American Prometheus (80 page)

By 1953, the Cold War had frozen the policy options in Washington at least as hard as they were frozen in Moscow, and Oppenheimer’s persistent efforts to somehow keep the nuclear genie attached to the bottle, if not in it, ran against the current of powerful forces at home. Now that a Republican was president, these political forces were determined to put Oppenheimer into a bottle—and throw him out to sea.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Scientist X”

He [Oppie] had had enough of me and I had had enough of
him too.

JOE WEINBERG

BY THE SPRING OF 1950, Oppenheimer had every reason to think that the FBI, HUAC and the Justice Department were all closing in on him. Hoover was telling his agents that Oppenheimer might be indicted for perjury, and they had to continue to investigate him vigorously. Twice that spring, FBI agents had interviewed him in his Princeton office. The agents noted that while he had been “entirely cooperative,” he had also “expressed great concern over the possibility of allegations concerning his past affiliation with the Communist Party being made a matter of public trial.” He was deeply worried that his name would be linked to Joe Weinberg—whom the Crouches and HUAC had identified as “Scientist X,” a Soviet spy. Oppenheimer had last seen Weinberg at a Physical Society conference in 1949, shortly after Weinberg’s troubles with HUAC had commenced. On this occasion, Weinberg sensed a coolness in their relationship. “So there was a cloud over our relationship at that point,” Weinberg recalled. “The cloud would be that Oppie wouldn’t know just what I was going to do. He would have to worry that the pressure on me might eventually be turned against him in some way. . . . It was clear that he felt that there were things that were damaging to him that I could be made to say, whether or not I knew them, if I were in some way weak.”

Weinberg admitted to feeling “terrified” and bewildered by what was happening to him. He knew, of course, that he was guilty of having discussed the bomb project with Steve Nelson in 1943, but he did not know that his conversation had been recorded. Nor did he believe that he had committed espionage. Recently, the
Milwaukee Journal
had published an outlandish story claiming that Weinberg had been a courier for the Soviets—and that he had even passed on a sample of uranium-235. “My God,” he thought, “what connections could they have made to make up such a theory?” For a time, he felt he might crack. “I felt desperate, I felt utterly alone and broken down and beset on every side. I literally trembled. God knows what I could have been made to say if they [the FBI] had followed up.”

Fortunately for Weinberg, the authorities were moving slowly. That spring a federal grand jury in San Francisco was weighing a perjury indictment against him. But the Justice Department had very little usable evidence. Weinberg had testified under oath that he had never been a Communist Party member and that he had never even met Steve Nelson. But the FBI wiretap was illegal and, therefore, inadmissible in court, and there was no other evidence that Weinberg had been a CP member. By April 1950, the Bureau had interviewed eighteen present and former Communist Party members in the San Francisco area, and none of them was able to link Weinberg to the Party. In the absence of the the wiretap evidence, the grand jury failed in 1950 to return an indictment against Weinberg.

Undeterred by this setback, the Justice Department convened a second grand jury in the spring of 1952. Their only other evidence against Weinberg was Paul Crouch’s testimony that he had seen Weinberg at a Party meeting talking to Nelson. Prosecutors were well aware that Crouch’s testimony might be unreliable—but they may have calculated that a trial would shake loose further evidence against Weinberg, and perhaps even Oppenheimer. By that time, Weinberg had mustered the courage to stick it out. “They were fools,” Weinberg later said of his antagonists. “They waited until I got a little bit less desperate and a little bit hardened.” Interviewed by the grand jury, he refused to tell them anything—and certainly nothing about Oppie. “I was not going to get Oppie into this at all,” Weinberg said. “That was the thing that would happen over my dead body.”

By then, Oppenheimer had been interviewed once again about the Crouches’ allegation that he had hosted a Party meeting at his Kenilworth Court home in Berkeley in July 1941. On this occasion, two investigators from the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned him in the presence of his attorney, Herbert Marks. Oppenheimer again denied knowing either of the Crouches; he also denied that he had ever met Grigori Kheifets, a Soviet intelligence officer stationed in San Francisco, and he denied that Steve Nelson had ever approached him for information about the bomb project.

The interview was conducted in a less-than-friendly manner. Seeing the Senate staffers taking careful notes, Marks interrupted to say that he wanted a copy of any record they made of the conversation. When they rebuffed this request, Marks insisted that if they wished to continue to ask about Oppenheimer’s affairs, “we would want a transcript.” To this the Senate staffers coldly observed that last spring Oppenheimer had been under subpoena, and at that time, Oppenheimer’s other lawyer, Joe Volpe, had suggested that Oppenheimer be interviewed in an “informal talk.” They thought, said the Senate staffers, that they “were being nice about it.” On this note, the twenty-minute interview soon ended. Such encounters convinced both Oppenheimer and Marks that the Crouches’ allegations had not been put to rest.

On May 20, 1952, just three days before Weinberg’s indictment, Oppenheimer arrived in Washington for yet another interrogation. The lawyers who were about to prosecute Weinberg had decided it might be useful to confront Oppenheimer with his accuser. Four years earlier, Richard Nixon and his HUAC investigators had lured an unsuspecting Alger Hiss to a room in New York City’s Commodore Hotel and confronted him with his accuser, Whittaker Chambers. Hiss was now serving a prison term for perjury. Perhaps, Justice Department investigators reasoned, Nixon’s tactic was worth trying on Oppenheimer.

Accompanied by his attorneys, Oppenheimer walked into the Justice Department to be interviewed by lawyers from the Criminal Division. Questioned about the alleged July 1941 meeting in his Kenilworth Court home, he once again denied the Crouches’ story and insisted that he had been in New Mexico at the time. He said he did not know either Paul or Sylvia Crouch, and “that no such persons” had come to his home during that period to talk about communism or the invasion of Russia. He said that he had read Crouch’s testimony before the California State Committee on Un-American Activities (the Tenney Committee) and he had no recollection of the meeting Crouch described. He volunteered that he had talked with his wife and also with Kenneth May, and “they confirmed his recollection that no such meeting occurred.”

At this point, the Justice Department lawyers turned to Oppenheimer’s attorneys—Herb Marks and Joe Volpe—and said that Paul Crouch was sitting in the next room. Would it be acceptable, they asked, if Crouch was brought into the room “to see if he would recognize Dr. Oppenheimer, as well as to see if Dr. Oppenheimer would recognize Crouch . . .”? With Oppenheimer’s acquiescence, Marks and Volpe agreed. The door then opened and Crouch walked up to Oppenheimer, shook his hand and said, “How do you do, Dr. Oppenheimer?” He then turned melodramatically to the lawyers and said that the man with whom he had just shaken hands was the same person who had been his host at a meeting in July 1941 at 10 Kenilworth Court. Crouch reiterated that he had given a talk on the “Communist Party propaganda line to be followed after the invasion of Russia by Hitler.”

If Oppenheimer was taken aback by this performance, the FBI record fails to report it. Instead, it merely notes that he quickly responded that he did not know Crouch. Prompted to describe the July 1941 meeting in greater detail, Crouch said that he remembered Oppenheimer asking him several questions at the conclusion of his hour-long presentation. To this Oppenheimer interrupted to ask what exactly he was supposed to have said in this question period. Crouch then claimed that Oppenheimer’s questions involved a philosophical analysis of Russia’s involvement in the war “based upon Marxian doctrine.” Crouch said, “Dr. Oppenheimer stated that he could see why we should give aid to Russia but asked why we should aid Britain, who might double-cross us.” Crouch claimed Oppenheimer also asked whether or not the German invasion of Russia had now created two wars: a “British-German imperialistic war” and a “Russian-German people’s war.” To this Oppenheimer said that such questions by him “were impossible because he had never at any time thought or advanced the suggestion of two wars.”

Marks and Volpe made some attempt to trip Crouch up by asking him about Oppenheimer’s appearance. Did he look substantially the same as he did in 1941? Crouch replied that he looked the same. What about his hair? asked one of the two attorneys. Crouch allowed that Oppenheimer’s hair might be a little shorter than in 1941, but he hadn’t really concentrated on his hair. In fact, in 1941 Oppenheimer had worn his hair in a long, bushy cut; by 1952 he kept it very short, almost a crew-cut. Still, this was a small discrepancy.

On the whole, Crouch had demonstrated that he might be a credible witness against Oppenheimer in a court trial. He had described the interior of Oppenheimer’s home, and he also had seemed credible in claiming to have seen Oppenheimer in the autumn of 1941 at a housewarming party for Ken May. Oppenheimer had conceded that he remembered dancing with a Japanese girl at a party that might well have been May’s housewarming party. This might be regarded as an important admission, since Crouch further claimed that he had seen Oppenheimer deep in conversation at this party with Ken May, Joseph Weinberg, Steve Nelson and Clarence Hiskey, another physics student at Berkeley.

After Crouch finally left the room, Oppenheimer turned to the Justice Department lawyers and once again stated that he had no recollection of ever having met Crouch. At that, he was excused. He left with Marks and Volpe, and afterwards the three men speculated on what the Justice Department’s next step would be.

Three days later, on May 23, 1952, they learned of the indictment of Weinberg, and that the indictment made no mention of Crouch, Oppenheimer or the Kenilworth meeting. In fact, Oppenheimer’s lawyers had lobbied the Justice Department, through AEC chairman Gordon Dean, to drop the Kenilworth incident from the indictment. Oppenheimer was relieved— but only momentarily.

JOE WEINBERG’S perjury trial finally commenced in the autumn of 1952, and almost immediately Oppenheimer was given notice by the government that he might be called as a witness. Herb Marks again diligently lobbied the Justice Department to keep Oppenheimer’s name off the witness list. Among other things, he persuaded the AEC chairman, Gordon Dean, to write President Truman, urging him to order the Justice Department to exclude Crouch’s charges from the trial proceedings. “It will be Oppenheimer’s word against Crouch’s word,” Dean wrote the president. “Whatever the outcome of the Weinberg case, Dr. Oppenheimer’s good name will be greatly impaired and much of his value to the country will be destroyed.” Truman replied the very next day: “I am very much interested in the Weinberg-Oppenheimer connection. I feel as you do that Oppenheimer is an honest man. In this day of character assassination and unjustified smear tactics it seems that good men are made to suffer unnecessarily.” Truman, however, gave no indication of what he would do.

Early that autumn, when the Justice Department’s bill of particulars against Weinberg was filed, it made no mention of Oppenheimer. But after Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the presidency in early November a harsher attitude toward security cases was instituted. A Justice Department official called Joe Volpe on November 18, 1952, and said, “Oppie will have to be brought into it.” The
San Francisco Chronicle,
among other newspapers, picked up on wire service reports: “. . . government prosecutors said today that Dr. Joseph Weinberg attended a Communist Party meeting in Berkeley, Calif. in a ‘residence believed to have been . . . occupied by J. Robert Oppenheimer.’ ” The very next day, Oppenheimer was served a subpoena by Weinberg’s attorney to appear in court as a defense witness. Oppie let Ruth Tolman know how upset he was and she wrote him back, “Such a miserable business. Robert, I know how worrisome the prospect must be.”

Marks and Volpe understood that anything could happen in a trial where it was one person’s word against another’s. If Weinberg was convicted of perjury, that would pave the way for an indictment of Oppenheimer himself. So, once again, Marks and Volpe scrambled to get Oppenheimer removed from the case. In a meeting with prosecutors, they argued that “it seemed a terrible thing to subject Oppenheimer to the embarrassment and grief . . . and expressed the hope that a way could be found to avoid doing this to a man who has been so important to his country. . . . [T]here would be no better way for Joe Stalin to play his game than to create suspicion about people like Oppenheimer.”

In late January, soon after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Volpe and Marks again approached AEC Chairman Dean and asked him if there “isn’t some natural and in-channel way of getting this question considered on a higher level.” But when the trial finally commenced in late February, Weinberg’s lawyer announced that Oppenheimer would appear as a defense witness and that he would testify that the Kenilworth Court meeting never took place. In his opening statement, Weinberg’s defense counsel dramatically announced that “this case can be cut down to whether they believe the word of a criminal [Crouch] or the word of a distinguished scientist and outstanding American. . . .”

Oppenheimer had to go to Washington to be ready to appear in court at a moment’s notice. But on February 27, he was told that he probably would not have to testify; the Justice Department had suddenly agreed to drop the part of the indictment pertaining to the Kenilworth meeting. In the interest of protecting the AEC’s reputation, Gordon Dean had evidently leaned on the Justice Department. Oppie took the train home on the evening of February 27 and arrived late to a party at Olden Manor hosted by Ruth Tolman, who was visiting from California. Ruth could see that he “felt so worn out and worried and frazzled.” But at least he had escaped “all the miseries of subpoenas and the like.”