Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Oppenheimer’s enemies included men practiced in the subterranean stiletto warfare of Washington who envied his brilliance and influence, resented his liberal politics, suspected his patriotism because of his radical past and their own fear of communism, and felt no qualms about ruthlessly exploiting his vulnerabilities. So Oppenheimer’s enemies, who felt intimidated and threatened by him and yet could not cope with him, decided to use these skeletons to shame Oppenheimer and to bring him down with a maximum of disgrace so that his influence would be finished. The atmosphere was even more Machiavellian and predatory than usual in Washington life.
On November 7, 1953, one of Oppenheimer’s enemies, William Borden, a former staff director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy who had zealously advocated the superbomb and deeply resented Oppenheimer’s opposition to it, mailed a three and a half page, single-spaced letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was another Oppenheimer foe. “More probably than not,” Borden asserted in his accusatory letter, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Borden listed the factors that led him to this conclusion: Oppenheimer’s financial contributions to the Communist Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s; the fact that his wife, his brother, and his onetime fiancée all had been communists; his contradictory information about espionage approaches in 1943; and his “tireless” work “to retard the United States H-bomb program.”
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Oppenheimer had been in Hoover’s crosshairs for years. In 1947 the FBI director had argued in vain against renewing Oppenheimer’s wartime security clearance. Since then, on Hoover’s instructions, FBI agents had busily collected further evidence and innuendo against the physicist through minute and ceaseless surveillance of his public and private life. Oppenheimer’s phone was tapped. His office and home were bugged. His mail was opened. By 1953 the FBI file on Oppenheimer was four and a half feet thick—plenty with which to tarnish his name. After receiving Borden’s letter, Hoover eagerly prepared a digest of Oppenheimer’s file and sent it, along with a copy of the letter, to various top government officials, including President Eisenhower. That Eisenhower had recently come under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy for laxness in confronting communism made it politically imperative that he and his administration be seen as tough in handling Borden’s accusation.
Unaware of the storm brewing against him—his celebrity and the caliber of his high-level friends gave him an illusion of invulnerability—Oppenheimer spent the last weeks of 1953 giving the distinguished Reith Lectures over BBC Radio from a studio in Bush House, London. In one of these lectures, Oppenheimer expressed his personal view of communism:
It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word “communism” which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men of learning content with anonymity.
But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual.
This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.
Whatever the young and naive Oppenheimer’s view of communism had been in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in these words an older and wiser Oppenheimer clearly condemned an ideology that held no appeal or sway over him. But perhaps that did not matter. It is a hallmark of Greek tragedy that the selection of the victim is never accidental, and the end is always foreordained.
Borden and Hoover triggered the vendetta against Oppenheimer, but it was AEC chairman Lewis Strauss who brought him down. An owlish and dour-looking man with cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal, Strauss had a keen mind and a clever political sense. As a young naval officer in World War I, he had caught Herbert Hoover’s attention, and had seen high politics firsthand as Hoover’s personal assistant. Between the wars, he had made a fortune on Wall Street before rejoining the navy at the beginning of World War II, where he had risen to the rank of rear admiral and head of the navy’s Ordnance Division. Strauss possessed considerable charm and urbanity that cloaked profound insecurity about his limited formal education and humble roots, two areas where he felt particularly inadequate in comparison to Oppenheimer. This was apparent in Strauss’s description of Oppenheimer when he first met him in the summer of 1945. “I was enormously impressed with him,” said Strauss. “He was a man with an extraordinary mind, a compelling, dramatic personality, a charm for me that I suppose rose out of his poetic approach to the problem we faced together. I’m not his peer, of course.”
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A self-made man with a limited formal education, Strauss labored to comprehend physics and was proudly sensitive about his intellectual ability. He made a cult of science, and since he saw Oppenheimer as the apotheosis of the scientist, he considered him a wizard who would not withhold his powers for good unless he proposed to employ them for evil. There was also something in Strauss that gave him a desperate need to be always agreed with, to dominate. With superiors, he was always pliable and flattering. But from equals and subordinates, he brooked no argument. One acquaintance said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.”
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His face, with its rosy hue and the blandness of its spectacles, gave no hint of his resentments or his long and unforgiving memory. His personality combined extraordinary vanity with a stubborn vindictiveness.
Oppenheimer was fated from the first to get on badly with such a man. The scientist bore some responsibility himself. He had demanding standards, more than a hint of intellectual snobbery, and sometimes cold contempt for those who failed to measure up. These qualities of Oppenheimer’s only inflamed those of Strauss.
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The triggering incident had occurred in June 1949, when Oppenheimer testified before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy about the exportation of radioactive isotopes. Strauss, who had testified against such exports because he thought they might assist in production of an atomic bomb, was present in the hearing room. When asked about the possible military application of exported isotopes, Oppenheimer replied with the laserlike sarcasm that had wounded so many others before:
No one can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and in my knowledge no part at all.
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As snickers spread around the hearing room, it became clear that Oppenheimer was ridiculing someone. AEC deputy general counsel Joseph Volpe, seated next to him at the witness table, had no doubt who that someone was. He turned around and sneaked a look at Strauss. His eyes had narrowed, his jaw had tightened, and his cheeks had colored. His countenance was cold, hard, and furious. A senator then asked: “Is it not true, doctor, that the overall national defense of a country rests on more than secret military development alone?” “Of course it does,” replied Oppenheimer, who could not stop there. “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins. Somewhere in between.” There were more snickers. At the end of his testimony, Oppenheimer, delighted and amused by his own wit, turned to Volpe and said, “Well, Joe, how did I do?” Volpe, with the memory of Strauss’s twisted face vividly in his mind, shook his head and answered, “
Too
well, Robert. Much too well.” Years later, another observer in the hearing room that afternoon could still remember Strauss’s expression. “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.”
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Like most vain and insecure men, Strauss was a close accountant of small insults. All such sins were entered in a ledger, no less permanent for being kept in Strauss’s razor-sharp memory rather than on bookkeeper’s pages. It concealed interior tides of terrible anger.
Oppenheimer’s barbs were unwise—it is always dangerous business to slight powerful people in Washington—but they were understandable. Oppenheimer knew that Strauss had whispered doubts about his loyalty to others in Washington, that the FBI had leaked these doubts to friends in the press, that his every action was under round-the-clock FBI surveillance, and that he could never be certain what kind of whispering campaign was being mounted against him or when it would eventually come to a head. He was angry about the backstage politics and it showed in his rude demeanor.
In Strauss, Oppenheimer had antagonized a vindictive man who retaliated from the moment Eisenhower named him AEC chairman in June 1953. During his first week in office, Strauss sent a squad of AEC security officers to Princeton to remove the classified documents which Oppenheimer had always been allowed to store in a specially guarded facility in his office, and then hired former army security agents to dig up derogatory information on Oppenheimer. Strauss was so obsessed with getting Oppenheimer that he turned the AEC’s security officers into his personal gumshoes.
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When Borden’s letter came in, Strauss could have reassured Eisenhower, but he did not. Oppenheimer’s influence among physicists was so pervasive and, in Strauss’s view, so pernicious that it could be thwarted only by destroying him. With the fuse lit by Borden, Strauss calculated that he at last had at hand the means of Oppenheimer’s destruction.
Strauss phoned Oppenheimer in Princeton shortly after the physicist’s return from Europe, but did not mention that his security clearance had been suspended or even that there were any serious problems. “I was wondering whether you planned to come down here?” Strauss amiably inquired. “I haven’t made plans,” Oppenheimer replied, “but I can easily do it if you like.”
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A week later, on the afternoon of December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer called on Strauss at his office at AEC headquarters. The two men took their seats at a long table in the large octagonal room where the Combined Chiefs of Staff had met during World War II. Oppenheimer had not been told the reason for the meeting, so it began with a coldly correct exchange of pleasantries. After a while, Strauss dropped the pleasantries and showed Oppenheimer a letter of charges based on Borden’s correspondence but refused to give him a copy. Strauss explained that as a result of Borden’s letter, Eisenhower had ordered a “blank wall” placed between Oppenheimer and any further access to secret information. The physicist’s clearance was being suspended until his “character, associations, and loyalty” had been judged by a Personnel Security Board hearing, which would be conducted in secret and not bound by courtroom rules of evidence. Strauss told Oppenheimer that he could resign rather than face a hearing and thus “avoid an explicit consideration of the charges.”
The issue of clearance was crucial because Oppenheimer’s influence depended on access to classified information. “You had to be inside the government if you wanted to have an influence, especially on these military matters,” Rabi noted. “Since there was all that secrecy, you couldn’t know what you were talking about unless you were a part of it.”
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Oppenheimer’s top secret “Q Clearance” allowed him to know what he was talking about; withdrawing it would eliminate his influence immediately and effectively.
Oppenheimer was stunned by the charges. Ignoring the cigarette burning down through his fingers, he wordlessly took the letter of charges handed to him and paged through it rapidly. He grew ashen. Stoicism came hard to Oppenheimer, but he held on. Underneath he was shaken and just wanted to get out of the room. Without saying what he intended to do, Oppenheimer ended the painful confrontation. Leaving AEC headquarters, he walked a few blocks north to 1701 K Street, NW, where he took the elevator to the sixth floor and entered the law office of now former AEC general counsel Joe Volpe. Oppenheimer’s personal attorney, Herbert Marks, joined them there. Oppenheimer told Volpe and Marks about his conference with Strauss, and they discussed what steps Oppenheimer should take in his own defense.
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*
Marks’s wife, Anne, had been Oppenheimer’s personal assistant at Los Alamos and was a close friend. As she drove Oppenheimer to the Markses’ Georgetown home that afternoon, the physicist gritted his teeth and fumed, “I can’t believe what is happening to me!”
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The three of them talked into the early morning. “It was like Pearl Harbor—on a small scale,” Oppenheimer later recalled. “Given the circumstances and the spirit of the times, one knew that something like this was possible and even probable; but still it was a shock when it came.” “I lost my pipe that day; put it down some place and couldn’t remember where,” he also recalled. “Maybe that sums up about as well as anything my state of mind.”
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Oppenheimer did not know what to do. If he resigned rather than face a hearing, Senator Joseph McCarthy might target him as the next victim of his anticommunist witch-hunt anyway. And resignation might not end the matter because Borden’s charges could be leaked to the press, making resignation, in effect, an admission of guilt. A hearing, on the other hand, could be humiliating. Eliminating Oppenheimer’s influence was not enough for his enemies—they hated him and wanted to destroy him. They would not be content until they had ousted him from power and publicly shamed him. His past—his communist associations during the 1930s and his lies to security officers during the 1940s—would be dredged up. The past communist affiliations of his wife, brother, and sister-in-law also might be scrutinized and used against him. And he knew the FBI had monitored his phone calls and personal movements, so various improprieties could be revealed. Yet Oppenheimer could not accept the judgment that he was disloyal or a security risk. Moreover, he did not want to lose the power, influence, and prestige that came from government service. He had devoted his best years to serving the country, forsaking the chance to do research and thus missing the significant discoveries expected of him.
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