Pandora's Keepers (51 page)

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,
F
ermi 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.