109 East Palace (58 page)

In the speech, Oppenheimer went out of his way to attack the air force for being more interested in protecting its Strategic Air Command that in any attempt “to protect the country.” Angered by his continued resistance, Oppenheimer’s emboldened critics exacted revenge for his many scornful slights, and articles began to appear describing his persistent campaign to reverse U.S. military strategy, endowing his views with the patina of disloyalty. He was personally blamed for allowing the communists to get ahead. The climate in Washington was so poisonous that on February 14, Conant wrote Oppenheimer, “I hope you are standing up under the strain of these trying times as well as usual,” and enclosed a copy of a letter he had received from a reporter disclosing that a Republican senator was spreading the story that the GAC opposed the H-bomb on “moral grounds.”

Oppenheimer received a letter of encouragement from Dorothy, who had read the text of his speech in the papers. She wanted him to know that it had the ring of conviction and had reassured her that “there is light ahead.”

There stand you, the beautiful Robert, the open mind, and your thoughts and suggestions which would quiet the din and still all hatred. Stand Robert, with the clarity and courage the world aches for. You speak, with the power of poetry and music.

Truman’s announcement to go forward with the hydrogen bomb marked a turning point in Robert Oppenheimer’s life. His stature and influence, after such an obvious rebuff, was sharply curtailed. Both he and Conant considered resigning from the GAC. According to Conant, one consideration that stopped them was not wanting “to do anything that would seem to indicate we were not good soldiers and did not want to carry out orders of the President.”

It could not have been a complete coincidence that Paul and Sylvia Crouch, former officers of the American Communist Party, chose that moment to inform on Oppenheimer, acting as paid informants for the Justice Department. In May 1950, Sylvia Crouch told the California Committee on Un-American Activities that in the summer of 1941, Oppenheimer had hosted a “session of a top drawer Communist group known as a special section, a group so important that its make-up was kept secret from ordinary Communists.’ She claimed that it had taken place at his house in Berkeley and that she and her husband had been there. The story made headlines in newspapers across the country, and reporters began hounding Oppenheimer at his home in Princeton. Then the FBI paid him a call, returning a second time that same week. Oppenheimer denied the Crouches’ story, and told the FBI that if he ever attended such a gathering—and he did recollect going to one where William Schneiderman, a leading Communist functionary, was present—it would probably have been at the home of his friend Haakon Chevalier. He was quoted in the FBI report as saying he was “greatly concerned with the allegations against him due to their possible effect on his reputation.”

At the urging of his lawyer, Joe Volpe, Oppenheimer began collecting evidence to disprove the charges, and in the spring of 1952 he wrote Dorothy and asked if she would meet with Volpe and help with the process. Not put off by the taint of scandal, she readily agreed. The difficulty they faced was in trying to reconstruct a series of events that had taken place over a decade earlier, with very little to go on but his own faulty memory. Fortunately, it was a hard summer to forget, a “bad-luck summer,” as Robert Serber later called it.

Oppenheimer recalled that both he and his wife were unwell that spring of 1941. He was tired and overworked and their son, Peter, was born in May, and Kitty, who was a long time recovering her strength, was still feeling weak in July. It was thus extremely unlikely that they had thrown any large parties at their home. At some point, they went to their ranch in the Pecos to recuperate, and Oppenheimer was able to give Dorothy a number of leads to work with in establishing their movements. He recalled that Hans and Rose Bethe had visited, and they had stopped by to see his old friend Katherine Page at her guest ranch. Around that same time, he was mucking about in the corral when a horse kicked him in the knee, causing a painful enough injury that he was worried the knee might be broken and sought medical attention. Not long afterward Kitty, while driving her Cadillac convertible from Santa Fe to the ranch, had a car accident. She slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a truck that had stopped short in front of her on a sharp curve and collided with the truck, hurting her leg and causing considerable damage to the front of the car.

Oppenheimer’s assistant, Priscilla Greene Duffield, also did what she could to pin down where he was from late July to early August 1941 and remembered Dorothy’s intrepid detective work on his behalf. “I was impressed by how close they were, and how much he relied on her,” said Greene. “When he got involved in all the security stuff, she started helping him. She went all around Santa Fe asking questions, and getting dates of prescriptions, and even tracked one down at the Capital Pharmacy to prove he had been in New Mexico at a certain point.”

Dorothy’s weeks of legwork paid off. She was able to establish that the Oppenheimers, accompanied by Frank and Jackie, arrived at Katherine Page’s ranch on the evening of Friday, July 11, and departed the following Tuesday, when they went to Perro Caliente. The local grocery store still had records going back that far, and they showed the Oppenheimers had made purchases on five separate occasions between July 12 and 29. In addition to the pharmacy receipt, she also dug up a receipt for the X-rays that were taken of Oppenheimer’s bruised knee at St. Vincent Hospital on July 25. It turned out that both the Bethes clearly remembered the incident with Oppie’s knee, and Rose had even taken a photograph of the “kicking horse,” which she had marked and dated. It was submitted as evidence, along with another receipt Dorothy dug up from the garage in Pecos that repaired Kitty’s car. Kevin recalled the stacks of yellow notepads that his mother filled with dates, times, and places. “She really threw herself into the detective work,” he recalled. “She would have done anything for him.”

Dorothy and Oppie were in contact more often during this period. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Kevin had enlisted in the army, and after he was stationed overseas in the winter of 1952, and Robert called often to see how she was doing. It had only been seven years since the “war to end all wars” had concluded, and Dorothy had never imagined she would live to see another one. Now she had sent her only son off to battle. His news from the front filled her with “pangs of dreadful horror,” she wrote Oppie, and she could already see how the experience had “aged and saddened and matured him.” Oppenheimer knew how frightened she was for Kevin, and how much she missed him, and did his best to reassure her. At the time, Kitty was not getting along with their own son, Peter, who was on the brink of adolescence, and because he thought it might do everyone some good, Oppie packed Peter off to Santa Fe to be with Dorothy. “I think she was very worried about me, and he was sort of a substitute for me while I was gone, which was fine,” said Kevin. “She took Peter under her wing a little bit and transferred a lot of mothering to him.”

In March 1953, Oppenheimer sent a heartfelt note to Dorothy thanking her for all her assistance and unfailing loyalty. The California committee had assembled quite a dossier on him, but no action had been taken. On a more personal note, he added that he had heard that Kevin had returned safely from Korea and wanted her to know that he was celebrating with her. He wrote he was “thinking, even though I find it hard to say, of all the nobility and simple courage which you have brought to the last years”:

This is the hour to put on paper, however inadequately, a word of the profound gratitude that Kitty and I have for all that you did last summer on our behalf. You can well think that this has played a decisive part in the course of events: and I must comfort myself with the reflection that anything done so superbly and well must also have brought you a little pleasure….

Our love, Dorothy, I hope we shall see one another very soon.

But Oppenheimer’s troubles were far from over. By the end of 1953, McCarthy’s reign of terror had already helped defeat the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 election, and the newly elected Eisenhower did not have the stomach to take on the powerful demagogue. “I just will not—I
refuse
—to get down in the gutter with that guy,” he repeatedly told his aides. With American boys now fighting Communists in Korea, however, McCarthy’s reckless allegations that the country was at risk because of disloyal government officials had taken on new force. Anti-Communist hysteria was at its height. After a lurid trial, played out before a full gallery of reporters and propagandists, the prosecution, aided by Roy Cohn, soon to be McCarthy’s chief counsel, sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair on June 19, 1953. McCarthy, now in his second term, had become chairman of the Senate Committee on Government, and turned its Subcommittee on Investigations into an instrument of persecution, holding hearings, issuing subpoenas, and hunting down and destroying anyone accused of being a Red, a Communist, an enemy of the state, a fellow traveler, a traitor, or a spy. By the spring of 1954, he had succeeded in embroiling the Department of the Army in an embarrassing inquiry into who was responsible for “coddling Communists” in the rank and file. The case quickly blew up into a major clash between the senator and the administration, with the Republican Senate demanding an investigation of the feud between the army and McCarthy. The atmosphere was one of such unbelievable tension that only those who lived through it can attest to its madness.

By then, Conant had long since concluded that Washington had become a “lunatic asylum.” When Eisenhower offered him the job of U.S. High Commissioner to West Germany in 1953, he leapt at the chance to get out of town. The bitter battle over the hydrogen bomb had divided the scientific community and made enemies of old friends, and a disgusted Conant, who had suffered the humiliation of having to withdraw his nomination as the next president of the National Academy of Sciences because of a well-orchestrated right-wing vendetta, washed his hands of the American scientific establishment for good. The prestigious post should have been the crowning achievement of Conant’s scientific career, but instead his enemies used it as an opportunity for vengeance and payback. As George Kistiakowsky later described the double-cross in a letter to Conant’s wife, Patty, a West Coast faction of Manhattan Project chemists had “ganged-up on him behind his back,” and he never saw the knife coming:

Probably the most painful incident in Jim’s life as science leader occurred without warning to me and without my being able to take any steps to prevent it, an event which I see as a tragedy to American science as well as a disappointment I know to Jim. I refer to Jim’s withdrawal from nomination as the next president of the National Academy of Sciences when suddenly being confronted by a small but secretly well organized group of little men who resented Jim’s wartime leadership. The rest of us were unaware of what was being organized and thus were unable to demonstrate to Jim in good time the strong support which in fact would have been his.

With Conant gone, Oppenheimer had lost his staunchest ally and was in trouble. It turned out the man who had led the revolt against Conant was Wendell M. Latimer, dean of chemistry at Berkeley, who not only loathed Oppenheimer, but had helped organize the Berkeley contingent—Alvarez, Lawrence, Teller—who had lobbied for the hydrogen bomb. It was a “dirty deal,” as Conant had put it, and there seemed to be nothing the ascending faction of scientists, who had favored the H-bomb, would not do to expel Oppenheimer and his “machine” from their positions of influence over U.S. atomic policy. In 1951, after the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb—a device based on a new design by Teller and Ulam—Oppenheimer finally gave up his opposition to further development. As even he admitted, their new approach was “technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.” Anyway, it had become a hopeless cause. Lawrence, still smarting from Oppenheimer’s decision after the war to choose Princeton over Berkeley, teamed up with Teller to start a second bomb laboratory, called Lawrence Livermore, to rival Los Alamos. Like rejected suitors, the two physicists were determined to prevail over the man who had spurned them and their weapons. In the meantime, with the revelations about Fuchs’ espionage spreading fear and innuendo throughout the entire nuclear establishment, and Oppenheimer’s reputation wounded by reports that it had happened on his watch, McCarthy’s bloodhounds were closing in.

In December 1953, Oppenheimer, who had just returned home from Europe after delivering the BBC’s illustrious Reith Lectures, received a call from Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the AEC, requesting a meeting in his Washington office. When he arrived at Strauss’ office on the afternoon of Monday, December 21, he was surprised to find AEC general manager Kenneth D. Nichols, one of the generals who had presided over the Trinity test with Groves, waiting for him. After a halfhearted attempt at polite conversation, the two men coolly informed him that the AEC had drafted a letter of charges stating the reason why Oppenheimer’s security status was being questioned and that his clearance would be withdrawn in thirty days unless he requested a hearing.