American Prometheus (89 page)

This description was nonsense, self-serving publicity designed to promote Robb’s courtroom image, and his humanity (“I felt sick . . .”). It is a measure of how cleverly Robb and Strauss manipulated the aftermath of the Oppenheimer hearings that journalists and historians have heretofore accepted Robb’s interpretation of this moment. But contrary to what Robb claimed, Oppenheimer’s “I was an idiot” comment was simply meant to eliminate the ambiguities surrounding the Chevalier incident. He was making it clear that he had no rational explanation as to why he had said that X (Chevalier) had approached three people. Robert knew that everyone knew he was not an idiot. He was using a colloquial phrase in a self-deprecating attempt to disarm his interrogator. Within minutes, however, it would become clear to him that he had not succeeded in disarming anyone—he was facing an adversary bent on destroying him.

Robb had only begun. Oppenheimer had admitted lying. Now Robb was going to confront him with the evidence and in painful detail dramatize the lie. Pulling out a transcript of Colonel Pash’s encounter with Oppenheimer on August 26, 1943, Robb said, “Doctor . . . I will read to you certain extracts from the transcript of that interview.” He then read a portion from the eleven-year-old transcript in which Oppenheimer asserted that someone in the Soviet Consulate was ready to transmit information “without any danger of a leak or scandal. . . .”

When Robb asked if he recalled saying this to Pash, Oppenheimer said he certainly didn’t recall saying such a thing. “Would you deny you said it?” Robb asked. Realizing, of course, that Robb had in his hand a transcript, Oppenheimer replied, “No.”

Robb melodramatically announced, “Doctor, for your information, I might say we have a record of your voice.”

“Sure,” Oppenheimer replied. But he went on to say that he was fairly certain that Chevalier had not mentioned someone from the Soviet Consulate when he told him about Eltenton’s idea. But he had given this detail to Colonel Pash and had also told Pash that there had been “several”—not one—approaches to scientists.

Robb: “So you told him specifically and circumstantially that there were several people that were contacted?”

Oppenheimer: “Right.”

Robb: “And your testimony now is, that was a lie?”

Oppenheimer: “Right.”

Robb continued reading from the 1943 transcript: “Of course,” Oppenheimer had told Pash, “the actual fact is that since it is not a communication that ought to be taking place, it is treasonable.”

“Did you say that?” Robb asked.

Oppenheimer: “Sure. I mean I am not remembering the conversation, but I am accepting it.”

Robb: “You did think it was treasonable anyway, didn’t you?”

Oppenheimer: “Sure.”

Robb, quoting the transcript again: “But it was not presented in that method. It is a method of carrying out a policy which was more or less a policy of the Government. The form in which it came out was that couldn’t an interview be arranged with this man Eltenton who had a very good contact with a man from the Embassy attached to the Consulate who is a very reliable guy and who had a lot of experience in microfilm or whatever.”

“Did you tell Colonel Pash,” Robb asked, “that microfilm had been mentioned to you?”

Oppenheimer: “Evidently.”

Robb: “Was that true?”

Oppenheimer: “No.”

Robb: “Then Pash said to you: ‘Well, now, I may be getting back to a little systematic picture. These people whom you mention, two are down with you now [in Los Alamos]. Were they contacted by Eltenton direct?’ You answered ‘No.’ ”

Pash then said, “Through another party?”

Oppenheimer: “Yes.”

“In other words,” Robb summed up, “you told Pash that X [Chevalier] had made these other contacts, didn’t you?”

Oppenheimer: “It seems so.”

Robb: “That wasn’t true?”

Oppenheimer: “That is right. This whole thing was a pure fabrication except for the one name Eltenton.”

With his client now genuinely squirming, Garrison finally interrupted this painful interrogation to ask Gray, “Mr. Chairman, could I just make a short request at this point?”

Gray: “Yes.”

Garrison politely wondered “if it would not be within the proprieties of this kind of proceeding when counsel reads from a transcript for us to be furnished with a copy of the transcript as he reads from it. This, of course, is orthodox in a court of law. . . .”

After some discussion, Gray and Robb agreed that perhaps at the end of the day a classification officer could make a determination about the release of the document—which of course, Robb was already selectively reading into the record.

Garrison’s intervention was long overdue and overly solicitous—and it did nothing to help release his client from the trap that Robb had set.

Soon Robb was back to quoting the Pash-Oppenheimer transcript with evident relish. “Dr. Oppenheimer . . . don’t you think you told a story in great detail that was fabricated?”

Oppenheimer: “I certainly did.”

Robb: “Why did you go into such great circumstantial detail about this thing if you were telling a cock-and-bull story?”

Oppenheimer: “I fear that this whole thing is a piece of idiocy. I am afraid I can’t explain why there was a consul, why there was microfilm, why there were three people on the project, why two of them were at Los Alamos. All of them seem wholly false to me.”

Robb: “You will agree, would you not, sir, that if the story you told to Colonel Pash was true, it made things look very bad for Mr. Chevalier?”

Oppenheimer: “For anyone involved in it, yes, sir.”

Robb: “Including you?”

Oppenheimer: “Right.”

Robb: “Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr. Oppenheimer, that according to your testimony now, you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?”

Feeling cornered, and perhaps panicky, Oppenheimer carelessly replied, “Right.”

Robb’s relentless questioning had backed Robert into a corner. He didn’t recall his conversation with Pash at the level required to respond adequately to Robb’s interrogation. And so he accepted his tormenter’s selective presentation of the transcript. Had Garrison been an experienced trial-room counsel he would have insisted earlier that his client answer no further questions about his interview with Pash until he had had an opportunity to review the transcript, and he also would have objected to Robb’s strategic use of the transcript to ambush Oppenheimer. But Garrison left the door to the interview wide open, and Oppenheimer stoically walked through it.

But Oppenheimer need not have capitulated so easily. There was an explanation for the convoluted story he had told Pash that was far less damaging than the interpretation that Robb maneuvered him into accepting. Recall that Eltenton told the FBI in 1946 that the Russian consular official, Peter Ivanov, had initially suggested that he contact three scientists associated with the Berkeley Rad Lab: Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez. Eltenton knew only Oppenheimer, and not well enough to ask him about sharing information with the Russians. But it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that Eltenton would have mentioned the three names to Chevalier—and that Chevalier might very well have specifically mentioned them to Oppenheimer, or at least noted that Eltenton had mentioned two (unspecified) others.

So in recounting to Pash what he knew about Eltenton’s activities, Oppenheimer referred to three scientists. Of all the interpretations of Oppenheimer’s “cock-and-bull story,” this notion appears to make the most sense, supported as it is by evidence from the FBI’s own files. Tellingly, the official historians of the AEC, Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, reached a similar conclusion: “Oppenheimer’s story, although misleading, was accurate as far as it went; unfortunately, thereafter, it became confused and twisted.”

Why?

The clearest and most convincing explanation of why Oppenheimer presented Pash with such an elaborately confused representation of his kitchen conversation with Chevalier was offered by Oppenheimer himself the day before his security hearing was concluded. His explanation not only conforms with the most compelling known facts, but it also conforms with Oppenheimer’s character—especially, as he had confessed to David Bohm five years earlier, “his tendency when things get too much” to say “irrational things.” Responding to Chairman Gray’s query whether he might have been telling the truth in 1943 to Pash and Lansdale, and was, in fact, fabricating today about the Chevalier incident, Oppenheimer replied:

The story I told Pash was not a true story. There were not three or more people involved on the project. There was one person involved. That was me. I was at Los Alamos. There was no one else at Los Alamos involved. There was no one at Berkeley involved. . . . I testified that the Soviet consulate had not been mentioned by Chevalier. That is the very best of my recollection. It is conceivable that I knew of Eltenton’s connection with the consulate, but I believe I can do no more than say the story told in circumstantial detail, and which was elicited from me in greater and greater detail during this was a false story. It is not easy to say that. Now when you ask me for a more persuasive argument as to why I did this than that I was an idiot, I am going to have more trouble being understandable. I think I was impelled by two or three concerns at that time. One was the feeling that I must get across the fact that if there was, as Lansdale indicated, trouble at the Radiation Laboratory, Eltenton was the guy that might very well be involved and it was serious. Whether I embroidered the story in order to underline the seriousness or whether I embroidered it to make it more tolerable, that I would not tell the simple facts, namely Chevalier had talked to me about it, I don’t know. There were no other people involved, the conversation with Chevalier was brief, it was in the nature of things not utterly casual, but I think the tone of it and his own sense of not wishing to have anything to do with it, I have correctly communicated.

Oppie went on to elaborate,

I should have told it [the story] at once and I should have told it completely accurately, but that it was a matter of conflict for me and I found myself, I believe, trying to give a tip to the intelligence people without realizing that when you give a tip you must tell the whole story. When I was asked to elaborate, I started off on a false pattern. . . . The notion that he [Chevalier] would go to a number of project people to talk to them instead of coming to me and talking it over as we did would have made no sense whatever. He was an unlikely and absurd intermediary for such a task . . . there was no such conspiracy. . . . When I did identify Chevalier, which was to General Groves, I told him of course that there were no three people, that this had occurred in our house, that this was me. So that when I made this damaging story, it was clearly with the intention of not revealing who was the intermediary.

THE NEXT TOPIC Robb turned to was certain to humiliate Robert—his love affair with Jean Tatlock.

“Between 1939 and 1944, as I understand it,” Robb asked, “your acquaintance with Miss Tatlock was fairly casual; is that right?

Oppenheimer: “Our meetings were rare. I do not think it would be right to say that our acquaintance was casual. We had been very much involved with one another and there was still very deep feeling when we saw each other.”

Robb: “How many times would you say you saw her between 1939 and 1944?”

Oppenheimer: “That is 5 years. Would 10 times be a good guess?”

Robb: “What were the occasions for your seeing her?”

Oppenheimer: “Of course, sometimes we saw each other socially with other people. I remember visiting her around New Year’s of 1941.”

Robb: “Where?”

Oppenheimer: “I went to her home or to the hospital. I don’t know which, and we went out for a drink at the Top of the Mark. I remember that she came more than once to visit our home in Berkeley.”

Robb: “You and Mrs. Oppenheimer.”

Oppenheimer: “Right. Her father lived around the corner not far from us in Berkeley. I visited her there once. I visited her, as I think I said earlier. In June or July of 1943.”

Robb: “I believe you said in connection with that you had to see her.”

Oppenheimer: “Yes.”

Robb: “Why did you have to see her?”

Oppenheimer: “She had indicated a great desire to see me before we left. At that time I couldn’t go. For one thing, I wasn’t supposed to say where we were going or anything. I felt she had to see me. She was undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was extremely unhappy.”

Robb: “Did you find out why she had to see you?”

Oppenheimer: “Because she was still in love with me.”

Robb: “Where did you see her?”

Oppenheimer: “At her home.”

Robb: “Where was that?”

Oppenheimer: “On Telegraph Hill.”

Robb: “When did you see her after that?”

Oppenheimer: “She took me to the airport, and I never saw her again.”

Robb: “That was in 1943?”

Oppenheimer: “Yes.”

Robb: “Was she a Communist at that time?”

Oppenheimer: “We didn’t even talk about it. I doubt it.”

Robb: “You have said in your answer that you knew she had been a Communist?”

Oppenheimer: “Yes. I knew that in the fall of 1937.”

Robb: “Was there any reason for you to believe that she wasn’t still a Communist in 1943?”

Oppenheimer: “No.”

Robb: “Pardon?”

Oppenheimer: “There wasn’t, except that I have stated in general terms what I thought and think of her relation with the Communist Party. I do not know what she was doing in 1943.”

Robb: “You have no reason to believe she wasn’t a Communist, do you?”

Oppenheimer: “No.”

Robb: “You spent the night with her, didn’t you?”

Oppenheimer: “Yes.”

Robb: “Did you think that consistent with good security?”

Oppenheimer: “It was, as a matter of fact. Not a word—it was not good practice.”

Robb: “Didn’t you think that put you in a rather difficult position had she been the kind of Communist that you have described her[e] or talk[ed] about this morning?”