Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (113 page)

When it came to choosing the members of the Security Board, Strauss and the lawyer acting on his behalf, William Mitchell, ignored Harold Green’s advice to go for people with experience of AEC Personal Security Boards and instead selected people on the basis that their hostility to Oppenheimer could more or less be assumed. Indeed, says Green: ‘My
knowledge that a “hanging jury” was being chosen was one of the reasons that I asked to be relieved of any further role in the case.’ (The other reason was his shocked disapproval of the tactic of bugging Oppenheimer’s conversations with his defence team and then making those conversations available to Robb.) The first man to be selected for the board, and the man chosen to chair it, was Gordon Gray, the politically conservative president of the University of South Carolina. The other two members were the equally conservative Thomas Morgan, chairman of the Sperry Corporation, and Ward Evans, a retired chemistry professor, who had served on AEC security panels before and had a record of repeatedly voting to deny clearance.

During the first two months of 1954, Oppenheimer, Garrison and Marks worked on their ‘whole man’ defence, which had two main strands. The first was an autobiography written by Oppenheimer that would serve as his reply to Nichols’s letter, arguing that the derogatory information listed in this letter ‘cannot be fairly understood except in the context of my life and my work’. Second, Garrison would call a series of eminent witnesses to vouch for Oppenheimer’s character and loyalty. The list of witnesses assembled for this purpose was indeed impressive, including as it did ten present or former members of the GAC, five former AEC commissioners, two Nobel Prize-winning physicists and a third who would win it some years later, two Los Alamos security officers and the head of the Manhattan Project himself, General Groves. The list of witnesses on the other side was much less impressive, consisting of four scientists from the University of California, two air-force officers, an air-force scientist, one security officer and William Borden.

Apart from the security officer, Boris Pash, all the witnesses in the anti-Oppenheimer camp were restricted to giving testimony that related to the post-war period – concerning Oppenheimer’s alleged retardation of the hydrogen-bomb project, his attempts to undermine the policy of massive retaliation, his opposition to the Livermore laboratory, and so on – none of which had a very large role to play in Robb’s strategy. Besides the reasons detailed above for not giving prominence to Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb, a new and powerful reason for not doing so was provided on 1 March 1954, when the Bravo test at Bikini Atoll seemed to provide a vivid and lethal demonstration that Oppenheimer and Conant had been right all along: a hydrogen bomb was simply
too
powerful to be considered as a weapon of war.

The device tested at Bikini, under the supervision of Los Alamos rather than the new Livermore laboratory, was a Ulam–Teller design H-bomb, using enriched lithium as its fuel. Like the Soviet device tested the previous August, this was a usable bomb, but, like the Mike blast of November 1952, its yield was measured in megatons rather than kilotons. Indeed,
at fifteen megatons, its yield was more than twice what had been predicted, and to this day it remains the largest explosive ever detonated by the United States. It was this test that alerted the world in dramatic fashion to the awe-inspiring power of the H-bomb, and, in particular, to the dangers of radioactive fallout.

More than seventy miles away from Bikini at the time of the blast, a Japanese fishing boat, the
Fukuryu Maru
(‘Lucky Dragon’), was trawling for tuna when its crew reported seeing ‘flashes of fire, as bright as the sun itself, rising to the sky’. Six minutes later they heard the sound of the explosion, ‘like the sound of many thunders rolled into one’. Then they saw a cloud rise in the sky, and about two or three hours later a fine white ash began to fall. Within a few days the entire crew of twenty-three fishermen was feeling unwell, and when they arrived back in Tokyo they were diagnosed with severe radiation sickness. In September, one of them was to die of the radiation poisoning. Already in March, six months earlier,
Life
magazine was reporting the incident under the heading ‘First Casualties of the H-Bomb’: ‘The scientists had warned of the power of the hydrogen bomb, but in abstract language that did not fully register with Americans until last week when fantastic news came filtering across the Pacific.’ A subsequent editorial asked: ‘Is the strategy of retaliation as realistic as it seemed before March 1?’ Clearly, this was not a good time to advance an argument based on the assumption that the H-bomb was self-evidently a good thing that made the United States safe, or to suggest that to doubt the wisdom of the policy of massive retaliation was evidence of being dangerously disloyal.

The day after the Bravo test, Garrison and Marks went to see Strauss to offer a deal that would make the security hearing unnecessary: if Strauss and Nichols would withdraw the letter of charges and restore Oppenheimer’s clearance, Oppenheimer would resign his consultancy. Strauss, having rigged the process to the point where he could hardly lose, was having none of it. What they had proposed, he told Garrison and Marks, was ‘out of the question’. Either Oppenheimer offered his resignation now, or the hearing would go ahead.

So, on 4 March, Oppenheimer put the finishing touches to his long autobiographical letter to Nichols, in which he formally requested a hearing. After detailing his involvement in communist front organisations in the 1930s, his personal connections with communists, his work at Los Alamos and his post-war work as a government advisor, Oppenheimer’s letter ended:

The letter was delivered to the AEC the next day, and shortly thereafter a date for the hearing was announced: 12 April 1954.

The hearing was to last three and a half gruelling weeks, during which events in Oppenheimer’s past were subjected to excruciatingly intense scrutiny. Because of this, and because Oppenheimer had chosen to reply to the original charges with an autobiography, the hearings were sometimes regarded as laying bare his life. He himself, however, always reacted strongly against this notion. He said towards the end of his life: ‘The records printed in so many hundred pages of fine print in 1954. My big year, I’ve heard people say, and my life story complete in those records. But it isn’t so. Almost nothing that was important to me came out there, almost nothing that meant anything to me is in those records.’

He also reacted angrily to the suggestion that the hearing was a ‘tragedy’. It was, he said, much more of a farce. He had a point. There were indeed several farcical features to the proceedings. For example, because his counsel never received the emergency clearance that had been granted to Robb, whenever – as happened frequently – Robb read from classified documents, Garrison and Marks had to leave the room. Moreover, because Robb had access to documents that Garrison had never seen, and could never see, and as he had foreknowledge of everything Garrison and Marks planned to do, whereas they had no knowledge at all of what he intended to do, the element of surprise was always on his side. There was, in addition, the farcical situation that Oppenheimer’s side had prepared their defence in ignorance of the rules of the game. They thought they had to show that, considered as a whole, Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen of the United States and a valuable person to consult on atomic matters, not that he was, as Caesar’s wife should have been, above suspicion.

The first day of the hearing, Monday 12 April, was taken up mainly by the reading out first of Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer and then of Oppenheimer’s long, autobiographical reply, at the end of which the chairman, Gordon Gray, reminded everyone that ‘this proceeding is an inquiry and not in the nature of a trial’. During the second day, Oppenheimer, prompted by gentle questions from Garrison, gave a detailed account of his work with the GAC and the development of his views on the hydrogen bomb. When Robb had a chance to cross-examine Oppenheimer on the third day, 14 April, he revealed that
his
interests lay elsewhere. Throughout the morning he fired questions at Oppenheimer, not about the hydrogen bomb, but about his connections with communists,
with Frank, Lomanitz, Bohm and Peters; then, at the end of the morning, just before lunch, he moved in for the kill. ‘Doctor,’ he began:

Oppenheimer then offered the following account:

After lunch, Robb, following a few more questions about Lomanitz, returned to the ‘Eltenton–Chevalier incident’, asking Oppenheimer about his initial approach to Lieutenant Johnson in Berkeley, in which he told Johnson that Eltenton was a man to watch. When he was asked by Johnson how he knew Eltenton to be involved in suspicious activities, Oppenheimer volunteered to the hearing, ‘I invented a cock-and-bull story.’ Robb, however, refused to pick up on this straight away; he wanted the story to unfold at
his
pace. Ignoring, for the moment, Oppenheimer’s ready confession of having lied, Robb led him slowly through the order of events. The day after Oppenheimer had spoken to Johnson, Robb established, he spoke to Boris Pash:

Robb. Did you tell Pash the truth about this thing?

Oppenheimer. No.

Robb. You lied to him?

Oppenheimer. Yes.

Robb. What did you tell Pash that was not true?

Oppenheimer. That Eltenton had attempted to approach members of the project, three members of the project, through intermediaries.

Robb. What else did you tell him that wasn’t true?

Oppenheimer. That is all I really remember.

Robb. That is all? Did you tell Pash that Eltenton had attempted to approach three members of the project?

Oppenheimer. Through intermediaries.

Robb. Intermediaries?

Oppenheimer. Through an intermediary.

Robb. So that we may be clear, did you discuss with or disclose to Pash the identity of Chevalier?

Oppenheimer. No.

Robb. Let us refer, then, for the time being, to Chevalier as X.

Oppenheimer. All right.

Robb. Did you tell Pash that X had approached three persons on the project?

Oppenheimer. I am not clear whether I said there were three Xs or that X approached three people

Robb. Didn’t you say that X had approached three people?

Oppenheimer. Probably.

Robb. Why did you do that, Doctor?

Oppenheimer. Because I was an idiot.

Robb. Is that your only explanation, Doctor?

Oppenheimer. I was reluctant to mention Chevalier.

Robb. Yes.

Oppenheimer. No doubt somewhat reluctant to mention myself.

Robb. Yes. But why would you tell him that Chevalier had gone to three people?

Oppenheimer. I have no explanation for that except the one already offered.

To make matters worse for Oppenheimer, Robb then took him through all the details of his conversation with Pash, highlighting each one of his false and unnecessary elaborations on his story about Eltenton – his mention of a contact at the Soviet consulate, of the possibility of microfilming documents, of their being two people working at Los Alamos who had been approached, and so on – all of which Robb got Oppenheimer to admit were not true. ‘Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr Oppenheimer,’ Robb summed up, ‘that according to your testimony now you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?’ ‘Right,’ Oppenheimer replied. From that moment onwards his ‘veracity’ lay in ruins.

But Robb was still not finished. Turning to Oppenheimer’s secret rendezvous with Jean Tatlock in 1943, Robb had another damaging confession (previously quoted) to wring out of him:

Robb. You spent the night with her, didn’t you?

Oppenheimer. Yes.

Robb. That is when you were working on a secret war project?

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.
^fn69

Though there were another three weeks of the hearing to go, the decision was never in doubt after this merciless exposure by Robb of Oppenheimer’s repeated dishonesty and of his poor judgement. On the evening after this exchange, when Robb got home, he told his wife: ‘I’ve just seen a man destroy himself on the witness stand.’

Now, it did not matter how many people Garrison produced to vouch for Oppenheimer’s loyalty, or how eminent they were. All Robb had to do was tell the witness about the Chevalier Affair and ask, for example, whether they would have reported the incident sooner than Oppenheimer had done, or whether they considered what Oppenheimer had said about the affair to be indicative of an honest and reliable character, or some other variation on that theme. Oppenheimer had lied, and he had lied several times, and he had admitted that he had lied several times, after which Robb’s task was simply to keep reminding the hearing of these palpable facts.