Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (115 page)

He conceded that Oppenheimer took a good deal of understanding: ‘But this man bears the closest kind of examination of what he really is, and what he stands for, and what he means to the country. It is that effort of comprehension of him that I urge upon you.’

After Garrison had finished his summation the hearing was brought to a close, and the three members of the board, Gray, Morgan and Evans, were given a ten-day break before returning to Washington on 17 May to consider their findings.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer and Kitty returned to Olden Manor, where FBI microphones continued to record their every conversation. On 7 May, Oppenheimer was reported to have told a friend despairingly that ‘he will never be through with the situation’, since ‘all the evil of the times’ was wrapped up in it. Exhausted from the hearing and nervously awaiting the result, he was described a few days later as
‘very depressed at the present time and has been ill-tempered with his wife’.

On 27 May, after considering the evidence put before it, the three-member board presented its findings to General Nichols. On the question of whether Oppenheimer’s clearance should be reinstated, the board was split, with Gray and Morgan recommending that it should not, and Evans recommending that it should. The majority report, signed by Gray and Morgan, repeatedly emphasises that none of them doubted Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country. ‘We have,’ they state, ‘come to a clear conclusion, which should be reassuring to the people of this country, that he is a loyal citizen.’

On the other hand, they add: ‘We have, however, been unable to arrive at the conclusion that it would be clearly consistent with the security interests of the United States to reinstate Dr Oppenheimer’s clearance, and, therefore, do not so recommend.’ They give four reasons for this recommendation. The first is ‘that Dr Oppenheimer’s continuing conduct and associations have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system’, by which they seem to mean Oppenheimer’s ‘current associations with Dr Chevalier’, to which, they say, they attach ‘a high degree of significance’. The second is that Oppenheimer had shown ‘a susceptibility to influence’. What they seem to have in mind here is Oppenheimer’s willingness to write letters on behalf of Lomanitz and Peters after he had been urged to do so by Ed Condon. Their third reason is the most controversial. ‘We find,’ they write, ‘his conduct in the hydrogen-bomb program sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt as to whether his future participation, if characterised by the same attitudes in a Government program relating to the national defense, would be clearly consistent with the best interests of security’. What they mean by this is not entirely clear, but it seemed to many – particularly to many scientists – to amount to saying that Oppenheimer was to be judged on the basis of his beliefs, which was a very dangerous path to tread. Their fourth and final reason for denying Oppenheimer clearance is that he had been ‘less than candid in several instances in his testimony before this Board’. In their report, Gray and Morgan do not elaborate or support this, but its basis seems to be their conviction that Oppenheimer had lied to the hearing about the Chevalier Affair.

In his minority report, Ward Evans, noting that all three members of the panel were agreed that Oppenheimer was loyal to his country, recommended the reinstatement of Oppenheimer’s clearance on several grounds. First: ‘To deny him clearance now for what he was cleared for in 1947, when we must know he is less of a security risk now than he was then, seems to be hardly the procedure to be adopted in a free country.’ Second,
Oppenheimer ‘did not hinder the development of the H-bomb and there is absolutely nothing in the testimony to show that he did’. And, finally: ‘His witnesses are a considerable segment of the scientific backbone of our Nation and they endorse him.’ At the end of his report, Evans adds, in the manner of a man protesting too much: ‘I would like to add that this opinion was written before the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
came out with its statement concerning the Oppenheimer case.’

The May 1954 issue of the
Bulletin
was a special issue, largely devoted to the Oppenheimer case, in which, after printing Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer’s reply to it, the editors published a collection of statements they had received during the first week of the hearing from notable scientists. Included in the collection are statements from Samuel Allison, Harold Urey, F.W. Loomis, Linus Pauling, Julian Schwinger, Albert Einstein and Victor Weisskopf, several of whom pointed out the injustice and the danger involved in declaring a man a security risk because, when asked for his opinion, he says something the government of the day does not want to hear. The
Bulletin
also published a statement condemning the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance by the executive committee of the Federation of American Scientists, and a petition signed by twenty-seven physicists at the University of Illinois disputing the charges brought against Oppenheimer and stating their collective wish, as people ‘closely associated with Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer’, to reassure the public that ‘there can be no reasonable doubt of his loyalty’. It was very clear from this issue of the
Bulletin
that the scientists who had testified against Oppenheimer – Alvarez, Latimer, Pitzer and Teller – belonged to a very small minority, and evidently not one that Ward Evans was particularly keen to join.

On 28 May, the findings of the board, including Ward’s minority report, were sent by Nichols to Oppenheimer. A few days later, Garrison responded to those findings on Oppenheimer’s behalf. He began by noting that the recommendation not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance ‘stands in such contrast with the Board’s findings regarding Dr Oppenheimer’s loyalty and discretion as to raise doubts about the process of reasoning by which the conclusion was arrived at’. Garrison also complained that, despite what Oppenheimer had said in his autobiographical letter to Nichols, the findings of the board were not ‘considered in the context of Dr Oppenheimer’s life as a whole’.

Garrison assumed that Nichols would forward the board’s findings to the AEC, together with a recommendation based upon them. In fact, in submitting the board’s findings to the AEC, Nichols also submitted his own recommendations, which, while loosely based upon the recommendations of the board, differed significantly in content
and in emphasis. For example, the general tone of Nichols’s memo is a good deal less friendly to Oppenheimer, and, unlike both the majority and the minority reports, he does not repeatedly stress Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country, confining himself simply to the statement: ‘The record contains no direct evidence that Dr Oppenheimer gave secrets to a foreign nation or that he is disloyal to the United States.’ Neither does Nichols endorse the majority report’s suggestion that Oppenheimer’s ‘disturbing’ conduct during the hydrogen-bomb programme offered a reason not to reinstate his clearance. On the contrary, Nichols is very careful to emphasise that his finding against Oppenheimer ‘is not based on Dr Oppenheimer’s opinions’, and that ‘the evidence establishes no sinister motives on the part of Dr Oppenheimer in his attitude on the hydrogen bomb, either before or after the President’s decision’.

In the memo, Nichols is at pains to make clear that his recommendation not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance is based squarely on the consideration of Oppenheimer’s
veracity
. In connection with this, Nichols gives
far
more weight to the ‘Chevalier incident’ than the board had done. It is this, above all else, Nichols’s memo suggests, that establishes that Oppenheimer is not to be trusted. After all:

Nichols is very clear which version of the story
he
thinks is true:

In thus emphasising the importance of the Chevalier Affair, Nichols was reflecting more accurately than the board members had done the case that had been presented by Robb at the hearing and also the views of Lewis Strauss. He was, moreover, closing the gap that Garrison had mentioned between the board’s recommendations and its comments on Oppenheimer’s loyalty and discretion. What had been murky in the panel’s majority report was made abundantly clear in Nichols’s memo: the reason for recommending that Oppenheimer’s clearance should not be reinstated was first and foremost that he had been shown to be a liar on a matter of national security.

If Nichols thought he could bury the admiring comments about Oppenheimer’s character, loyalty and service to the country that had been made in the panel’s reports, he was shown to be mistaken on 1 June 1954, when Garrison leaked the text of those reports to the press. In retaliation, Strauss took a somewhat desperate step. Despite the fact that the witnesses at the hearing had been promised that their testimony would be treated in confidence, Strauss persuaded the AEC to publish the entire proceedings. On 15 June, before the AEC had even announced its decision in the Oppenheimer case, the transcript, entitled
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
, was released in book form to the press, and the following day it was available to the general public.

Two weeks later, the AEC finally announced its decision. By a vote of four to one, the commissioners voted not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance. The majority report, signed by Strauss, Campbell and Zuckert, followed the lines of Nichols’s letter, in emphasising that the reasons for denying clearance to Oppenheimer rested not on his opinions, or on any alleged disloyalty, but rather on his ‘associations’ with communists and, above all, on the flaws in his character demonstrated by the ‘whole fabrication and tissue of lies’ that he had, by his own admission, told Pash about the Chevalier incident. Commissioner Murray also voted to deny Oppenheimer clearance, but his reasons were rather different and so he wrote his own report, in which he did
not
shy away from accusing Oppenheimer of disloyalty. In an echo of the split among the panel members, the only commissioner to vote
for
the reinstatement of Oppenheimer’s clearance was also the only scientist on the AEC, namely Henry DeWolf Smyth, who, in his own report, wrote that he agreed with the Gray board that Oppenheimer was ‘completely loyal’ and that ‘I do not believe he is a security risk.’ The Chevalier incident, Smyth conceded, was ‘inexcusable’, but ‘that was 11 years ago; there is no subsequent act even faintly similar’.

The AEC announced its decision not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s clearance on 29 June. The following day, Oppenheimer’s one-year contract as
a consultant to the AEC was due to expire anyway. In effect, what had been achieved by a hearing lasting three and a half weeks, followed by several more weeks of deliberation, was that Oppenheimer’s employment as an AEC consultant came to an end a day earlier than originally contracted.

^fn68
The title is an allusion to the Latin phrase,
falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
, which means ‘false in one, false in all’. In law the phrase is used to indicate that, if a witness has been shown to lie once, then his or her entire testimony cannot be trusted.

^fn69
See footnote 49 on p.360

H
AAKON CHEVALIER FIRST
learned of his leading role in the Oppenheimer case on 13 April 1954, when the
New York Times
published Nichols’s letter to Oppenheimer listing the charges against him, together with Oppenheimer’s autobiographical reply. Chevalier found Nichols’s letter ‘repulsive’, but Oppenheimer’s reply ‘even more distressing’, because, with its talk of ‘intermediaries’ between Eltenton and scientists working on the bomb, it seemed to paint a picture of something much more elaborate than the simple and short conversation that Chevalier remembered.

Then, on 16 June, just after the AEC published the entire transcript of the hearings, Chevalier, still living in Paris, saw a headline in the
Paris-Presse
that read: ‘Oppie confesse: “J’étais un idiot.”’ When he bought a copy of the paper, Chevalier saw that it contained extracts from the transcript, including the exchange between Robb and Oppenheimer during which Oppenheimer admitted to having told a ‘tissue of lies’. Reading it made Chevalier realise what, or rather who, had been the source of the story that had dogged him all those years:

On 28 June,
Time
magazine ran a long article on the Oppenheimer case, reporting on the board’s findings, but not yet on the AEC’s decision, which was announced the following day. ‘In the list of witnesses against
J. Robert Oppenheimer,’ the piece said, ‘the most effective was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. His testimony showed that he had lied repeatedly in the past about important security matters.’ ‘The most telling example of Oppenheimer’s past capacity for untruths was drawn out in cross-examination about his relationships with his good friend Haakon Chevalier.’