The Age of Radiance (48 page)

When Strauss presented excerpts of the transcripts along with Borden’s research to various government agency chiefs, Hoover was unimpressed, the secretary of defense was alarmed, and the president thought it all material that had been gone over before and cleared up by army intelligence. Still, Eisenhower worried: “The truth is that no matter now what could or should be done, if this man is really a disloyal citizen, then the damage he can do now as compared to what he has done in the past is like comparing a grain of sand to an ocean beach. It would not be a case of merely locking the stable door after the horse is gone; it would be more like trying to find a door for a burned-down stable.”

On December 21, 1953, Strauss informed Oppenheimer that his AEC security clearance would have to be reviewed, presented him with a list of accusations, and asked if he would like to gracefully resign. The exceedingly proud Oppenheimer did not want to quietly exit from his life’s work and tried to get Strauss to fire him. Neither would accede. Later Oppenheimer wrote Strauss,
“I have thought most earnestly of [resignation]. 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 twelve years. This I cannot do.” When Isidor Rabi then told Strauss that the whole of the General Advisory Committee would testify on behalf of
Oppenheimer, Strauss said that he considered that nothing less than blackmail. An FBI report said that Strauss “felt that if this case is lost, the atomic energy program and all research and development connected thereto will fall into the hands of ‘left-wingers.’ If this occurs, it will mean another ‘Pearl Harbor’ as far as atomic energy is concerned. Strauss feels that the scientists will then take over the entire program. Strauss stated that if Oppenheimer is cleared, then ‘anyone’ can be cleared regardless of the information against them.”

Valentine Telegdi:
“The day the Oppenheimer case broke, we were having lunch with Fermi at the Quadrangle Club. He said, ‘What a pity that they took him and not some nice guy, like Bethe. Now we have to all be on Oppenheimer’s side!’ ” Einstein told Oppenheimer that he
“had no obligation to subject himself to the witch hunt, that he had served his country well, and that if this was the reward that she offers, he should turn his back on her,” and told Abraham Pais, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.”

At the beginning of April 1954, American newspaper headlines were dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations that secret Communist agents employed by the federal government had stifled for eighteen months “our research on the hydrogen bomb.” Then on April 12, in World War II barracks converted to AEC Building T-3, with a table for the security inquisitors, two more for the defense team, a chair for the witnesses, and a couch for the victim, the inquiry known as “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” began.

On the very first morning AEC attorney Roger Robb, using FBI and army documents the defendant and his attorneys were not allowed to see, caught Oppenheimer in a series of contradictions about Los Alamos events from ten years before.
“I felt sick,” Robb said. “That night when I came home, I told my wife, ‘I’ve just seen a man destroy himself.’ ”

The story was fairly straightforward. In 1942, the Soviet consulate had asked British engineer George Eltenton to contact Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez for any information on atomic bomb research at the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory. Eltenton may have asked Oppenheimer’s friend Haakon Chevalier to talk to Robert or to Frank Oppenheimer. Nothing more happened, until Oppenheimer started working at Los Alamos and began to wonder if Eltenton constituted a material threat. He wanted army security to be aware of these entreaties, but did not want to implicate his friend Chevalier or, more importantly, his brother, Frank. So Oppenheimer told one version of these events in
1943, and a different one in 1946, but he told the truth to Leslie Groves, who kept the matter quiet until “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” when Groves testified,
“There was an approach made, that Dr. Oppenheimer knew of this approach, that at some point he was involved, in that the approach was made to him—I don’t mean involved in the sense that he gave anything—I mean he just knew about it personally from the fact that he was in the chain, and that he didn’t report it in its entirety as he should have done. . . . [He] was doing what he thought was essential, which was to disclose to me the dangers of this particular attempt to enter the project. . . . It was always my impression that he wanted to protect his brother, and that his brother might be involved in having been in this chain, and that his brother didn’t behave quite as he should have, or if he did, [Robert Oppenheimer] didn’t even want to have the finger of suspicion pointed at his brother, because he always felt a natural loyalty to him and had [a] protective attitude toward him.” Robb was able to prod Groves into admitting that, under the agency’s more stringent rules, for this fibbing, Oppenheimer did not now deserve a security clearance.

The vast majority of the hearings were then spent analyzing Robert’s years of opposition to the hydrogen bomb—before he declared the Teller-Ulam design “sweet” and encouraged its development—and whether that opposition meant he was a traitor to the United States. Rabi, Conant, Bethe, Bush, Groves, and even von Neumann all testified to his loyalty, and to his character. Like Teller, childhood friend Ernest Lawrence had turned on Robert, infuriated that he had opposed the Super, opposed creating the Livermore lab, and had conducted a love affair with the wife of a mutual friend. Lawrence agreed to testify against clearance, but felt too ill with colitis to attend and so provided a transcript saying that a man with such a poor moral sense should obviously not have influence over defense policy.

On April 28 at 4:00 p.m., Edward Teller took the stand. After talking over Oppenheimer’s many faults ad nauseam with Lawrence and Alvarez and seeing the damning FBI and army intelligence materials about Haakon Chevalier, it’s clear that Teller believed he was following his conscience by testifying. Freeman Dyson:
“Teller thought Oppenheimer was somehow a Machiavelli who had far more influence than he really had in the real world. And Teller must have had, somehow, the feeling that if he could once destroy Oppenheimer’s political power, that somehow things would be all right.” At this moment in history, any number of Americans in Washington were fearfully trying to save the world in their own fashion, perhaps no one with as much fervor as Edward. But Teller couldn’t save Teller from Teller:

Q. Is it your intention in anything that you are about to testify to, to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States?

A. 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.

Q. Now, a question which is the corollary of that. Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?

A. In a great number of cases 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 on numerous issues, and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent 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.

Q. I would then like to ask you this question: Do you feel that it would endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Dr. Oppenheimer?

A. I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr. Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance. 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.

After Edward finished his testimony, he shook Robert’s hand and murmured, “I’m sorry.” Oppie replied, “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean.”

For J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Teller damnation would in the long run mean little, since Lewis Strauss was clearly determined Oppenheimer would not get his needed security clearance. A decade later, Oppie would tell the
Washington Post
:
“The whole damn thing was a farce.” But for Edward Teller, this moment would make of him a pariah in the scientific community. His
colleagues in nuclear physics were enraged, not just because of loyalties to Oppenheimer or because Teller was such a remarkably difficult character to work with, but because if
anyone
was responsible for delaying the progress of thermonuclear research, it was not Robert Oppenheimer, but Edward Teller. His Alarm Clock was ready to move forward, but he was so insistent on achieving megatons of destruction that he only pursued the most extreme version of the Bomb, the design that required Stan Ulam’s intervention. The eighteen-month delay that so riled up Joe McCarthy and Lewis Strauss was entirely Edward Teller’s doing.

His hypocritical Oppenheimer testimony, combined with his relentlessly hawkish views, incinerated most of Teller’s professional relationships. “He’s a danger to all that’s important,” Hans Bethe decided. “I really do feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”
“I’ve never seen [Teller] take a position where there was the slightest chance in the interest of peace,” Isidor Rabi said. “I think he is the enemy of humanity.” Twenty years later, Teller told his biographers,
“If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety percent of these then come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect.” In the community of nuclear physicists, he was shunned as harshly as any Old Testament whoremonger and would in time become the Richard Nixon of American science—dark, brooding, rejected, isolated, and alone.

On May 27, the security board decided that while America owed Oppenheimer
“a great debt of gratitude for loyal and magnificent service,” that he was “a loyal citizen,” and that “no man should be tried for the expression of his opinions,” his security clearance would not be reinstated: “Dr. Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the Government and of this Commission because of the proof of fundamental defects in his ‘character.’ ” Bob Serber:
“I think it broke his spirit, really. He had spent the years after the war being an adviser, being in high places, knowing what was going on. To be in on things gave him a sense of importance. That became his whole life. As Rabi said, he could run the institute with his left hand. And now he really didn’t have anything to do.”

Isidor Rabi: “I was indignant. Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine
fear of Communism. He was an aesthete. I don’t think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn’t pay enough attention to the outward symbols. He was a very American person of a certain kind.” But Freeman Dyson had a different view:
“The real tragedy of Oppenheimer’s life was not the loss of his security clearance bur his failure to be a great scientist.” In a 1939 paper, Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder created the concept of black holes—that echo of the death of stars into a continuous free fall of matter, time, and space—with “On Continued Gravitational Contraction.” By the 1950s, however, Oppenheimer had completely turned away from the subject, and the great expert in black holes was his Princeton colleague and political antagonist, John Wheeler.

In April 1962, J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked to join Robert Frost, John Glenn, and forty-nine Nobel laureates at the Kennedy White House for dinner. The following spring, the president announced Oppenheimer would be awarded the $50,000 Fermi Prize for his service to the American people. Three years later, in February of 1966, Robert was diagnosed with throat cancer, and the following year, on February 18, 1967, he died at the age of sixty-two.

A few months after Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings, Enrico Fermi returned to Chicago from summering in Europe, “and all of us were absolutely shocked by his appearance,” physicist Maurice Glicksman remembered. “We asked him what was the trouble, and he said that he just couldn’t eat. What he said was that food tasted like dirt, and he couldn’t get it in.”

Fermi soon learned the diagnosis: stomach cancer. Emilio Segrè: “Fermi was resting in the hospital, with his wife in attendance, and was being fed artificially. In typical fashion he was measuring the flux of nutrient by counting drops and timing them with a stopwatch. It seemed as if he were performing one of his usual physics experiments on an extraneous object. He was fully aware of the situation and discussed it with Socratic serenity. . . . He preserved to the last an almost superhuman courage, strength of character, and clarity of thought.”

From his deathbed, Enrico begged Edward Teller to repair his broken professional relationships. Segrè:
“One of the last times I saw him, at the hospital when he knew he had very little time to live, he said that he wanted to set straight a friend whose testimony he thought had been unethical. He smiled with slight irony and said, ‘What nobler thing for a dying man to do than to try to save a soul?’ ” The following year, Teller published “The Work of Many People” in
Science
(February 1955), giving Ulam the credit he deserved for thermonuclear implosion.