American Prometheus (96 page)

Oppenheimer’s friend the syndicated columnist Joe Alsop was outraged by the decision. “By a single foolish and ignoble act,” he wrote Gordon Gray, “you have cancelled the entire debt that this country owes you.” Joe and his brother Stewart soon published a 15,000-word essay in
Harper’s
lambasting Lewis Strauss for a “shocking miscarriage of justice.” Borrowing from Emile Zola’s essay on the Dreyfus affair, “J’Accuse,” the Alsops titled their essay “We Accuse!” In florid language they argued that the AEC had disgraced, not Robert Oppenheimer, but the “high name of American freedom.” There were obvious similarities: Both Oppenheimer and Capt. Alfred Dreyfus came from wealthy Jewish backgrounds and both men were forced to stand trial, accused of disloyalty. The Alsops predicted that the long-term ramifications of the Oppenheimer case would echo those of the Dreyfus case: “As the ugliest forces in France engineered the Dreyfus case in swollen pride and overweening confidence, and then broke their teeth and their power on their own sordid handiwork, so the similar forces in America, which have created the climate in which Oppenheimer was judged, may also break their teeth and power in the Oppenheimer case.”

After news of the verdict was published, John McCloy wrote Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “What a tragedy that one who contributed so much—more than half the bemedaled generals I know—to the security of the country should now after all these years be designated a security risk. I understand the Admiral [Lewis Strauss] is annoyed at my testimony but great God what does he expect? I was there when Oppie’s massive contribution was rendered and know there is so much more to say, but what’s the use?”

Frankfurter tried to reassure his old friend, writing to him that “you opened a good many minds to a realization of the profound importance of your ‘concept of an affirmative security.’ ” Both Frankfurter and McCloy agreed that the chief culprit in the whole sad case was Strauss.

AT THE APEX of the McCarthyite hysteria, Oppenheimer had become its most prominent victim. “The case was ultimately the triumph of McCarthyism, without McCarthy himself,” the historian Barton J. Bernstein has written. President Eisenhower appeared satisfied with the outcome—but unaware of the tactics Strauss had used to obtain it. In mid-June, seemingly oblivious to the nature and import of the hearing, Ike wrote Strauss a short note suggesting that Oppenheimer be put to work solving the problem of the desalinization of seawater. “I can think of no scientific success of all time that would equal this in its boon to mankind. . . .” Strauss quietly ignored his suggestion.

Lewis Strauss, with the help of his like-minded friends, had succeeded in “defrocking” Oppenheimer. The implications for American society were enormous. One scientist had been excommunicated. But all scientists were now on notice that there could be serious consequences for those who challenged state policies. Shortly before the hearing, Oppenheimer’s MIT colleague Dr. Vannevar Bush had written a friend that “the problem of how far a technical man working with the military is entitled to speak out publicly is quite a question. . . . I kept in channels rather religiously, perhaps too much so.” From experience, Bush believed he would only destroy his usefulness if he talked publicly about internal government deliberations. On the other hand, “when an individual citizen sees his country going down a path which he thinks is likely to be disastrous he has some obligation to speak out.” Bush shared many of Oppenheimer’s critical instincts about Washington’s growing reliance on nuclear weapons. But unlike Oppenheimer, he had never really spoken out. Oppenheimer had—and now all his colleagues could see him punished for his courage and patriotism.

The scientific community remained traumatized for years. Teller became a pariah to many of his former friends. Three years after the case, Rabi still couldn’t control his anger at those who had judged his friend. Bumping into Gene Zuckert at New York City’s Place Vendôme, an upscale French restaurant, Rabi launched into a tirade of abuse, his voice rising to a fervent pitch. He loudly denounced Zuckert for the decision he had rendered as an AEC commissioner in the case. Mortified, Zuckert beat a hasty retreat and later complained to Strauss about Rabi’s behavior.

Lee DuBridge wrote Ed Condon that “it is probably quite impossible for anything to be done about the Oppenheimer case itself. The term ‘security risk’ is such a broad one that you can start out accusing a fellow of treason and end up by convicting him of fibbing, but still impose the same punishment. I guess there is no doubt that Robert did do some fibbing, and in the public mind now anybody who fibbed and also once was a ‘Communist’ is clearly an unforgivable character.”

FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953
Foreign A fairs
essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.

For several decades, American scientists had been leaving the academy in droves for corporate jobs in industrial research laboratories. In 1890, America had only four such labs; by 1930 there were over a thousand. And World War II had only accelerated this trend. At Los Alamos, of course, Oppenheimer had been central to the process. But afterwards, he had taken an alternative course. In Princeton, he was not part of any weapons laboratory. Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost. As the science historian Patrick McGrath later observed, “Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their fullthroated militarism and anti-communism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests.”

Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism. Liberals were not on trial during the Rosenberg atom spy case. Alger Hiss was accused of perjury, but the underlying accusation was espionage. The Oppenheimer case was different. Despite Strauss’ private suspicions, no evidence emerged to suggest that Oppenheimer had passed any secrets. Indeed, the Gray Board had exonerated him of any such accusations. But like many Roosevelt New Dealers, Oppenheimer had once been a man of the broad Left, active in Popular Front causes, close to many communists and to the Party itself. Having evolved into a liberal disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he had used his iconic status to join the ranks of the liberal foreign policy establishment, counting as personal friends men like Gen. George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Liberals had then embraced Oppenheimer as one of their own. His humiliation thus implicated liberalism, and liberal politicians understood that the rules of the game had changed. Now, even if the issue was not espionage, even if one’s loyalty was unquestioned, challenging the wisdom of America’s reliance on a nuclear arsenal was dangerous. The Oppenheimer hearing thus represented a significant step in the narrowing of the public forum during the early Cold War.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“I Can Still Feel the Warm Blood
on My Hands”

It achieved just what his opponents wanted to achieve; it
destroyed him.

I. I. RABI

THE OPPENHEIMERS WERE DELUGED WITH LETTERS—supportive letters from admirers, abusive letters from cranks, and anguished letters from close friends. Jane Wilson, the wife of the Cornell physicist Robert Wilson, wrote Kitty, “Robert and I have been shocked from the onset, & each new development fills us with nausea and disgust. Uglier little comedies have probably been played in the course of history, but I can’t recall them.” Robert tried to make light of the whole affair, telling his cousin Babette Oppenheimer Langsdorf, “Aren’t you tired of reading about me? I am!” But then the bitterness would seep out in wry comments like “They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.”

In a phone conversation with his brother, Robert said he had known “all the time the way the affair would turn out. . . .” Though certainly disheartened, he was already trying to think of his ordeal as history. He told Frank in early July that he had spent $2,000 for extra copies of the hearing transcripts “so that historians and scholars might study them.”

Some of his closest friends thought he had aged noticeably in the previous six months. “One day he would indeed look drawn and haggard,” said Harold Cherniss. “Another day he was as robust and as beautiful as ever.” Robert’s childhood friend Francis Fergusson was startled by his appearance. His short-cropped, speckled-gray hair had turned silver white. He had just turned fifty, but now, for the first time in his life, he looked older than his age. Robert confessed to Fergusson that he had been a “damn fool” and that he probably deserved what had happened to him. Not that he had been guilty of anything, but he had made real mistakes, “like claiming to know things that he didn’t know.” Fergusson thought his friend knew by now that “some of his most depressing mistakes were due to his vanity.” “He was like a wounded animal,” Fergusson recalled. “He retreated. And returned to a simpler way of life.”

Reacting with the same stoicism he had displayed at the age of fourteen, Oppenheimer refused to protest the verdict. “I think of this as a major accident,” he told a reporter, “much like a train wreck or the collapse of a building. It has no relation or connection to my life. I just happened to be there.” But six months after the trial, when the writer John Mason Brown compared his ordeal to a “dry crucifixion,” Oppenheimer answered with a thin smile, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.” Indeed, the more he tried to trivialize the ordeal—as a “major accident” with “no connection to my life”—the more heavily it weighed on his spirit.

Robert did not plunge into a deep depression or suffer any visible blows to his psyche. But some of his friends noticed a change in tenor. “Much of his previous spirit and liveliness had left him,” Hans Bethe said. Rabi later said of the security hearing, “I think to a certain extent it actually almost killed him, spiritually, yes. It achieved what his opponents wanted to achieve; it destroyed him.” Robert Serber always thought that in the aftermath of the hearings, Oppie was “a sad man, and his spirit was broken.” But later that year, when David Lilienthal encountered the Oppenheimers at a party in New York, hosted by the socialite Marietta Tree, he noted in his diary that Kitty looked “radiant” and that Robert was “looking actually happy, something I can’t remember ever thinking about him.” A close friend like Harold Cherniss “thought that both Robert and Kitty had come through the hearings amazingly well.” Indeed, if Robert had changed at all, Cherniss thought it was a change for the better. After his ordeal, Cherniss said, Robert listened more and displayed “a greater understanding of others.”

Oppenheimer was devastated and yet simultaneously capable of remarkable equanimity. He could pass off what had happened as an absurd accident, but such diffidence left him without the energy and anger that a different kind of man might have used to fight back. Perhaps the diffidence was a deep-rooted survival strategy, but if so it came at considerable cost.

For a time, Oppenheimer wasn’t even sure whether the Institute’s trustees would permit him to keep his job. He knew Strauss would like to see him ousted as director. In July, Strauss told the FBI that he believed eight of the Institute’s thirteen trustees were ready to dismiss Oppenheimer—but he had decided to postpone a vote on the matter until the autumn so it would not appear that Strauss as chairman was acting out of personal vindictiveness. This proved to be a miscalculation, because the delay gave members of the faculty time to organize an open letter in support of Oppenheimer. Every member of the Institute’s permanent faculty signed the letter, an impressive show of solidarity for a director who had bruised more than a few egos over the years. Strauss was forced to back off, and later that autumn the trustees voted to keep Oppie as director. Angry and frustrated, Strauss continued to clash with Oppenheimer at Institute board meetings. Strauss never relinquished his obsession with Oppenheimer, filling his files with memoranda that obsessively detailed Robert’s alleged infractions. “He cannot tell the truth,” he wrote in January 1955 about a minor dispute over a faculty sabbatical payment. Over the years, he filed away vindictive notes on Oppie’s friends and defenders: He called Justice Frankfurter “an unconscionable liar” and took delight in passing around rumors that Joe Alsop’s sexual preferences made him “vulnerable to Soviet blackmail.”
²³

IF OPPENHEIMER was showing the strain of the last few months, so, too, was his immediate family. Although Kitty had given a stellar performance before the security panel, her friends could see that she was visibly distressed. One night at 2:00 a.m., she phoned her old friend Pat Sherr. “We were sound asleep,” Sherr recalled, “and she was obviously quite drunk; her speech was slurred and she was saying things that were sort of disconnected.” In early July, just after the AEC’s decision to uphold the ruling, an illegal FBI phone tap picked up the information that Kitty had just suffered a severe attack of an unidentified illness and had to be attended to by a physician at Olden Manor.