Authors: David Halberstam
Borden’s interest turned into an obsession, and he became more and more suspicious of Oppenheimer. Obsessed himself, he could not comprehend how a man of Oppenheimer’s intelligence could come to different conclusions. He soon concluded it was not simply a simple disagreement between two men of goodwill. Instead, he decided that there was something sinister to Oppenheimer’s behavior and his opposition to the Super. In 1950 Borden began to study Oppenheimer’s security file. At that point, his attitude hardened from suspicion to conviction. Borden had always believed that there was someone in a high place in the American nuclear program who had allowed Fuchs to operate. For Borden, Oppenheimer now became that man.
In July 1953, Lewis Strauss became the chairman of the AEC. He arrived with an agenda of his own, not the least of which, some thought, was to separate the AEC from the influence of Robert Oppenheimer. At the time Herbert Marks, a former AEC attorney and a close friend of Oppenheimer’s, received a call from an old friend on the AEC staff: “You’d better tell your friend Oppie to batten down the hatches and prepare for some stormy weather,” he said.
In the summer and fall of 1953, Harold Green was a young lawyer doing security checks at the AEC. He was thirty-one years old and had been at the AEC for some three years. He loved his job and he was at ease with the way cases were handled. The commission, unlike some other agencies in the government, used what he called “the whole-man concept.” It meant an official had the right to answer derogatory charges; in addition, no one episode was isolated from the totality of a man’s life. Critical to this view was a belief that everyone, at some point in his or her life, made a mistake—got drunk publicly, bounced a check, had a friend who was not worthy of him.
Green saw his role as helping to preserve a free and decent society, in which the essential rights of the individual were balanced against the interests of the state. At one point he was summoned to argue before the Supreme Court in the Rosenberg case, and he had no doubts, having studied the private files and secret reports from the cryptographers, of their guilt. Later he came to believe that he had played a significant role in sending the Rosenbergs to their death; it was a role for which he felt little remorse.
But Green found attitudes toward security in the AEC changing after Strauss arrived. “The caesar’s wife rules,” Green called the new
method, which he thought reflected a more anxious society—in the new era security “was a privilege and not a right.” If there was significant derogatory information, clearance would not be granted. Nor was an individual always given a chance to answer his or her accusers. Since the FBI files were filled with hearsay, this posed a terrible problem. Early in the Strauss years, there was a case in which the local people recommended clearance, and Green passed their recommendation on without comment. His superior, Harry Trainer, who, Green thought, cared considerably less about individual liberties than his predecessor, was enraged. He charged into Green’s office, shouting: “How can you clear him? Look who his lawyer is—he’s got a Communist lawyer.” The lawyer was from the American Civil Liberties Union. “Harry,” Green said. “The American Civil Liberties Union is anti-Communist.”
From the first, Strauss showed he was going to be a far more powerful, indeed dominating, chairman. Security was made the first order of business. Now Harold Green often started his day with an early-morning call from Ken Nichols, the AEC general manager, who would ask Green to come to his office to get a security file. “See what you can do about this,” Nichols would say, and it was clear that Green was to draw up a list of charges.
Suddenly, the security staff of the commission was spending long hours going through the files of men who had been previously cleared. Strauss brooked no dissent on this: “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first,” one of his fellow commissioners told the Alsop brothers, “but if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.”
It became clear soon after Strauss’s takeover at the AEC that he wanted to get rid of as many of the holdovers as he could, on the assumption that they were all too liberal. Suddenly, the AEC added considerable investigative muscle to its staff. Almost overnight, there was a new connection between the AEC and the FBI. Charley Bates, the FBI’s man at the AEC, became a virtual extension of the AEC staff, and it was hard at times to know whether he worked for Hoover or Strauss. He was a classic FBI man, unusually privileged because he had a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office—his aunt was the Speaker’s secretary. Unlike most FBI agents at his level, he did not have to leave Washington and serve in the Bureau’s field offices periodically. Bates made constant references to Hoover—“the director wants,” or “the boss wants”—that seemed to underline the immediacy of the Hoover/Strauss connection. Harold Green decided that while Lewis Strauss was so security-minded he probably
moved to tighten security procedures on his own, he was also doing this to please Hoover. Indeed, thought Green, who was in an unusually good position to monitor such things, it was almost eerie. What the FBI knew, Strauss knew almost immediately thereafter, and vice versa. There was such an assumption of collegiality that to his astonishment, Green found himself looking at FBI transcripts of illegal wiretaps of Oppenheimer. Normally, Hoover took great care that no one outside his inner circle ever saw such illegal evidence, which was far more damning to the FBI than the subjects.
Strauss was a tough bureaucratic infighter. Whenever possible, he preferred to wield the ax in a genteel fashion; his favorite ploy was to get powerful friends in the business world to offer irresistible jobs in the private sector to the men he wanted to get rid of. No one in that era of government greased as many palms (or as many skids) as Lewis Strauss; he was wealthy in a town where few had money, and he knew how to silence potential enemies. Was there a former AEC lawyer who had left the commission feeling less than warmly about Lewis Strauss? Strauss, knowing that he was just starting out in legal practice, sent him a lot of business. Was there someone who might surface as a knowing and hostile critic to Strauss’s autobiography? Strauss made sure that the potential critic was paid well, ostensibly to correct mistakes (which were not corrected, of course) in the manuscript. Yet what was taking place at the AEC was nothing less than a purge, Green noted, done “with consummate artistry.”
The notable exception, Green noted, came to be Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had shown himself as one not lightly bought off. But J. Edgar Hoover wanted him out. The FBI director liked to judge people by what he defined as their Americanism—i.e. the more conventional they were, the more they thought like him and shared his prejudices, the better Americans they were. It would have been hard to find anyone less like Hoover than Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer offended Hoover professionally and personally; everything about him jarred Hoover’s nerves: his fellow traveling, his intellectual and moral arrogance, his left-wing Jewish background, the elegant schools he had attended, the pretentiousness of his life as Hoover saw it, the fact that he was willing to lie to protect old, left-wing friends. In recent years, Oppenheimer’s defenders were ever less powerful and J. Edgar Hoover saw his chance.
Green became convinced that some kind of promise had been made by Strauss to Hoover to clean out the AEC, specifically, by
getting rid of Oppenheimer. Hoover, in a different time, under a different administration, had acquiesced to Oppenheimer’s security clearance, but he had become increasingly bitter about the AEC since the Klaus Fuchs case. Oppenheimer in the words of the AEC security people, was “like a bone in Hoover’s throat.”
Some thirty-five years after these events, it was hard to believe that at one time Hoover had been one of the two or three most powerful men in the country. His name alone struck fear in the hearts of the most powerful politicians in America, for he was the most successful of entrenched bureaucrats at a time of mounting fear, and he used that fear with great skill to expand his power. He had longevity, and he had secrets. Every year his files grew, and he added more secrets, and thus his power grew. The secrets were nothing so mundane as information about the criminal world or organized crime or even genuine cases of Communist subversion. There was some of that, to be sure, but the important information, the material that made his files so potent a weapon, concerned the moral failings of his fellow Americans, particularly those in power.
Because he was the keeper of the files, he was a man not to be crossed. He dealt in fear. In the inner circle of Washington, the very powerful (almost all of whom had in some way or another transgressed—sexually or financially) feared what his files contained on them; ordinary Americans were made to fear some great and threatening enemy by him. If the nation was afraid, be it of John Dillinger and other punk bank robbers or of the German American Bund or Communist espionage agents
next door,
it strengthened his hand, and his appropriations went through the Congress ever more readily.
He was a man who lived by ritual. Every morning at the same hour, a chauffeur-driven car picked him up. The car was bulletproof, so heavily laden with plating that it was powered by a truck engine. The chauffeur was James Crawford, a black man who had driven John Edgar Hoover for some twenty years, seven days a week, fifteen hours a day if the job so required. He could also, on the occasions that civil rights groups protested the lily-white nature of the FBI, be dressed up in a suit, posted at a desk outside Hoover’s office, and described to innocent visitors as one of the Bureau’s premier black agents. Already in the car by the time it reached Hoover’s house was Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s number-two man, as well as his closest friend.
It was Tolson’s job to flatter the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to make sure that others flattered him as well; he did this without subtlety, for the job did not require any. Tolson
also spent much of his time telling others, when Hoover was out of hearing distance, what a great man the director was. These statements of loyalty, miraculously, almost always got back to Hoover. If the weather was pleasant, the chauffeur would let them off a short distance from the FBI office and they would walk the last few blocks at a brisk pace.
The two men lunched together every day at the same restaurant—Harvey’s. No one else was asked to join them. (Once, a man named Lee Boardman was moved into the number-three slot at the Bureau, and he had the effrontery to suggest that he join them at Harvey’s. His job was soon dissolved.) Hoover and Tolson sat at the same table, surrounded by empty tables to fend off well-wishers and gawkers, and for additional protection, the owner strategically placed a large serving cart to block access. His lunch rarely varied: grapefruit, cottage cheese, and black coffee; at dinner he and Tolson usually ate again at Harvey’s: prime ribs and whiskey from miniature bottles that could be hidden from view by large napkins. Hoover was comped every day by the owner, a considerable favor, which he did not refuse. He did, however, faithfully leave a tip each day of 10 percent of the tab. The director did not like to be seen drinking or gambling in public. When he went to the racetrack (his passion), he boasted that he placed only two-dollar bets. In truth, he often bet a hundred dollars or more, but those larger bets were placed discreetly by FBI agents.
He also liked to boast that he never took a vacation. In fact, his vacations, with Tolson in tow, were as ritualized as his lunches and cost him about the same. They were pegged to the racing seasons. Famous for his frugality (repair work on his house was done by FBI agents; his income tax was done by yet another agent), he and Tolson traveled by train at government expense. The cover story was that they were inspecting FBI field offices. They would stay at hotels belonging to friends who comped them—in San Diego they stayed at the Hotel Del Charro, owned by right-wing oil millionaire Clint Murchison. Hoover would stay in the same bungalow every year, one built especially for him and Tolson by an admiring Murchison. Every afternoon he went to the Del Mar track.
The political and social prejudices of the era were his by instinct, and he waged a relentless struggle against those who might challenge them or, more important, might challenge him. He enshrined the American family and gave frequent speeches extolling its virtues (indeed, in his book
Masters of Deceit,
which tells of the evils of Communism, he quoted information excoriating Karl Marx for running
a dirty household: “In the entire apartment there is not a single piece of clean and good furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and ragged; everything is covered with a finger-thick dust, everywhere there is the greatest disorder ...”). In reality he knew remarkably little about the American family. He never married and had virtually no contact with his nieces and nephews. The families he knew were those idealized in Hollywood movies. No women entered his life if he could help it. The things he did, only men did; the places he went, only men went to. He was the lonely puritan, a morally fierce man, on red alert, fulminating to protect something he knew nothing of. He was also phobic, so frightened of infection that he kept an ultraviolet light in his bathroom to battle the armies of subversive germs.
He lived his entire life in Washington, D.C. His mother was strong and domineering; his father, fragile and weak, lapsed into depression and died of “melancholia” while Hoover was still young. In no small part because of his mother’s will and ambition, he was always eager and hardworking; as a boy he delivered groceries and earned the nickname Speed for his quickness and efficiency. He worked all day to put himself through law school at night. Starting his career with nothing save his ambition and nimbleness—no family money, no fancy college degree—he joined the Justice Department as a clerk in 1917 without illusion and prospered because of that.
He lived with his mother until he was forty-three, when she died. During World War One he worked as part of the War Emergency Division’s alien-enemy bureau. His efficiency and ability to master the bureaucracy were noticed by his superiors, and after the war he was appointed head of the FBI’s Radical division. Working with Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, he led the assault upon the radicals of the twenties. He became assistant director of the Bureau in 1921, when he was only twenty-six.