He then explained, “I went to see Lawrence, and Lawrence blew a gasket.” Lawrence—whose politics had become increasingly conservative over the years—was incensed that a communist-backed union was trying to organize the people in his laboratory. When he demanded to know who was behind this, Oppenheimer insisted, “I can’t tell you who they are. They’ll have to come tell you themselves.” Lawrence was furious, not only because he was violently opposed to his physicists and chemists joining a union, but because the incident demonstrated that his old friend was still wasting his precious time on
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