Pandora's Keepers (47 page)

The issue of clearance was crucial because Oppenheimer’s influence depended on access to classified information. “You had
to be inside the government if you wanted to have an influence, especially on these military matters,” Rabi noted. “Since
there was all that secrecy, you couldn’t know what you were talking about unless you were a part of it.”
¹⁰
Oppenheimer’s top secret “Q Clearance” allowed him to know what he was talking about; withdrawing it would eliminate his
influence immediately and effectively.

Oppenheimer was stunned by the charges. Ignoring the cigarette burning down through his fingers, he wordlessly took the letter
of charges handed to him and paged through it rapidly. He grew ashen. Stoicism came hard to Oppenheimer, but he held on. Underneath
he was shaken and just wanted to get out of the room. Without saying what he intended to do, Oppenheimer ended the painful
confrontation. Leaving AEC headquarters, he walked a few blocks north to 1701 K Street, NW, where he took the elevator to
the sixth floor and entered the law office of now former AEC general counsel Joe Volpe. Oppenheimer’s personal attorney, Herbert
Marks, joined them there. Oppenheimer told Volpe and Marks about his conference with Strauss, and they discussed what steps
Oppenheimer should take in his own defense.
^11
*

Marks’s wife, Anne, had been Oppenheimer’s personal assistant at Los Alamos and was a close friend. As she drove Oppenheimer
to the Markses’ Georgetown home that afternoon, the physicist gritted his teeth and fumed, “I can’t believe what is happening
to me!”
¹²
The three of them talked into the early morning. “It was like Pearl Harbor—on a small scale,” Oppenheimer later recalled.
“Given the circumstances and the spirit of the times, one knew that something like this was possible and even probable; but
still it was a shock when it came.” “I lost my pipe that day; put it down some place and couldn’t remember where,” he also
recalled. “Maybe that sums up about as well as anything my state of mind.”
¹³

Oppenheimer did not know what to do. If he resigned rather than face a hearing, Senator Joseph McCarthy might target him as
the next victim of his anticommunist witch-hunt anyway. And resignation might not end the matter because Borden’s charges
could be leaked to the press, making resignation, in effect, an admission of guilt. A hearing, on the other hand, could be
humiliating. Eliminating Oppenheimer’s influence was not enough for his enemies—they hated him and wanted to destroy him.
They would not be content until they had ousted him from power and publicly shamed him. His past—his communist associations
during the 1930s and his lies to security officers during the 1940s—would be dredged up. The past communist affiliations of
his wife, brother, and sister-in-law also might be scrutinized and used against him. And he knew the FBI had monitored his
phone calls and personal movements, so various improprieties could be revealed. Yet Oppenheimer could not accept the judgment
that he was disloyal or a security risk. Moreover, he did not want to lose the power, influence, and prestige that came from
government service. He had devoted his best years to serving the country, forsaking the chance to do research and thus missing
the significant discoveries expected of him.
¹⁴

The next day Oppenheimer sent Strauss a letter. “I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested [resignation],”
his letter read in carefully controlled language. “Under the circumstances, 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 12 years. This I cannot
do. If I were thus unworthy, I could hardly have served our country as I have tried,… or have spoken, as on more than one
occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of science and our country.”
¹⁵
Oppenheimer had decided to fight to maintain his clearance.

Meanwhile, the FBI continued to tap Oppenheimer’s home and office phones at Strauss’s direction. Bureau agents also tailed
the physicist wherever he went. Oppenheimer knew that he was under surveillance. “Even the walls have ears,” he told visitors
to Princeton.
¹⁶
Oppenheimer sought to make light of the stressful situation. He told friends that he wished he had a fraction of the money
that was being spent keeping him under surveillance—it would make him very rich. Strauss not only concealed his enlistment
of the FBI but flatly denied that there was any taping of anyone on his initiative.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer sought to line up support from other scientists. He encountered Teller at a physics conference in Rochester,
New York, early the next year. Teller told Oppenheimer he was sorry to hear about his current difficulties. “I suppose, I
hope, that you don’t think that anything I did has sinister implications,” Oppenheimer replied. “I said I did not think that—after
all, the word ‘sinister’ was pretty harsh,” recalled Teller later. “Then he asked if I would speak to his lawyer, and I said
I would.”
¹⁷
Teller went to see Oppenheimer’s lawyer, told of his disagreements with the physicist, but professed that he had no doubts
about Oppenheimer’s patriotism.

Teller also spoke to the FBI, using these secret interviews to tell a very different story. Teller told Hoover’s agents that
Oppenheimer had fought development of the superbomb since 1945 and that it would have been built sooner if he had not. He
attributed Oppenheimer’s opposition not to honest disagreement over policy but to fundamental deviousness and dishonesty:

[Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered the development of the H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds. After the
President announced the H-bomb was to be made, [Oppenheimer] opposed it on the ground that it was not feasible…. After this,
[Oppenheimer] changed his approach and opposed the H-bomb on the basis that there were insufficient facilities and scientific
personnel to develop it, which according to Teller is incorrect.

He ascribed Oppenheimer’s motives “to a combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on
the A-bomb done better on the H-bomb, and also because he does not feel the H-bomb is politically desirable.” Asserting that
Oppenheimer had never gotten over the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller

said that he found Oppenheimer to be a very complicated person, even though an outstanding man. He also said that he understands
that in his youth Oppenheimer was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected
him. He has also had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.

Teller proceeded to affirm Oppenheimer’s loyalty while subtly undermining it. He told the FBI “that in all of his dealings
with Oppenheimer he has never had the slightest reason or indication to believe that Oppenheimer is in anyway disloyal to
the United States”—and then followed that declaration by slyly noting “that Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, is an admitted former
member of the Communist Party.”
^*
He concluded by stating that “he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from the General Advisory Committee
because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of
the H-bomb.” Teller asked the FBI to keep his attack against Oppenheimer secret because “such information could prove very
embarrassing to him personally” with other scientists.
¹⁸

One of them, Rabi, was furious at what he saw happening to his friend. “My own feeling was just indignation, outrage that
this was happening,” recalled Rabi. “He was a great man, who had done something very great for his country.”
¹⁹
Rallying to Oppenheimer’s defense, Rabi went to see Strauss and urged appointing an independent board to hear the case and
sit in judgment of Oppenheimer. Strauss refused. A short time later, Rabi went to see Strauss again, this time with a letter
signed by each member of the GAC, stating their willingness to testify on Oppenheimer’s behalf. Strauss was unmoved. Given
that Oppenheimer’s official influence had greatly diminished when the Republicans took office in January 1953 and that the
AEC had an easy and graceful “out” (simply to let his consultant contract expire), the zeal with which Strauss pursued Oppenheimer’s
banishment belied his vindictiveness.

The selection of the three-member Personnel Security Board to hear the case was a case in point. An AEC attorney at the time
later recalled: “Strauss was looking for three members who would have a predisposition to find against Oppenheimer. Although
pains were taken to maintain a facade of seeking members with a fair and judicious attitude, the major consideration was whether
the candidate would shrink from revoking Oppenheimer’s clearance.”
²⁰
Strauss wanted a “hanging jury.” If Oppenheimer won this fight, he would be back on top of the heap: vindicated and as influential
as ever among scientists.

Strauss picked three men whom he thought would give him the verdict he wanted: Gordon Gray, a Yale Law School graduate, former
secretary of the army, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Democrat who had supported Eisenhower
over his own party’s candidate in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, because he considered Stevenson insufficiently anticommunist; Thomas
Morgan, a defense contractor who had been president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company before being appointed to a presidential
commission on defense preparedness; and Ward Evans, a conservative Loyola University of Chicago chemistry professor who had
served on security boards before and had almost always voted to deny clearance.

Strauss continued his machinations. He chose Roger Robb, one of the most aggressive and conservative trial lawyers in Washington,
to prosecute the case before the board—the first time the AEC had gone outside for a lawyer to handle a security hearing—and
quickly arranged clearance for Robb to read Oppenheimer’s AEC file. When Oppenheimer’s attorney for the hearing, Lloyd Garrison,
a New York lawyer well known for defending civil liberties cases but with little trial experience, sought similar clearance
for himself and two associates, the request was refused—only Garrison would be cleared. Oppenheimer and Garrison decided that
unless all of them were cleared, then none of them would be; they would instead rely on the AEC to declassify documents. But
the AEC declassified only two documents—after it asserted the right to decide which documents were relevant for declassification
and what portions of these “relevant” documents it would be “consistent with the national interest” to permit Oppenheimer’s
legal team to see. Garrison thus changed course and requested clearance for just himself (as had been promised) seventeen
days before the hearing began. It had taken only eight days for Robb to obtain his clearance, yet the AEC not only failed
to process Garrison’s request in time for the opening of the hearing but declared it was “not possible” to clear Garrison
before the hearing ended and the Gray Board had submitted its report—eight weeks after Garrison’s initial request. Finally,
Robb spent hours going through Oppenheimer’s FBI file with the three board members in the week before the hearing, and socialized
with them.
²¹
When Garrison asked if he, too, could spend time with the board and see his own client’s FBI file, his requests were refused.

During the week that Robb met with the Gray Board to discuss the contents of Oppenheimer’s FBI file, the physicist received
letters of support from his friends. Bethe, stunned and angry at what was happening to a great man and a good friend and convinced
that it was rooted in Oppenheimer’s now unpopular advice about the superbomb, cabled Oppenheimer: “You know that we believe
in you and will do all we can to help.” Victor Weisskopf, who had learned of Oppenheimer’s predicament from Bethe, wrote Oppenheimer
a moving letter:

I would like you to know that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware of the fact that you are fighting here our
own fight. Somehow Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle. I know that you are
suffering from this as any man would under such enormous strain. On the other hand, I would not know of any better man to
bear this load. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose whom to select for the person who has to take this on, I could not
but choose you. Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of our way of life?
Please think of us when you are feeling low. Think of all your friends who are going to remain your friends and who rely upon
you…. I beg you to remain what you always have been, and things will end well.
²²

The AEC’s Building T-3 was one of the “temporary” offices put up during World War I on the Mall in Washington and inherited
from the navy in the late 1940s. The white planks of its facade, the wooden bridges that connected its sheds, and its ugly,
greenish, makeshift roof were strikingly similar to those of the Tech Area building in Los Alamos where Oppenheimer had his
office during the war. Room 2022 on the second floor was an ordinary office whose furnishings were official, functional, and
drab; there was no carpet on the composition floor. This became the temporary courtroom where, in the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer
stood trial in an inquisition masquerading as a fact-finding proceeding.

Along the north wall of the broad, oblong room ran a row of windows that opened out across Constitution Avenue and onto the
grassy ellipse just south of the White House. Along the east wall stood a long, baize-covered table, with three chairs for
the hearing board members—the “judges” in the case. Perpendicular to it and forming the stem of a T were two tables running
parallel to the windows. To the board’s right, with his back to the window, sat prosecutor Robb; to the left, facing the windows,
defending counsel Garrison. A witness chair sat at the base of the T. Behind the witness chair, against the west wall, was
an old leather couch where Oppenheimer would sit, puffing incessantly on a pipe or cigarette when he was not on the stand,
unable to study the witnesses’ faces as they spoke. Seldom more than a handful of people would ever be present in the room,
but at times a disembodied voice would be heard coming from a tape recorder, statements by Oppenheimer which had been recorded—without
his knowledge—during his wartime security interrogations ten and a half years earlier.