Bohm had a candid conversation with Oppie. He asked why he had said such things about their friend. “He told me,” Bohm recalled, “that his nerve just gave way at that moment. That somehow the thing was too much for him. . . . I can’t remember his words, but that’s what he meant. He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things. He said he couldn’t understand why he did it.” Of course, it had happened before—in his interview with Pash in 1943 and his meeting with Truman in 1945—and it would happen again during his security hearing in 1954. But, as Bernard
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