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I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.
—Harry S. Truman
Being uninterested in politics before Jean had come into his life, Oppenheimer hadn’t voted until he was thirty-two years old. He’d cast his first ballot for the 1936 re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies had appealed to Oppie’s recently kindled socialist sensibilities. He’d voted for FDR twice more: in 1940 and, in recognition of his support for the nascent United Nations, again in 1944.
And now, at last, Oppie was at the White House, having been granted a meeting with the president. But the occupant of the Oval Office was no longer FDR, a man Oppie would have loved to have met, despite some growing misgivings during the war years, but rather Harry Truman, who, in Oppie’s opinion, had botched things horribly at Potsdam by failing to bring Russia into an accord for international control of atomic energy; worse, Truman had indeed needlessly prolonged the Pacific war by insisting on unconditional surrender, instead of just letting the Japanese keep their damned Emperor in the first place.
Sure, it was an honor to meet the president no matter who held that title. But just as some infinities are smaller than others—there are only half as many odd numbers as integers and yet both exist in endless profusion—so certain honors were inferior to their kin. Adding to Oppie’s muted mood was the fact that he was being escorted down the corridor not by Henry Stimson, the principled gentleman who had served as Secretary of War until his recent seventy-eighth birthday, but rather by his successor, Bob Patterson, in office all of a month now and bearing the same title even though the country was no longer at war.
After passing through the office of the president’s secretary, Oppie and Patterson entered the Oval from a door at the north end of its major axis, facing the empty desk. Oppie had only ever seen a couple of black-and-white pictures of this place in magazines. It was smaller than he’d imagined it, but really was elliptical; he judged its eccentricity to be about zero-point-six. The presidential seal was woven into the central blue-gray rug.
Another door to the room opened and in came Truman, three inches shorter than Oppie, with a round, full face, blue eyes behind thick lenses, and hair more gray than brown. “Dr. Oppenheimer,” he said, mispronouncing the surname by stretching the O into a long vowel. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“The pleasure,” replied Oppie, shaking the offered hand, “is all mine.” He had flown in for this meeting; this was his third trip to Washington since the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki, and all of them had been by plane. Without a word being said to him, the stricture against flying had been quietly lifted; even before his resignation, nine days ago, the government had decided he was no longer too valuable to risk losing in a crash.
FDR, even though he couldn’t stand up, had been a towering presence, but this Truman was just a workaday Missourian chosen as a compromise running mate for Roosevelt’s fourth term. Southern Democrats had objected to the flagrantly liberal Henry Wallace, who had been vice president up until this past January, and so now this man held the reins of power. More than that—Oppie had a flash of that Harvard physicist in the control bunker at Trinity—he was the one with his hand on the atomic lever, the only man in the whole world, at least so far, who had fission weapons under his command.
Really, for the task ahead, it should probably have been Szilard taking this meeting, not Oppie—but Leo had tried and failed once already to get in to see Truman, ending up with Jimmy Byrnes instead. He’d prevailed upon Oppie for this one task: perhaps the now world-famous laboratory director could succeed where Szilard had failed. Oppie had promised to report back with his assessment.
“Doctor,” said Truman, “won’t you and Secretary Patterson please have a seat?” There were short couches on either side of the rug. The president took the couch on the west side of the room; Oppie and Patterson sat on the other one.
“Congratulations and all that,” said Truman. “Now, let’s get down to it, shall we? This business of the control of nuclear weapons, right? The first thing is to define the national problem, then the international one.”
A dozen replies ran through Oppie’s head, none of them polite. For Pete’s sake, the primary concern had to be getting international controls in place rather than all this brouhaha about whether the military or a civilian agency would manage atomic matters domestically; any fool could see that—except, apparently, this fool. He looked at Patterson, but the Secretary’s long face was studiously neutral. “Actually, Mr. President,” Oppie said slowly, “perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.”
“Well, when you get right down to it, there is no international problem,” Truman said. “We’re the only ones who’ve got this. You know when the Russians will have their own atom bomb?”
“As I told the House of Representatives last week, sir, no, I don’t.”
“Well, I do,” snapped Truman. “Never.”
“I assure you, Mr. President, the laws of physics are the same in Moscow as they are here; the Soviets will master this technology soon enough.”
“Like the damn Nazis did? Have you seen the reports from the Alsos mission into Germany? They’d thrown up their hands; it was too much for them to fathom. No, it’s like I said after we took out Hiroshima. No one but your team, and no country but America, could have made that happen.”
“You are ...” But, for once, Oppie managed to intercept impolitic words on their way out; he ended instead with “... too kind, sir.”
They talked for another twenty minutes, mostly about the May-Johnson Bill, the draft legislation that had been making Leo Szilard and others apoplectic. It treated nuclear matters as a state secret, rather than something the rest of the world was bound to gain access to, and threatened scientists who made even trivial violations of security with fines of $100,000 and a decade in prison.
Oppie wasn’t troubled about that. Getting any domestic legislation in place was a beginning; it could always be tweaked after the fact. No, he was here for a more important reason. It was crucial to take the measure of this Truman, to determine if he should be made privy to the pending solar calamity.
“What’s the matter, Doctor?” said Truman. “You look like you swallowed an anthill.”
Oppie glanced over at the desk and noticed a little sign on it: The buck stops here! He turned back to Truman and said, “Salus populi suprema lex esto.” It was the Missouri state motto—“let the welfare of the people be the supreme law”—and he’d expected Truman to recognize it, but the president just frowned. Oppie made another attempt, a trial balloon, a test: “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Truman reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a white silk handkerchief, and shoved it toward Oppie. “Well, why don’t you wipe them, sonny boy?”
The two men locked eyes for a moment then Truman rose. “I think we’re done here.”
Yes, thought Oppie, rising as well. We most certainly are.