American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Garrison interrupted at this point to complain once again that “the surprise production of documents is not the shortest way to arrive at the truth. It seems to me more like a criminal trial than it does like an inquiry and I just regret that it has to be done here.”

In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you don’t want to consult the guy, you don’t consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance and go through all of this sort of thing, he is only there when called and that is all there was to it. So it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished.

“You have to take the whole story,” Rabi insisted. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.”

Dr. Vannevar Bush was called to testify and was asked about Oppenheimer’s opposition in the summer and autumn of 1952 to the testing of the early hydrogen bomb. Bush explained, “I felt strongly that that test ended the possibility of the only type of agreement that I thought possible with Russia at that time, namely, an agreement to make no more tests. For that kind of an agreement would have been self-policing in the sense that if it was violated, the violation would be immediately known. I still think that we made a grave error in conducting that test at that time.” His conclusion was uncompromising: “I think history will show that was a turning point, that when we entered into the grim world that we are entering right now, that those who pushed that thing through to a conclusion without making that attempt have a great deal to answer for.”

Bush: “If it were a trial, I would not be saying these things to the judge, you can well imagine that. . . .” Dr. Evans: “Dr. Bush, I wish you would make clear just what mistake you think the Board made. I did not want this job when I was asked to take it. I thought I was performing a service to my country.” Bush: “I think the moment you were confronted with that letter, you should have returned the letter, and asked that it be redrafted so that you would have before you a clear-cut issue. . . . I think this board or no board should ever sit on a question in this country of whether a man should serve his country or not because he expressed strong opinions. If you want to try that case, you can try me. I have expressed strong opinions many times, and I intend to do so. They have been unpopular opinions at times. When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state. . . . Excuse me, gentlemen, if I become stirred, but I am.”

Teller wonders if some way can be found to ‘deepen the charges’ to include a documentation of the ‘consistently bad advice’ that Oppenheimer has given, going all the way back to the end of the war in 1945.” Heslep added that “Teller feels deeply that this ‘unfrocking’ must be done or else— regardless of the outcome of the current hearing—scientists may lose their enthusiasm for the [atomic weapons] program.”

Teller regrets the case is on a security basis because he feels it is untenable. He has difficulty phrasing his assessment of Oppie’s philosophy except a conviction that Oppie is not disloyal but rather— and Teller put this somewhat vaguely—more of a “pacifist.” Teller says what is needed . . . and the job is most difficult, was to show his fellow scientists that Oppie is not a menace to the program but simply no longer valuable to it. Teller said “only about one per cent or less” of the scientists know of the real situation and that Oppie is so powerful “politically” in scientific circles that it will be hard to “unfrock him in his own church.” (This last phrase is mine and he agrees it is apt.) Teller talked at length about the “Oppie machine,” running through many names, some of which he listed as “Oppie men” and others as not being “on his team” but under his influence.

“There is more than Dr. Oppenheimer on trial in this room. . . . The Government of the United States is here on trial also.” In a veiled reference to McCarthyism, Garrison spoke of the “anxiety abroad in the country.” Anticommunist hysteria had so infected the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that the security apparatus was now behaving “like some monolithic kind of machine that will result in the destruction of men of great gifts. . . . America must not devour her own children.” On this note, having pleaded once again that the Gray Board should “judge the whole man,” Garrison ended his summation.

The primary responsibility for the proceedings lay with Lewis Strauss. But as chairman of the board, Gordon Gray could have ensured that the hearing was conducted properly and fairly. He did not do his job. Instead of taking control of the hearing to maintain fairness, which would have required him to rein in Robb’s illicit tactics, he allowed Robb to control the proceedings. Prior to the hearing, Gray permitted Robb to meet exclusively with the board to review the FBI files, a direct violation of the AEC’s 1950 “Security Clearance Procedures.” He accepted Robb’s recommendation that Garrison be denied a similar meeting; he acquiesced to Robb’s refusal to reveal his witness list to Garrison; he did not share Lawrence’s damaging written testimony with the defense; he did nothing to expedite a security clearance for Garrison. The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. As AEC commissioner Henry D. Smyth would insist, any objective legal review of how the hearing was conducted surely would result in its nullification.

But now, upon his return from Chicago, “Dr. Evans clearly had undergone a complete reversal of view.” Evans said he had simply reviewed the record and decided that there was nothing new in the charges. The FBI thought “someone had ‘gotten to’ him.” Strauss became frantic when he learned of this development. He and Robb had wiretapped Oppenheimer’s lawyers, they had blocked Garrison’s attempt to get a security clearance, they had ambushed witnesses with classified documents, they had prejudiced the Gray panel with hearsay evidence from the FBI files—and despite all their efforts to assure a guilty verdict, now it seemed possible that Oppenheimer would be exonerated. Fearing that Evans might influence one of the two other panel members, Strauss called Robb. The two men agreed that something had to be done and Robb, with Strauss’ approval, called the FBI and asked for Hoover’s intercession. Robb told Bureau agent C. E. Hennrich that he thought “it extremely important that the Director discuss this matter with the Board. . . . Robb said that he feels it will be a tragedy if the decision of the Board goes the wrong way and that he considers this a matter of extreme urgency.” Almost at the same moment, Strauss was on the phone to A. H. Belmont, one of Hoover’s personal assistants, begging him to get the director to intervene. He said things were “touch and go” and that “a slight tip of the balance would cause the Board to commit a serious error.”

Evans’ dissent on the other hand, was a clear, unambiguous critique of his fellow board members’ verdict. “Most of the derogatory information,” Evans observed in his dissent, “was in the hands of the Committee when Dr. Oppenheimer was cleared in 1947.” They apparently were aware of his associations and his left-wing policies: yet they cleared him. They took a chance because of his special talents and he continued to do a good job. Now when the job is done, we are asked to investigate him for practically the same derogatory information. He did his job in a thorough and painstaking manner. There is not the slightest vestige of information before this Board that would indicate that Dr. Oppenheimer is not a loyal citizen of his country. He hates Russia. He had communistic friends, it is true. He still has some. However, the evidence indicates that he has fewer of them than he had in 1947. He is not as naïve as he was then. He has more judgment; no one on the Board doubts his loyalty— even the witnesses adverse to him admit that—and he is certainly less a security risk than he was in 1947, when he was cleared. To deny him clearance now for what he was cleared for in 1947, when we must know he is less of a security risk now than he was then, seems hardly the procedure to be adopted in a free country. . . . I personally think that our failure to clear Dr. Oppenheimer will be a black mark on the escutcheon of our country. His witnesses are a considerable segment of the scientific ...

Why was his conduct with respect to the hydrogen bomb program disturbing? Oppenheimer had opposed a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb, but so had seven other members of the GAC; and they all had explained their reasons clearly. What Gray and Morgan were actually saying was that they opposed Oppenheimer’s judgments and they did not want his views represented in the counsels of government. Oppenheimer wanted to corral and perhaps even reverse the nuclear arms race. He wanted to encourage an open democratic debate on whether the United States should adopt genocide as its primary defense strategy. Apparently, Gray and Morgan considered these sentiments unacceptable in 1954. More, they were asserting in effect that it was not legitimate, not permissible, for a scientist to express strong disagreement on matters of military policy.

But as chairman, Strauss was in a position to influence his fellow commissioners. He understood how power worked in Washington, and he had no qualms about offering his colleagues tangible rewards for seeing things his way. He treated them to lavish lunches and talked to Smyth about lucrative employment opportunities in private industry. At one point, Smyth wondered whether Strauss was trying to buy his vote. Harold P. Green, the AEC lawyer who had been called upon to write the original letter of charges against Oppenheimer, thought Strauss was playing hard-ball. Green knew that Zuckert was initially inclined to find Oppenheimer innocent. In fact, on May 19, Strauss was informed that, “Gene Zuckert would welcome the opportunity not to stand up and be counted on the vote making final disposition of the security case.” But at some point, Zuckert flipped. He was scheduled to resign his post as a commissioner of the AEC on June 30—the day after signing on with the majority decision against Oppenheimer—to start a private law practice in Washington. Green firmly believed that something untoward was happening, especially after he learned that Strauss subsequently transferred a lot of his legal business to Zuckert. Green didn’t know it, but Zuckert also signed a contract with Strauss to serve as the latter’s “personal adviser and consultant.”

On a personal level, he didn’t particularly care for Oppenheimer; they had been Princeton neighbors for ten years, and Oppenheimer had always struck him as a vain and pretentious man. What mattered was that Smyth didn’t find the evidence convincing. In early May, he and Strauss had lunch and proceeded to argue about the verdict. At the end of their lunch, Smyth said, “Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.” “Harry,” Strauss snapped back, “let me recommend you to a good oculist.”

Strauss persuaded his fellow commissioners to have all 3,000 typewritten pages of the hearing transcript published by the Government Printing Office. This violated the Gray Board’s promise to all the witnesses that their testimony would remain confidential. But Strauss felt that he was not winning the public relations battle and so he brushed aside this concern. Comprising some 750,000 words in 993 densely printed pages, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer soon became a seminal document of the early Cold War. To be certain that the initial news stories embarrassed Oppenheimer, Strauss had the AEC staff highlight the most damaging testimony for reporters. Walter Winchell—the right-wing mudslinging syndicated columnist—obligingly wrote: “. . . Oppenheimer’s testimony (which most people skip over) included the name of his mistress (the late Jean Tatlock), a fanatical ‘Redski’ with whom he admitted associations after his marriage ‘of the most intimate kind.’ . . . This when he was working on the Big Bomb and knew his Doll was an active member of a Commy apparatus.

IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss.

Ironically, publicity surrounding the trial and its verdict enhanced Oppenheimer’s fame both in America and abroad. Where once he was known only as the “father of the atomic bomb,” now he had become something even more alluring—a scientist martyred, like Galileo. Outraged and shocked by the decision, 282 Los Alamos scientists signed a letter to Strauss defending Oppenheimer. Around the country, more than 1,100 scientists and academics signed another petition protesting the decision.

The broadcaster Eric Sevareid noted, “He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to s...

AT THE APEX of the McCarthyite hysteria, Oppenheimer had become its most prominent victim. “The case was ultimately the triumph of McCarthyism, without McCarthy himself,” the historian Barton J. Bernstein has written. President Eisenhower appeared satisfied with the outcome—but unaware of the tactics Strauss had used to obtain it. In mid-June, seemingly oblivious to the nature and import of the hearing, Ike wrote Strauss a short note suggesting that Oppenheimer be put to work solving the problem of the desalinization of seawater. “I can think of no scientific success of all time that would equal this in its boon to mankind. . . .” Strauss quietly ignored his suggestion.

The implications for American society were enormous. One scientist had been excommunicated. But all scientists were now on notice that there could be serious consequences for those who challenged state policies. Shortly before the hearing, Oppenheimer’s MIT colleague Dr. Vannevar Bush had written a friend that “the problem of how far a technical man working with the military is entitled to speak out publicly is quite a question. . . . I kept in channels rather religiously, perhaps too much so.” From experience, Bush believed he would only destroy his usefulness if he talked publicly about internal government deliberations. On the other hand, “when an individual citizen sees his country going down a path which he thinks is likely to be disastrous he has some obligation to speak out.” Bush shared many of Oppenheimer’s critical instincts about Washington’s growing reliance on nuclear weapons. But unlike Oppenheimer, he had never really spoken out. Oppenheimer had—and now all his colleagues could see him punished for his courage and patriotism.

With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953 Foreign A fairs essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.

Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost. As the science historian Patrick McGrath later observed, “Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their fullthroated militarism and anti-communism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests.”

Having evolved into a liberal disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he had used his iconic status to join the ranks of the liberal foreign policy establishment, counting as personal friends men like Gen. George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Liberals had then embraced Oppenheimer as one of their own. His humiliation thus implicated liberalism, and liberal politicians understood that the rules of the game had changed. Now, even if the issue was not espionage, even if one’s loyalty was unquestioned, challenging the wisdom of America’s reliance on a nuclear arsenal was dangerous. The Oppenheimer hearing thus represented a significant step in the narrowing of the public forum during the early Cold War.

ABROAD, foreign opinion reacted to the trial with incredulity. European intellectuals saw it as further evidence that America was gripped by irrational fears. “How can the independent experimental mind survive in such an atmosphere?” asked R.H.S. Crossman in The New Statesman and Nation, Britain’s leading liberal weekly. In Paris, when Chevalier received his copy of the hearing transcript—shipped to him by Oppenheimer himself—he read portions of the document out loud to André Malraux. Both men were struck by Oppenheimer’s strange passivity in the face of his interrogators. Malraux was particularly troubled that Oppenheimer had freely answered questions about the political views of his friends and associates. The hearing had turned him into an informer.

“The trouble with secrecy,” he said, “is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and resources of the whole community. .

Instead, he gently asked Oppenheimer if scientists had become alienated from the government. “They like to be called in and asked for their counsel,” Oppenheimer replied obliquely. “Everybody likes to be treated as though he knew something. I suppose that when the government behaves badly in the field you’re working close to, and when decisions that look cowardly or vindictive, or short-sighted, or mean are made . . . then you get discouraged and you may—may—you may recite George Herbert’s poem I Will Abroad. But that’s human rather than scientific.”

Oppenheimer spoke up and “explained that he didn’t think he should sign the statement, though agreeing with it, because of the to-do this would cause.” He went on to throw cold water over the whole notion of protesting the Eisenhower Administration’s drift toward war. After all, he said, a war over Formosa (Taiwan) was not necessarily worse than a peace under any circumstances, and if it came to war, the limited use of tactical A-bombs might not lead inexorably to the wholesale bombings of cities. He even argued that any statement—which he agreed with but would not sign—should not imply that “thoughtful and careful and intelligent attention to the relevant issues was not already being given, in Washington.” Robert had always been persuasive with any audience—and by the end of the meeting, they all agreed that perhaps a public statement was not in order. Lilienthal came away wondering “whether those of us— such as myself—who have been under terrific attack don’t go out of our way to be conservative in discussing the position of our country and our Government, lest we be thought less than pro-American.” It seems obvious that Robert was determined to prove that he was a reliable patriot, that his critics had been wrong to question his devotion to the country. He was steering clear of all public policy confrontations, especially those that had any relationship to nuclear weapons. He disapproved of self-appointed pundits—like the young Henry Kissinger, who had turned himself in...

Oppenheimer wrote Russell that he was “somewhat troubled when I look at the proposed agenda. . . . Above all, I think that the terms of reference ‘the hazards arising from the continuous development of nuclear weapons’ prejudges where the greatest hazards lie. . . .” Nonplussed, Russell replied, “I can’t think that you would deny that there are hazards associated with the continued development of nuclear weapons.”

He was consumed with the deep ethical and philosophical dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons, but at times it seemed that, as Thorpe puts it, “Oppenheimer offered to weep for the world, but not help to change it.”

A few years later, he gave a hint of his feelings to Max Born, his former professor in Göttingen, who had made it clear that he rather disapproved of Oppenheimer’s decision to work on the atomic bomb. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote in his memoirs, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote Born, “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.”

Oppenheimer intoned, “The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique in politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.”

Nash left that summer, and for many years afterwards he struggled with a debilitating mental illness that for a time required him to be institutionalized. Oppenheimer was sympathetic with Nash’s psychiatric ordeals, and invited him back to the Institute when he had recovered from one of his severest bouts with schizoid symptoms. Robert had a forgiving instinct for the frailty of the human psyche, an awareness of the thin line between insanity and brilliance.

There was, he later said, a “contradiction between Oppenheimer’s brilliant mind and his awkward personality. . . . He did not know how to deal with people, his children especially.” Lilienthal later harshly concluded that Oppenheimer “ruined” his children’s lives. “He kept them on a tight leash.” Peter grew up to become a shy but highly sensitive and intelligent young man. But he lived estranged from his mother. Francis Fergusson knew that Robert loved his son, but he saw that Robert seemed incapable of protecting Peter from his mother’s volatile moods.

“He worked for Rockefeller?” Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, “I, too, have taken money for doing harm.”

Kitty said the two girls would sleep in a tent they had brought. And then she announced they couldn’t possibly stay the whole summer, but might manage a month. Nancy Gibney was stunned; she had thought they would be staying for a few days. Thus began what Nancy later called “seven hideous, hilarious weeks,” marked by disagreements, misunderstandings and worse.

Robert and Kitty were hosting a raucous New Year’s Eve party when one of their guests, Ivan Jadan, burst into gusty, operatic song. The singing was too much for Bob Gibney, who came storming down to the Oppenheimer beach in a rage. He had brought a gun with him, and, apparently in an effort to get everyone’s attention, he fired several shots in the air. Robert turned on him ferociously and shouted, “Gibney, never come to my house again!” Thereafter, the Gibneys and the Oppenheimers had nothing to do with each other. They hired lawyers and squabbled over beach rights. The feud became a legend on the island.

But she dreaded the thought of stopping by the cottage if Kitty was there alone. Inevitably, Kitty would make some caustic, “malicious” remark about something unpleasant. “I learned to overlook those things because a lot of the time she wasn’t herself. . . . I knew her moves. I knew what to anticipate. What a ghastly life, to be that unhappy.”

The drinks would turn into dinner and Robert would often begin reciting poetry. In a low whisper of a voice, he would recite Keats, Shelley, Byron and sometimes Shakespeare. He loved The Odyssey, and had memorized long passages of it in translation. He had become the simple philosopher king, adored by his ragtag followers of expatriates, retirees, beatniks and natives. Despite his cultivated aura of otherworldliness, he fit comfortably into their island world. On St. John, the father of the atomic bomb had somehow found just the right refuge from his inner demons.

“Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” On another occasion, when an interviewer asked him on camera what he thought of Senator Robert Kennedy’s recent proposal that President Johnson initiate talks with the Soviet Union to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer puffed hard on his pipe and said, “It’s twenty years too late. . . . It should have been done the day after Trinity.”

“I was rather disturbed,” Bohm wrote, “especially by a statement you made, indicating a feeling of guilt on your part. I feel it to be a waste of the life that is left to you for you to be caught up in such guilt feelings.” He then reminded Oppenheimer of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre “in which the hero is finally freed of guilt by recognizing responsibility. As I understand it, one feels guilty for past actions, because they grew out of what one was and still is.” Bohm believed that mere guilt feelings are meaningless. “I can understand that your dilemma was a peculiarly difficult one. Only you can assess the way in which you were responsible for what happened. . . .” Oppenheimer replied promptly: “The play and such things have been rattling around for a long time. What I have never done is to express regret for doing what I did and could at Los Alamos; in fact, on varied and recurrent occasions, I have reaffirmed my sense that, with all the black and white, that was something I did not regret.” And then, in words he edited out before mailing the letter, he wrote, “My principal remaining disgust with Kipphardt’s text is the long and totally improvised final speech I am supposed to have made, which indeed affirms such regret. My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me.”

As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word “responsibility”— and when Morgan suggested he was using the word in an almost religious sense, Oppenheimer agreed it was a “secular device for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word ‘ethical’ here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before—although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.”