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Oppenheimer was particularly active in Local 349 of the East Bay Teachers’ Union.
Only a year after Hitler came to power in 1933, Oppenheimer was contributing sizable sums to assist German Jewish physicists to escape Nazi Germany.
In the autumn of 1937, Robert’s aunt Hedwig Oppenheimer Stern (Julius’ youngest sister) and her son Alfred Stern and his family landed in New York as refugees from Nazi Germany. Robert had sponsored them legally and paid their expenses, and soon he persuaded them to settle in Berkeley. Robert’s generosity toward the Sterns was not fleeting. He always regarded them as family; decades later, when Hedwig Stern died, her son wrote Oppenheimer, “As long as she could think and feel, she was all for you.”
“unless I meant to do something about it, I didn’t want to talk about it.”
By 1935, it was not at all unusual for Americans who were concerned with economic justice—including many New Deal liberals—to identify with the Communist movement. Many laborers, as well as writers, journalists and teachers, supported the most radical features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“The intellectuals who were drawn toward the left by the horror, the injustices and fears of the thirties did, in varying degrees, identify with the history of protest in America. . . . John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and even with movements such as the abolitionists, the early AFL and the IWW.”
Without question, Robert was surrounded by relatives, friends and colleagues who at some point or other were members of the Communist Party. As a left-wing New Dealer, he gave considerable sums of money to causes championed by the Party. But he always insisted that he was never a card-carrying member of the CP.
Tellingly, he expressed qualms about the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime. He openly admired Franklin Roosevelt and defended the New Deal. And while he was a member of various Popular Front organizations dominated by the Communist Party, he was also a staunch civil libertarian and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union. In short, he was a classic fellow-traveling New Deal progressive who admired the Communist Party’s opposition to fascism in Europe, and its championing of labor rights at home. It is neither surprising nor revealing that he worked with Party members in
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Many left-of-center, pro-union, anti-fascist intellectuals in the late 1930s never affiliated with the Communist Party. And yet, many who did join the Party chose to hide their affiliation even if, like Oppenheimer, they were politically active on behalf of causes supported by the Party.
Oppenheimer, May explained to the FBI agents, was the kind of man who was quite willing to “agree with CP aims and objectives at any particular time if he had decided in his own mind that they had merit. He would not, however, condone those objectives with which he did not agree.”
“The outbreak of war in Europe,”
“has changed profoundly the course of our own political development. In the last month strange things have happened to the New Deal. We have seen it attacked, and more and more surely we have seen it abandoned. There is a growing discouragement of liberals with the movement for a democratic front and red-baiting has grown to a national sport. Reaction is mobilized.”
But what do these “reports” propose? More than anything else, a defense of the New Deal and its domestic social programs:
The Communist Party is being attacked for its support of the Soviet policy. But the total extermination of the Party here cannot reverse that policy: it can only silence some of the voices, some of the clearest voices, that oppose a war between the United States and Russia. What the attack can do directly, what it is meant to do, is to disrupt the democratic forces, to destroy unions in general and CIO unions in particular, to make possible the cutting of relief, to force abandonment of the great program of peace, security and work that is the basis of the movement toward a democratic front.
The elementary test of a good society is its ability to keep its members alive. It must make it possible for them to feed themselves and it must protect their persons from violent death. Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today,
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“The cutting of relief and the simultaneous increase in the budget for armaments are connected not only by arithmetic considerations. Roosevelt’s abandonment of the program for social reform, the attack, where once there had been support, on the labor movement, and the preparation for war, these are related and parallel developments.”
since August 1939, “not a single new measure of progressive purpose has been proposed . . . and the measures of the past have not even been defended against reactionary attack.”
“It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out.”
WHATEVER THE STATE OF his associations with Communist Party members, Oppenheimer had always been enamored of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
“We have to defend Western values against the Nazis,” Bethe recalled Oppenheimer saying. “And because of the Molotov–von Ribbentrop pact we can have no truck with the Communists.”
“He had sympathies to the far left, mostly, I believe, on humanitarian grounds. The Hitler-Stalin pact had confused most people with Communist sympathies into staying completely aloof from the war against Germany until the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941. But Oppenheimer was so deeply impressed by the fall of France [a year before the invasion of Russia] that this displaced everything else in his mind.”
The Man Who Would Be God.
The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.
Robert always had that porkpie hat on.”
“He was gentle, mild,” recalled one friend who knew them both. “She was strident, assertive, aggressive. But that’s often what makes a good marriage, the opposites.”
in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs.
In Bohr’s hands, quantum theory became a joyous celebration of life.
at Berkeley, “Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.”
“being in a course with Oppie was like experiencing lightning flashes five or ten times in an hour, so brief that you might’ve missed them.
many Europeans appeared to prefer the Nazis to the Russians. “And I felt,” Bohm said, “that there was such a trend in America too. I thought the Nazis were a total threat to civilization. . . . It seemed that the Russians were the only ones that were really fighting them. Then I began to listen to what they said more sympathetically.”
“He was very persuasive, very cogent, elegant in language and able to listen to what other people said and incorporate it in what he would say. I had the impression that he was a good politician in the sense that if several people spoke he could summarize what they said and they would discover that they had agreed with each other as a result of his summary. A great talent.”
we were self-consciously a left-wing component of the New Deal. We were pulling the New Deal to the left. That was our mission in life.” It was an accurate description of Robert Oppenheimer’s political objectives as well as his own.
When asked years later whether he thought Oppenheimer had been a member of the Party, Hawkins replied, “Not that I know of. But you know, again, I would say it wouldn’t have mattered very much. In a sense, it’s not an important question. He was clearly identified with many of these left-wing activities.”
By 1943, however, Oppenheimer had long since turned his back on union organizing. He did so not because he had changed his political views but because he had come to the realization that unless he followed Lawrence’s advice he would not be allowed to work on a project that he believed might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany.
IN THE LATE 1930S, Robert Oppenheimer found himself in the center of things. And that’s where he wanted to be.
On September 18, 1942, Groves formally took charge of the bomb project—officially designated the Manhattan Engineer District, but most often referred to as the Manhattan Project.
On October 8, 1942, he met Oppenheimer at a Berkeley luncheon hosted by the president of the university. Soon afterwards, Robert Serber saw Groves walk into Oppenheimer’s office, accompanied by Colonel Nichols. Groves took off his Army jacket and handed it to Nichols, saying, “Take this and find a dry cleaner and get it cleaned.”
Oppenheimer understood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project,
Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems.
a brief conversation
“the Chevalier affair,”
Chevaliers
Haakon and Barbara
George C. Eltenton,
Eltenton, Chevalier reported, had solicited him to ask his friend Oppenheimer to pass information about his scientific work to a diplomat Eltenton knew in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco.
By all accounts—Chevalier’s, Oppenheimer’s and Eltenton’s—Oppie angrily told Hoke that he was talking about “treason” and that he should have nothing to do with Eltenton’s scheme.
Chevalier always insisted that he was merely alerting Oppie to Eltenton’s proposal rather than acting as his conduit.
Chevalier recounts that he and Oppenheimer talked only briefly about Eltenton’s proposition. He insisted that he was not soliciting information from Oppie, but was merely passing on to his friend the fact that Eltenton had proposed a means of sharing information with Soviet scientists.
After Robert’s death, Kitty reported yet another version of the story.
Chevalier realized that he could not get Robert off by himself, he related his conversation with Eltenton in her presence. Kitty said it was she who then blurted out, “But that would be treason!”
