Authors: Brian Van DeMark
The next day Oppenheimer sent Strauss a letter. “I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested [resignation],” his letter read in carefully controlled language. “Under the circumstances, this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this Government that I have now served for some 12 years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy, I could hardly have served our country as I have tried,… or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of science and our country.”
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Oppenheimer had decided to fight to maintain his clearance.
Meanwhile, the FBI continued to tap Oppenheimer’s home and office phones at Strauss’s direction. Bureau agents also tailed the physicist wherever he went. Oppenheimer knew that he was under surveillance. “Even the walls have ears,” he told visitors to Princeton.
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Oppenheimer sought to make light of the stressful situation. He told friends that he wished he had a fraction of the money that was being spent keeping him under surveillance—it would make him very rich. Strauss not only concealed his enlistment of the FBI but flatly denied that there was any taping of anyone on his initiative.
Meanwhile, Oppenheimer sought to line up support from other scientists. He encountered Teller at a physics conference in Rochester, New York, early the next year. Teller told Oppenheimer he was sorry to hear about his current difficulties. “I suppose, I hope, that you don’t think that anything I did has sinister implications,” Oppenheimer replied. “I said I did not think that—after all, the word ‘sinister’ was pretty harsh,” recalled Teller later. “Then he asked if I would speak to his lawyer, and I said I would.”
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Teller went to see Oppenheimer’s lawyer, told of his disagreements with the physicist, but professed that he had no doubts about Oppenheimer’s patriotism.
Teller also spoke to the FBI, using these secret interviews to tell a very different story. Teller told Hoover’s agents that Oppenheimer had fought development of the superbomb since 1945 and that it would have been built sooner if he had not. He attributed Oppenheimer’s opposition not to honest disagreement over policy but to fundamental deviousness and dishonesty:
[Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered the development of the H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds. After the President announced the H-bomb was to be made, [Oppenheimer] opposed it on the ground that it was not feasible…. After this, [Oppenheimer] changed his approach and opposed the H-bomb on the basis that there were insufficient facilities and scientific personnel to develop it, which according to Teller is incorrect.
He ascribed Oppenheimer’s motives “to a combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on the A-bomb done better on the H-bomb, and also because he does not feel the H-bomb is politically desirable.” Asserting that Oppenheimer had never gotten over the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller
said that he found Oppenheimer to be a very complicated person, even though an outstanding man. He also said that he understands that in his youth Oppenheimer was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected him. He has also had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.
Teller proceeded to affirm Oppenheimer’s loyalty while subtly undermining it. He told the FBI “that in all of his dealings with Oppenheimer he has never had the slightest reason or indication to believe that Oppenheimer is in anyway disloyal to the United States”—and then followed that declaration by slyly noting “that Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, is an admitted former member of the Communist Party.”
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He concluded by stating that “he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from the General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of the H-bomb.” Teller asked the FBI to keep his attack against Oppenheimer secret because “such information could prove very embarrassing to him personally” with other scientists.
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One of them, Rabi, was furious at what he saw happening to his friend. “My own feeling was just indignation, outrage that this was happening,” recalled Rabi. “He was a great man, who had done something very great for his country.”
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Rallying to Oppenheimer’s defense, Rabi went to see Strauss and urged appointing an independent board to hear the case and sit in judgment of Oppenheimer. Strauss refused. A short time later, Rabi went to see Strauss again, this time with a letter signed by each member of the GAC, stating their willingness to testify on Oppenheimer’s behalf. Strauss was unmoved. Given that Oppenheimer’s official influence had greatly diminished when the Republicans took office in January 1953 and that the AEC had an easy and graceful “out” (simply to let his consultant contract expire), the zeal with which Strauss pursued Oppenheimer’s banishment belied his vindictiveness.
The selection of the three-member Personnel Security Board to hear the case was a case in point. An AEC attorney at the time later recalled: “Strauss was looking for three members who would have a predisposition to find against Oppenheimer. Although pains were taken to maintain a facade of seeking members with a fair and judicious attitude, the major consideration was whether the candidate would shrink from revoking Oppenheimer’s clearance.”
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Strauss wanted a “hanging jury.” If Oppenheimer won this fight, he would be back on top of the heap: vindicated and as influential as ever among scientists.
Strauss picked three men whom he thought would give him the verdict he wanted: Gordon Gray, a Yale Law School graduate, former secretary of the army, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Democrat who had supported Eisenhower over his own party’s candidate in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, because he considered Stevenson insufficiently anticommunist; Thomas Morgan, a defense contractor who had been president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company before being appointed to a presidential commission on defense preparedness; and Ward Evans, a conservative Loyola University of Chicago chemistry professor who had served on security boards before and had almost always voted to deny clearance.
Strauss continued his machinations. He chose Roger Robb, one of the most aggressive and conservative trial lawyers in Washington, to prosecute the case before the board—the first time the AEC had gone outside for a lawyer to handle a security hearing—and quickly arranged clearance for Robb to read Oppenheimer’s AEC file. When Oppenheimer’s attorney for the hearing, Lloyd Garrison, a New York lawyer well known for defending civil liberties cases but with little trial experience, sought similar clearance for himself and two associates, the request was refused—only Garrison would be cleared. Oppenheimer and Garrison decided that unless all of them were cleared, then none of them would be; they would instead rely on the AEC to declassify documents. But the AEC declassified only two documents—after it asserted the right to decide which documents were relevant for declassification and what portions of these “relevant” documents it would be “consistent with the national interest” to permit Oppenheimer’s legal team to see. Garrison thus changed course and requested clearance for just himself (as had been promised) seventeen days before the hearing began. It had taken only eight days for Robb to obtain his clearance, yet the AEC not only failed to process Garrison’s request in time for the opening of the hearing but declared it was “not possible” to clear Garrison before the hearing ended and the Gray Board had submitted its report—eight weeks after Garrison’s initial request. Finally, Robb spent hours going through Oppenheimer’s FBI file with the three board members in the week before the hearing, and socialized with them.
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When Garrison asked if he, too, could spend time with the board and see his own client’s FBI file, his requests were refused.
During the week that Robb met with the Gray Board to discuss the contents of Oppenheimer’s FBI file, the physicist received letters of support from his friends. Bethe, stunned and angry at what was happening to a great man and a good friend and convinced that it was rooted in Oppenheimer’s now unpopular advice about the superbomb, cabled Oppenheimer: “You know that we believe in you and will do all we can to help.” Victor Weisskopf, who had learned of Oppenheimer’s predicament from Bethe, wrote Oppenheimer a moving letter:
I would like you to know that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware of the fact that you are fighting here our own fight. Somehow Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle. I know that you are suffering from this as any man would under such enormous strain. On the other hand, I would not know of any better man to bear this load. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose whom to select for the person who has to take this on, I could not but choose you. Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of our way of life? Please think of us when you are feeling low. Think of all your friends who are going to remain your friends and who rely upon you…. I beg you to remain what you always have been, and things will end well.
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The AEC’s Building T-3 was one of the “temporary” offices put up during World War I on the Mall in Washington and inherited from the navy in the late 1940s. The white planks of its facade, the wooden bridges that connected its sheds, and its ugly, greenish, makeshift roof were strikingly similar to those of the Tech Area building in Los Alamos where Oppenheimer had his office during the war. Room 2022 on the second floor was an ordinary office whose furnishings were official, functional, and drab; there was no carpet on the composition floor. This became the temporary courtroom where, in the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer stood trial in an inquisition masquerading as a fact-finding proceeding.
Along the north wall of the broad, oblong room ran a row of windows that opened out across Constitution Avenue and onto the grassy ellipse just south of the White House. Along the east wall stood a long, baize-covered table, with three chairs for the hearing board members—the “judges” in the case. Perpendicular to it and forming the stem of a T were two tables running parallel to the windows. To the board’s right, with his back to the window, sat prosecutor Robb; to the left, facing the windows, defending counsel Garrison. A witness chair sat at the base of the T. Behind the witness chair, against the west wall, was an old leather couch where Oppenheimer would sit, puffing incessantly on a pipe or cigarette when he was not on the stand, unable to study the witnesses’ faces as they spoke. Seldom more than a handful of people would ever be present in the room, but at times a disembodied voice would be heard coming from a tape recorder, statements by Oppenheimer which had been recorded—without his knowledge—during his wartime security interrogations ten and a half years earlier.
On Monday, April 12, 1954, shortly before 10:00
A.M.
, the various parties began to make their way to room 2022. It was springtime in Washington, and the cherry trees lining the Tidal Basin just south of the Mall were in full and glorious bloom. Upon arrival, the hearing board members took their places at the table. Before each of them lay not a blank notepad but a thick binder of material from the FBI files and investigative reports that they had been studying throughout the previous week. Oppenheimer, his wife, Kitty, and Garrison made an inauspicious, but highly symbolic, entrance. Nervous and strained by her husband’s ordeal, Kitty had fallen down some stairs, and she had her leg in a cast and was on crutches. The Oppenheimers and their attorney arrived late and the board was irritated with them.
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“The hearing will come to order.” With these words, chairman Gray opened the proceeding “in the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The atmosphere of the Cold War pervaded the hearing room. A week earlier, Senator McCarthy, who had been on the scent of Oppenheimer, had alleged in a nationally televised speech that communists in government had delayed research on the superbomb by eighteen months, effectively pressing the Gray Board to produce a culprit. This made it all the harder for Oppenheimer’s judges to evaluate him fairly. It was almost as if the Gray Board members were peering at those earlier days through the wrong end of a long telescope. Here were three men of a prosperous, communist-hating, fear-ridden America of the Cold-War 1950s sitting in judgment on Oppenheimer’s radical associations and activities in the Depression-ridden 1930s, when the U.S. economy was in total collapse, when fascism was spreading across Europe, and when American communists—far from being treated as political lepers, as they were in 1954—were openly allied with the noncommunist American Left. It was a dark irony that the proceedings the three led resembled nothing so much as a Stalinist show trial.
Gray began the hearing by reading the AEC letter of charges and Oppenheimer’s written reply into the record. It was a self-accusing and self-abasing document. He admitted his political näiveté before the war, acknowledged his association with Communist Party causes, but denied—perhaps falsely—that he had ever belonged to the party, and in effect repudiated his left-wing past.
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Summing up, Oppenheimer wrote: “What I have hoped was, not that I could wholly avoid error, but that I might learn from it. What I have learned has, I think, made me more fit to serve my country.” Gray then ventured some observations on the nature and ground rules of the hearing. First, said Gray, he wanted to “remind everyone concerned that this proceeding is an inquiry, and not in the nature of a trial. We shall approach our duties in that atmosphere and in that spirit,” he asserted.
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Gray added that the hearing would not be subject to the strict rules and procedures that governed courtroom trials. His implication was that the informality of a hearing worked to Oppenheimer’s advantage, affording him more flexibility in meeting the charges—yet later in the hearing, Gray announced that Oppenheimer’s witnesses would be heard at times suited “to the convenience of this board, and not the convenience of the witnesses, as would be true in most [judicial] proceedings in the American tradition.”
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