Fifties (57 page)

That turned out not to be true. The hearing—a trial, really, with a prosecution and a defense—was one of the lowest moments in American politics. The rules of evidence greatly favored the prosecution. Strauss did not use a lawyer from inside the AEC to conduct
the hearing, as normal procedure might have mandated. Instead, he got a fierce trial lawyer named Roger Robb, prominent in conservative causes and a close friend of the right-wing commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. Robb behaved as a savage prosecutor, but Oppenheimer was not particularly well represented; his lawyer was far too genteel. The elite of the scientific and political community testified to Oppenheimer’s loyalty and dedication—Fermi, Rabi, von Neumann, McCloy, Kennan, Conant. But it was to no avail. Quite possibly no American public figure had been bugged and shadowed by the FBI more relentlessly than Robert Oppenheimer. There were wiretaps of Oppenheimer going back some fourteen years. Gone was the context in which things were said. Gone, as well, was any sense of his years at Los Alamos, during which he had sacrificed so much for his country. It was as if he was caught in a maze from which he could not escape. Asked why he had told a minor lie to a security officer a decade earlier, he answered, “Because I was an idiot.”

On certain questions Oppenheimer’s lawyers were forced to leave the room because they did not have sufficiently high security clearances. “There hadn’t been a proceeding like this since the Spanish Inquisition,” Lilienthal noted. Oppenheimer stood on the witness stand for some twenty exhausting hours, including three brutal days of cross-examination. In the end, to the surprise of his friends, he was not the powerful witness for freedom of scientific opinion that they had expected but a man diminished by tiny misdeeds from the past.

In the end it was probably Edward Teller’s testimony that brought Oppenheimer down. Right after the accusations against Oppenheimer had surfaced, the two had met at a scientific conference in Rochester, New York. He was sorry to hear about his trouble, Teller told Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer asked Teller if he thought there was anything sinister in what he had done in those years. Teller answered no. Oppenheimer thereupon suggested that Teller talk to Lloyd Garrison, his lawyer. Perhaps Teller might be a witness for him. The meeting between Garrison and Teller did not go well. Garrison came away with the belief that Teller viewed Oppenheimer not only as dangerously wrong, but with virulent dislike. Teller told Garrison he did not, however, have any doubts about Oppenheimer’s patriotism.

After being recruited by Strauss, Teller was confused and ambivalent about his role, it was later clear from FBI documents—not so much about testifying against Oppenheimer, but because he feared that in so doing he would become a pariah among American scientists.

Teller later claimed that he arrived in Washington unsure of whether or not he would testify, and it was only when Robb showed him Oppenheimer’s security files that he decided to go ahead. The record is different: It shows that almost certainly a deal was worked out among Strauss and Robb and Teller and that much effort had gone into figuring out how Teller could best damage Oppenheimer while not rupturing his relationship with other scientists. A very delicate line had to be walked. When Robb asked Teller whether he wanted to suggest that Oppenheimer was disloyal to the United States, Teller answered quickly, “I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this and I shall continue to believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.”

Robb knew exactly what he was doing and moved to maximize the effect of Teller’s testimony. “Now, a question which is the corollary of that,” he began. “Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?” This was the critical moment, and Robb knew from the previous night’s talk what he was going to hear: “In a great number of instances I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this intent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.” It was deftly done—Teller had punished Oppenheimer severely while seeming not to call him a security risk.

Finally came the denouement: Teller said that while Oppenheimer would never deliberately intend to do anything against the safety of the country, “if it is a question of wisdom and judgment as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”

He finished his testimony, walked over to the couch where Oppenheimer sat, and shook his hand. “I’m sorry,” Teller said. Oppenheimer, in a polite voice that nonetheless expressed his disbelief, looked at Teller and said: “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean.”

The testimony was devastating to both men. The board ruled
two to one against Oppenheimer. Northwestern University scientist Ward Evans was the dissenter. Considered a solid anti-Oppenheimer vote at the hearing’s beginning, he became a defender after sampling opinion in the academic world. When Oppenheimer had been asked to run the Manhattan Project, Evans said, “They cleared him. They took a chance on him because of his special talents and he continued to do a good job. Now when the job is done, we are asked to investigate him for practically the same derogatory information.” Many in the scientific world were stunned by the decision, among them a talented scientist of German origin then working in the American space program. His name was Wernher von Braun, and at the time of Oppenheimer’s supposed security lapses, he had been working for Nazi Germany. What a strange country America was, he thought; in England, Oppenheimer surely would have been knighted for his scientific achievements.

Harold Green, the young AEC security lawyer who had drawn up the security charges, was enraged by Teller’s testimony. You double-dealing, lying son of a bitch, he thought to himself. You don’t have the guts to say for the record what you said to the FBI, the words I helped base this procedure on. The word Green finally used to describe the hearing was a
lynching.
The hearings were supposed to be a secret, but Strauss ordered the publication of the transcript. He did it, Green noted, as a means not merely of damaging Oppenheimer personally but of bringing additional pressure on the three Truman leftovers on the AEC to uphold the two-to-one Gray board ruling.

Green resigned in August 1954. When Lewis Strauss asked him why, Green was circumspect at first. Finally, Strauss asked if his departure had anything to do with the Oppenheimer case. Yes, said Green, though that was only partly the reason—it had merely reflected the entire change in the nature of the commission.

The administration was pleased by the outcome. It wanted to remove Oppenheimer from government and yet keep the case away from McCarthy. But as the case began to appear in the newspapers and Oppenheimer counterattacked in public, Eisenhower became nervous: “We’ve got to handle this so that all our scientists are not made out to be Reds. That goddamn McCarthy is just likely to try such a thing ...” Later, after the review board ruled against Oppenheimer and the scientist decided to make the panel decision public, Eisenhower was furious: “This fellow Oppenheimer is sure acting like a Communist. He is using all the rules that they use to get public sentiment in their corner on some case where they want to make an individual a martyr.”

Oppenheimer was devastated. He said he would not resign from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Strauss, who was on the Institute’s board, said that he had not been moved by personal animus. To show his good faith, he told reporters, he had just secured a 25 percent raise for Oppenheimer at the Institute. But essentially, having his clearance revoked severed Oppenheimer from the cutting edge of work in his field. Now he could no longer even get together with his colleagues and talk informally about their work. Inevitably, he pulled back from his old professional friendships and became something of a loner, more remote than ever, more than a little sad. He chain-smoked constantly now. The FBI watched him constantly. Once a friend ran into him at Idlewild Airport and Oppenheimer motioned to three men off to the side, noting that they, or men like them, followed him at all times. The writer John Mason Brown once suggested to Oppie that he had been subjected to a “dry crucifixion.” Oppenheimer smiled and answered, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.”

Later that year Enrico Fermi, who had ties to all camps, lay dying of cancer. Deeply depressed by the coming of the H bomb and the political squabbles it had occasioned, Fermi gave a statement from his hospital bed. “The Los Alamos laboratory,” he said, “has deserved the gratitude of this nation for its development of both A and H weapons.” It was, thought Emilio Segre, a close friend of Fermi’s, his way of trying to restore some sense of justice after Oppenheimer’s ordeal.

Edward Teller became a pariah within the larger scientific community. The jury of his peers, those who knew best what had happened, were the angriest at him. What made things even worse, many of them believed, was the fact that if there had been any delay in the creation of the Super, it had been caused not by Oppenheimer’s coolness to the project but by Teller’s faulty calculations. The summer after the Oppenheimer verdict, Teller attended a conference of nuclear scientists at Los Alamos. On the first day he went to the dining room for lunch. Across the crowded room he spied Robert Christy and I. I. Rabi. He eagerly went over to join their table, hoping to join in the easy camaraderie of old colleagues reunited after a time apart. While a room full of prominent scientists looked on, both Christy and Rabi refused Teller’s extended hand and Rabi congratulated him on what he termed the extremely clever way in which Teller had phrased his testimony.

As if slapped in the face, Teller retreated and went immediately to his room. There he sat for the rest of the day and wept. He did not return to Los Alamos for nine years. Once notoriously gregarious, he
now seemed quieter, more removed. His distrust of the world around him grew. Before he would talk with a news reporter, he demanded to know the reporter’s position on the hydrogen bomb. He developed colitis. His wife, Mici, had to warn their children to stay away when their father was in one of his dark moods. Friends heard their young daughter say on one occasion, “Don’t bother Daddy, he has black bugs in his head.” Some eight years later, Princeton historian Eric Goldman interviewed Teller for a television program. At one point Goldman asked Teller if he favored reinstating Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Teller was dumbfounded by the question. While the film rolled he remained still, unable to utter a word. The camera seemed to emphasize the devastating silence. Later, Teller pleaded to have the question cut from the tape and Goldman obliged, but word of what had happened got out and made the nation’s newspapers.

The political shift taking place in Washington, with such men as Teller and Strauss on the ascent, was also marked by the growing importance of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). In an age just before the intercontinental ballistic missile, when the Soviets still had a vast land army in Europe, the SAC was seen as the key to America’s ability to retaliate against any major provocation in the world. It was commanded by Curtis LeMay, a legend in military circles—a sort of airborne George Patton. He was singleminded, demanding, fearless, and original, and he oversaw SAC’s great expansion, coming as it did between Joe One and
Sputnik.
For a period after the war, aeronautical technology fell short of SAC’s mission, but in the fall of 1951, the first B-47 bombers started to arrive. This signaled the marriage of the jet age and the long-range bomber. It replaced the old B-36, a much heavier prop plane with six engines, which had a huge range—up to 7,500 miles—but a limited top speed of 430 miles per hour. The B-47, by contrast, was all skin and power. It could fly at speeds of up to 600
MPH
, far faster than any Soviet bomber, and it could reach altitudes of up to 45,000 feet. It could only go about 3,000 miles without refueling, but it could be refueled in the air by the KC-97 tanker, which had arrived in the summer of 1951. Thus its real range was more like 6,000 miles.

From 1949 to 1955, LeMay more than quadrupled the size of SAC, increasing not only the quantity of planes and equipment but also the quality of the pilots and crews. LeMay had been appalled by the conditions he found when he took it over in late 1948. The planes were in poor shape; the pilots, he felt, had gotten fat and lazy in
peacetime. They weren’t, he noted, “worth a goddamn.” Almost as soon as he took over in October 1948, LeMay had ordered a simulated attack on Dayton, Ohio. It became a legendary event within the small world of SAC, a disaster of epic proportions. The planes were to fly at night and select targets by use of radar. The crews were unaccustomed to flying at combat altitude, the planes were not ready, and the pressurization did not work on many of them. Not a single one of the 150 crews involved flew the mission as prescribed. The level of bombing error defied the imagination. LeMay, privately pleased that the Dayton mission had shown to the pilots that they were in every bit as bad shape as he thought, called it the darkest night in the history of American aviation.

He wanted from the start to make SAC the best unit in the American military. He busted commanders who did not perform and rewarded those who did. Because he thought that his officers were spending too much time at the officers’ clubs drinking, his men were not merely lectured about the standards now going to be set at SAC, but their wives were now summoned to meetings as well, and told that promotions would henceforth be given not on the basis of seniority but on the basis of performance. An entire crew would be promoted together, and it was the job of the wives to produce each morning a husband who was not hung over but ready to provide his country a full day’s work.