Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (114 page)

The appearance of Groves on the fourth day should have provided an important boost to Oppenheimer’s camp, but Robb was able to undermine all the supportive things Groves had to say about Oppenheimer with one simple question: ‘General, in the light of your experience with security matters and in the light of your knowledge of the file pertaining to Dr Oppenheimer, would you clear Dr Oppenheimer today?’ To which Groves felt obliged to tell the truth, which was: ‘I would not clear Dr Oppenheimer today if I were a member of the Commission.’

The following day, John Lansdale, by this time a practising lawyer no longer in the army, appeared for Oppenheimer and showed himself ready, able and willing to stand up to Robb. When Robb drew attention to the fact that the other security officers at Los Alamos, including Peer de Silva, were more suspicious of Oppenheimer than Lansdale, he tried further to maintain that their view was somehow more authoritative than Lansdale’s. To this, Lansdale reacted firmly and combatively:

Robb. He [de Silva] was certainly more of a professional than you were, wasn’t he, Colonel?

Lansdale. In what field?

Robb. The field he was working in, security.

Lansdale. No.

Robb. No?

Lansdale. No.

Robb. He was a graduate of West Point, wasn’t he?

Lansdale. Certainly. I am a graduate of VMI [Virginia Military Institute], too. You want to fight about that?

Robb was, however, able to nullify Lansdale’s support for Oppenheimer in one crucial exchange. Prompted by Garrison, Lansdale stated that, in spite of the Chevalier Affair, he still maintained his belief in Oppenheimer’s general truthfulness: ‘I don’t believe that he lied to us except about this one incident – my general impression is that his veracity is good. I don’t know of any other incident.’ Robb’s response to this was as effective as it was cunning:

Robb. Colonel Lansdale, as a lawyer are you familiar with the legal maxim, ‘
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
’?

Lansdale. Yes, I am. Like all legal maxims, it is a generalization, and not of particular significance when applied to specifics.

Robb. When you are trying a jury case and the veracity of a witness is in question, do you request the court to give an instruction on that subject?

Lansdale. Oh, certainly; don’t you?

Robb. Certainly, I want to know what you do.

Lansdale. The instruction usually is that the jury may, but does not have to, take that as an indication, and the judgment is to be exercised in the particular case.

Robb. And when you are trying a jury case and you examine a witness on the opposite side and you demonstrate that he has lied, don’t you argue to the jury from that that they should disregard his evidence?

Lansdale. You are speaking now as to what I as an advocate do?

Robb. Yes.

Lansdale. It depends on circumstances; usually I do.

Robb. Sure. Any lawyer worth his salt would.

The following week saw a procession of pro-Oppenheimer witnesses: Gordon Dean, Hans Bethe, George Kennan, James Conant, Enrico Fermi, David Lilienthal, Isidor Rabi, Norris Bradbury, Hartley Rowe, Lee DuBridge and Vannevar Bush. By this time, however, a pattern had been established that rendered their testimony all but useless: first, they would be led by Garrison or Marks through their avowals of
Oppenheimer’s loyalty and truthfulness, then Robb would use the Chevalier Affair to re-establish Oppenheimer’s lack of truthfulness. So established did this pattern become that, sometimes, the members of the board would raise the matter of the Chevalier Affair, as it were, on Robb’s behalf. When Conant appeared, for example, it was Ward Evans who asked him: ‘Dr Conant, if you had been approached by someone for security information, wouldn’t you have reported it just as quickly as you could?’ To which, of course, Conant had to reply: ‘I think I would have, yes.’ Perhaps feeling that Evans had not done it properly, Robb then added: ‘When you did report it, Doctor, you would have told the whole truth about it?’ ‘I hope so,’ replied Conant. ‘I am sure you would,’ concluded Robb.

The hero of the second week was Rabi, who took the opportunity to express his feelings about the hearing. ‘I never hid my opinion from Mr Strauss that I thought that this whole proceeding was a most unfortunate one,’ Rabi said.

While the hearing was going on, it was reported and commented upon in the newspapers, often with the assumption that McCarthy had something to do with it. ‘McCarthy has few partisans and enjoys little prestige in the Deep South,’ commented
The Southeast
, ‘and the Oppenheimer ouster has done little, if anything, to raise his stock.’ During Oppenheimer’s security hearing, in fact, McCarthy’s ‘stock’ sank to an all-time low, owing to his unwise decision to take on the US army. For five weeks, beginning on 22 April 1954, the entire country was gripped by the televised Army–McCarthy hearings, which marked the beginning of the end of McCarthyism.

Not that the media lost interest in the Oppenheimer case. On 26 April, the first day of the third week of the Oppenheimer hearing,
Life
magazine carried a story about it, which began with the following vivid and evocative description of Oppenheimer’s arrival at the hearing:

The article was non-committal in its sympathies, but was clear about one thing: ‘Whatever the truth of the charges and whatever the outcome of the inquiry, the situation which involved one of the nation’s most brilliant scientific minds was in itself a national tragedy.’

The third week of the hearing saw the appearance of the anti-Oppenheimer witnesses, though none of them did anything like as much damage to his case as he himself had done on the third day. Wendell Latimer, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley with a long-standing dislike of Oppenheimer, testified to Oppenheimer’s ‘astounding’ ability to influence people and his use of that ability to persuade young physicists to become pacifists and dissuade them from joining the H-bomb programme. General Wilson from the air force testified to Oppenheimer’s opposition to strategic bombing as being ‘not helpful to national defense’. Kenneth Pitzer, another chemistry professor at Berkeley with a grudge against Oppenheimer, talked without any great authority or conviction about Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and David Griggs cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty on the grounds of the ‘pattern’ of his post-war activities, which seemed to Griggs to point to a desire to undermine the defence of the US.

The two most significant witnesses called by Robb were Luis Alvarez and Edward Teller, both of whom spoke rather cautiously. Alvarez was careful to stress that what he had to say did nothing to impugn Oppenheimer’s loyalty and indeed did very little other than provide, in his own words, ‘corroborative testimony’ to the fact that Oppenheimer was opposed to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, too, stated: ‘I have always assumed, and I now assume that he [Oppenheimer] is loyal to the United States.’ When asked a slightly different question, however – namely, whether he thought Oppenheimer was a ‘security risk’ – Teller answered:

When he was asked by Gordon Gray, ‘Do you feel that it would endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Dr Oppenheimer?’ Teller replied:

Apart from these two statements from Teller, which, though tentatively expressed, were, in the context of the hearing, extremely powerful, there was very little in the testimony from Robb’s chosen witnesses that would do the Oppenheimer case much damage. Right to the end Robb scored more blows against Oppenheimer in cross-examining Garrison’s witnesses than he did in examining his own. The last pro-Oppenheimer witness was John McCloy, the chairman of Chase National Bank, who had got to know Oppenheimer when they served together on a Soviet–US relations study group. After McCloy had expressed his opinion that Oppenheimer was emphatically
not
a security risk, Robb developed the following variation on his reliably effective ruse of mentioning, or alluding to, the Chevalier Affair at every turn:

Robb. As far as you know, Mr McCloy, do you have any employee of your bank who has been for any considerable period of time on terms of rather intimate and friendly association with thieves and safecrackers?

McCloy. No, I don’t know of anyone.

Robb. I would like to ask you a few hypothetical questions, if I might, sir. Suppose you had a branch bank manager, and a friend of his came to him one day and said, ‘I have some friends and contacts who are thinking about coming to your bank to rob it. I would like to talk to you about maybe leaving the vault open some night so they could do it,’ and your branch manager rejected
the suggestion. Would you expect that branch manager to report the incident?

McCloy. Yes.

Robb. If he didn’t report it, would you be disturbed about it?

McCloy. Yes.

Robb. Let us go a little bit further. Supposing the branch bank manager waited six or eight months to report it, would you be rather concerned about why he had not done it before?

McCloy. Yes.

Robb. Suppose when he did report it, he said this friend of mine, a good friend of mine, I am sure he was innocent, and therefore I won’t tell you who he is. Would you be concerned about that? Would you urge him to tell you?

McCloy. I would certainly urge him to tell me for the security of the bank.

Robb. Now, supposing your branch bank manager, in telling you the story of his conversations with his friend, said, ‘My friend told me that these people that he knows that want to rob the bank told him that they had a pretty good plan. They had some tear gas and guns and they had a car arranged for the getaway, and had everything all fixed up,’ would you conclude from that it was a pretty well-defined plot?

McCloy. Yes.

Robb. Now, supposing some years later this branch manager told you, ‘Mr McCloy, I told you that my friend and his friends had a scheme all set up as I have told you, with tear gas and guns and getaway car, but that was a lot of bunk. It just wasn’t true. I told you a false story about my friend.’ Would you be a bit puzzled as to why he would tell you such a false story about his friend?

McCloy. Yes; I think I would be.

Robb. That is all.

From the chair, Gordon Gray evidently found this analogy too attractive to leave alone and was tempted to contribute his own elaboration:

Gray. Mr McCloy, following Mr Robb’s hypothetical question for the moment, let us go further than his assumption. Let us say that ultimately you did get from your branch manager the name of the individual who had approached him with respect to leaving the vault open, and suppose further that your branch manager was sent by you on an inspection trip of some of your foreign branches, and suppose further that you learned that while he was in London he looked up the man who had made the approach to him some years before, would this be a source of concern to you?

McCloy. Yes; I think it would. It is certainly something worthy of investigation, yes.

The last two witnesses, Boris Pash and William Borden, were the two most convinced of Oppenheimer’s disloyalty. When asked whether he would consider Oppenheimer a security risk, Pash was unequivocal: ‘Yes, I would.’ Borden, meanwhile, stood by his judgement that ‘more probably than not’ Oppenheimer was an agent of the Soviet Union, to which Gray felt obliged to point out:

In the light of this statement from Gray, Garrison chose not to cross-examine Borden.

The hearing ended on Thursday 6 May, with a summary statement from Garrison, in which he reiterated his ‘whole man’ approach. ‘In the Commission’s own view of the matter,’ he said: