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
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