Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (112 page)

Written, but not yet signed, by General Nichols, the letter consisted of yet another summary of Oppenheimer’s FBI file, running once more over the list of communist front organisations to which he had belonged in the 1930s and ’40s, the number of communists among his family and friends, his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and, above all, the Chevalier Affair and Oppenheimer’s delay in reporting it, all of which, the letter alleged, ‘raise questions as to your veracity, conduct and even your loyalty’. ‘Accordingly,’ the letter continued, ‘your employment on Atomic Energy Commission work and your eligibility for access to restricted data are hereby suspended, effective immediately.’ Finally, the letter informed Oppenheimer that, if he wanted to contest these charges and the suspension of his security clearance, he had the ‘privilege’ of appearing before an AEC personal security board. Strauss gave Oppenheimer as little leeway as possible in responding to this letter, allowing him only until the following day to decide whether or not to take up his ‘privilege’ and refusing his request for a copy of the letter. It seems that Strauss and Nichols hoped Oppenheimer would resign, in which case the as-yet-unsigned letter could be destroyed and forgotten about.

Obviously shaken by the turn of events, Oppenheimer, after leaving Strauss’s office, went to see Joe Volpe, the former AEC lawyer, the two of them being joined soon afterwards by Oppenheimer’s own lawyer, Herb Marks. Unknown to them, their conversation was recorded by hidden microphones installed at Strauss’s request. At the end of the evening Oppenheimer took the train back to Princeton to talk it over with Kitty.
Shortly after noon the next day, he received a call from Nichols, telling him he had just three more hours to reach a decision. An hour later, Oppenheimer called back to tell Nichols that he would give his decision in person the following morning.

That afternoon Oppenheimer and Kitty travelled to Washington, where, together with Marks and Volpe, they drafted a letter rejecting the idea that he should resign, on the grounds that such an action ‘would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government that I have served now for some twelve years. This I cannot do.’ Rather than implicitly concede his guilt, he would subject himself to the ordeal of a security hearing. In the meantime, his access to restricted documents would remain suspended, as was forcibly brought home to him two days later – Christmas Eve – when representatives of the AEC arrived in Princeton with a letter telling Oppenheimer that he was ‘hereby directed to deliver’ all remaining AEC documents in his possession. The same day, he received the letter from General Nichols that he had looked through in Strauss’s office. This time it was signed.

On 1 January 1954, in accordance with the wishes of Strauss, the telephones in Oppenheimer’s home and Princeton office were tapped and he himself was put under close surveillance, followed wherever he went. When the FBI agent in Newark found himself listening to conversations between Oppenheimer and his lawyers, he contacted Hoover’s office expressing concern about the legality and propriety of the procedure, ‘in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney–client relations’. As disclosing attorney–client relations was precisely the point of the surveillance (Strauss was reported to have commented to an FBI agent that ‘the Bureau’s technical coverage on Oppenheimer at Princeton had been most helpful to the AEC in that they were aware beforehand of the moves he was contemplating’), the agent was reassured that it was all right, that such surveillance was necessary to alert the authorities to any plans Oppenheimer might have to flee the country.

In the New Year of 1954, Oppenheimer, advised by both Marks and Volpe, considered who should represent him at the hearing. Volpe thought he needed a trial lawyer, someone with experience of the cut and thrust of the courtroom. Marks, on the other hand, influenced partly by the fact that the hearing was, officially at any rate, not actually a trial, but rather an inquiry, thought Oppenheimer needed someone eminent and distinguished, instead of a tough courtroom fighter. So it was that the genteel Lloyd Garrison was chosen. Garrison lacked courtroom experience, but was from a distinguished family and was an extremely educated man. In his spare time he read philosophy and Greek literature.

‘The fact that this clearance has been suspended is presently classified information,’ Nichols had emphasised in a letter circulated to the army,
navy, air force and AEC installations. Nevertheless, news of it began to spread around Washington in early January. On 2 January, Rabi, in his role as chairman of the GAC, went to see Strauss to tell him that he hoped the security board would ‘whitewash Oppenheimer’, a suggestion that Strauss dismissed out of hand. Not long afterwards Vannevar Bush told Strauss that news of Oppenheimer’s suspension and forthcoming hearing was ‘all over town’.

On 25 January, Oppenheimer went to Rochester to attend the fourth in the series of conferences there on high-energy physics. The conference lasted three days and concentrated mainly on the properties of the unstable ‘new particles’ that Oppenheimer had described in his Reith Lectures as ‘the greatest puzzle in today’s physics’. One important recent development in this field much discussed during the conference was the classification of some of those particles into two categories: hyperons, which are heavier than neutrons (an example is the Lambda hyperon, which decays into a proton and a negatively charged pi-meson), and K-particles, which are intermediate in mass between a proton and a pi-meson. What Oppenheimer had described a few years earlier as the ‘particle zoo’ was showing no signs of becoming either less puzzling or less interesting.

Oppenheimer not only took part in the discussion of this conference, but also chaired its opening session on ‘Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering and Polarization’. According to Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer even played a ‘leading role’ at the conference, though he adds: ‘I don’t know how closely he had been following the physics.’ Those taking notes at the conference were, Bernstein says, at pains ‘to record Oppenheimer’s often Delphic remarks’. When he reread those remarks, one thing that struck Bernstein was ‘just how gratuitously nasty Oppenheimer could be when he thought his time was being wasted’:

Abraham Pais was there, too, and also reread the notes taken at the conference. What struck him was ‘how unusually quiet Robert had been at that time’.

Neither Pais nor Bernstein knew about the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance and his imminent security hearing, though there were several there who did, among them Edward Teller. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your trouble,’ Teller told Oppenheimer when they met between sessions. ‘I
suppose, I hope, that you don’t think that anything I did has sinister implications?’ Oppenheimer replied. When Teller assured him that he did not, Oppenheimer asked him if he would speak to his new attorney, Garrison. At this point Oppenheimer knew nothing about Teller’s meetings with FBI agents, and Teller knew nothing about the Chevalier Affair. When Teller met Garrison (and Marks), therefore, the issue that figured most in their conversation was the hydrogen bomb, in connection with which Teller was able to assure them that, though he and Oppenheimer disagreed, he did not think Oppenheimer was disloyal. After his meeting with Oppenheimer’s lawyers, Teller later said, he left with the determination that ‘I would testify that Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen.’ Garrison, however, decided that Teller’s dislike of Oppenheimer was so intense and so obvious ‘that I finally concluded not to call him as a witness’.

By this time Strauss had chosen his own lawyer to represent the AEC at the hearing. The man in question was Roger Robb, who had a reputation as one of Washington’s toughest trial lawyers. Almost immediately Robb was granted an ‘emergency Q clearance’, which enabled him to immerse himself in Oppenheimer’s FBI files, as a result of which he became convinced that ‘Oppenheimer was a Communist and a Russian sympathiser’. Having read through the FBI material, Robb flew out to California to meet some of the scientists – Teller, Alvarez, Lawrence, Pitzer and Wendell Latimer – who were on record as having doubts about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. However, the strategy he was developing would in fact focus less on Oppenheimer’s alleged disloyalty, which, Robb knew, would be difficult (if not impossible) to prove, than on his ‘veracity’, legitimate doubts about which would be very easy to demonstrate: all one had to do was to draw the hearing’s attention again and again to the Chevalier Affair and to Oppenheimer’s documented lies on the subject. He intended to mention the affair as early as possible at the hearing. ‘My theory,’ he later said, ‘was that if I could shake Oppenheimer at the beginning, he would be apt to be more communicative thereafter.’

Garrison, meanwhile, was unable to study the FBI file since he did not have clearance. In January he applied for clearance on behalf of himself and his two colleagues, Herb Marks and Sam Silverman. When the AEC replied that they were willing to clear Garrison but not Marks and Silverman, Garrison responded by withdrawing his application for clearance. It was a fatal error, Garrison’s justification for which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what he and Oppenheimer were up against. ‘We thought,’ Garrison said:

From the start, Garrison’s defence of Oppenheimer took the ‘whole man’ approach, which sought to rise above the ‘dredging up of all these little incidents from his past’ by relying on the testimony of ‘men of the highest integrity and reputation’, who would vouch that Oppenheimer – considered, as it were, in the round – could be entrusted with atomic secrets. If he had known what Robb’s strategy was going to be, Garrison would have realised that this ‘whole man’ approach was useless, and that the possibility of ‘an examination of the technical pros and cons of proceeding with H-bomb development’ was the least of his worries.

For, although Borden in his letter to Hoover makes much of Oppenheimer’s post-war doubts about the hydrogen bomb, and despite the fact that it was Oppenheimer’s attitude to the hydrogen bomb that had aroused the suspicion and hostility of most of the people Robb would call upon to testify against Oppenheimer – Griggs, Teller, Alvarez, and so on – it was never Robb’s intention to rest his case on those doubts. Indeed, concentrating on Oppenheimer’s views about the hydrogen bomb might be counterproductive; it might give the impression that Oppenheimer was being attacked for his opinions, which might arouse sympathy for him.

No, Robb’s case against Oppenheimer would centre squarely upon the Chevalier Affair as a cast-iron demonstration of Oppenheimer’s lack of veracity. There was an obvious drawback to this approach, which was that Oppenheimer had been cleared several times
after
it had been known that he had delayed reporting the Chevalier Affair and that he had lied about it. However, between them, Strauss and Robb developed a way of overcoming this drawback, based on the claim that, since Oppenheimer had been cleared, the rules for granting and maintaining security clearance had been changed.

This is why the letter from Nichols mentions Executive Order 10450 of 27 April 1953, which, the letter claims, ‘requires the suspension of employment of any individual where there exists information indicating that his employment may not be clearly consistent with the interests of the national security’. The issues at stake here have been discussed very illuminatingly in print by Harold Green, who was a legal officer with the AEC at the time of the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance and who, in fact, drafted the letter that was signed by Nichols. In an article he published in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
in 1977 entitled ‘The Oppenheimer Case: A Study in the Abuse of Law’, Green emphasises
the importance of what he describes as ‘the ideological struggle over the concept of security’ that was being fought at the time of Oppenheimer’s suspension.

The struggle was between upholders of two different concepts of security: the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept and the ‘whole man’ concept. The phrase ‘Caesar’s wife’ comes from the motto ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’, which dates from the time that Julius Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, was suspected of adultery. Caesar divorced her, not because he believed her to be guilty, but merely because the question of her guilt had been raised. ‘My wife,’ he famously declared, ‘ought not even to be under suspicion.’

The ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept of security, in Green’s words, held that ‘if there was any significant derogatory information at all that might be true, clearance should not be granted; and there was no need to waste time and money in trying to find out whether or not the information was true’. The ‘whole man’ approach, on the other hand, held that ‘it was unfair to those enmeshed in the security net and to the atomic energy program itself to deny security clearance merely on the basis of derogatory information without giving the individual an opportunity to set the record straight and without considering favourable information that might outweigh the blemishes, as well as the importance of the individual to the nuclear program’.

Among the upholders of the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept were J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss, but, despite this, it was the ‘whole man’ concept that prevailed at the AEC, which is how Oppenheimer ‘and others with blemished backgrounds’ (in Green’s words) were granted clearance. Executive Order 10450, however, was, according to Green, ‘widely interpreted as requiring agencies to use the “Caesar’s wife” approach’. The AEC, though, was an exception to this requirement, as was made explicitly clear in a letter to the AEC from the Deputy Attorney General, William P. Rogers, dated 8 June 1953, in which he reassured the AEC that, as its pre-existing security programme ‘exceeds the minimum standards of Executive Order 10450’, no change was required in the AEC’s approach to security. In other words, the claim that the rules had changed since Oppenheimer had previously been cleared was spurious. There was no requirement on Strauss and Nichols to apply to Oppenheimer the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept of security that was widely believed to be embodied in Executive Order 10450.