American Prometheus (85 page)

Oppenheimer was allowed to read the letter, and as he scanned through its contents, he commented that “there were many items that could be denied, some were incorrect, but that many were correct.” It all seemed a familiar rehash of the mix of truths, half-truths and outright lies.

According to Nichols’ notes of the meeting, it was Oppenheimer who first raised the possibility of resigning prior to any security review. However, this option seemed to be suggested by Strauss’ comment that the letter of charges had not been signed—and therefore was not yet an official charge. Thinking out loud, Oppenheimer at first seemed open to this possibility, but he quickly observed that if the Jenner Committee was going to open an investigation of him anyway, a resignation now “might not be too good from a public relations point of view.”

When Robert asked how long he had to decide, Strauss said he would be at home from 8:00 p.m. on to receive his answer—but that he could not in any case defer action beyond another day. When Oppie asked if he could have a copy of the letter of charges, Strauss refused, saying he could have the letter only after deciding what he was going to do. And when Oppenheimer asked if “the Hill [Congress] knew about this,” Strauss said not to his knowledge, but that he doubted “such a thing could be kept from the Hill indefinitely.”

Strauss finally had Oppenheimer exactly where he wanted him. Yet Oppie seems to have reacted calmly to the news, politely asking all the right questions, trying to explore his options. Thirty-five minutes after entering Strauss’ office, Oppenheimer rose to leave, telling Strauss that he was going to consult with Herb Marks. Strauss offered him the use of his chauffeur-driven Cadillac and Oppenheimer—distraught (outward appearances to the contrary)—foolishly accepted.

But instead of going to Marks’ office, he directed the driver to the law offices of Joe Volpe, the former counsel to the AEC who together with Marks had given him legal advice during the Weinberg trial. Soon afterwards, Marks joined them and the three men spent an hour weighing Robert’s options. A hidden microphone recorded their deliberations. Anticipating that Oppenheimer would consult with Volpe, and unconcerned about violating the legal sanctity of client-lawyer privilege, Strauss had arranged in advance for Volpe’s office to be bugged.
²⁰

The hidden microphones in Volpe’s office allowed Strauss, through the transcripts provided to him, to monitor the discussion as to whether Oppenheimer ought to terminate his consulting contract or fight the charges in a formal hearing. Oppie was clearly undecided and anguished. Late that afternoon, Anne Wilson Marks came by and drove her husband and Robert back to their Georgetown home. On the way, Oppenheimer said, “I can’t believe what is happening to me.” That evening, Robert took the train back to Princeton to consult with Kitty.

Strauss had expected Oppenheimer’s decision that evening, and when the next morning he still hadn’t heard from him, he ordered Nichols to phone Oppenheimer at noon that day. Oppenheimer said he needed more time to make up his mind. Nichols brusquely replied that he “could not have any more time. . . .” He gave him a three-hour ultimatum. Oppenheimer seemed to agree, but an hour later he called Nichols back and said that he wanted to come to Washington and give his answer in person. He said he would take an afternoon train and see Strauss the next morning at 9:00 a.m.

Leaving Peter and Toni in the care of his secretary, Verna Hobson, Robert and Kitty boarded a train at Trenton and arrived in Washington in the late afternoon. Heading over to the Marks home in Georgetown, they spent the evening huddled with Marks and Volpe, continuing to debate whether Robert should fight the charges.

“He was still in the same almost despairing state of mind,” Anne remembered. After hours of strategizing, the lawyers finally drafted a one-page letter addressed to “Dear Lewis.” Oppenheimer strongly implied that Strauss had encouraged him to resign. “You put to me as a possibly desirable alternative that I request termination of my contract as a consultant to the Commission, and thereby avoid an explicit consideration of the charges. . . .” Oppenheimer said he had earnestly considered this option. “Under the circumstances,” he wrote Strauss, “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 twelve years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy I could hardly have served our country as I have tried, or been the Director of our Institute in Princeton, or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of our science and our country.”

By the end of the evening, Robert was clearly tired and despondent. After more than one drink, he rose and announced that he was retiring upstairs to the guest bedroom. A few minutes later, Anne, Herb and Kitty heard a “terrible crash” and Anne was the first to the top of the stairs. Robert was nowhere to be seen. After knocking on the bathroom door and then shouting his name, with no response, she tried to open the door. “I couldn’t get the bathroom door open,” she said, “and I couldn’t get a response from Robert.”

He had collapsed on the bathroom floor and his unconscious body was blocking the door. The three of them together gradually forced the door open, pushing Robert’s limp form to one side. They then carried him to a couch and revived him. “But he sure was mumbly,” Anne recalled. Robert said he had taken a sleeping pill, a prescription drug Kitty had given him. Anne called a doctor—who said, “Don’t let him go to sleep.” So for an hour they walked him back and forth, coaxing coffee down his throat until the doctor arrived. Oppie’s “beast in the jungle” had struck; his ordeal had begun.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“It Looks Pretty Bad, Doesn’t It?”

Someone must have traduced Joseph K.,
for without having done anything wrong
he was arrested one fine morning.

FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial

AS SOON AS OPPENHEIMER INFORMED STRAUSS that he would not resign, the AEC’s general manager, Kenneth Nichols, set in motion an extraordinary American inquisition. Nichols told Harold Green, on the day the young AEC attorney was drafting the letter of charges against Oppenheimer, that the physicist was “a slippery sonuvabitch, but we’re going to get him this time.” In retrospect, Green reflected that the remark was an accurate reflection of the AEC’s conduct throughout the hearing.

On Christmas Eve, two FBI agents arrived at Olden Manor and seized control of Oppenheimer’s remaining classified papers. That same day, Oppenheimer received the AEC’s letter of formal charges, dated December 23, 1953. Nichols informed Oppenheimer that the AEC now questioned “whether your continued employment on Atomic Energy Commission work will endanger the common defense and security and whether such continued employment is clearly consistent with the interests of the national security. This letter is to advise you of the steps which you may take to assist in the resolution of this question. . . .” The charges included all the old “derogatory” facts of Oppenheimer’s associations with known and unknown communists, his contributions to the Communist Party of California, the Chevalier affair—and “that you were instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen bomb project, and that the opposition to the hydrogen bomb, of which you are the most experienced, most powerful, and most effective member, has definitely slowed down its development.” With the exception of this last charge—delaying the hydrogen bomb’s development—all of this information had been reviewed previously and discounted by both General Groves and the AEC. With the full knowledge of these facts, Groves had ordered the Army to give Oppenheimer his security clearance in 1943, and the AEC had renewed it in 1947 and thereafter.

The inclusion of Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. The AEC’s charges were not the kind of narrowly crafted indictment likely to bring a conviction in a court of law. This was, rather, a political indictment, and Oppenheimer would be judged by an AEC security review panel appointed by the chairman of the AEC, Lewis L. Strauss.

A DAY OR TWO before Christmas, Oppenheimer’s secretary was at her desk when Robert and Kitty walked into his office and shut the door. That was unusual: Robert almost always kept his door open. “They stayed in there a long time,” Verna Hobson recalled. “It was clear that something was wrong.” When they finally came out, they had a drink and offered Hobson one as well. Later, when Hobson went home, she told her husband, Wilder, “The Oppenheimers are in some kind of trouble; I do not know what it is, but I want to give them some kind of present.” Wilder had just bought a record cut by a Brazilian soprano, so Verna took it into the office the next day and gave it to Robert, saying, “This is not a Christmas present, and I did not go out and buy it for you; it has been played. It’s just a present I want to give you now.” Robert took it and sat with his head down very still for a moment, and then he looked up and said, “How incredibly dear.”

Later that afternoon, he called Hobson into his office and, closing the door, he said he wanted to tell her what had happened. For the next hour and a half, he sat there telling her not only about the charges but about the whole story of his childhood, his family and his adult life. It was all new to Hobson. And in retrospect, she thought he may have been rehearsing what he planned to say by way of answering Nichols’ letter of charges. He had decided that the “items of so-called derogatory information . . . cannot be fairly understood except in the context of my life and my work.”

Over the next few weeks, Robert worked feverishly to prepare a defense. The AEC had given him a thirty-day deadline to reply to the charges. First, he had to assemble a legal team. So early in January 1954, he consulted with Herb Marks and Joe Volpe. Marks strongly believed that his friend needed to be represented by a distinguished, politically connected lawyer. Volpe disagreed, and urged Oppenheimer to get a skilled trial lawyer. For a time, it was thought they might get John Lord O’Brian, a highly regarded but elderly New York attorney. O’Brian had to bow out for reasons of health. Another prominent trial lawyer, eighty-year-old John W. Davis, said he would be willing to take the case—if the AEC would agree to hold the hearing in New York City. Strauss made sure this did not happen. Eventually, Oppenheimer and Marks went to see Lloyd K. Garrison, a senior partner in the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Oppie had met Garrison the previous spring, when the lawyer had become a trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he liked his genteel manners. Garrison’s lineage was as distinguished as his own reputation. One of his great-grandfathers was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and his grandfather had served as the literary editor of
The Nation.
Garrison himself was a firm liberal and a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Not long after the New Year, Marks and Oppenheimer saw Garrison in his New York home and showed him General Nichols’ letter of charges. After Garrison read through the document, Robert said, “It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” Garrison replied simply, “Yes.”

Garrison was sympathetic. The first thing to do, he said, was to get the AEC to extend its thirty-day deadline for Oppenheimer’s response to the charges. On January 18, Garrison went to Washington and got the necessary extension. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit as chief counsel a lawyer with trial experience. In the meantime, he began working with Oppenheimer on his written response to the charges. As the weeks rolled by, Garrison became by default Oppenheimer’s lead counsel. Everyone realized, including Garrison, that his lack of trial experience made him a less-than-ideal choice. When, in mid-January, David Lilienthal learned from Oppenheimer that he had retained Garrison, Lilienthal noted in his diary, “I had hoped it might be an experienced trial lawyer, but the case against Robert is so weak, really, that choice of counsel isn’t as important as if it were.”

NEWS OF Oppenheimer’s impending hearing soon began to leak all over Washington. On January 2, 1954, the FBI overheard Kitty on the phone trying, unsuccessfully, to reach Dean Acheson to see if he knew “how things stand.” A few days later, Strauss reported to the FBI that he was “receiving some pressure from scientists . . . to appoint a hearing board in the Oppenheimer case which would ‘whitewash’ Oppenheimer.” Strauss told the FBI that he “did not intend to be pressured into any action of this kind. . . .” Moreover, he said he understood that the selection of the board which would judge Oppenheimer “was most important.” Vannevar Bush confronted Strauss in his office and told the AEC chairman that news of his action against Oppenheimer was “all over town.” Bush bluntly informed him that this was a “great injustice,” and that if he pursued the case, “it would undoubtedly result in attacks against Strauss himself.” Strauss angrily replied that he “didn’t give a damn” and that he wasn’t going to be “blackmailed” by any such suggestions.