Einstein's Genius Club (27 page)

In 1929, Paul Ehrenfest, Einstein's close friend, arranged for Oppenheimer to study with Wolfgang Pauli. Oppenheimer had brilliant ideas, but was poor at calculations. Pauli, a superb and rigorous calculator, put Oppenheimer through the mill. It says much about physics in the 1920s that Pauli was only four years older than Oppenheimer, yet seemed the master to Oppenheimer's apprentice. What made the difference was the pace of discoveries in physics in that decade. The brunt of that advance was accomplished
by 1927—by then, someone like Oppenheimer could feel as if he had missed the golden age by a twinkling.

He went to Berkeley in 1929 and by the late 1930s had built—as Hans Bethe put it flatly—“the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known.” This was more than an academic matter. Through the 1920s, the best young American physicists studied in Europe, especially Germany. When Oppenheimer returned to the United States, he made it possible for American students to be educated at home. The arrivals of refugees from Hitlerism only strengthened this achievement. When research for the atom bomb seriously began in 1942, American physics, the equal of any in the world, was ready.

There is no end of testimony to Oppenheimer's brilliance, and justly so. His research on quantum physics made him an international force.
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His graduate students, fascinated by him, mimicked the way he spoke, smoked, and gestured. He attracted women, daunted colleagues, and by sheer intellectual speed and range overwhelmed many of his peers. The physicist Emilio Segré said Oppenheimer had the quickest mind he had ever seen—no small praise: Segré had been trained by no less than Fermi himself. The young Edward Teller was overpowered by Oppenheimer's mind and personality.
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To those around him, he glittered.

The inner Oppenheimer was much more complicated and troubled. He had grown up rich, sheltered, and rather spoiled. He could not help using his intelligence to browbeat others. He was feared for his sarcasm, which, unlike Pauli's, seemed personal and even vicious. Certainly, Oppenheimer's taste for humiliating others reflected his own insecurity. He could analyze, criticize, absorb, and penetrate all difficulties with astonishing ease with his “iron memory.” But he never succeeded in producing truly creative work. For someone so gifted, it must have been a bitter failure. The psychological burden seems to have lifted when he directed Los Alamos. There, his critical gifts were exactly what was needed, and
his restless energy was wholly occupied. In those years, he was self-confident and at ease with himself.

During his early years at Berkeley, Oppenheimer's private interests were as rarefied as his physics. He describes himself then:

I studied and read Sanskrit with Arthur Ryder. I read very widely, mostly classics, novels, plays and poetry; and I read something of other parts of science. I was not interested in and did not read about economics or politics. I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like
Time
or
Harper's
; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 only long after the event; the first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936. To many of my friends, my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me with being too much a highbrow.
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In 1936, his interests shifted radically. The exquisite aesthete became a political activist. The transformation was sparked in part by Oppenheimer's growing awareness of Nazi persecutions. It was also encouraged by his affair with the moody, smart, beguiling, and sometimes badly depressed Jean Tatlock. She introduced Oppenheimer to the world of left-wing protest and intrigue, to Communists, union organizers, and Spanish Civil War loyalists. She herself had been a Party member off and on. It was a heady experience for the privileged and precious Oppenheimer. The affair did not last, however. (Four years later, the gifted but troubled Tatlock committed suicide.) In 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine Puening, whose first husband, Joe Dallet, had died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Dallet had been a Party organizer; Katherine had been a member herself for several years. By 1939 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact that led to the devouring of Poland, she had become disillusioned. Oppenheimer, too, began to gravitate away from the extreme left.

But his political past returned to haunt Oppenheimer. When General Groves, head of the bomb project, decided that Oppenheimer was the ideal director, he was rebuffed, at first, by the Army. Groves persisted and managed to cow the security-conscious Military Policy Committee.
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Oppenheimer's organizational brilliance surprised many of his colleagues, who were first dismayed to have a young man who had not even won a Nobel Prize leading Los Alamos. Despite his support of Oppenheimer, Groves was intensely security-minded. So guarded was he of atomic secrets that he hesitated to brief agents sent behind Germany lines lest a captured agent unwittingly give away a vital secret.
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Still, Groves could not prevent background checks on Oppenheimer, and throughout 1943 they continued. He was shadowed, his Berkeley neighbors were questioned, and he was interrogated endlessly. FBI reports accumulated. Whenever Oppenheimer was questioned, his answers were recorded. Later, careless errors and contradictions were pointed to as evidence of questionable loyalty. In June 1943, Oppenheimer visited Berkeley and then met Jean Tatlock in San Francisco. The FBI trailed them on leaden feet:

He was met by Jean Tatlock who kissed him. They dined… then proceeded at 10:50 pm to 1450 Montgomery Street and entered a top-floor apartment. Subsequently the lights were extinguished and Oppenheimer was not observed until 8:30 am next day when he and Jean Tatlock left the building together.
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In late 1943, with the supersecret Los Alamos laboratory well under way and awaiting his attention, its director was forced to reveal the name of a friend, Haakon Chevalier, a former colleague at Berkeley. Chevalier had earlier approached Oppenheimer with the name of an engineer who had Russian contacts. Having at first failed to mention the incident to the FBI, he later did so. The admission, and his failure to disclose the conversation immediately, became part of the evidence at his 1954 hearing.

Security dogged Oppenheimer, as it did (and still does) all physical scientists underwritten by a government at war (whether hot or cold, declared or not). In the 1940s, security meant Army G-2 (Intelligence) and the FBI, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, was rabidly anti-Communist and reflexively anti-Semitic. In the earlier Red Scare of 1919, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer had launched a campaign against “foreign-born subversives and traitors,”
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by which was meant anyone connected to Marxism, socialism, trade unionism, or a myriad of other left-wing inclinations. (It did Hitler no harm among many conservative Americans that he declared himself an enemy of Bolshevism.) Likewise, Palmer's protégé Hoover believed that the Communist threat came from within. When, later, Oppenheimer faced his inquisition, his work at Los Alamos seemed to constitute “means and opportunity.” The motive was a given.

Los Alamos meant the end of Oppenheimer's scientific career. Like all his Los Alamos colleagues, he did no fundamental work during the war. Afterwards, he became a public figure, for better or worse. Yet Los Alamos in turn did much for Oppenheimer. The astute Hans Bethe, who knew him well, later observed:

There was a tremendous change in Oppenheimer from 1940 to 1942, and especially in 1943. In 1940 he was confused, he mumbled, he certainly wouldn't have given anybody any orders…. [H]e was attracted by problems beyond the capacity of anybody to solve, including his…. In 1942 the new personality had gelled. He was much more decisive…. [In 1943] he really came into his own, and he obviously had always wanted to accomplish something definite, something outstanding. And Berkeley and Caltech had not given him that opportunity.
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Inside the esoteric theorist was a man of action, happy to escape into the world. His early political activities had launched him into the arena of action; at Los Alamos, he led. It must have seemed a sublime
duty, to ensure the military safety of the United States against the Nazis. He could at once hold his own with the brilliant Fermi and keep in mind every detail from the number and size of the mess halls to the need for code names for Niels Bohr and his son. He bent the rules to bring Feynman's beloved and dying wife to New Mexico. He stood up to his own strong-minded superior, General Groves, who wanted all the physicists commissioned, to keep them under strict Army regulations.

After Hiroshima, Oppenheimer became a national hero. He was the man who had ended the war. His thin, ascetic face was everywhere, in magazines and newspapers and even on TV. To be a “theoretical” physicist suddenly seemed glamorous. Oppenheimer brought his organizational acumen to Princeton as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study. There, he quietly assisted the government in its atomic policy, armed guards watching over a safe near his office.

But even at the height of his power and celebrity, Oppenheimer was vulnerable. With the end of World War II came the Cold War. The Soviet Union, not surprisingly, developed its own bomb (aided by the Los Alamos spy Klaus Fuchs). The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began hearings in the late 1940s. Charges began to fly. Communist subversives were said to infest the unions, own Hollywood, and have infiltrated the government. Inevitably, the Committee turned to the very laboratories that had produced the American bomb. Oppenheimer was an easy target.

New charges were now brought against Oppenheimer for his refusal to support the hydrogen bomb effort with sufficient enthusiasm. At first, he was too popular and influential to be tackled directly. His former students could be grilled, however. One, Bernard Peters, was named by Oppenheimer himself. In a closed hearing before HUAC, Oppenheimer said that Peters called himself a Communist fighting the Nazis. Oppenheimer concluded that Peters was still “dangerous.” Peters denied the charges vigorously and wrote to his old teacher for clarification. Oppenheimer equivocated.

Close friends reproached Oppenheimer for testifying. Victor Weisskopf wrote to Oppenheimer in dismay: “[W]e are losing something that is irreparable. Namely confidence in
you
… whom so many regard as our representative in the best sense of the word.”
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Hans Bethe, Edward Condon, and even Edward Teller were horrified. Oppenheimer, confronted by Peters, apologized after a fashion. Writing to Weisskopf, Peters recalled: “He [Oppenheimer] said it was a terrible mistake. He was not prepared for any questions. He had never done anything as wrong.” Peters felt “sad” to see Oppenheimer in such “moral despair.”
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In the 1954 hearing, Oppenheimer himself was finally brought down by his pursuers. One, Lewis Strauss, was a wealthy businessman who had become a rear admiral during the war and then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Strauss was touchy and vain. Oppenheimer unwisely mocked Strauss's views before Congress. The specific reason for the hearing was to inquire about Oppenheimer's refusal to support building the hydrogen bomb, though he was scarcely the only one to voice opposition—Bethe, Rabi, and James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, were also opposed. Oppenheimer's loyalty was not questioned, but he was nonetheless said to suffer a “susceptibility to influence.” Rabi voiced support for Oppenheimer: We built you the A-bomb, “and what more do you want, mermaids?”
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Edward Teller, on the other hand, testified that he did not feel “comfortable” with Oppenheimer's holding a security clearance. Teller was thereafter reviled by a large part of the physics community.

Oppenheimer, forced out of government service, went back to the Institute and physics, more serene in some ways, more troubled in others. He lived little more than a decade longer, dying of throat cancer in 1967. In his blunt way, Rabi insisted that the HUAC hearings were meant to kill Oppenheimer—and did. The Oppenheimer security trial is sometimes said to have inaugurated a new era in governmental suspicion and control of its scientists. Yet Oppenheimer
must have known, during those uncomfortable interviews of 1943, that he had met his masters.

Oppenheimer succeeded in building the bomb, and was eventually disgraced. Heisenberg failed, and was received in triumph.

Einstein no sooner arrived in Princeton in 1933 than the FBI opened a file on him as a suspicious character. To keep him out of the country, the Woman Patriot group, made up of affluent right-wing women living in Washington, D.C., published a sixteen-page screed. They accused Einstein of being the true and “acknowledged world leader” of all Communist activity, outdoing “even Stalin himself” in this effort. Einstein meant to destroy all organized government, promote treason, organize unlawful “acts of rebellion against officers of the U.S. in time of war.” He was also a charlatan; his relativity theory was nonsense; he was moreover an atheist.
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This was the first item in Einstein's FBI file. Einstein read a copy of the publication and thought it so funny he answered it in print lightheartedly. The FBI did not find it amusing; its fantasies would be repeated a thousand times over in that file. The FBI added this warning when it forwarded the file to Army G-2 in 1940:

In view of his radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.
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That same year, Einstein became a citizen of the United States. He would contribute to the war effort minimally, as a consultant to the Navy, with his wild hair intact.