The notable exception, Green noted, came to be Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had shown himself as one not lightly bought off. But J. Edgar Hoover wanted him out. The FBI director liked to judge people by what he defined as their Americanism—i.e. the more conventional they were, the more they thought like him and shared his prejudices, the better Americans they were. It would have been hard to find anyone less like Hoover than Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer offended Hoover professionally and personally; everything about him jarred Hoover’s nerves: his fellow traveling, his intellectual and
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