American Prometheus (62 page)
By then, Oppie was disillusioned with both the Soviet and American positions. Neither country seemed prepared to do what was necessary to avoid a nuclear arms race. As a result of both the broadening of his despair and his new responsibilities, his views began to change. That January, Hans Bethe came to visit him in Berkeley, and Oppie confessed in several long conversations that he had “given up all hope that the Russians would agree to a plan.” The Soviet attitude appeared inflexible; their proposal to ban the bomb seemed designed to “deprive us immediately of the one weapon which would stop the Russians from going into Western Europe.” Bethe agreed.
Later that spring, Oppenheimer used his influence as chairman of the GAC to toughen the American negotiating position. In March 1947, he flew to Washington, where Acheson gave him a preview of the president’s soon-to-be-announced Truman Doctrine. “He wanted me to be quite clear,” Oppenheimer later testified, “that we were entering an adversary relationship with the Soviets, and whatever we did in the atomic talk we should bear that in mind.” Oppenheimer acted on this advice almost immediately; soon afterwards, he met with Frederick Osborn, Bernard Baruch’s successor at the United Nations atomic energy negotiations. To Osborn’s surprise, Oppenheimer told him that the United States should withdraw from the UN talks. The Soviets, he said, would never agree to a workable plan.
Oppenheimer’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was now following the general trajectory of the emerging Cold War. By his own account, during the war he had already begun to turn away from his left-wing internationalist enthusiasms. He was also troubled by a speech Stalin gave on February 9, 1946; Oppenheimer—like most observers in the West—characterized it as a reflection of Soviet fears of “encirclement and their need to keep their guard up and to rearm.” In addition, he was disheartened by what he was learning about Soviet wartime espionage. According to an FBI informant—identified as “T-1,” an administrator on the Berkeley campus— Oppenheimer returned from receiving a 1946 briefing in Washington “terribly depressed.” “T-1 reported that an unnamed government official had “given Oppenheimer ‘the facts of life’ concerning the Communist conspiracy, and as a result Oppenheimer had become thoroughly disillusioned with Communism.”
The briefing Oppenheimer received pertained to a Canadian spy scandal, precipitated by the defection of Soviet code clerk Igor Gouzenko which led to the arrest of Alan Nunn May, a British physicist working in Montreal who had spied for the Soviets. Oppenheimer was genuinely shaken by this evidence of “treachery” on the part of a fellow scientist, and later that year, when the FBI came to interview him about the Chevalier affair, he “commented on the fact that often Communists in various countries outside of the Soviet Union could be led into situations where they would be acting, either knowingly or unknowingly, as spies for the Soviet Union.” He could not “reconcile the treachery employed by them [the Soviets] in their international relationships with the high purposes and the democratic aims ascribed to the Soviets by the local [American] Communists.”
The failure of the Baruch Plan had made things worse. The dream of international control would have to await a change in geopolitical circumstances. He understood now that the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union were unlikely soon to be reconciled. “It is clear,” he told an audience of Foreign Service and Army officers in September 1947, “that, even for the United States, proposals of this kind [international controls] involve a very real renunciation. Among other things, they involve a more or less permanent renunciation of any hope that the United States might live in relative isolation from the rest of the world.”
He knew that the diplomats of many other countries were “genuinely goggle-eyed” at the sweeping nature of his proposals for international control. They involved radical sacrifices and at least a partial renunciation of sovereignty. But he now understood that the sacrifices required of the Soviet Union were of another order of magnitude. In a perceptive analysis, he noted: “That is because the proposed pattern of [international] control stands in a very gross conflict to the present patterns of state power in Russia. The ideological underpinning of that power, namely the belief in the inevitability of conflict between Russia and the capitalist world, would be repudiated by a co-operation as intense or as intimate as is required by our proposals for the control of atomic energy. Thus what we are asking of the Russians is a very far-reaching renunciation and reversal of the basis of their state power. . . .”
He knew that the Soviets were not likely to “take this great plunge.” He had not given up hope that in the distant future international controls could be achieved. In the meantime, he had reluctantly decided that the United States had to arm itself. This had led him to conclude—with considerable melancholy—that the principal job of the Atomic Energy Commission would be to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” Having preached the necessity of international control and openness in 1946, Oppenheimer by 1947 was beginning to accept the idea of a defense posture supported by a multitude of nuclear weapons.
TO ALL APPEARANCES, Oppenheimer was now a member in good standing of the American Establishment. His credentials included the chairmanship of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, a coveted “Q” (atomic secrets) security clearance, the presidency of the American Physical Society and a member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers. As a Harvard Overseer, Oppenheimer rubbed shoulders with such influential men as the poet Archibald MacLeish, Judge Charles Wyzanski, Jr., and Joseph Alsop. On a warm, sunny day in early June 1947, Harvard awarded Oppenheimer an honorary degree. During the graduation ceremonies, he listened as his friend Gen. George C. Marshall unveiled the Truman Administration’s plan to pour billions of dollars into a program for European economic recovery—what soon became known as the Marshall Plan.
Oppenheimer and MacLeish grew particularly close. The poet took to sending him sonnets and they corresponded frequently. He and Robert shared similar liberal values, values that they had come to believe were equally threatened by the communists on the left and the radicals on the right. In August 1949, MacLeish published an astonishingly bitter essay in the
Atlantic Monthly,
“The Conquest of America,” in which he attacked the country’s postwar descent into an atmosphere of dystopia, of a utopia gone awry. Although America was the most powerful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been “conquered” by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. “Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,” MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.
MacLeish asked Oppenheimer what he thought of the essay. Robert’s reply revealed the evolution of his own political views. He thought MacLeish’s description of the “present state of affairs” was masterful. But he was troubled by MacLeish’s prescription—a call for a “redeclaration of the revolution of the individual.” This familiar exhortation to Jeffersonian individualism seemed somehow inadequate and not very fresh. “Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. He reminded MacLeish of the “profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation.” Therefore, “I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.”
Robert then told MacLeish of his midnight walk in the snow with Niels Bohr earlier that year, in which the Dane had expounded his philosophy of openness and complementarity. Bohr, he thought, provides “that new insight into the relations of the individual and society without which we can give an effective answer neither to the Communists nor to the antiquarians nor to our own confusions.” MacLeish welcomed Robert’s letter: “It was extraordinarily kind of you to write me at such length. The point you raise is, of course, the central point of the whole business.”
Some of his friends on the left were not quite sure what to make of this transformation. But those who had all along thought of Oppenheimer as a Popular Front Democrat had no reason to think his political spots had changed. Rather, the issues had changed: With the war against fascism won (except in Franco’s Spain), and the Depression over, the Communist Party was simply no longer the magnet it had once been for politically active intellectuals. To his noncommunist liberal friends like Robert Wilson, Hans Bethe and I. I. Rabi, Oppie was the same man, with the same motivations.
Significantly, Frank Oppenheimer’s transformation was less abrupt. While no longer a communist, he did not think the Russians really threatened America. On this issue the two brothers had some of their most serious political arguments. Robert told his brother that he believed “the Russians were ready to march if they were given the opportunity.” He favored Truman’s hard line against the Soviets now, and when Frank tried to argue with him, “Robert would say that he knew things that he couldn’t report, but they convinced him that the Russians could not be expected to cooperate.”
In their first reunion after the war, Haakon Chevalier also noted the change in Oppie’s outlook. Sometime in May 1946, Oppie and Kitty visited the Chevaliers in their new oceanfront home at Stinson Beach. Oppie made it clear that his political sympathies had moved, at least in Haakon’s view, “considerably to the right.” Chevalier recalled being shocked at some of the “very uncomplimentary” things he had to say about the American Communist Party and the Soviet Union. “Haakon,” Oppie said, “Haakon, believe me, I am serious, I have real reason to believe, and I cannot tell you why, but I assure you I have real reason to change my mind about Russia. They are not what you believe them to be. You must not continue your trust, your blind faith, in the policies of the USSR.”
Moreover, Chevalier continued to hear things about his old friend that confirmed his observation. One evening in New York, Chevalier ran into Phil Morrison on the street, and they talked about all that had happened since the outbreak of the war. Chevalier regarded Morrison as a former comrade. But he also knew Morrison as one of Oppie’s closest friends before the war and as one of the key physicists who had followed him to Los Alamos.
“What about Opje?” Chevalier asked.
“I hardly see him any more,” Morrison replied. “We no longer speak the same language. . . . He moves in a different circle.” Morrison then related how he and Oppenheimer had been talking one day and Oppie kept referring to “George.” Finally, Morrison had interrupted to ask who this George was. “You understand,” Morrison said to Chevalier, “General [George C.] Marshall to me is General Marshall, or the secretary of state—not George. This is typical. . . .” Oppenheimer had changed, Morrison said: “He thinks he’s God.”
CHEVALIER HAD suffered numerous disappointments since he had last seen Oppenheimer in the spring of 1943. His efforts to obtain war-related work were stymied in January 1944, when the government refused him a security clearance for a job in the Office of War Information. His FBI file contained “unbelievable” allegations, said a friend working in OWI: “Someone obviously has it in for you.” Mystified by this news, Chevalier stayed in New York and found occasional free-lance work as a translator and magazine writer. In the spring of 1945, he returned to his teaching post at Berkeley. But soon after the war ended, he was hired by the War Department to serve as a translator at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. He flew to Europe in October 1945 and did not return to California until May 1946. By then, Berkeley had denied him tenure. Devastated by this blow to his academic career, Chevalier decided to work full-time on a novel he had under contract with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
On June 26, 1946, about six weeks after his first reunion with Oppie, Chevalier was at home working on his novel when two FBI agents knocked on his door. They insisted that he accompany them to their office in downtown San Francisco. On that same summer day, at about the same hour, FBI agents also appeared at George Eltenton’s home and asked him to accompany them to the FBI field office in Oakland. Chevalier and Eltenton were simultaneously questioned for about six hours. During the ensuing interrogations it became clear to both men that the agents wanted to know about the conversations that they had had regarding Oppenheimer in the early winter of 1943.
Although each was unaware of the other’s interrogation, both men gave similar stories. Eltenton acknowledged that sometime late in 1942, when the Soviets were barely containing the Nazi onslaught, Peter Ivanov from the Soviet Consulate approached him and asked whether he knew Professors Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer, and one other individual whom Eltenton could not fully recall—but he thought the name might be Alvarez. Eltenton replied that he knew only Oppenheimer, and not very well. But he volunteered that he had a friend who was close to Oppenheimer. The Russian then asked if his friend might ask Oppenheimer whether he could share information with Soviet scientists. Eltenton said he made the inquiry to Chevalier and told him that his Russian friend had assured him that such information “would be safely transmitted through his channels which involved photo reproduction. . . .” In the event, Eltenton confirmed to the FBI that a few days later, Chevalier “dropped by my house and told me that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.” Further, Eltenton denied having approached any other individuals.
Chevalier confirmed to the FBI the broad outlines of Eltenton’s statement. But to his surprise, the FBI agents pressed him repeatedly about approaches to three other scientists. Chevalier denied approaching anybody other than Oppenheimer. After nearly eight hours of interrogation, Chevalier reluctantly agreed to sign an affidavit: “I wish to state that to my present knowledge and recollection I approached no one except Oppenheimer to request information concerning the work of the radiation laboratory.” But then he carefully qualified this categorical statement: “I may have mentioned the desirability of obtaining this information for Russia with any number of people in passing. I am certain that I never made another specific proposal in this connection.” He later wrote in his memoirs that he left wondering how the FBI had heard about his conversations with Eltenton and Oppenheimer. Neither could he understand why they believed he had approached three scientists.