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[Oppenheimer] certainly did not suffer fools gladly—and there are lots of fools. He could be extremely cutting and he was especially cutting to people in high positions whom he considered fools.
—Hans Bethe
After staring into an atomic fireball, Oppie mused, you’d think flashbulbs wouldn’t bother me. But they did, each little explosion stinging his eyes and leaving an afterimage that lingered like guilt.
Robert strode into the massive, marble-walled caucus room on the second floor of the senate office building, six Corinthian columns along each of its long sides, feeling alive and important. He smiled at or shook hands with a phalanx of reporters, many of whom had previously written fawning pieces about him.
At the front of the room there were six long mahogany tables forming three sides of a square. The five members of the Atomic Energy Commission sat at the middle table, ordered, it amused Oppie to notice, left to right by increasing degree of baldness and right to left by seated height. At the far right was Lewis Strauss, and that positioning tickled him, too.
Oppie’s world-line intersected frequently with that of the fifty-three-year-old Strauss. In addition to his role as an A.E.C. member, Strauss was also one of the trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study. In November 1945, Truman bestowed upon him the rank of rear admiral in the Navy Reserve—essentially an honorific now that the war was over—and, in the months soon following, Strauss had supported Einstein’s suggestion of Oppenheimer for the I.A.S.’s directorship, perhaps thinking that Oppie in peacetime would follow an admiral’s instructions as obediently as he’d followed a general’s during the war. But Robert had firmly rejected Strauss’s meddling for two and a half years now—partly because Strauss wasn’t privy to the Arbor Project, and partly because Oppie found the pompous, thin-skinned businessman irritating.
Even his name irked Oppie. Robert had met many a Strauss during his time in Göttingen, but the admiral, born in Charleston, had a Southern drawl that elongated his surname to “Straws,” any hint of the Teutonic buried under hominy and huckleberry. Each time Oppie heard him say it, he winced.
As a teenager, Oppie knew, Strauss had wanted to become a physicist, but he’d managed only a high-school diploma before his father put him on the road selling shoes. During World War I, though, Lewis ingratiated himself into a position as an aide to future-president Herbert Hoover, and, after the war, with Hoover’s help, he landed a job at a New York investment-banking firm. Ever the opportunist, Strauss married the daughter of one of the partners, and come the year of the great crash—the one that had originally sailed by Oppie unnoticed—he was a partner himself, raking in more than a million dollars annually. Strauss had his claws firmly dug into business and government, equally at home on Wall Street and in the West Wing.
But it was the Southerner’s efforts to play in the arena he’d never actually gotten around to studying—physics—that truly made Robert angry. Lewis Strauss was the sole member of the Atomic Energy Commission who opposed the exporting of radioisotopes produced by U.S. reactors to friendly powers for use in medical and industrial applications. As Oppie understood it, Strauss felt that, by definition, an atheist nation such as Russia couldn’t possibly be moral, and any isotopes that left U.S. control were bound to eventually end up in Soviet clutches.
Of course, the U.S. didn’t export U-235 or any plutonium, but iron isotopes such as Fe-59? There was no sane reason to withhold them from allies. Still, Strauss had taken his fight against exports to the press, which was out in force today, and also to Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, an Iowan who looked like Central Casting’s notion of an accountant.
Hickenlooper was immediate past chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the body that oversaw the A.E.C., and he was jealous that Joe McCarthy, a senator from the neighboring state of Wisconsin, was getting so much press attention for his hearings. After being coached by the admiral, Hick—as his constituents called him—accused the rest of the A.E.C. of “incredible mismanagement” for having let some two thousand shipments of isotopes go overseas. In response, the new chair of the Joint Committee, Brien McMahon, called precisely the sort of public hearing Hick wanted—and, to best McCarthy, this hearing was open to the public, with klieg lights blazing to aid the newsreel cameras.
Today, Oppie had been summoned to provide his expert opinion. Although not a member of the A.E.C., he was chairman of its group of scientific consultants, the General Advisory Committee; the other members had sneakily voted him chair at their first meeting while he himself had been stuck in traffic, thanks to a snowstorm.
Oppie took a seat at another one of the mahogany tables, next to the A.E.C.’s general counsel, a wavy-haired New Yorker in his early thirties called Joe “The Fox” Volpe. After a bit of preliminary material, Hick looked over at Strauss, and Oppie noted a smug little nod pass between them. The senator called Oppie to the settee reserved for those speaking. A carved eagle was perched on its backrest, poised to pounce on anyone wavering from the patriotic good.
Admiral Strauss was president of the Reform temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, the same synagogue that Felix Adler had abandoned to found his Ethical Culture Society and its primary and secondary school at which Oppie had been a student. Adler’s position—and Oppie’s own—was the opposite of Strauss’s: morality could indeed be established without any recourse to theology. McMahon wasn’t requiring the swearing of oaths, although in this case, Oppie thought, the Rubber Bible, that giant compendium of chemistry and physics data, would have served admirably as scripture: facts, after all, are facts. He might defer to Lewis on picking a pair of shoes, but when it came to science, the businessman really needed to shut the hell up.
“When we furnish isotopes to other nations,” said Hickenlooper, rising to face Oppie, thumbs hitched into suspenders, “we are embarking on a program which I believe is inimical to our national defense.” He fixed his eyes on Robert as if to make sure the scientist understood what he was supposed to say, then asked his question: “Dr. Oppenheimer, on this matter of exporting isotopes, surely you agree with Admiral Strauss here”—he said the name the way Lewis himself did as he indicated the man, who was leaning forward earnestly, chin supported on arms held up by the polished wood in front of him—“that there’s some possibility of them being used not for peaceful manufacturing or medicine but for atomic processes—first, atomic energy, and then, possibly, atomic bombs. Surely that objection is well-founded, sir, wouldn’t you say?”
Oppie looked out at the faces, the crowd, the audience, and spread his arms wide, palms up, an imploring Christ. “No one can force me to say that you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy,” he said. He paused, making sure every eye was on him. “You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact you do.” There were a few laughs. “You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy; in fact, you do.” More laughter, the holdouts from a moment earlier now emboldened. “But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and, in my knowledge, no part at all.”
He had them, Oppie knew, had them in his thrall. “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than, oh, electronic devices but far more important than, let us say ...” He made a show of seeking a word, then delivered it like a punch line: “... vitamins.” Open guffaws. To milk the moment, he added with dancing eyebrows, “Somewhere in between.”
Hick was frowning and his face had grown red. He dismissed Oppie, and Robert strode across the room. “Well, Joe,” he said, grinning, as he sat back down in his previous seat, “how did I do?”
Volpe shook his head left and right, left and right, oscillating in anguished discomfort. “Too well,” he said. “Much too well.” The lawyer cast his gaze across the room at Lewis Strauss, and Oppie turned to look in that direction.
Robert’s throat constricted. He’d faced down rattlesnakes on the mesa, coyotes in the scrub, buzzards in the desert. He knew the expression of something that wanted you dead. But Lewis Strauss’s face, red with rage, taut with humiliation, was worse than that, a look Oppie had only ever seen once before, a look telegraphing not just wanting him dead—of that there was no doubt—but of wanting to see him suffer first, to have Oppie know who it was who had destroyed him. He knew the look because he’d seen it himself, years ago at the Cavendish, as he glared in the shaving mirror, straight razor scraping flesh, on the day he’d tried to kill Patrick Blackett with a poisoned apple.
Oppie shuddered, turned away, and more bulbs exploded in his face.