American Prometheus (77 page)

BORDEN HAD first met Oppenheimer in April 1949 at a GAC meeting, where he listened silently as Oppie openly disparaged Project Lexington, the Air Force’s proposal to build a nuclear-powered bomber. As if that weren’t controversial enough, Oppie also criticized the AEC’s plan to push ahead with a program of civilian nuclear energy plants: “It is a dangerous engineering undertaking.” Unconvinced, Borden left thinking that Oppenheimer was a “born leader and a manipulator.”

In the wake of Fuchs’ confession, however, Borden began to wonder if Oppenheimer might be something more dangerous than a mere “manipulator.” Not surprisingly, his suspicions along these lines were encouraged by Lewis Strauss. By 1949, Strauss and Borden were on a first-name basis, and Strauss continued, even after leaving the AEC, to cultivate the staff director of the Senate committee responsible for oversight of AEC activities. They quickly realized that they had similar concerns about Oppenheimer’s influence.

On February 6, 1950, Borden was present when FBI Director Hoover testified before the Joint Committee. Ostensibly, Hoover had come to brief the Committee about Fuchs—but he dealt at length with Oppenheimer. Sitting on the Committee that day were Senator McMahon and Congressman Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.).

Scoop Jackson’s district in Washington State was home to the Hanford nuclear facilities. He was a hard-line anticommunist and a strong proponent of nuclear weapons. He had met Oppenheimer the previous autumn, during the debate over the Super, and had invited him to dinner at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There he had listened in disbelief as the physicist argued that building the H-bomb would only fuel an arms race and make America less secure. “I think he had a guilt complex because of his role in the Manhattan Project,” Jackson would say years later.

Now, for the first time, Jackson and McMahon learned from Hoover about Haakon Chevalier’s 1943 approach to Oppenheimer in which Chevalier had suggested that perhaps there was scientific information that ought to be shared with their wartime Soviet ally. Hoover reported that Oppenheimer had rejected the overture, but to Borden’s suspicious mind, the incident still sounded incriminating. He began to wonder if Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super bomb was motivated by a nefarious loyalty to the communist cause.

A month later, Edward Teller told Borden that Oppenheimer had wanted to close down Los Alamos after the war. He claimed that Oppie had said, “Let’s give it back to the Indians.” As the historian Priscilla J. McMillan has documented, Teller worked assiduously to cultivate Borden against Oppenheimer. According to McMillan, Teller made a point of seeing Borden “every time he came to Washington.” Teller flattered the younger man in their frequent correspondence and “fueled Borden’s doubts by telling him repeatedly that the thermonuclear program was lagging, and Oppenheimer was to blame.” Borden was also told that a Los Alamos security officer believed Oppenheimer had once been a “philosophical Communist.” And finally, for the first time he learned that Kitty Oppenheimer had once been married to a communist who had fought and died in Spain.

Borden, McMahon and Jackson also were appalled to learn that Oppenheimer had recently begun to use his influence to make the case for battlefield, tactical nuclear weapons. To the Air Force and its congressional allies, Oppenheimer’s initiative was viewed as a transparent effort to undermine the dominant role of the Strategic Air Command. Jackson and his colleagues considered SAC’s ability to deliver a devastating atomic attack America’s trump weapon. “Until now,” Jackson said in a speech, “our atomic superiority has held the Kremlin in check. . . . Falling behind in the atomic armaments competition will mean national suicide. The latest Russian explosion means that Stalin has gone all out in atomic energy. It is high time we go all out.” In the atomic era, Jackson felt America had to have absolute military superiority over any conceivable enemy. Thus, if a hydrogen bomb could be built, America should be the first to build it. His biographer, Robert Kaufman, wrote that “[h]e never forgot the experience of well-meaning but naïve scientists arguing against building the H-bomb. . . .”
¹⁷

WHILE POLITICIANS like Congressman Jackson thought Oppenheimer naïve and guilty of poor judgment, Borden, as noted, was beginning to suspect him of far worse. On May 10, 1950, Borden read on the front page of the
Washington Post
that two former Communist Party members, Paul and Sylvia Crouch, had testified that Oppenheimer had once hosted a Party meeting in his Berkeley home. In testimony before the California State Senate Un-American Activities Committee, the Crouches claimed that Kenneth May had driven them to Oppenheimer’s home at 10 Kenilworth Court in July 1941. Hitler had recently invaded the Soviet Union, and as chairman of the Alameda County Communist Party, Paul Crouch was supposed to explain the Party’s new stand on the war. Some twenty to twenty-five people were present. Sylvia Crouch described the alleged meeting at Oppenheimer’s home as a “session of a top-drawer Communist group known as a special section, a group so important that its makeup was kept secret from ordinary Communists.” She said that she and her husband were not introduced to anyone in the room. She only later identified her host as Oppenheimer when she saw him in a 1949 newsreel. The Crouches further claimed that after being shown photographs by the FBI, they could place David Bohm, George Eltenton and Joseph Weinberg at the same meeting. Sylvia named Weinberg as “Scientist X,” the individual labeled by the House Un-American Activities Committee as someone who gave atomic bomb secrets to a communist spy during the war. The California papers played these allegations as a “bombshell.” Paul Crouch was described as a “West Coast Whittaker Chambers,” a reference to the
Time
magazine editor and former communist whose testimony had led, on January 21, 1950, to the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss.

Oppenheimer immediately issued a written statement denying the allegation: “I have never been a member of the Communist Party. I never assembled any such group of people for any such purpose in my home or anywhere else.” Oppenheimer said he didn’t recognize the name “Crouch.” And then he went on to say, “I have made no secret of the fact that I once knew many people in left-wing circles and belonged to several left-wing organizations. The Government has known in detail of these matters since I first started work on the atomic bomb project.” His denials were widely reported in the press and seemed to put the matter to rest. His friends offered their reassurances. Having read about the “nasty thing” in the California papers, David Lilienthal wrote Oppenheimer of the Crouches’ testimony, “How utterly nauseating—but this is like a puff of wind against the Gibraltar of your great standing in American life.”

Lilienthal, however, was underestimating the effect of this testimony on less sympathetic minds. William Borden wrote a memo saying he found the Crouches’ allegations “inherently believable.” Paul and Sylvia Crouch had been extensively interviewed by the FBI weeks before their May 1950 testimony in California. By then, they were paid informants, on the payroll of the Justice Department, and testifying regularly against alleged communists in security cases around the country.

The son of a North Carolina Baptist preacher, Paul Crouch had joined the Communist Party in 1925. That same year, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, he wrote a letter to CP officials boasting that he had “formed an Esperanto Association as a front for revolutionary activity.” The Army intercepted the letter and concluded that he had been organizing a communist cell at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Court-martialed on the charge of “fomenting revolution,” Crouch was sentenced to an extraordinary forty years in prison. At his trial he testified, “I am in the habit of writing letters to my friends and imaginary persons, sometimes to kings and other foreign persons, in which I place myself in an imaginary position.”

Curiously, Crouch was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge after serving only three years of his forty-year sentence in Alcatraz. It is not clear whether this was the result of being turned into a double agent, as his subsequent behavior would suggest, or just incredibly good luck. But upon his release, the Communist Party hailed him as a “proletarian hero.” For a short time he worked alongside Whittaker Chambers as an editorial assistant on the
Daily Worker.
And then, in 1928, the Party sent him to Moscow, where, he later claimed, he had lectured at the Lenin School and been awarded the honorary rank of colonel in the Red Army. He also asserted that he had met with Soviet Army Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, who had given him plans “they had formulated for the penetration of the American armed forces.” Actually, his Soviet hosts thought his behavior so unhinged that they soon sent him packing. Back in America, however, the Communist Party sent him on a tour of his native South, where he sang the praises of the socialist state and Comrade Stalin. Settling in Florida, he found work as a newspaper reporter and CP organizer.

Inexplicably, one day he crossed a picket line and worked as a strike-breaker on a Miami newspaper; when his comrades discovered what he had done, Crouch fled to California, where, by 1941, he was serving as secretary of the Communist Party in Alameda County. He proved to be an unpopular comrade and an incompetent leader. “He spent a lot of his time drinking alone in bars,” wrote Steve Nelson. In December 1941—or, at the latest, January 1942—local Party members demanded his dismissal when he proposed activities that many felt would invite violence at street meetings. Had he moved from double agent to agent provocateur? Perhaps, but in any case, at this point his Party career came to an end, and by the late 1940s he and his wife had made a remarkably smooth transition, emerging as professional witnesses against their former comrades. By 1950, Crouch was the most highly paid “consultant” on the Justice Department’s payroll, and would earn $9,675 in the following two years.

Despite his bizarre career, initially Paul Crouch appeared to be a credible witness against Oppenheimer. Crouch was able to describe the interior layout of Oppenheimer’s Kenilworth Court home. He told the FBI that the man he later identified as Oppenheimer had asked him several questions, and that after the formal meeting ended he and Oppenheimer had spoken privately for ten minutes. As he and Kenneth May were driving home from the meeting, May told him, according to Crouch, that he “had been talking to one of the nation’s leading scientists.” Crouch’s story had enough details to sound plausible—and highly damaging.

On the other hand, Oppenheimer had an alibi proving that he could not have hosted the CP meeting described by Crouch. Interviewed by FBI agents on April 29 and May 2, 1950, he explained that he and Kitty had been at their Perro Caliente ranch in New Mexico—1,187 miles away from Berkeley. That was the summer he and Kitty had gone to New Mexico, leaving their newborn son Peter in the care of the Chevaliers. Oppenheimer later documented that he had been kicked by a horse on July 24, 1941, and X-rayed the next day at a hospital in Santa Fe. Hans Bethe was visiting him at the time and vividly remembered the incident. Two days later, on July 26, Robert wrote a letter datelined “Cowles [N.M.].” Finally, there was also a record of the Oppenheimer car—with Kitty at the wheel—colliding with a New Mexico Fish and Game truck on the road to Pecos on July 28. All of this made it clear that Oppenheimer had been continuously in New Mexico from at least July 12 through August 11 or 13. Crouch was either mistaken, fantasizing or lying regarding his claim to have seen Robert at a Party meeting in late July in Kenilworth Court.

OVER TIME, Crouch proved to be a highly unreliable informant. In 1953, Armand Scala, an airlines worker and union leader, won a $5,000 libel judgment against the Hearst newspapers when they published one of Crouch’s more outlandish allegations. He was also the source for some of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s most outrageous charges—such as the claim that communists employed by the State Department had stolen blank American passports and handed them over to agents of the Soviet secret police. Later, Crouch’s testimony so tainted one major Justice Department case against leading members of the Communist Party that the Supreme Court was forced in 1956 to dismiss the case.

Eventually, Crouch’s lies and theatrics caught up with him. When the syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop accused Crouch of committing perjury in a trial of Philadelphia communists, President Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, reluctantly announced that he would “investigate” Crouch. In response, Crouch sued the Alsop brothers for $1 million and warned Brownell that “if my reputation could be destroyed, 31 Communist leaders could get new trials. . . .” Soon, he was calling upon J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the loyalty of Brownell’s aides. This prompted the
New York Times
to report that sources in Washington “could not see how the Justice Department could continue using Mr. Crouch.” By the end of 1954, Crouch fled to Hawaii, where he attempted to write a memoir entitled
Red Smear Victim.
It was never published, and Crouch died before his libel suit against the Alsops could come to trial.

Yet William Liscum Borden still found Crouch believable. If Crouch was telling the truth, then Oppenheimer the enigma became Oppenheimer the Communist sympathizer. In June 1951, Borden sent one of his staff aides, J. Kenneth Mansfield, to talk with Oppenheimer. Mansfield found Oppenheimer “exceedingly ambivalent” about America’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal. Oppenheimer had explained that he believed strategic nuclear weapons—the city-busters—had only one purpose, to deter the Soviets from attacking the United States. Doubling their number, as the Truman Administration proposed, would not add to that deterrence.

Tactical nuclear warheads were a different matter, Oppenheimer had explained. In 1946, he had disparaged such weapons in a letter to President Truman. But after the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, Oppenheimer and his GAC colleagues had urged the Truman Administration to build more such “battlefield” weapons as an alternative to the Super. As Oppenheimer told Mansfield, the military utility of the nuclear arsenal depended more on the “wisdom of our war plan and our skill in delivery, and less on the actual number of bombs.” At the time, American troops were fighting in a real war on the Korean peninsula. Oppenheimer did not advocate the use of atomic weapons in Korea, but he argued that there was an “obvious need” for small, tactical nuclear weapons that could be used on a battlefield. “Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful in so far as it is an integral part of military operations,” he wrote in the
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
in February 1951, “will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war.”