Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Rabi felt sore at the Gray Board—and Oppenheimer, too. Rabi understood his old friend on many levels and was directly honest about him. “I’m a bit angry that Robert let it happen,” Rabi later said. “He should’ve said, ‘I have a record, and I’m not going to be badgered by you’… and just denounce them. Instead, he let it get dragged over all sorts of things. He shouldn’t have stood up there and spilled his guts to those people.”
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As another physicist who knew both men has said, “Rabi appreciated Robert and when you appreciate the man you tell him, at least when you are courageous which Rabi always was, you tell him what’s wrong with him.”
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Reflecting on the hearing years later, Rabi felt a sense of both guilt and anger:
I was one of the few living who could sit down and say [to Oppenheimer], “Now don’t be a fool.”… If I’d been in on it [the defense team]…, I would simply have advised him to stand up and say, “This is what I accomplished for the United States. There is a record. I see no reason for a retrial. If you find it in your hearts to do this, there it is. I hope you have a long life and live to regret it. I will have no part of it.” Period. And walk out.
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Yet even if Oppenheimer had taken the hearing more seriously, or if he had followed Rabi’s advice and stormed out, the outcome probably would have been the same. A part of him knew this, and that is why his normally quick and intuitive mind seemed paralyzed by the morbid circumstances. He felt doomed from the start. Months before the Gray Board convened, he confided to Bethe that “no matter what happens during the hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission cannot do anything but find me guilty.”
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In the existing political atmosphere, he sensed that there could be no other outcome.
The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer’s Washington career. All of his government connections were severed, and his long service to national security came to an abrupt and ignoble end. After having contributed so much during the war as director of Los Alamos and so much after the war in many different capacities, his contribution was now over. If Oppenheimer had suffered previously because of the weight of his power, he now suffered grievously because of the effect of its absence.
“He had spent the years after the war being an adviser, being in high places, knowing what was going on,” said a close friend, “To be in on things gave him a sense of importance. That became his whole life. He could run the institute with his left hand. And now he really didn’t have anything to do.”
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Bethe felt that Oppenheimer “was not the same person afterward.”
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Rabi said this about his friend’s destruction:
I was indignant. Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don’t think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn’t pay enough attention to the outward symbols.
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Oppenheimer was deeply wounded and hurt. His feelings were raw, his pain so fierce as to be almost physical. The effects of the ordeal began to show. Oppenheimer had always been lithe and vibrant; now he began to age visibly and his body took on a look of frailty. He seemed like a biblical martyr with his sad voice and gaunt, haunted appearance. He even took to quoting biblical scripture: “I cannot sit with anger.” When a friend compared his ordeal to a dry crucifixion, Oppenheimer smiled unhappily and said, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.”
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There was now pain and hurt in his eyes. The old intellectual impatience, the flashes of arrogance, were gone.
Oppenheimer disappeared from public view and seemed almost to disappear from the life of his friends. Nearly all of them were scientists engaged in one way or another in government work ruled by security regulations. Their lives revolved around their research, as Oppenheimer’s had, but he and they could not talk to each other about work. They could not talk about the case, or even about the old days, because all that was too painful to discuss. So they were left with nothing to talk about. Oppenheimer was kept under surveillance even after the hearing. A friend ran into him at the airport months later, and while they were chatting Oppenheimer gestured toward three bystanders and explained calmly but wearily, “They, or others like them, are with me all the time.” They had presumably trailed Oppenheimer out to the airport to ensure he did not flee the country and defect to the Soviet Union.
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Oppenheimer maintained a stoic facade. It was his family that suffered the most. The ordeal abode like a permanent ghost at Olden Manor, the Oppenheimers’ Princeton home. Kitty simmered with indignation and remained on a slow, corrosive burn for years to come. She deeply resented the injustice, and partly blamed herself for her husband’s ordeal. Her health deteriorated as she began to drink even more. It was hard for the children, who could not understand what it was all about except that everything seemed unfair. The hearings meant that they were separated from their parents for much of the spring of 1954. Thirteen-year-old-son Peter knew his father was going through some kind of ordeal. He came home from school one afternoon in tears and said a classmate had taunted him: “Your father is a communist!” Peter and Toni both came to resent any intrusion on their father’s life, any reminder of his banishment from government. They tried to spend as much time as they could with their father, but Oppenheimer made this difficult by being a distant parent who had difficulty relating to his children. Still, they remained devoted to him. Peter chalked this on the blackboard in his room:
The Amican Govermerant is unfair to Acuse Certain People that I know, of being unfair to them. Since this true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the U.S. govermeant, should go to HELL.
Yours truly
Certain People
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Oppenheimer was not the only scientist to suffer as a result of the hearing. Paradoxically, Teller also suffered, for his testimony against Oppenheimer brought down on him a harvest of resentment mingled with cold, angry contempt. Although Teller was aware that he had offended many of his fellow scientists, he had no real idea of what was in store for him. A few weeks after the AEC’s verdict had been announced and the hearing transcript had been published, Teller went to Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer was a living legend, for a conference of physicists from across the country. Gatherings like this one were usually jovial affairs, reunions of old friends as well as serious scientific sessions. A few physicists were glad to see Teller, but others went out of their way to avoid him. The first large gathering was a dinner in the main hall of Fuller Lodge. Just as Teller was about to sit down, he spotted Rabi and Robert Christy, a Caltech physicist who had been a graduate student of Oppenheimer and a close wartime colleague of Teller, at a nearby table. With great bonhomie and nonchalance, Teller walked over to Rabi and Christy’s table and greeted them with a hearty laugh and outstretched hand. As everyone in the crowded dining room looked on, both Christy and Rabi looked icily at Teller and refused to shake his hand. Rabi then acidly congratulated Teller on the “brilliance” of his testimony before the Gray Board and “the
extremely
clever way” he had phrased his reply concerning Oppenheimer as a security risk. “‘I would personally feel more secure’ without Oppenheimer in the government,” said Rabi caustically and loudly—“a brilliant way of saying, ‘don’t restore his clearance!’” Teller was stunned and speechless, as if Christy and Rabi had punched him. He staggered back to his table, his face red with emotion. He tried as hard as he could to maintain his composure, but the shock and humiliation were too great. In a tight voice he excused himself, abruptly left the hall, and returned to his room, where he broke down and wept.
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Teller was to endure this kind of rejection again in the years to come because, in the minds of many scientists, he had destroyed Oppenheimer. But no incident was branded on Teller’s soul as deeply as this first, stinging rebuke.
The physicists who shunned Teller were the very people whose respect and friendship he craved most. Twice before he had been forced to relinquish the familiar: first his homeland of Hungary, then the continent of his birth and culture. In America everything had been initially unfamiliar except for the community of physicists, who had afforded him comfort since the day he arrived. Now he lost those closest to him. Teller, who had always cherished his friendships, found the loss very painful and hard to bear. He was more miserable than he had ever been in his entire life. “I am just bewildered and also personally very greatly hurt,” he wrote after returning from Los Alamos, “when I hear a great number of hateful words coming from people who used to be close to me.”
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Teller’s ostracism provoked intense hostility—even hatred—in him toward his enemies, particularly Rabi. These feelings of childlike hurt and resentment came pouring out in a letter he wrote to a friend:
I came back from Los Alamos a few days ago…. I felt like Daniel in the lions’ den. After some time you learn to distinguish the lions by their growls….
I got so that I can guess what a man is going to say. And I begin to believe that I can guess what he thinks. It is not a nice experience.
The worst of them is Rabi. He was never my friend but now he is terrible….
Last night I dreamed that there was a Raven and I did not dare to go to sleep because he may pick out my eyes. Please translate Raven into German [
rabe
]. I found this amusing because the Raven started to smile and I slept quite well.
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Teller was once again in exile, treated like a leper, or—even worse—a modern-day Judas. As long as he remained in the confines of his home at Berkeley, where he had moved from Chicago in 1952, or his office at Livermore, life went along much as usual. But he could never be sure of the reception he would receive whenever he made one of his frequent trips to scientific conferences or public meetings. Lifelong acquaintances began to ignore him and even to pillory him. Many at Los Alamos made it clear that Teller would no longer be welcome there. Teller perceived this all too well, and he did not return there for nearly ten years.
The animosity against Teller, however, went deeper than just defense of Oppenheimer. Teller was regarded not only as having betrayed one of his peers but as having collaborated with—some thought sold out to—the military-industrial complex. As he raced from his lectures at Berkeley to his bomb laboratory at Livermore or to conferences at the Pentagon, Teller grew to be a vivid symbol and an unpleasant reminder to his peers of the captivity of physics. For someone of Teller’s sensitivity—whose feelings always lay just beneath the surface, who enjoyed friendships so much, and who wanted so much to be liked—such treatment was traumatic. He grew physically and emotionally depleted. Like Lawrence, he developed a painful and dangerous form of ulcerative colitis, an ailment closely associated with emotional tension. His gaiety, spontaneity, and teasing nature disappeared. He became bitter, combative, distrustful, and reclusive. Even his children noticed the difference in his personality. He had always been prone to moods of silence, but they now became more frequent. There were times when Mici would warn Paul and Wendy not to disturb their father. At these times Wendy would say, “Don’t bother Daddy, he has black bugs in his head.”
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Teller’s painful ostracism led him to have second thoughts about his testimony against Oppenheimer. “What else could I do at the hearing?” he began pleading to friends. “What else could I say?”
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He drafted a public statement saying that his testimony had been misunderstood, that he had not meant to imply that opinions should be punished. Teller sent the desperate statement to Strauss, explaining that he now felt his testimony had been a mistake and revealing his alarm at his own conduct:
I continue to feel that I made a grave mistake when I clearly implied that opinion of a man can make him a security risk. I did not say this, but, rereading my own testimony, I see that I came extremely close to saying it. I therefore would feel very much happier if I could make a statement to the press in which I remedy as much of this damage as I possibly can. After a lot of headache and a waste of much paper, I arrived at this brief statement which I am attaching.
It seems particularly important for me to say something of this kind since my friends among the physicists attach very great importance to this point. If I should lose their respect it would be an extremely hard blow to me.
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Strauss would have none of this. The last thing he wanted now was a public recantation by his star witness against Oppenheimer. He bucked up Teller by urging him to consult with Roger Robb. To make sure that Teller did so, Strauss sent Teller’s draft statement to Robb. Robb immediately advised Teller to stand by his testimony, which had required “courage and character” and had performed “a public service of great value.” Teller remained silent.
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