CHAPTER 10

The Oppenheimer Affair

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER HAD a mind and a manner that could be very persuasive, but also an arrogance and an impatience that could be very wounding. His moral sensitivity, moreover, stood at odds with his desire to be near power, an enterprise not often guided by considerations of sin. Famous after the war, Oppenheimer became infatuated with the Washington scene and his influence within it. He became ever sensitive to the way he appeared; Robert Oppenheimer was on his mind at all times. While Oppenheimer’s vanity irritated many of his friends, to his enemies it was intolerable. ¹

Oppenheimer’s enemies included men practiced in the subterranean stiletto warfare of Washington who envied his brilliance and influence, resented his liberal politics, suspected his patriotism because of his radical past and their own fear of communism, and felt no qualms about ruthlessly exploiting his vulnerabilities. So Oppenheimer’s enemies, who felt intimidated and threatened by him and yet could not cope with him, decided to use these skeletons to shame Oppenheimer and to bring him down with a maximum of disgrace so that his influence would be finished. The atmosphere was even more Machiavellian and predatory than usual in Washington life.

On November 7, 1953, one of Oppenheimer’s enemies, William Borden, a former staff director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy who had zealously advocated the superbomb and deeply resented Oppenheimer’s opposition to it, mailed a three and a half page, single-spaced letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was another Oppenheimer foe. “More probably than not,” Borden asserted in his accusatory letter, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Borden listed the factors that led him to this conclusion: Oppenheimer’s financial contributions to the Communist Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s; the fact that his wife, his brother, and his onetime fiancée all had been communists; his contradictory information about espionage approaches in 1943; and his “tireless” work “to retard the United States H-bomb program.” ²

Oppenheimer had been in Hoover’s crosshairs for years. In 1947 the FBI director had argued in vain against renewing Oppenheimer’s wartime security clearance. Since then, on Hoover’s instructions, FBI agents had busily collected further evidence and innuendo against the physicist through minute and ceaseless surveillance of his public and private life. Oppenheimer’s phone was tapped. His office and home were bugged. His mail was opened. By 1953 the FBI file on Oppenheimer was four and a half feet thick—plenty with which to tarnish his name. After receiving Borden’s letter, Hoover eagerly prepared a digest of Oppenheimer’s file and sent it, along with a copy of the letter, to various top government officials, including President Eisenhower. That Eisenhower had recently come under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy for laxness in confronting communism made it politically imperative that he and his administration be seen as tough in handling Borden’s accusation.

Unaware of the storm brewing against him—his celebrity and the caliber of his high-level friends gave him an illusion of invulnerability—Oppenheimer spent the last weeks of 1953 giving the distinguished Reith Lectures over BBC Radio from a studio in Bush House, London. In one of these lectures, Oppenheimer expressed his personal view of communism:

It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word “communism” which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men of learning content with anonymity.

But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual.

This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.

Whatever the young and naive Oppenheimer’s view of communism had been in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in these words an older and wiser Oppenheimer clearly condemned an ideology that held no appeal or sway over him. But perhaps that did not matter. It is a hallmark of Greek tragedy that the selection of the victim is never accidental, and the end is always foreordained.

Borden and Hoover triggered the vendetta against Oppenheimer, but it was AEC chairman Lewis Strauss who brought him down. An owlish and dour-looking man with cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal, Strauss had a keen mind and a clever political sense. As a young naval officer in World War I, he had caught Herbert Hoover’s attention, and had seen high politics firsthand as Hoover’s personal assistant. Between the wars, he had made a fortune on Wall Street before rejoining the navy at the beginning of World War II, where he had risen to the rank of rear admiral and head of the navy’s Ordnance Division. Strauss possessed considerable charm and urbanity that cloaked profound insecurity about his limited formal education and humble roots, two areas where he felt particularly inadequate in comparison to Oppenheimer. This was apparent in Strauss’s description of Oppenheimer when he first met him in the summer of 1945. “I was enormously impressed with him,” said Strauss. “He was a man with an extraordinary mind, a compelling, dramatic personality, a charm for me that I suppose rose out of his poetic approach to the problem we faced together. I’m not his peer, of course.” ³

A self-made man with a limited formal education, Strauss labored to comprehend physics and was proudly sensitive about his intellectual ability. He made a cult of science, and since he saw Oppenheimer as the apotheosis of the scientist, he considered him a wizard who would not withhold his powers for good unless he proposed to employ them for evil. There was also something in Strauss that gave him a desperate need to be always agreed with, to dominate. With superiors, he was always pliable and flattering. But from equals and subordinates, he brooked no argument. One acquaintance said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.” ⁴ His face, with its rosy hue and the blandness of its spectacles, gave no hint of his resentments or his long and unforgiving memory. His personality combined extraordinary vanity with a stubborn vindictiveness.

Oppenheimer was fated from the first to get on badly with such a man. The scientist bore some responsibility himself. He had demanding standards, more than a hint of intellectual snobbery, and sometimes cold contempt for those who failed to measure up. These qualities of Oppenheimer’s only inflamed those of Strauss. ⁵

The triggering incident had occurred in June 1949, when Oppenheimer testified before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy about the exportation of radioactive isotopes. Strauss, who had testified against such exports because he thought they might assist in production of an atomic bomb, was present in the hearing room. When asked about the possible military application of exported isotopes, Oppenheimer replied with the laserlike sarcasm that had wounded so many others before:

No one can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. 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. ⁶

As snickers spread around the hearing room, it became clear that Oppenheimer was ridiculing someone. AEC deputy general counsel Joseph Volpe, seated next to him at the witness table, had no doubt who that someone was. He turned around and sneaked a look at Strauss. His eyes had narrowed, his jaw had tightened, and his cheeks had colored. His countenance was cold, hard, and furious. A senator then asked: “Is it not true, doctor, that the overall national defense of a country rests on more than secret military development alone?” “Of course it does,” replied Oppenheimer, who could not stop there. “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins. Somewhere in between.” There were more snickers. At the end of his testimony, Oppenheimer, delighted and amused by his own wit, turned to Volpe and said, “Well, Joe, how did I do?” Volpe, with the memory of Strauss’s twisted face vividly in his mind, shook his head and answered, “Too well, Robert. Much too well.” Years later, another observer in the hearing room that afternoon could still remember Strauss’s expression. “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.” ⁷ Like most vain and insecure men, Strauss was a close accountant of small insults. All such sins were entered in a ledger, no less permanent for being kept in Strauss’s razor-sharp memory rather than on bookkeeper’s pages. It concealed interior tides of terrible anger.

Oppenheimer’s barbs were unwise—it is always dangerous business to slight powerful people in Washington—but they were understandable. Oppenheimer knew that Strauss had whispered doubts about his loyalty to others in Washington, that the FBI had leaked these doubts to friends in the press, that his every action was under round-the-clock FBI surveillance, and that he could never be certain what kind of whispering campaign was being mounted against him or when it would eventually come to a head. He was angry about the backstage politics and it showed in his rude demeanor.

In Strauss, Oppenheimer had antagonized a vindictive man who retaliated from the moment Eisenhower named him AEC chairman in June 1953. During his first week in office, Strauss sent a squad of AEC security officers to Princeton to remove the classified documents which Oppenheimer had always been allowed to store in a specially guarded facility in his office, and then hired former army security agents to dig up derogatory information on Oppenheimer. Strauss was so obsessed with getting Oppenheimer that he turned the AEC’s security officers into his personal gumshoes. ⁸ When Borden’s letter came in, Strauss could have reassured Eisenhower, but he did not. Oppenheimer’s influence among physicists was so pervasive and, in Strauss’s view, so pernicious that it could be thwarted only by destroying him. With the fuse lit by Borden, Strauss calculated that he at last had at hand the means of Oppenheimer’s destruction.

Strauss phoned Oppenheimer in Princeton shortly after the physicist’s return from Europe, but did not mention that his security clearance had been suspended or even that there were any serious problems. “I was wondering whether you planned to come down here?” Strauss amiably inquired. “I haven’t made plans,” Oppenheimer replied, “but I can easily do it if you like.” ⁹ A week later, on the afternoon of December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer called on Strauss at his office at AEC headquarters. The two men took their seats at a long table in the large octagonal room where the Combined Chiefs of Staff had met during World War II. Oppenheimer had not been told the reason for the meeting, so it began with a coldly correct exchange of pleasantries. After a while, Strauss dropped the pleasantries and showed Oppenheimer a letter of charges based on Borden’s correspondence but refused to give him a copy. Strauss explained that as a result of Borden’s letter, Eisenhower had ordered a “blank wall” placed between Oppenheimer and any further access to secret information. The physicist’s clearance was being suspended until his “character, associations, and loyalty” had been judged by a Personnel Security Board hearing, which would be conducted in secret and not bound by courtroom rules of evidence. Strauss told Oppenheimer that he could resign rather than face a hearing and thus “avoid an explicit consideration of the charges.”

The issue of clearance was crucial because Oppenheimer’s influence depended on access to classified information. “You had to be inside the government if you wanted to have an influence, especially on these military matters,” Rabi noted. “Since there was all that secrecy, you couldn’t know what you were talking about unless you were a part of it.” ¹⁰ Oppenheimer’s top secret “Q Clearance” allowed him to know what he was talking about; withdrawing it would eliminate his influence immediately and effectively.

Oppenheimer was stunned by the charges. Ignoring the cigarette burning down through his fingers, he wordlessly took the letter of charges handed to him and paged through it rapidly. He grew ashen. Stoicism came hard to Oppenheimer, but he held on. Underneath he was shaken and just wanted to get out of the room. Without saying what he intended to do, Oppenheimer ended the painful confrontation. Leaving AEC headquarters, he walked a few blocks north to 1701 K Street, NW, where he took the elevator to the sixth floor and entered the law office of now former AEC general counsel Joe Volpe. Oppenheimer’s personal attorney, Herbert Marks, joined them there. Oppenheimer told Volpe and Marks about his conference with Strauss, and they discussed what steps Oppenheimer should take in his own defense. ¹¹ *

Marks’s wife, Anne, had been Oppenheimer’s personal assistant at Los Alamos and was a close friend. As she drove Oppenheimer to the Markses’ Georgetown home that afternoon, the physicist gritted his teeth and fumed, “I can’t believe what is happening to me!” ¹² The three of them talked into the early morning. “It was like Pearl Harbor—on a small scale,” Oppenheimer later recalled. “Given the circumstances and the spirit of the times, one knew that something like this was possible and even probable; but still it was a shock when it came.” “I lost my pipe that day; put it down some place and couldn’t remember where,” he also recalled. “Maybe that sums up about as well as anything my state of mind.” ¹³

Oppenheimer did not know what to do. If he resigned rather than face a hearing, Senator Joseph McCarthy might target him as the next victim of his anticommunist witch-hunt anyway. And resignation might not end the matter because Borden’s charges could be leaked to the press, making resignation, in effect, an admission of guilt. A hearing, on the other hand, could be humiliating. Eliminating Oppenheimer’s influence was not enough for his enemies—they hated him and wanted to destroy him. They would not be content until they had ousted him from power and publicly shamed him. His past—his communist associations during the 1930s and his lies to security officers during the 1940s—would be dredged up. The past communist affiliations of his wife, brother, and sister-in-law also might be scrutinized and used against him. And he knew the FBI had monitored his phone calls and personal movements, so various improprieties could be revealed. Yet Oppenheimer could not accept the judgment that he was disloyal or a security risk. Moreover, he did not want to lose the power, influence, and prestige that came from government service. He had devoted his best years to serving the country, forsaking the chance to do research and thus missing the significant discoveries expected of him. ¹⁴

The next day Oppenheimer sent Strauss a letter. “I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested [resignation],” his letter read in carefully controlled language. “Under the circumstances, this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this Government that I have now served for some 12 years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy, I could hardly have served our country as I have tried,… or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of science and our country.” ¹⁵ Oppenheimer had decided to fight to maintain his clearance.

Meanwhile, the FBI continued to tap Oppenheimer’s home and office phones at Strauss’s direction. Bureau agents also tailed the physicist wherever he went. Oppenheimer knew that he was under surveillance. “Even the walls have ears,” he told visitors to Princeton. ¹⁶ Oppenheimer sought to make light of the stressful situation. He told friends that he wished he had a fraction of the money that was being spent keeping him under surveillance—it would make him very rich. Strauss not only concealed his enlistment of the FBI but flatly denied that there was any taping of anyone on his initiative.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer sought to line up support from other scientists. He encountered Teller at a physics conference in Rochester, New York, early the next year. Teller told Oppenheimer he was sorry to hear about his current difficulties. “I suppose, I hope, that you don’t think that anything I did has sinister implications,” Oppenheimer replied. “I said I did not think that—after all, the word ‘sinister’ was pretty harsh,” recalled Teller later. “Then he asked if I would speak to his lawyer, and I said I would.” ¹⁷ Teller went to see Oppenheimer’s lawyer, told of his disagreements with the physicist, but professed that he had no doubts about Oppenheimer’s patriotism.

Teller also spoke to the FBI, using these secret interviews to tell a very different story. Teller told Hoover’s agents that Oppenheimer had fought development of the superbomb since 1945 and that it would have been built sooner if he had not. He attributed Oppenheimer’s opposition not to honest disagreement over policy but to fundamental deviousness and dishonesty:

[Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered the development of the H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds. After the President announced the H-bomb was to be made, [Oppenheimer] opposed it on the ground that it was not feasible…. After this, [Oppenheimer] changed his approach and opposed the H-bomb on the basis that there were insufficient facilities and scientific personnel to develop it, which according to Teller is incorrect.

He ascribed Oppenheimer’s motives “to a combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on the A-bomb done better on the H-bomb, and also because he does not feel the H-bomb is politically desirable.” Asserting that Oppenheimer had never gotten over the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller

said that he found Oppenheimer to be a very complicated person, even though an outstanding man. He also said that he understands that in his youth Oppenheimer was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected him. He has also had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.

Teller proceeded to affirm Oppenheimer’s loyalty while subtly undermining it. He told the FBI “that in all of his dealings with Oppenheimer he has never had the slightest reason or indication to believe that Oppenheimer is in anyway disloyal to the United States”—and then followed that declaration by slyly noting “that Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, is an admitted former member of the Communist Party.” * He concluded by stating that “he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from the General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of the H-bomb.” Teller asked the FBI to keep his attack against Oppenheimer secret because “such information could prove very embarrassing to him personally” with other scientists. ¹⁸

One of them, Rabi, was furious at what he saw happening to his friend. “My own feeling was just indignation, outrage that this was happening,” recalled Rabi. “He was a great man, who had done something very great for his country.” ¹⁹ Rallying to Oppenheimer’s defense, Rabi went to see Strauss and urged appointing an independent board to hear the case and sit in judgment of Oppenheimer. Strauss refused. A short time later, Rabi went to see Strauss again, this time with a letter signed by each member of the GAC, stating their willingness to testify on Oppenheimer’s behalf. Strauss was unmoved. Given that Oppenheimer’s official influence had greatly diminished when the Republicans took office in January 1953 and that the AEC had an easy and graceful “out” (simply to let his consultant contract expire), the zeal with which Strauss pursued Oppenheimer’s banishment belied his vindictiveness.

The selection of the three-member Personnel Security Board to hear the case was a case in point. An AEC attorney at the time later recalled: “Strauss was looking for three members who would have a predisposition to find against Oppenheimer. Although pains were taken to maintain a facade of seeking members with a fair and judicious attitude, the major consideration was whether the candidate would shrink from revoking Oppenheimer’s clearance.” ²⁰ Strauss wanted a “hanging jury.” If Oppenheimer won this fight, he would be back on top of the heap: vindicated and as influential as ever among scientists.

Strauss picked three men whom he thought would give him the verdict he wanted: Gordon Gray, a Yale Law School graduate, former secretary of the army, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Democrat who had supported Eisenhower over his own party’s candidate in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, because he considered Stevenson insufficiently anticommunist; Thomas Morgan, a defense contractor who had been president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company before being appointed to a presidential commission on defense preparedness; and Ward Evans, a conservative Loyola University of Chicago chemistry professor who had served on security boards before and had almost always voted to deny clearance.

Strauss continued his machinations. He chose Roger Robb, one of the most aggressive and conservative trial lawyers in Washington, to prosecute the case before the board—the first time the AEC had gone outside for a lawyer to handle a security hearing—and quickly arranged clearance for Robb to read Oppenheimer’s AEC file. When Oppenheimer’s attorney for the hearing, Lloyd Garrison, a New York lawyer well known for defending civil liberties cases but with little trial experience, sought similar clearance for himself and two associates, the request was refused—only Garrison would be cleared. Oppenheimer and Garrison decided that unless all of them were cleared, then none of them would be; they would instead rely on the AEC to declassify documents. But the AEC declassified only two documents—after it asserted the right to decide which documents were relevant for declassification and what portions of these “relevant” documents it would be “consistent with the national interest” to permit Oppenheimer’s legal team to see. Garrison thus changed course and requested clearance for just himself (as had been promised) seventeen days before the hearing began. It had taken only eight days for Robb to obtain his clearance, yet the AEC not only failed to process Garrison’s request in time for the opening of the hearing but declared it was “not possible” to clear Garrison before the hearing ended and the Gray Board had submitted its report—eight weeks after Garrison’s initial request. Finally, Robb spent hours going through Oppenheimer’s FBI file with the three board members in the week before the hearing, and socialized with them. ²¹ When Garrison asked if he, too, could spend time with the board and see his own client’s FBI file, his requests were refused.

During the week that Robb met with the Gray Board to discuss the contents of Oppenheimer’s FBI file, the physicist received letters of support from his friends. Bethe, stunned and angry at what was happening to a great man and a good friend and convinced that it was rooted in Oppenheimer’s now unpopular advice about the superbomb, cabled Oppenheimer: “You know that we believe in you and will do all we can to help.” Victor Weisskopf, who had learned of Oppenheimer’s predicament from Bethe, wrote Oppenheimer a moving letter:

I would like you to know that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware of the fact that you are fighting here our own fight. Somehow Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle. I know that you are suffering from this as any man would under such enormous strain. On the other hand, I would not know of any better man to bear this load. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose whom to select for the person who has to take this on, I could not but choose you. Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of our way of life? Please think of us when you are feeling low. Think of all your friends who are going to remain your friends and who rely upon you…. I beg you to remain what you always have been, and things will end well. ²²

The AEC’s Building T-3 was one of the “temporary” offices put up during World War I on the Mall in Washington and inherited from the navy in the late 1940s. The white planks of its facade, the wooden bridges that connected its sheds, and its ugly, greenish, makeshift roof were strikingly similar to those of the Tech Area building in Los Alamos where Oppenheimer had his office during the war. Room 2022 on the second floor was an ordinary office whose furnishings were official, functional, and drab; there was no carpet on the composition floor. This became the temporary courtroom where, in the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer stood trial in an inquisition masquerading as a fact-finding proceeding.

Along the north wall of the broad, oblong room ran a row of windows that opened out across Constitution Avenue and onto the grassy ellipse just south of the White House. Along the east wall stood a long, baize-covered table, with three chairs for the hearing board members—the “judges” in the case. Perpendicular to it and forming the stem of a T were two tables running parallel to the windows. To the board’s right, with his back to the window, sat prosecutor Robb; to the left, facing the windows, defending counsel Garrison. A witness chair sat at the base of the T. Behind the witness chair, against the west wall, was an old leather couch where Oppenheimer would sit, puffing incessantly on a pipe or cigarette when he was not on the stand, unable to study the witnesses’ faces as they spoke. Seldom more than a handful of people would ever be present in the room, but at times a disembodied voice would be heard coming from a tape recorder, statements by Oppenheimer which had been recorded—without his knowledge—during his wartime security interrogations ten and a half years earlier.

On Monday, April 12, 1954, shortly before 10:00 A.M., the various parties began to make their way to room 2022. It was springtime in Washington, and the cherry trees lining the Tidal Basin just south of the Mall were in full and glorious bloom. Upon arrival, the hearing board members took their places at the table. Before each of them lay not a blank notepad but a thick binder of material from the FBI files and investigative reports that they had been studying throughout the previous week. Oppenheimer, his wife, Kitty, and Garrison made an inauspicious, but highly symbolic, entrance. Nervous and strained by her husband’s ordeal, Kitty had fallen down some stairs, and she had her leg in a cast and was on crutches. The Oppenheimers and their attorney arrived late and the board was irritated with them. ²³

“The hearing will come to order.” With these words, chairman Gray opened the proceeding “in the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The atmosphere of the Cold War pervaded the hearing room. A week earlier, Senator McCarthy, who had been on the scent of Oppenheimer, had alleged in a nationally televised speech that communists in government had delayed research on the superbomb by eighteen months, effectively pressing the Gray Board to produce a culprit. This made it all the harder for Oppenheimer’s judges to evaluate him fairly. It was almost as if the Gray Board members were peering at those earlier days through the wrong end of a long telescope. Here were three men of a prosperous, communist-hating, fear-ridden America of the Cold-War 1950s sitting in judgment on Oppenheimer’s radical associations and activities in the Depression-ridden 1930s, when the U.S. economy was in total collapse, when fascism was spreading across Europe, and when American communists—far from being treated as political lepers, as they were in 1954—were openly allied with the noncommunist American Left. It was a dark irony that the proceedings the three led resembled nothing so much as a Stalinist show trial.

Gray began the hearing by reading the AEC letter of charges and Oppenheimer’s written reply into the record. It was a self-accusing and self-abasing document. He admitted his political näiveté before the war, acknowledged his association with Communist Party causes, but denied—perhaps falsely—that he had ever belonged to the party, and in effect repudiated his left-wing past. ²⁴ * Summing up, Oppenheimer wrote: “What I have hoped was, not that I could wholly avoid error, but that I might learn from it. What I have learned has, I think, made me more fit to serve my country.” Gray then ventured some observations on the nature and ground rules of the hearing. First, said Gray, he wanted to “remind everyone concerned that this proceeding is an inquiry, and not in the nature of a trial. We shall approach our duties in that atmosphere and in that spirit,” he asserted. ²⁵ Gray added that the hearing would not be subject to the strict rules and procedures that governed courtroom trials. His implication was that the informality of a hearing worked to Oppenheimer’s advantage, affording him more flexibility in meeting the charges—yet later in the hearing, Gray announced that Oppenheimer’s witnesses would be heard at times suited “to the convenience of this board, and not the convenience of the witnesses, as would be true in most [judicial] proceedings in the American tradition.” ²⁶

Now came Garrison’s turn. Tall and stately in appearance and manner, Garrison had a reputation for integrity and dedication to good causes, but he was not a litigator who was at home in the ringlike atmosphere of the courtroom. In his opening remarks, Garrison spoke softly and carefully—almost gingerly—as if convinced that if he could just avoid any abrasive actions that might offend the hearing board members, he would be able to persuade them to use the rule of reason in judging “the whole Oppenheimer,” and thus find in his client’s favor.

Garrison put Oppenheimer on the stand that afternoon. He tried to minimize his client’s left-wing past as an indiscretion of youth and ignorance, and by stressing his later patriotic service. Oppenheimer spoke easily and confidently, as though he were addressing a friendly gathering, but there was a quality of desperation about him. He felt oppressed by the unfriendly atmosphere of the proceeding and kept his distance even from his own attorney. He told the facts about his life and career; what he left out were the motives and context. Similar ambiguities exist in the lives of all individuals; they are not usually exposed to harsh examination and judgment. Nevertheless, the board felt something was left out, and it was unlikely to fill the gap with a generous, sympathetic picture that Oppenheimer himself failed to draw.

The next morning Mervin Kelly, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, took the stand as the first pro-Oppenheimer witness. When Garrison finished his questions, those in the hearing room got their first glimpse of Robb. It quickly became clear that he was not a fact-finder but a ruthlessly aggressive prosecutor. Robb cross-examined Kelly in a manner deliberately calculated to intimidate Oppenheimer. The prosecutor turned to Gray and said, “Mr. Chairman, I would like to read the witness something from the report which is classified.” For the next few minutes, Oppenheimer remained in the hearing room alone, his attorney having been dismissed from the room. The psychological impact—the demonstration of power that Robb had, based on his privileged access to Oppenheimer’s security file—must have unnerved the lonely and embattled physicist. “When I saw what they were doing to Oppenheimer,” said another witness, “I was ready to throw chairs. How can a lawyer defend his client’s interests if he isn’t even in the hearing room? There hadn’t been a proceeding like this since the Spanish Inquisition.” ²⁷

Oppenheimer resumed the stand later that day. He talked at length about his service to the country at Los Alamos during the war and in Washington since. He also talked about his fondness and protectiveness toward his younger brother, Frank. Frank, it was recalled, had wed Jacquenette Quann in September 1936. A Canadian majoring in economics at Berkeley who was active in the campus Young Communist League, Jackie had done for Frank what Jean Tatlock had done for Robert: she had opened his eyes to the suffering in the world around him and had turned his attention to left-wing politics. Shortly after their marriage, Frank and Jackie had joined the Communist Party. Later, in Pasadena, where Frank was studying physics at Caltech, the younger brother had invited Robert to attend a Communist Party meeting at his house—the only thing “recognizable as a Communist Party meeting” that Robert allegedly ever recalled attending.

Robb began his interrogation of Oppenheimer the next morning. The prosecutor and the physicist were vastly different: Oppenheimer was intellectual and reflective; Robb was aggressive and combative. Robb, convinced of the physicist’s guilt, took a quick and strong personal dislike to Oppenheimer: “My feeling was that he was just a brain and as cold as a fish, and he had the iciest pair of blue eyes I ever saw.” ²⁸ Vigorous and bludgeoning, the fleshy, shovel-jawed prosecutor was intent on taking full advantage of Oppenheimer’s predicament by impelling him to testify from sheer memory about long-past events, while secretly holding in reserve documents containing the facts about these events. Robb mercilessly interrogated Oppenheimer, casting the physicist on the defensive and making him seem imprecise and evasive.

Robb quickly turned to the “Chevalier incident.” Sometime in late 1942 or early 1943 (before Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos), Haakon Chevalier, one of his closest friends and a communist professor at Berkeley, had approached the physicist (and perhaps others, including his younger brother, Frank) on behalf of a West Coast British engineer and communist named George Eltenton. Chevalier had told Oppenheimer that Eltenton could pass secret information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Chevalier had gone back to Eltenton almost immediately and had told him, as Eltenton later said, “that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.” ²⁹

Although Oppenheimer had rebuffed this espionage approach, he had—seeking to protect his friend Chevalier and perhaps his brother, Frank—delayed reporting the approach to Manhattan Project security officer Colonel Boris Pash, identified Chevalier as the intermediary only after being specifically ordered to do so by Groves, and later changed the details of his story. Oppenheimer was unaware, however, that Pash had secretly recorded his 1943 revelation. With access to these 1943 recordings (access denied to Oppenheimer and his attorneys), Robb—instead of stressing the essence of the matter: that Chevalier got nothing from Oppenheimer and that Oppenheimer had taken the initiative to give the warning about Eltenton—hammered away at the story that Oppenheimer had made up in order to tip off security officers to espionage feelers without implicating those close to him: *

ROBB: Did you tell Pash the truth about this thing?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: You lied to him?

OPPENHEIMER: Yes. ³⁰

Oppenheimer’s last response was barely audible. Anguished and surprisingly inarticulate, he slumped in the witness chair. He felt like a man sliding helplessly down a slope toward the sheer cliff that would finish him. His heart was pounding. He rubbed his hands between his knees, his head bowed, the color drained from his face:

ROBB: So that we may be clear, did you discuss with or disclose to Pash the identity of Chevalier?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: Let us refer then, for the time being, to Chevalier as X.

OPPENHEIMER: All right.

ROBB: Did you tell Pash that X had approached three persons on the project?

OPPENHEIMER: I am not clear whether I said there were three Xs or that X approached three people.

ROBB: Didn’t you say that X had approached three people?

OPPENHEIMER: Probably.

ROBB: Why did you do that, Doctor?

“Because,” said Oppenheimer, dropping his voice, “I was an idiot.”

    ROBB: Is that your only explanation, Doctor?

    OPPENHEIMER: I was reluctant to mention Chevalier.

    ROBB: Yes.

    OPPENHEIMER: No doubt somewhat reluctant to mention myself. ³¹

Smelling blood, Robb confronted Oppenheimer with section after section of the 1943 recordings. Then he made Oppenheimer go back over the details of what he forced him to admit was a cock-and-bull story.

ROBB: Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr. Oppenheimer, that according to your testimony now you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?

OPPENHEIMER: Right. ³²

Even after this, Oppenheimer’s ordeal was not over. There was one added humiliation to be suffered that day: intimate questions about his relationship with Jean Tatlock—in particular, his overnight stay with her at her apartment on Montgomery Street in San Francisco on June fourteenth and fifteenth, 1943—three years after he had married Kitty and three months after he had become director of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos. Robb asked Oppenheimer why he had to see Jean. Oppenheimer explained that his former fiancée was being treated for depression at a San Francisco hospital and had sent word to Los Alamos that she wanted to see him. * Robb continued to probe, pitilessly and relentlessly:

ROBB: Did you find out why she had to see you?

OPPENHEIMER: Because she was still in love with me….

ROBB: You spent the night with her, didn’t you?

OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

ROBB: That is when you were working on a secret war project?

OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

ROBB: Did you think that consistent with good security?

OPPENHEIMER: It was, as a matter of fact. Not a word—it was not good practice. ³³

Oppenheimer’s blurred, stumbling reply showed that Robb had crushed him. Some in the hearing room thought Oppenheimer might have a nervous breakdown or even commit suicide that night. He did not. In fact, Oppenheimer’s friends were astonished at his resilience during the pressure-filled proceedings. Back in Princeton over the weekend breaks, he attended to physics and institute business. Oppenheimer’s friends did, however, notice a change in him: his self-confidence gave way to melancholy. He paced his bedroom floor at night. He felt trapped. To this pressure was added the burden of media scrutiny. Journalists hounded him for interviews, followed him and Kitty as they came and went from the hearing, and dug deep into their newspaper files for background information to add to sketches for their daily reporting. One newspaperman found himself on the same train with Oppenheimer and Kitty between Washington and Princeton. Stuck with the reporter over dinner, Oppenheimer gently but steadfastly refused to comment while the hearing was under way. The reporter was surprised to see two security “shadows” following Oppenheimer’s every move on the train.

The day after Robb’s withering interrogation about the Chevalier incident and the night with Jean Tatlock, Groves, wartime commander of the Manhattan Project and now a businessman in Connecticut, took the stand. He reaffirmed his 1943 decision to appoint Oppenheimer as head of Los Alamos because his overriding objective had been “to produce an atomic bomb in the shortest possible time.” Groves added that he would be “amazed” if Oppenheimer would ever be disloyal. He dismissed Oppenheimer’s reluctance to divulge Chevalier’s name to him as “the typical American schoolboy attitude that there is something wicked about telling on a friend.” ³⁴ Oppenheimer had said no to the espionage approach and had named Eltenton—those were the essential things as far as Groves was concerned. * Robb cleverly asked Groves whether he would clear Oppenheimer now. (Robb already knew the answer to this question because Strauss, by threatening Groves for having withheld information from the FBI during the war, had compelled the general to submit a letter that stated: “If I am asked whether I think the [AEC] would be justified in clearing Dr. Oppenheimer, I will say ‘no.’ If I am asked if I think he is a security risk, I will say ‘yes’”—thereby compromising the defense’s most important witness.) ³⁵ Groves dutifully replied that he “would not clear Dr. Oppenheimer today” under his interpretation of new and tougher security standards. Thus Groves had covered himself, and the value of his testimony to Oppenheimer had been diminished considerably ³⁶

After Groves finished testifying, Oppenheimer returned to the stand, this time to face questioning about his stance on the superbomb. The weather outside the hearing room had changed—a rainstorm now beat against the windows—and so had Oppenheimer’s bearing from the previous day. No longer subdued, uncertain, and slow to respond, he was now confident, combative, and quick to reply. His upper lip was tense and coldly resolved. Misery had turned to indignation. Robb brought up Oppenheimer’s reference to Lawrence and Teller as “two experienced promoters” in a letter he wrote shortly before the October 1949 GAC meeting. Oppenheimer’s irritation and resentment toward both men—once friends and now enemies who would speak against him—was apparent:

ROBB: Would you agree, Doctor, that your references to Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Teller and their enthusiasm for the superbomb… are a little bit belittling?

OPPENHEIMER: Dr. Lawrence came to Washington. He did not talk to the Commission. He went and talked to Congressmen and to members of the military establishment. I think that deserves some belittling.

ROBB: So you would agree that your references to those men in this letter were belittling?

OPPENHEIMER: No. I pay my great respects to them as promoters. I don’t think I did them justice.

ROBB: You used the word “promoters” in an invidious sense, didn’t you?

OPPENHEIMER: I promoted lots of things in my time.

ROBB: Doctor, would you answer my question? When you used the word “promoter” you meant it to be in a slightly invidious sense, didn’t you?

OPPENHEIMER: I have no idea.

ROBB: When you use the word now with reference to Lawrence and Teller, don’t you intend it to be invidious?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: You think that their work of promotion was admirable, is that right?

OPPENHEIMER: I think they did an admirable job of promotion. ³⁷

Robb then suggested, rather darkly, that Oppenheimer had had qualms about the building of the superbomb. By this time Oppenheimer understood in his bones that moral objection was very bad form in the corridors of power that he loved to stroll, and during cross-examination he desperately fought to conceal his qualms. But Robb goaded and pressed until he extracted from Oppenheimer a confession of at least a certain ethical queasiness about the superbomb:

OPPENHEIMER: I could very well have said this is a dreadful weapon…. I have always thought it was a dreadful weapon. Even [if] from a technical point of view it was a sweet and lovely and beautiful job, I have still thought it was a dreadful weapon.

ROBB: And have said so?

OPPENHEIMER: I would assume that I have said so, yes.

ROBB: You mean you had a moral revulsion against the production of such a dreadful weapon?

OPPENHEIMER: This is too strong….

ROBB: Which is too strong, the weapon or my expression?

OPPENHEIMER: Your expression. I had a grave concern and anxiety.

ROBB: You had moral qualms about it, is that accurate?

OPPENHEIMER: Let us leave the word “moral” out of it.

ROBB: You had qualms about it.

OPPENHEIMER: How could one not have qualms about it? I know no one who doesn’t have qualms about it. ³⁸

That night Oppenheimer met with his legal advisers to talk about the case. They invited Joe Volpe to join them. Volpe had warned all along about ploys that Robb might use. Now he listened as Oppenheimer and Garrison recounted what had occurred during the first few days of the hearing:

Robert said to me, “Joe, I would like to have these fellows describe to you what’s going on in the hearing.” I don’t think the others liked it very much, but finally they got around to telling me and honestly I was outraged. I was the one who had drawn up the procedures for these hearings when I was General Counsel and they were very definitely not meant to be an adversary procedure, and this one was. What’s more, they told me that they were withholding documents, which was utterly ridiculous…. This behavior gave me great concern, and so after an hour or so, I finally said, “Robert, tell them to shove it, leave it, don’t go on with it because I don’t think you can win.” ³⁹

Oppenheimer listened closely to Volpe, weighing his advice carefully, but in the end he rejected it. Said Volpe:

He had always known that if someone, someday, wanted to bring all that stuff out and really make an issue of it, he could be made a victim. He lived with this sword of Damocles always suspended over his head; he knew he was deliberately taking risks in putting himself and his ideas forward in all these… groups and plans that made him powerful enemies. But he went on anyway, knowing the possible consequences and ready to face them if they came. ⁴⁰

Brilliant, amusing, and attractive, Oppenheimer had a way of getting into morally uncomfortable positions from which he hoped to extricate himself without anyone noticing. He had also resigned himself to play the game according to the rules. Like many people who resign themselves in this way, Oppenheimer did so too thoroughly. For most of his time in Washington, this did not affect him; but when he found himself in a situation where the rules were broken, he was at a loss, and he surrendered too easily. A less-disciplined person might have made more of a row, upset the applecart, played to the court of public opinion. For Oppenheimer, however, it was psychologically inconceivable: fighting back wasn’t good manners. He had made a place for himself—and, to an extent, from himself—in the corridors of power that was precious to him. In the long run, he could not break away. Any behavior that Washington officials would condemn, even if they sympathized with him, he could not manage. Anything they would not do, he would not do either.

One by one, through the rest of April, an A-list of witnesses testified on behalf of Oppenheimer’s character and loyalty. His friends came first, including Bethe, Fermi, and Rabi. These supreme rationalists were the most emotional of the witnesses, because they were depressed and angry. They had talked with some of the other witnesses as they left the hearing room and were shown parts of the testimony. They could see how things were going; it was clear to them that Oppenheimer was going to be judged harshly. And yet, when their time came to take the stand, each of them described why he believed in Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Bethe spoke movingly of Oppenheimer as the driving force at wartime Los Alamos, the person who was recognized as “superior in judgment and superior in knowledge to all of us.” He explained that when he had to decide whether to join Teller on the superbomb project, it was from Oppenheimer that he had sought advice. Robb did not attempt to challenge Bethe’s faith in Oppenheimer but instead tried to undermine his credibility by exposing Bethe’s own vulnerability:

ROBB: Doctor, how many divisions were there at Los Alamos?

BETHE: It changed somewhat in the course of time. As far as I could count the other day, there were seven, but that may have been eight or nine at some time.

ROBB: What division was Klaus Fuchs in?

BETHE: He was in my division which was the Theoretical Division.

ROBB: Thank you. That is all. ⁴¹

“A long dark room”—so thought Rabi on entering the hearing room on the morning of April twenty-first. “The board were stationed in front, then Robb, then Oppenheimer in the back. It made me rather indignant to see him there,” he reflected afterward. ⁴² Robb’s bullying tactics had unsettled and confused many witnesses, but not Rabi. That testifying for Oppenheimer might jeopardize his own advisory role to the government was of no concern to him. Rabi was confident in himself and his conviction that the hearing was a farce and a travesty. In his view, whatever Oppenheimer’s politics before the project, however arrogant Oppenheimer appeared to some, it was nonsense to brand him a security risk. Rabi understood what was happening and was ready for the rough Robb. ⁴³

Rabi made his points forcefully. First, he urged the board to keep in mind the times in which the Chevalier incident had occurred. While a Soviet espionage approach would be “horrifying” in 1954, a similar approach in 1943—a time when Russia was an ally and before the Cold War had begun—would not, in Rabi’s judgment, have required notifying authorities. Second, Rabi stressed that Oppenheimer’s shortcomings should be judged against his much larger wartime contributions. Oppenheimer had given the United States the most powerful weapon in the history of the world up to that time, a weapon that had helped it to successfully end the war against Japan. Something took hold of Rabi’s throat. His voice choked and turned guttural with anger. “What more do you want,” Rabi asked, his voice dripping with outraged sarcasm, “mermaids?” “This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can’t help but be humiliating,” he added, “I think it is a pretty bad show.” ⁴⁴

Once again, Robb tried to deflate the witness by exploiting, and trumpeting, his privileged access to information. Rabi would have none of this prosecutorial bullying. He parried Robb’s jabs with a lively and sharp tongue:

ROBB: Perhaps the board may be in possession of information which is not now available to you about the [Chevalier] incident.

RABI: It may be. On the other hand, I am in possession of a long experience with this man, going back to 1929, which is twenty-five years, and there is a kind of seat-of-the-pants feeling [upon] which I myself lay great weight. ⁴⁵

Robb persisted by trying to confine Rabi’s opinion of Oppenheimer to the Chevalier incident. Rabi would have none of it. “You have to take the whole story,” he shot back. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment in 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.” ⁴⁶

Compton, abroad on a world lecture tour during the hearing, took the time to publicly support the embattled Oppenheimer. Compton told wire-service reporters in Istanbul, Turkey, that he believed one of Oppenheimer’s qualifications for the job was the fact that he was not innocent about communism. “I considered his acquaintance with communism, and his rejection of it as a result of that acquaintance, was a factor in favor of his reliability.” Compton noted he had made a careful personal investigation of Oppenheimer before choosing him to head the bomb theory and design program in April 1942. “I satisfied myself completely that Oppenheimer was reliable and no security risk, and have had no reason since to change my views,” he said. Compton stressed that Oppenheimer’s postwar stance against the superbomb’s development was based on moral grounds. “He did not want the United States to make such a vastly destructive weapon because of the death and suffering to many people, nor did he want people to suspect the United States contemplated its use,” Compton said. “It’s an argument that any person sensitive to human reaction must respect.” ⁴⁷ Compton elaborated on these points in a detailed affidavit to the Gray Board that resoundingly affirmed Oppenheimer’s loyalty. ⁴⁸

A distinguished group of public officials also testified enthusiastically on Oppenheimer’s behalf. David Lilienthal and Gordon Dean, Lilienthal’s successor and Strauss’s predecessor as AEC chairman, swore their confidence in Oppenheimer’s loyalty and reliability. Other such men appeared: George F. Kennan; John J. McCloy; and Sumner Pike, a tough-minded self-made millionaire and former AEC commissioner—one after another praising Oppenheimer and pledging their reputation to his probity.

Then came the leaders of American science to provide strong endorsements of his character. Vannevar Bush, organizer of the nation’s scientific mobilization effort during World War II, said of Oppenheimer: “More than any other scientist that I know of he was responsible for our having an atomic bomb on time,” and affirmed his faith in Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Bush minced no words in saying that he felt “this board has made a mistake and that it is a serious one.” He spoke eloquently. The AEC charges, said Bush, are “quite capable of being interpreted as placing a man on trial because he held opinions… and had the temerity to express them.” “When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state.” ⁴⁹ James Conant said that Oppenheimer was one of the three or four scientists whose combination of professional knowledge, hard work, and loyal devotion made possible the development of the bomb. Lee DuBridge said, “I feel that there is no one who has exhibited his loyalty to this country more spectacularly than Dr. Oppenheimer. He was a natural and respected and at all times a loved leader.” ⁵⁰

Other eminent scientists who had played leading roles in America’s nuclear weapons program spoke to the same effect. Perhaps the most eloquent was John von Neumann, the brilliant Hungarian émigré mathematician, father of the electronic computer, and friend of both Oppenheimer and Teller. Von Neumann entreated the three-member board to put Oppenheimer’s wartime indiscretions in their proper context. The war years were a time, von Neumann observed, when the atomic scientists—none of whom had been educated or conditioned to exist in such a situation—became sensitive to the threat of espionage and the need for security, and slowly developed the necessary maturity and established the necessary code of ethics.

*  *  *

At the end of April, prosecutor Robb began calling “government” witnesses. The first was Berkeley chemistry professor Wendell Latimer, an ally of Ernest Lawrence who harbored an intense dislike of Oppenheimer. Speaking in a low and barely audible voice, Latimer stoked the board’s suspicions by depicting Oppenheimer as a mesmerist who bewitched scores of intelligent and individualistic young scientists:

It is just astounding the influence he has upon a group…. He is a man of tremendous sincerity and his ability to convince people depends so much upon this sincerity…. Things started happening immediately after he left Los Alamos. Many of our boys came back from it pacifists. I judged that was due very largely to his influence, this tremendous influence he had over those young men. ⁵¹

Military officers and scientists who worked for the military were the most eager prosecution witnesses. Fervent cold warriors and zealous anticommunists, they had—through their fear, suspicion, and hatred of Oppenheimer as an individual and a political symbol—triggered the case and provided much of the zeal behind the government’s savage prosecution of him. The air force in particular considered Oppenheimer’s removal from influence “an urgent and immediate necessity” and secretly encouraged their contacts on the Hill and in the executive branch—including Borden and Strauss—to go after him. ⁵² “They had it out for Oppie,” recalled Harold Agnew, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and later the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s, who personally knew many of these officers and scientists in the 1950s. ⁵³

The military men leveled their fiercest attack on Oppenheimer for opposing the superbomb. In their eyes, Oppenheimer had argued against a weapon that would increase America’s military power, and this was by definition a form of treason. Air force major general Roscoe Wilson thought Oppenheimer “might as well go fishing for the rest of his life.” David Griggs, former chief scientist for the air force who had felt the sting of Oppenheimer’s acerbic tongue, was even less inhibited. An intense and zealous man, Griggs recalled “pretty violent” policy controversies in which he and his air force colleagues found themselves arrayed against Oppenheimer. He challenged the physicist’s loyalty and alleged the existence of a scientists’ conspiracy, headed by Oppenheimer, committed to the air force’s destruction. Griggs recalled an occasion when he told Oppenheimer face-to-face that he could not be sure whether or not the physicist was pro-Russian. Oppenheimer “then asked if I had impugned his loyalty to high officials of the Defense Department, and I responded yes. He said I was a paranoid.” ⁵⁴

The next witness to appear seated himself in the witness chair with his back to Oppenheimer. He was a figure of considerable importance in political-scientific circles, for he had carried the battle for the superbomb over the head of Oppenheimer’s powerful GAC and had cleared the way for its successful creation. Whatever he said was bound to have a major impact. The heavyset, beetle-browed man was sworn in at 4:00 in the afternoon on April twenty-eighth, a day that he would never forget—but would later come to regret.

Edward Teller was nervous and afraid about testifying—he knew it would cause a lot of trouble. He had thought about this moment long and hard. An AEC official who had spoken with him a week earlier found him “interested only in discussing the Oppenheimer case.” This official summarized his conversation with Teller in a memo to Strauss, a memo that revealed Teller’s intense animosity toward Oppenheimer:

Since the case is being heard on a security basis, 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….

Teller said that “only about one percent 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 [wrote the AEC official] and he agrees it is apt….)

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 [superbomb] program. ⁵⁵

Teller’s personal fears and friendships shaped his politics, and by now he deeply believed that having Oppenheimer in a high advisory role was dangerous for the United States. “Every time you go to Washington and you open a door to go into some high official’s office,” he told another physicist, “you open the door and there’s Oppenheimer, blocking the way. Us good guys who have the correct view of what should be done can’t even get in because Oppenheimer’s there first.” ⁵⁶ For many years Teller had taken the backseat, but now he had reached a point in his own career where he could challenge Oppenheimer. It was a powerful vendetta. “He was absolutely determined to get Oppenheimer,” recalled a close associate, “and he would say whatever he had to” to accomplish this. ⁵⁷ Teller’s mind was set on revenge, and he awaited his opportunity.

The night before his appearance at the hearing, Teller had been the object of a desperate last-minute search by Szilard. Szilard disliked what he considered Oppenheimer’s infatuation with power, but he did not think him disloyal or a security risk. Szilard had seen a threat to all scientists when the AEC revoked Oppenheimer’s clearance, and he had tried to influence the Gray Board in several ways. He had published a letter whose final sentence read: “Classing Oppenheimer as a Security Risk and subjecting him to a formal hearing is regarded by scientists in this country as an indignity and an affront to all; it is regarded by our friends abroad as a sign of insanity—which it probably is.” ⁵⁸ He had written to scientists who might be called to testify, urging them to support Oppenheimer. He also had helped draft an editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that dismissed the charges as “contrary to both decency and common sense.”

Szilard took a plane from New York to Washington on the eve of Teller’s scheduled testimony and set out from his hotel to find his friend. According to his wife, Trude, Szilard wanted to save Teller from his own “worst instincts.” He worried that Teller would damage his own reputation by testifying against Oppenheimer. Szilard rode taxis to restaurants and clubs, walked to other hotels, but after hours of searching, finally returned dispirited. “If Teller attacks Oppenheimer,” Szilard grumbled to Trude that night, “I will have to defend Oppenheimer for the rest of my life.” ⁵⁹

Szilard did not find Teller, but Bethe did, at the American Physical Society conference at the Wardman Park Hotel. Bethe, serving as the society’s president that year, discovered Teller in one of the hotel’s hallways and beseeched him at length to testify in favor of Oppenheimer—or, at least, not to testify against him. “It was a desperate discussion,” recalled Bethe, “but he was absolutely set in his opinion that Oppenheimer must be eliminated from an advisory role in the government. Teller was immovable.” ⁶⁰ Teller’s determination to testify against Oppenheimer frightened Bethe, who understood only too well the damage that Teller’s intensity and tenacity—characteristics that seemed so patriotic in 1954—would do to Oppenheimer. A physicist who saw Bethe later that night asked him, “Are [Oppenheimer’s] hearings going badly?” “Yes,” sighed Bethe, “but that is not the worst. I have just now had the most unpleasant conversation of my whole life. With Edward Teller.” ⁶¹

Teller harbored conflicting emotions about Oppenheimer: fond memories of the prewar friendship, the grievances at Los Alamos, the respect he felt nonetheless for Oppenheimer’s intellect. But if Teller felt any remorse that his rival was wounded and struggling for his life, it vanished when Robb showed him a dossier containing items unfavorable to Oppenheimer just hours before he was to testify. The dossier consisted of material from Oppenheimer’s security file and damning excerpts of the Gray Board hearing transcript relating to the Chevalier incident that Teller had never seen before. He read the material with rising agitation and emotion. (Teller later recalled that at this meeting Robb painted Oppenheimer as a devil.) Teller had, of course, known of Oppenheimer’s left-wing past in a general sense, but to be suddenly presented with a mass of detailed information inflamed him. ⁶² His resentment rose to the surface. The material put Teller “in shock,” as he later said, just as Robb and Strauss had hoped it would. ⁶³

It was in this agitated frame of mind that Teller entered the AEC hearing room the next afternoon. The atmosphere was expectant. There was a palpable tension in the room as he faced Robb for the first questions. Time seemed almost to be standing still. Jealousy and anger were boiling up inside Teller, but he affected a calm demeanor on the stand. He couldn’t wait to begin. His energies were surging, his heart was pounding with extra adrenaline. This was the moment, and he was the man. Victory was his at last in the great rivalry with Oppenheimer. Today he would dispatch this self-important nuclear pundit. All of Oppenheimer’s special friends—they no longer mattered. The inspiration of liberal and left-wing physicists brought down. Could one ask for a greater victory?

Teller proceeded to play the reluctant witness, earnest and troubled, anxious not to do an injustice to Oppenheimer:

ROBB: Dr. Teller,… are you appearing as a witness here today because you want to be here?

TELLER: I appear because I have been asked to and because I consider it my duty upon request to say what I think in the matter. I would have preferred not to appear.

ROBB: You stated to me some time ago that anything you had to say, you wished to say in the presence of Dr. Oppenheimer?

TELLER: That is correct.

Robb then went straight to the heart of the matter:

ROBB: To simplify the issues here, let me ask you this question: Is it your intention to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States?

TELLER: I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.

ROBB: Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?

TELLER: In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appear to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands. ⁶⁴

Gordon Gray, dissatisfied with Teller’s artful phrase “personally more secure,” put the question directly: “Do you feel that it would endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Dr. Oppenheimer?” Teller replied:

I believe… that Dr. Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance.

If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance. ⁶⁵

Oppenheimer sat listening as Teller spoke, his face an expressionless mask, scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad:

Teller—aggressive

had conscience

hysterical

two sides on H-bomb ⁶⁶

At the close of his testimony, Teller rose from the witness chair, walked over to the leather davenport where Oppenheimer was sitting, and offered his hand. Oppenheimer looked at Teller for a long moment, saying nothing, then shook his hand. “I’m sorry,” Teller said, meeting Oppenheimer’s eyes. Oppenheimer looked at him oddly. “After what you’ve just said,” replied Oppenheimer in a polite but unbelieving tone, “I don’t know what you mean.” ⁶⁷ Teller turned away, his shoulders heavy, and limped slowly from the room. His innuendoes had their intended effect.

Ernest Lawrence’s relationship with Oppenheimer had changed after the war. Lawrence thought Oppenheimer took too much personal credit for the collective success of Los Alamos and had become self-important, while Oppenheimer thought Lawrence simply resented his new stature. The growing tension between them became apparent in the press. In response to Oppenheimer’s famous remark “The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose,” Lawrence defiantly replied, “I am a physicist and I have no knowledge to lose in which physics has caused me to know sin.” ⁶⁸

A proponent of American nuclear superiority, Lawrence believed Oppenheimer’s persuasive, almost hypnotic, influence made his counsel of restraint dangerous. When Robb visited Berkeley shortly before the hearing, Lawrence complained how others had been “taken in” by Oppenheimer, but—“giving him the benefit of the doubt”—still believed that “everything he did can be attributed to bad judgment.” Lawrence also stressed to Robb that Oppenheimer “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy.” ⁶⁹ How much better, Lawrence thought, if only Oppenheimer would recognize that accomplishment in science did not confer political competence. Lawrence also resented what he considered his former friend’s arrogance toward security rules and regulations. “Lawrence was the sort of person,” recalled an associate, “who could say, ‘Well, if you haven’t done anything wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.’” ⁷⁰ He remembered that in Greek mythology the gods always repaid pride with a fall. It was painful to see a man’s life picked apart and exposed, but Lawrence thought Oppenheimer had asked for it. He was convinced that Oppenheimer’s clearance should be revoked.

Lawrence hoped Oppenheimer would quietly accept revocation of his clearance, but when Oppenheimer protested and requested a hearing, Strauss insisted that Lawrence testify against his former friend. Lawrence was terrified. A few days before his scheduled testimony in late April, he attended a meeting of national laboratory directors at Oak Ridge. The prime topic of conversation, aside from scientific matters, was the Oppenheimer hearing. Oppenheimer was a close friend of many of those present, and feelings ran high. Angrily confronted at the meeting by Rabi, Lawrence insisted that he was playing no part in any personal vendetta, that he was only concerned about the country’s welfare. Yet he was worried that his pending testimony would be leaked to the press and would therefore harm himself as well as Oppenheimer. The stress that Lawrence felt was so great that he suffered an acute attack of ulcerative colitis. He canceled his scheduled appearance before the Gray Board and returned home to Berkeley.

Strauss thought Lawrence was using an illness to avoid an unpleasant duty. He pressed Lawrence for a written statement. Lawrence ultimately did as he was told, delivering a short but damning statement to the Gray Board just two days before the hearings ended. In his statement, Lawrence cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty by recalling an incident that had occurred in the fall of 1949:

I remember driving up to San Francisco from Palo Alto with Luis W. Alvarez and Dr. Vannevar Bush when we discussed Oppenheimer’s activities in the nuclear weapons program. At that time we could not understand or make any sense out of the arguments Oppenheimer was using in opposition to the thermonuclear program and indeed we felt he was much too lukewarm in pushing the overall AEC program. I recall Dr. Bush being concerned about the matter and in the course of the conversation he mentioned that [air force chief of staff] General Hoyt Vandenberg had insisted that Dr. Bush serve as Chairman of a committee to evaluate the evidence for the first Russian atomic explosion, as General Vandenberg did not trust Dr. Oppenheimer. I believe it was on the basis of the findings of this committee that the President made the announcement that the Soviets had set off their first atomic bomb.

Ernest O. Lawrence ⁷¹

The hearing finally came to an end on May 6, 1954. The board members went home for ten days to consider and to judge. The first thing Gray did was to dictate a memorandum for the record, in which he protested that the proceedings had been as fair as circumstances permitted. When the board reconvened, it voted two to one (Ward Evans dissenting) that Robert Oppenheimer was a security risk and that his clearance should not be renewed.

Garrison broke the news of the board’s decision to Oppenheimer on May twenty-eighth. Oppenheimer had expected it all along. Even before the hearing began, he had confided to Bethe: “It is impossible for the AEC to find me innocent. After what has happened, they just have to convict me. But nevertheless I have to go through with it.” ⁷² “Once a thing like that has been started,” he added after it was over, “they couldn’t not go through with it to the end; and they couldn’t let me win.” ⁷³ Although numbed by his recent ordeal and frazzled by the wait for a verdict, Oppenheimer followed Garrison’s advice and agreed to appeal the verdict to the AEC commissioners. But when Garrison asked to argue the case before the AEC, the commission’s general manager, a Strauss appointee, rejected his request. Oppenheimer was dazed by now. He faced persistent requests for comment by newsmen after the board’s verdict broke on June second, which he refused. Yet he did take a call from a reporter in Australia, who quoted him as saying: “Maybe this is the end of the road for me. I have no sympathy for Communism, but I have moral principles from which I will never depart.” ⁷⁴ Underneath his stoic facade, however, Oppenheimer was steaming. To family and friends he privately described the hearing and the verdict—the “whole thing”—as an “outrage.” “This is an abuse of the power of the state,” he said, “and is a problem [for] everybody, not just [me].” ⁷⁵

A majority of AEC commissioners, led by Lewis Strauss, affirmed the Gray Board’s verdict on June twenty-ninth by a four-to-one vote, physicist Henry Smyth being the lone dissenter. Strauss himself undertook the composition of the AEC majority opinion. It found that “Dr. Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the Government and of this Commission because of the proof of fundamental defects in his ‘character’” and emphasized his questionable “associations.” ⁷⁶

Strauss released the commissioners’ verdict to reporters, but not to Oppenheimer himself; he learned of the verdict from a journalist who had gotten advance word of it. There was no shock this time; he was reconciled to the inevitable. Three days after the AEC’s verdict was made public, Oppenheimer granted an interview to the Associated Press. He chain-smoked and fidgeted but volunteered little. Did Oppenheimer think he had received a fair hearing? The scientist would only say he hoped “people will study the record of the case and reach their own conclusions.” “I think there is something to be learned from it.” ⁷⁷

Since Oppenheimer’s AEC consulting contract was due to expire on June thirtieth, Strauss had vindictively rushed the decision through to get the humiliating denial of clearance on the record. Strauss also released the unflattering transcript of the board hearing to the public, despite Gray’s promise to each witness that the AEC would “not take the initiative” in publishing it. Later that summer, in a final, stunning act of personal vindictiveness, Strauss called a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and vainly tried to force Oppenheimer’s resignation as director. Not satisfied with destroying Oppenheimer’s reputation, Strauss also tried to destroy his livelihood.

The verdict against Oppenheimer dismayed, angered, and disgusted American physicists. They reacted to the verdict personally—it struck uncomfortably close to home. Szilard considered it a chilling comment on the times. “Unfortunately for all of us, [the Gray Board members] are as good men as they come,” noted Szilard with characteristic dryness, “and if they are affected by the general insanity which is more and more creeping up on us, who can be counted on to be immune?” ⁷⁸ Szilard disagreed with Teller’s testimony, but he gave Teller the benefit of the doubt: Teller had said what he believed was true. The friendship between the two Hungarians endured.

The McCarthyite paranoia that Bethe saw in the verdict angered and frightened him. “I was afraid that they might go after all of us” was the way he put it. ⁷⁹ Bethe’s friendship with Teller went back almost as many years as Szilard’s, but he could not bring himself to forgive Teller. “I did not see Teller for a long time after this, and our relationship was strained from then on,” Bethe said later. “We still encountered each other from time to time, and we were not unfriendly outwardly, but we never discussed this event. There was no question where I stood, however.” ⁸⁰ Bethe hoped, as he wrote in a letter to Teller in November 1954, “that some day we shall again be in a state where we can again talk about the things we used to talk about—meaning the things we talked about before 1942.” ⁸¹

Lawrence thought Teller had been rightly disturbed by Oppenheimer’s falsehoods about the Chevalier incident. “I can stand a lot,” Lawrence told a colleague that spring, “but when a man lies to security agents, that’s it.” Although Lawrence had helped to bring Oppenheimer down, he took no pleasure in the outcome. He turned down an invitation to attend a dinner in honor of Strauss shortly after the hearing ended, and his ulcerative colitis worsened. Still, there was a bitterness in Lawrence about Oppenheimer that associates could not miss. “I got Oppenheimer that job in the first place,” Lawrence complained with some emotion the summer after the hearing. “Of course, we’ve got a better man around here now.” “Who’s that?” the associate asked. “Teller,” came Lawrence’s reply. ⁸²

Fermi regretted the whole affair. He detested the emotions provoked by the controversy and these emotions’ negative impact on American science. He also was very sick. At first it took the form of increasing indigestion. Fermi took antacid pills, but he began to lose energy and grow very thin. Doctors told him his sickness was psychological, so he began to read medical textbooks in an attempt to diagnose his own illness. Then doctors examined his esophagus by putting a tube down his throat; the visible tissue looked normal. He continued to grow thinner. Finally doctors performed exploratory surgery. They found stomach cancer that had metastasized so widely that nothing could be done. He was in the very prime of life.

Knowing he had very little time to live, Fermi resolved to set straight a friend whose behavior he thought had been reprehensible. A visitor to Fermi’s hospital room described his mood:

When I came into his room we talked for a moment about his condition, he apparently knowing very well that these were his last days. We then discussed the characters of some of the people with whom we had been associated together. The thing, however, that he was most interested in was a visit Teller was to pay him the next day…. Fermi’s principal interest was in talking to Teller in a way that would lead him to mend his ways and restore his own position among his scientific associates. I thought he was far more interested in saving Teller than he was in his own desperate condition. ⁸³

“What nobler thing for a dying man to do—” Fermi smiled ironically to another friend—“than to try to save a soul?” ⁸⁴

Lying in Billings Hospital in Chicago and feeling terribly sick and tired, his condition so grave that he was allowed only a few visitors for brief periods of time, Fermi asked his wife, Laura, to summon Teller. Teller came to his old friend at once. He found Fermi, a man of habit and order whose mind never rested, being fed by a tube that ran directly into his stomach, measuring the flow of the intravenous drip by counting the drops with a stopwatch. Laura, grief stricken, was standing by his bedside.

Although shockingly thin and weak, Fermi seemed only a little tired and sad. He told Teller very calmly about his condition and wondered objectively how much time he had. He was stoically good-humored as always. He said that he had been blessed by a Catholic priest, a Protestant pastor, and a Jewish rabbi. At different times the three had entered his room and politely asked permission to bless him; he had given it. “It pleased them and it did not harm me,” he said. ⁸⁵ Then he quipped: “The doctors have played a dirty trick on me.”

Teller, choking up, tried to be witty in return. “It’s a dirty trick on your friends,” he responded halfheartedly. ⁸⁶ Teller was crestfallen. As natives of another continent transplanted to the United States, he and Fermi had shared a common culture and many common understandings. They had spent innumerable happy hours in conversations together. Losing Fermi now—at a time when he was so greatly in need of friendly counsel—was particularly hard.

Fermi got right to the point. He asked his friend how he was doing; even as he lay facing death, he was concerned about others’ problems. Then Fermi told Teller that, in his judgment, Oppenheimer had rendered outstanding service during the war, and that after the war his advice had been given after thorough study and in good faith. If the advice had not been taken, or if it was thought to be wrong—these offered no grounds for impugning Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Fermi told Teller that he considered the AEC hearing—and its verdict—a national disgrace and a disaster for American science. He quietly urged Teller to heal the breach. The emotion of the moment moved Teller to remorse. He spoke more openly than he had ever dared to before. “One usually reads,” Teller said in recalling the occasion, “that dying men confess their sins to the living. It has always seemed to me that it would be much more logical the other way about. So I confessed my sins to Fermi. None but he, apart from the Deity, if there is one, knows what I then told him.” ⁸⁷ A month later, on November 29, 1954, Enrico Fermi died at the age of only fifty-three.

Rabi felt sore at the Gray Board—and Oppenheimer, too. Rabi understood his old friend on many levels and was directly honest about him. “I’m a bit angry that Robert let it happen,” Rabi later said. “He should’ve said, ‘I have a record, and I’m not going to be badgered by you’… and just denounce them. Instead, he let it get dragged over all sorts of things. He shouldn’t have stood up there and spilled his guts to those people.” ⁸⁸ As another physicist who knew both men has said, “Rabi appreciated Robert and when you appreciate the man you tell him, at least when you are courageous which Rabi always was, you tell him what’s wrong with him.” ⁸⁹ Reflecting on the hearing years later, Rabi felt a sense of both guilt and anger:

I was one of the few living who could sit down and say [to Oppenheimer], “Now don’t be a fool.”… If I’d been in on it [the defense team]…, I would simply have advised him to stand up and say, “This is what I accomplished for the United States. There is a record. I see no reason for a retrial. If you find it in your hearts to do this, there it is. I hope you have a long life and live to regret it. I will have no part of it.” Period. And walk out. ⁹⁰

Yet even if Oppenheimer had taken the hearing more seriously, or if he had followed Rabi’s advice and stormed out, the outcome probably would have been the same. A part of him knew this, and that is why his normally quick and intuitive mind seemed paralyzed by the morbid circumstances. He felt doomed from the start. Months before the Gray Board convened, he confided to Bethe that “no matter what happens during the hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission cannot do anything but find me guilty.” ⁹¹ In the existing political atmosphere, he sensed that there could be no other outcome.

The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer’s Washington career. All of his government connections were severed, and his long service to national security came to an abrupt and ignoble end. After having contributed so much during the war as director of Los Alamos and so much after the war in many different capacities, his contribution was now over. If Oppenheimer had suffered previously because of the weight of his power, he now suffered grievously because of the effect of its absence.

“He had spent the years after the war being an adviser, being in high places, knowing what was going on,” said a close friend, “To be in on things gave him a sense of importance. That became his whole life. He could run the institute with his left hand. And now he really didn’t have anything to do.” ⁹² Bethe felt that Oppenheimer “was not the same person afterward.” ⁹³ Rabi said this about his friend’s destruction:

I was indignant. Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don’t think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn’t pay enough attention to the outward symbols. ⁹⁴

Oppenheimer was deeply wounded and hurt. His feelings were raw, his pain so fierce as to be almost physical. The effects of the ordeal began to show. Oppenheimer had always been lithe and vibrant; now he began to age visibly and his body took on a look of frailty. He seemed like a biblical martyr with his sad voice and gaunt, haunted appearance. He even took to quoting biblical scripture: “I cannot sit with anger.” When a friend compared his ordeal to a dry crucifixion, Oppenheimer smiled unhappily and said, “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.” ⁹⁵ There was now pain and hurt in his eyes. The old intellectual impatience, the flashes of arrogance, were gone.

Oppenheimer disappeared from public view and seemed almost to disappear from the life of his friends. Nearly all of them were scientists engaged in one way or another in government work ruled by security regulations. Their lives revolved around their research, as Oppenheimer’s had, but he and they could not talk to each other about work. They could not talk about the case, or even about the old days, because all that was too painful to discuss. So they were left with nothing to talk about. Oppenheimer was kept under surveillance even after the hearing. A friend ran into him at the airport months later, and while they were chatting Oppenheimer gestured toward three bystanders and explained calmly but wearily, “They, or others like them, are with me all the time.” They had presumably trailed Oppenheimer out to the airport to ensure he did not flee the country and defect to the Soviet Union. ⁹⁶

Oppenheimer maintained a stoic facade. It was his family that suffered the most. The ordeal abode like a permanent ghost at Olden Manor, the Oppenheimers’ Princeton home. Kitty simmered with indignation and remained on a slow, corrosive burn for years to come. She deeply resented the injustice, and partly blamed herself for her husband’s ordeal. Her health deteriorated as she began to drink even more. It was hard for the children, who could not understand what it was all about except that everything seemed unfair. The hearings meant that they were separated from their parents for much of the spring of 1954. Thirteen-year-old-son Peter knew his father was going through some kind of ordeal. He came home from school one afternoon in tears and said a classmate had taunted him: “Your father is a communist!” Peter and Toni both came to resent any intrusion on their father’s life, any reminder of his banishment from government. They tried to spend as much time as they could with their father, but Oppenheimer made this difficult by being a distant parent who had difficulty relating to his children. Still, they remained devoted to him. Peter chalked this on the blackboard in his room:

The Amican Govermerant is unfair to Acuse Certain People that I know, of being unfair to them. Since this true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the U.S. govermeant, should go to HELL.

Yours truly
Certain People ⁹⁷

Oppenheimer was not the only scientist to suffer as a result of the hearing. Paradoxically, Teller also suffered, for his testimony against Oppenheimer brought down on him a harvest of resentment mingled with cold, angry contempt. Although Teller was aware that he had offended many of his fellow scientists, he had no real idea of what was in store for him. A few weeks after the AEC’s verdict had been announced and the hearing transcript had been published, Teller went to Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer was a living legend, for a conference of physicists from across the country. Gatherings like this one were usually jovial affairs, reunions of old friends as well as serious scientific sessions. A few physicists were glad to see Teller, but others went out of their way to avoid him. The first large gathering was a dinner in the main hall of Fuller Lodge. Just as Teller was about to sit down, he spotted Rabi and Robert Christy, a Caltech physicist who had been a graduate student of Oppenheimer and a close wartime colleague of Teller, at a nearby table. With great bonhomie and nonchalance, Teller walked over to Rabi and Christy’s table and greeted them with a hearty laugh and outstretched hand. As everyone in the crowded dining room looked on, both Christy and Rabi looked icily at Teller and refused to shake his hand. Rabi then acidly congratulated Teller on the “brilliance” of his testimony before the Gray Board and “the extremely clever way” he had phrased his reply concerning Oppenheimer as a security risk. “‘I would personally feel more secure’ without Oppenheimer in the government,” said Rabi caustically and loudly—“a brilliant way of saying, ‘don’t restore his clearance!’” Teller was stunned and speechless, as if Christy and Rabi had punched him. He staggered back to his table, his face red with emotion. He tried as hard as he could to maintain his composure, but the shock and humiliation were too great. In a tight voice he excused himself, abruptly left the hall, and returned to his room, where he broke down and wept. ⁹⁸ Teller was to endure this kind of rejection again in the years to come because, in the minds of many scientists, he had destroyed Oppenheimer. But no incident was branded on Teller’s soul as deeply as this first, stinging rebuke.

The physicists who shunned Teller were the very people whose respect and friendship he craved most. Twice before he had been forced to relinquish the familiar: first his homeland of Hungary, then the continent of his birth and culture. In America everything had been initially unfamiliar except for the community of physicists, who had afforded him comfort since the day he arrived. Now he lost those closest to him. Teller, who had always cherished his friendships, found the loss very painful and hard to bear. He was more miserable than he had ever been in his entire life. “I am just bewildered and also personally very greatly hurt,” he wrote after returning from Los Alamos, “when I hear a great number of hateful words coming from people who used to be close to me.” ⁹⁹

Teller’s ostracism provoked intense hostility—even hatred—in him toward his enemies, particularly Rabi. These feelings of childlike hurt and resentment came pouring out in a letter he wrote to a friend:

I came back from Los Alamos a few days ago…. I felt like Daniel in the lions’ den. After some time you learn to distinguish the lions by their growls….

I got so that I can guess what a man is going to say. And I begin to believe that I can guess what he thinks. It is not a nice experience.

The worst of them is Rabi. He was never my friend but now he is terrible….

Last night I dreamed that there was a Raven and I did not dare to go to sleep because he may pick out my eyes. Please translate Raven into German [rabe]. I found this amusing because the Raven started to smile and I slept quite well. ¹⁰⁰

Teller was once again in exile, treated like a leper, or—even worse—a modern-day Judas. As long as he remained in the confines of his home at Berkeley, where he had moved from Chicago in 1952, or his office at Livermore, life went along much as usual. But he could never be sure of the reception he would receive whenever he made one of his frequent trips to scientific conferences or public meetings. Lifelong acquaintances began to ignore him and even to pillory him. Many at Los Alamos made it clear that Teller would no longer be welcome there. Teller perceived this all too well, and he did not return there for nearly ten years.

The animosity against Teller, however, went deeper than just defense of Oppenheimer. Teller was regarded not only as having betrayed one of his peers but as having collaborated with—some thought sold out to—the military-industrial complex. As he raced from his lectures at Berkeley to his bomb laboratory at Livermore or to conferences at the Pentagon, Teller grew to be a vivid symbol and an unpleasant reminder to his peers of the captivity of physics. For someone of Teller’s sensitivity—whose feelings always lay just beneath the surface, who enjoyed friendships so much, and who wanted so much to be liked—such treatment was traumatic. He grew physically and emotionally depleted. Like Lawrence, he developed a painful and dangerous form of ulcerative colitis, an ailment closely associated with emotional tension. His gaiety, spontaneity, and teasing nature disappeared. He became bitter, combative, distrustful, and reclusive. Even his children noticed the difference in his personality. He had always been prone to moods of silence, but they now became more frequent. There were times when Mici would warn Paul and Wendy not to disturb their father. At these times Wendy would say, “Don’t bother Daddy, he has black bugs in his head.” ¹⁰¹

Teller’s painful ostracism led him to have second thoughts about his testimony against Oppenheimer. “What else could I do at the hearing?” he began pleading to friends. “What else could I say?” ¹⁰² He drafted a public statement saying that his testimony had been misunderstood, that he had not meant to imply that opinions should be punished. Teller sent the desperate statement to Strauss, explaining that he now felt his testimony had been a mistake and revealing his alarm at his own conduct:

I continue to feel that I made a grave mistake when I clearly implied that opinion of a man can make him a security risk. I did not say this, but, rereading my own testimony, I see that I came extremely close to saying it. I therefore would feel very much happier if I could make a statement to the press in which I remedy as much of this damage as I possibly can. After a lot of headache and a waste of much paper, I arrived at this brief statement which I am attaching.

It seems particularly important for me to say something of this kind since my friends among the physicists attach very great importance to this point. If I should lose their respect it would be an extremely hard blow to me. ¹⁰³

Strauss would have none of this. The last thing he wanted now was a public recantation by his star witness against Oppenheimer. He bucked up Teller by urging him to consult with Roger Robb. To make sure that Teller did so, Strauss sent Teller’s draft statement to Robb. Robb immediately advised Teller to stand by his testimony, which had required “courage and character” and had performed “a public service of great value.” Teller remained silent. ¹⁰⁴

Years would pass before Teller would again be tolerated by his peers, but even then he was never really forgiven. And while many conservatives admired Teller for conceiving the superbomb and protecting the state against Oppenheimer, he would remain a pariah to liberals for the rest of his long life. Being a perceptive man with a sensitive ego, Teller saw his fate all too clearly. Questioned about the long-term effects of the Oppenheimer affair nearly twenty years later, Teller replied without hesitation: “I think it made Oppenheimer. I think it destroyed Teller.” ¹⁰⁵ When he published his memoirs in 2001—nearly half a century after the affair—Teller was moved to write: “Why did I testify? In retrospect, the answer is simple and obvious: because I was demonstrating my fulsome quantity of that general human property, stupidity….... In retrospect, I should have said at the beginning of my testimony that the hearing was a dirty business, and that I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it.” ¹⁰⁶

Such expressions of personal regret and suffering were rare. But at unguarded moments, Teller would let the bitterness pour forth. “If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety percent of these then come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect.” ¹⁰⁷ And in his final days, during the summer of 2003, he confessed: “In my long life I had to face some difficult decisions and found myself often in doubt whether I acted the right way.” ¹⁰⁸ The affair crippled both men: Oppenheimer because he lost, Teller because he won. The poignancy of Teller’s self-awareness about the pariah status to which he relegated himself spoke volumes about the horrible irony of the larger story.

After Strauss retired as AEC chairman in 1958, a review of the Oppenheimer hearing was made by the commission’s general counsel, who found that there was “a messy record from a legal standpoint; that the charges kept shifting at each level of the proceedings; that the evidence was stale and consisted of information that was 12 years old and was known when a security clearance was granted during World War II, and that it was a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system.” ¹⁰⁹ But by then it was too late.

Not long after his hearing was over and his security clearance had been revoked, Oppenheimer gave a speech at Amherst College where students asked him why he had not helped his case by showing more repentance for his past left-wing associations. Oppenheimer replied, “It may not be the obligation of a man in a position of responsibility to conform his actions to what the public desires; but if he wishes to play an effective part in politics, it is clear that he must either conform himself to what the public desires, or persuade the public to accept what he is.” ¹¹⁰ Oppenheimer refused to do the former and failed to do the latter.

Freed from the burden of playing the Washington game, Oppenheimer devoted himself to investigating issues raised by modern science and commenting on man’s fate in the nuclear age. Those who encountered him now noticed traces of defeat in his manner. At the same time, they noticed tranquility in his face. He was calmer than he had been since going to Los Alamos. “We did the devil’s work,” he told a visitor in 1956, summing up his experiences during and after the war. “But we are now going back to our real jobs. Rabi for instance was telling me only the other day that he intended to devote himself exclusively to research in the future.” ¹¹¹ Oppenheimer felt unburdened at last. The hearing made him a martyr among liberals. The Gray Board’s verdict ended their concern that Oppenheimer had surrendered his independence to establish his political influence. The AEC’s action ironically served as a means of his redemption.

Everywhere people wondered, “How could this happen?” Some blamed the unpopularity of Oppenheimer’s views on the superbomb. Others blamed Oppenheimer’s unscrupulous enemies. Still others blamed Oppenheimer’s own arrogance and past evasions. All of them were factors, but all of them would not have been enough had the country not been in the grip of the insecurity and paranoia that expressed itself in anticommunist witch-hunts. In the spring of 1954, when McCarthyism was at its peak, the reigning dogma identified security with superiority in the arms race: the superbomb served as a powerful buttress against expanding communism and kept the peace by means of deterrence, the capacity to wreak sufficient destruction on the enemy so as to discourage any attack. In this climate, it was all too easy to see a physicist with a radical past who disagreed with this view as being a security threat. It was a mood fed by hysterical fear; its chief symptom was the belief that anyone who did not share it was dangerously unreliable.

Of course, because of his association with the bomb, because of the fascinating complexities of his personality, and because of his marvelous eloquence, Oppenheimer had come to represent all physicists in the public mind. To liberals frightened by the arms race and obsessed with avoiding a nuclear war, he was a superb scientist and a selfless public servant who had been sacrificed for his unpopular beliefs. To conservatives frightened by communism and obsessed with national security, he was the man who had cavorted with the Cold War enemy. Robert Oppenheimer touched people—then and now—because he was the most sensitive and reflective individual among all those involved in the creation of the terrible new weapons.

Yet the Oppenheimer affair was not just the story of one man; it was also the story of all of the atomic scientists. His personal tragedy was also his profession’s. It dramatized physicists’ sudden transformation from naive academics into major players in the realm of American national security. The bomb had given once-obscure physicists a new standing akin to the mathematician-astronomer-priests of the ancient Maya, who were both revered and feared as the keepers of the mystery of the seasons and the helpers of the sun and stars. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, became the unofficial high priest. Not just Oppenheimer’s life had been dissected in the hearing room but the lives—with all their subtle pressures and unsolved problems—of the scientists who had ushered in the atomic age. The hearings revealed the new and influential part these men now played in national security politics, their uneasiness in a nuclear world they had helped to create, and above all their anxiety about losing sight of the deeply rooted set of ethical beliefs out of which science—their passion—had grown. How had it happened that men who had tried to find a more comprehensive truth were in the end obliged to spend the best years of their lives in the search for ever more destructive weapons—and then the best among them punished for it? Science had ceased to be seen as something remote and now was looked upon as something terrible. To an extent, then, Oppenheimer and the other atomic scientists whom he symbolized had fallen victim to the very weapon they had created.