Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (99 page)

The four young scientists whose group photograph had been bought by an agent tailing Rossi Lomanitz – David Bohm, who was now teaching physics at Princeton University; Max Friedman, who, having changed his name to Ken Manfred, was at the University of Puerto Rico; Joseph Weinberg, who was now a colleague of Frank’s at Minnesota, and
Lomanitz himself, who was teaching at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee – were all subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. All of them except Weinberg pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Weinberg, who of course did not know the FBI had a transcript of his conversation with Steve Nelson back in March 1943, continued to deny any involvement with espionage.

In contrast, Oppenheimer knew all about his FBI file and what it contained, and was very alarmed to discover that one of the six members of HUAC, Harold Velde, was a former FBI man. When his turn to testify duly arrived, Oppenheimer took with him the AEC’s lawyer, Joseph Volpe. As it turned out, the meeting seemed to go quite well. The committee members went out of their way to assure Oppenheimer that
his
loyalty, having been vouched for by General Groves, was not in doubt. In response to their polite and gentle, even deferential, questioning, Oppenheimer repeated what had by now become the standard version of the ‘Chevalier Affair’ (the chief feature of which was that Chevalier had approached just
one
scientist, namely Oppenheimer himself) and was no doubt relieved not to be asked why he had originally claimed that Chevalier had approached
three
scientists. He also gave bland and protective answers to questions about Lomanitz and Weinberg. When asked about Frank, he said: ‘Mr Chairman, I will answer the questions you put to me. I ask you not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg you not to ask me these questions.’ Remarkably, the response to this was to withdraw the question.

With regard to the unfortunate Bernard Peters, however, Oppenheimer revealed himself to be willing not only to confirm the damaging things he had said to Peer de Silva in January 1944, but also to elaborate on them. He confirmed that he had described Peters as ‘a dangerous man and quite Red’, and added that Peters had been a member of the German Communist Party, but had ‘violently denounced’ the American Communist Party, because it was ‘too constitutional and conciliatory an organization, not sufficiently dedicated to the overthrow of the Government by force and violence’. Perhaps most extraordinary, though, were Oppenheimer’s remarks when asked to explain his comment to de Silva that Peters’s past had been filled with incident that pointed towards ‘direct action’. As grounds for believing Peters to be prone to such action, Oppenheimer cited:

The implied suggestion seemed to be that being placed in a concentration camp and then escaping from it were evidence of some sort of character flaw in Peters. When asked how he knew Peters had been in the German Communist Party, Oppenheimer replied: ‘It was well known. Among other things, he told me.’

These remarks about Peters not only go beyond what Oppenheimer had said to de Silva, but also go way beyond what was required of him on this occasion. When one tries to explain why he was prepared to say so many damaging things about a man who had been his student and friend, the only thing that comes to mind is that he thought that, if he gave the appearance of candour, his bland evasions about his other students, about Chevalier and about Frank would be more likely to be accepted. He must also have believed (though this would have required extraordinary naïvety in the circumstances) that, because this was a closed, executive session with no reporters present, what he said would never be made public. At the hearing there were some signs that, if Oppenheimer’s aim had been to charm the committee into trusting him, then he had been successful. The committee members did not probe him about these other people, and yet seemed delighted by his testimony. At the end of the session, all six members of the panel came down to shake his hand, and one of them, the future President Richard Nixon, made a short speech:

Bernard Peters, who was at this time an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, was called before the committee the very next day, but was not faced with Oppenheimer’s allegations. Instead, in a session that lasted a mere twenty minutes and was presumably an attempt to get him to perjure himself, he was given the opportunity (which he took) to deny that he had been a member of the Communist Party, either in Germany or in the US. On his way back to Rochester, Peters visited Oppenheimer at Princeton and asked him what he had told HUAC. Oppenheimer replied: ‘God guided their questions so that I did not say anything derogatory.’

A week later, however, both Oppenheimer and Peters received a very nasty shock. On 15 June 1949, a Rochester newspaper, the
Times-Union
, had on its front page the headline ‘Dr Oppenheimer once termed Peters “quite Red”’, beneath which was a full account of what Oppenheimer
had said about Peters, both to de Silva and to HUAC. Clearly someone (the chief suspect is surely Velde, the FBI man on the committee) had leaked this information to the newspaper.

On the day this newspaper article was published, Peters was in Idaho Springs, Colorado, attending a conference on cosmic rays. Also there were Hans Bethe, Ed Condon and Frank Oppenheimer. Victor Weisskopf had intended to be there, but on the way had stopped to visit David Hawkins, who lived in Boulder, Colorado, and was enjoying himself so much that he decided to skip the conference and stay in Boulder. Weisskopf, however, read the article, and – like Bethe, Condon, Frank and Peters himself – was appalled by it. All five of them wrote to Oppenheimer expressing their anger and disappointment.

In his letter, Weisskopf mentioned that he did not actually like Peters very much, ‘because of his intransigence and his lack of humour and human understanding’, but, he told Oppenheimer: ‘If Peters loses his job because of the statement about his political leanings made by
you
 . . . we are all losing something that is irreparable. Namely confidence in
you
.’ Here, Weisskopf had put his finger on the central point, and, one suspects, the main purpose of leaking the testimony: not to ruin Peters, but to undermine the respect Oppenheimer enjoyed among his fellow scientists.

Condon’s letter also made an excellent point. He had, he said, ‘lost a good deal of sleep trying to figure out how you could have talked this way about a man whom you have known so long, and of whom you know so well how good a physicist and good a citizen he is:

Bethe’s letter, meanwhile, was concerned with what could be done practically to limit the damage to Peters’s career. He urged Oppenheimer to write to the president of Rochester University correcting the impression that Peters was a dangerous subversive.

Peters himself, accompanied by Frank (the pair were working on a joint project analysing cosmic rays), went to see Oppenheimer personally. It was, he reported to Weisskopf, ‘rather dismal’. Oppenheimer confirmed that he had indeed said the things attributed to him, but that it had been a ‘terrible mistake’ on his part. At first, Oppenheimer had refused to write a public retraction of his testimony, but Weisskopf’s letter changed his mind about that, and he wrote a partial retraction, which he sent to a different Rochester newspaper and which Peters, sending Weisskopf a copy
of it, called ‘a not very successful piece of double-talk’. Oppenheimer, Peters added, ‘was obviously scared to tears of the hearings but that is hardly an explanation’. His letter concludes: ‘I found it a rather sad experience to see a man whom I regarded very highly in such a state of moral despair.’ Similar feelings were expressed by the other young physicists who had so revered Oppenheimer at Berkeley. ‘I think mostly,’ Lomanitz said, speaking for them all, ‘we came to feel sad personally about the man’s weaknesses, and also very sorry that he was not able to give any kind of leadership needed during very bad times.’

As it happened, the incident did not ruin Peters’s career. Displaying a moral steadfastness that was all too rare during these troubled times, Alan Valentine, the president of the University of Rochester, not only refused to fire Peters, but promoted him to full professor. The University of Minnesota showed no such resoluteness, however, and fired Weinberg after he had been charged with perjury, even though (because the evidence obtained from the wire tap in Nelson’s house was not produced) he was acquitted. A similar fate befell Bohm and Lomanitz, both of whom lost their academic jobs.

On 14 June 1949, the day before the Rochester
Times-Union
broke the story of Oppenheimer’s testimony against Peters, it was Frank’s turn to be summoned before HUAC. Frank was at that point in the worst position of all of them, since he had gone on record as denying that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Two years earlier, on the basis, obviously, of leaked FBI documents, the Washington
Times-Herald
had published a front-page story with the headline ‘US atom scientist’s brother exposed as communist who worked on A-bomb’. The newspaper emphasised that ‘the official report on Frank Oppenheimer in no way reflects on the loyalty or the ability of his brother, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer’, but claimed (correctly) to have evidence that Frank was ‘a card-carrying member of the Communist Party’.

When, the day after this story was published, Frank was asked to comment on it, he made a fundamental error. Instead of saying ‘no comment’, he rather foolishly said he had never been a Communist Party member, a lie he repeated to the authorities at the University of Minnesota. Now, at his HUAC hearing in June 1949, Frank decided to tell the truth and admitted that he and Jackie had been members of the Communist Party for three and a half years, beginning in 1937. Despite repeated requests to name other members, Frank refused to do so. Prior to testifying before HUAC, he had been to see J.W. Buchta, the head of the physics department at Minnesota, to tell him that he had, indeed, been a member of the Communist Party, and handed him a letter of resignation ‘just in case’ – the assumption being that this was a mere courtesy and that his resignation would not be acted upon.
Within hours of giving his testimony, however, while he was still in Washington, Frank heard from newspaper reporters that the University of Minnesota had accepted his resignation. A week later, more than fifty physicists, including Hans Bethe, signed a joint letter, sent from the Idaho Springs conference in Colorado, asking the president of the university, James Morrill, to change his mind and reinstate Frank. Edward Teller wrote a separate letter, saying that, although he had ‘never agreed with Frank Oppenheimer on politics’, he thought he was a very good physicist. ‘I always liked him,’ Teller added, and besides, he told Morrill, he strongly believed in ‘the freedom to make mistakes’. One person who was conspicuous in not offering vociferous public support for Frank was his brother. ‘Jackie was absolutely furious,’ a friend of Frank has said, ‘and that was causing a lot of pain in that family.’

Despite the pleas of Frank’s fellow physicists, Morrill refused to let Frank keep his job. In desperation, Frank turned to his old friend and colleague Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley. The last time he had seen Lawrence, on a trip to Berkeley from Minnesota, Lawrence had put his arm round him and said: ‘Come back any time you want to.’ Now, however, Lawrence would have nothing to do with him. ‘Frank Oppenheimer is no longer welcome in this laboratory,’ read a telegram from the Rad Lab. ‘What is going on?’ Frank wrote to Lawrence. ‘Who has changed, you or I? Have I betrayed my country or your lab? Of course not. I have done nothing.’ Finding it impossible to get a university job, Frank bought a ranch in Colorado and, much to his brother’s disdain, would work as a rancher for the next ten years.

By the end of June 1949, then, leaked FBI documents had severely weakened the esteem in which Oppenheimer was held by his fellow scientists, had wrecked the careers of several of his ex-students, and had all but destroyed the closest and most important emotional relationship of his life: that with his brother. In the same month Oppenheimer himself took a major step towards his own ruin when he made an implacable enemy of a man who, on more than one account, was in a position to do him great harm.

That man was Lewis Strauss, who was both a member of the AEC and a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study. Within a few years he would be chairman of both the AEC and the institute’s board of trustees. He was a vain man who craved above all admiration and respect. Oppenheimer felt neither admiration nor respect for Strauss and made no secret of it. Two years earlier, Strauss had felt slighted by Oppenheimer, when Oppenheimer gave evidence to the AEC concerning the possible military uses of radioactive isotopes. Such isotopes were a by-product of the nuclear reactors at, for example, Oak Ridge and Hanford, which
fell under the administration of the AEC, and it had been US policy to allow the isotopes to be sent abroad to friendly countries to be used in scientific research. In the spring of 1947, Strauss attempted to reverse that policy on the grounds that the isotopes might be used for military purposes. When asked for his opinion on the matter, Oppenheimer simply dismissed Strauss’s concerns as not worthy of serious attention, and, much to his chagrin, Strauss found himself outvoted on the issue by four to one.