppenheimer kept up his clever performance, ridiculing several more of Hickenlooper’s blundering questions, leaving the gallery in stitches, and turning the hearings on their head. When it came to the last, routine query about endowing security personnel with more authority, Oppenheimer responded with one word, “Morbid,” as though the entire boorish line of questioning had rendered him almost speechless. Oppenheimer spotted Joseph Volpe, one of the AEC’s lawyers. “How did I do?” he asked. “Too well, Robert, too well,” Volpe told him.

If Oppenheimer had wanted to eviscerate his inquisitors, he succeeded admirably, but his victory came at a price. The next day, HUAC, with its power to command headlines, exposed Frank. His face and name were splashed across the nations morning newspapers, accompanied by the sordid details of his life as a “closet Communist.” Over the next few weeks, HUAC also leaked bits of Oppenheimer’s secret testimony to the press, revealing that he had acknowledged that a number of prewar friends and associates were radicals or Communists. When the story broke in the Rochester, New York,
Times-Union
that Oppenheimer had given evidence against his talented former student Bernard Peters in the HUAC hearing, it turned people’s stomachs. It may have been that Oppenheimer felt put upon and harassed, but not only did he not lift a finger to help Peters, he appeared to have betrayed him in an effort to save himself. Many of the old Berkeley crowd, who remembered the old days, found his behavior especially galling. After Bethe and Weisskopf advised him of the intense negative reaction among his peers, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the paper praising Peters’ “high ethical standards” despite his left-wing activities. But the damage was done. Oppenheimer still did not seem to grasp that he was bound by the same laws as everyone else. As he had committed more than a few indiscretions of his own, some considered it only just that he suffer the same fate as those he had so easily condemned.

Oppenheimer made himself even more of a target by his outspoken opposition to the hydrogen bomb. He had always been skeptical about the feasibility of the thermonuclear bomb, and believed the technical challenges and prohibitive costs involved in the bomb program made it inadvisable. Throughout the fall of 1949, after Russia exploded its first atomic bomb at the end of August and nervous government officials seized on Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence’s proposal to develop hydrogen weapons, Oppenheimer argued America should not deliberately step up the arms race. When Teller had first called him in a state of extreme excitement after news broke of the Soviet test, he had responded brusquely, “Keep your shirt on.” Oppenheimer did not agree that this was a reason to rush the hydrogen bomb into being and engage in the all-out production of dueling doomsday machines. On October 29,1949, he led the General Advisory Committee’s strong recommendation against the crash development of the Super, supported by all seven members present that morning, especially Conant, who memorably declared the thermonuclear weapon would be built “over my dead body.” Oppenheimer commended the group for firmly opposing the weapons development and boasted of their “surprising unanimity,”
a claim his critics would later disparage.

During the three months of fierce debate, Oppenheimer’s statements against the hydrogen bomb program once again brought him into direct conflict with Teller, whose hatred of his old Los Alamos boss had become almost pathological. Teller accused Conant of being “unduly influenced by Oppenheimer”—though in fact the opposite may have been true—and referred to the conspiracy of Los Alamos loyalists as “Oppie’s machine.” This time, however, Teller sensed he had an advantage. Playing on fears of an imminent Cold War showdown, he galvanized support for the Super and won powerful allies in ardent conservatives like Lewis Strauss and Senator Brian McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as well as a militarist wing of the air force, which desperately wanted to protect the millions of dollars promised for the Strategic Air Command. With his advisors deadlocked, President Truman stalled. Then word came of Fuchs’ confession, his funneling of atomic secrets to the Russians while he was at Los Alamos, and his presence at high-level meetings in which the fusion weapon had been discussed. There was now no longer any doubt about whether the Soviet Union was in a race for nuclear supremacy. On January 31, 1950, Truman decided that, given the Soviet threat, America had “no choice” and ordered the AEC to pursue “all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”

In the wake of the president’s decision, Oppenheimer delivered a widely quoted speech before the Council on Foreign Relations warning of a tense, protracted Cold War ahead. “During this period the atomic clock ticks faster and faster,” he lectured. “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at risk of his own life.”