American Prometheus (116 page)

185 “Take this and find”: Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb, pp. 179–83; Serber, The
Los Alamos Primer,
p. xxxii.

185
“overweening ambition”
and subsequent quote:
Norris,
Racing for the Bomb,
pp. 240–42; Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
p. 449.

186
“we could begin”:
JRO hearing, p. 12; Lillian Hoddeson, et al.,
Critical Assembly,
p. 56.

186
A week after:
Norris,
Racing for the Bomb,
p. 241.

186
“[his political] background included”:
Groves,
Now It Can Be Told,
p. 63.

186
“It was not obvious”:
Hans Bethe later claimed that Ernest Lawrence had wanted his Rad Lab colleague Edwin McMillan appointed director of Los Alamos. “Groves very wisely decided that the director had to be Oppenheimer,” Bethe told Jeremy Bernstein. (Bernstein,
Hans Bethe,
p. 79.)

186
“I had no support”:
Groves to Victor Weisskopf, March 1967, Weisskopf folder, box 6, RG 200, NA, Papers of Leslie Groves, courtesy of Robert S. Norris.

186
As much as he admired:
Herken,
Brotherhood of the Bomb,
p. 71.

186
“He was a very impractical”; “He couldn’t run”:
Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin, “Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer?”
Social Studies of Science,
August 2000, p. 564; Bernstein,
Experiencing Science,
p. 97.

187
“was a real stroke of genius”:
Jon Else,
The Day After Trinity,
transcript, p. 11.

187
“It is about time”:
JRO to Hans Bethe, 10/19/42, Bethe folder, box 20, JRO Papers.

187
“He talked very fast”:
John McTernan, phone interview by Bird, 6/19/02.

187
“many people all around”:
Bohm, interview by Sherwin, 6/15/79, p. 15.

187
“various radical study groups”:
Betty Friedan,
Life So Far,
pp. 57–60.

187
“They were all working”:
Ibid., p. 60; Friedan, interview by Bird, 1/24/01.

188
“Many of us thought”:
Lomanitz, interview by Sherwin, 7/11/79, part 1, p. 17.

188
“I’ve heard some of these”:
Lomanitz, interview by Sherwin, 7/11/79, part 2, p. 5. For an argument about why a “second front” was not opened up in 1943, see John Grigg,
1943: The Victory That Never Was.

188
“respected him a great deal”:
Lomanitz, interview by Sherwin, 7/11/79.

188
“I was responsible”:
Steve Nelson,
American Radical,
pp. 268–69.

188
By the early spring of 1943:
Steve Nelson–Joseph Weinberg transcript, 3/29/43, entry 8, box 100, RG 77, MED, NA, College Park, MD.

191
“cunning and shrewd”:
Anonymous review of
The Alsos Mission,
by Boris T. Pash (1969), in
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature,
Winter 1971. The author of this book review reports that he is a close friend of Pash’s.

191
Pash quickly leaped:
Herken,
Brotherhood of the Bomb,
pp. 96–98. Shortly after Nelson’s wiretapped conversation with “Joe,” the FBI observed Nelson meeting Peter Ivanov, the Soviet vice counsel in San Francisco. They were seen talking on the grounds of the St. Francis Hospital—and then a few days later a Soviet diplomat stationed in Washington visited Nelson in his home and paid him ten bills of unknown denomination. As a result, J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a letter to Harry Hopkins in the White House to report that Nelson was trying to infiltrate Communist Party members into “industries engaged in secret war production” (Report on Atomic Espionage [Nelson-Weinberg and Hiskey-Adams Cases], 9/29/49, HUAC, pp. 4–5; J. Edgar Hoover to Harry Hopkins, 5/7/43, reprinted in Benson and Warner,
Venona,
p. 49. Hoover claimed this transaction occurred on 4/10/43. Haynes and Klehr,
Venona,
pp. 325–26).

192
“we had an unidentified man”:
JRO hearing, pp. 811–12.

192
“Pressure was brought to bear”:
Herken,
Brotherhood of the Bomb,
p. 106.

192
“Lehmann advised Nelson”:
FBI doc. 100-17828-51, 3/18/46, JRO background. According to the FBI, in May 1943, John V. Murra, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, arrived in San Francisco and contacted Bernadette Doyle. Murra reportedly told Doyle that he wanted to get in touch with Mrs. Oppenheimer. Presumably, Murra had known Joe Dallet in Spain. In response, Doyle directed Murra to call the Joint Anti-Fascist Committee or the University of California at Berkeley. According to the FBI document, Doyle stated that Robert Oppenheimer was a Party member but that his name should be removed from any mailing lists in Murra’s possession and he should not be mentioned in any way. There is no indication that Murra ever saw Kitty, who was by then in Los Alamos. We see this story as evidence that some members of the CP thought of Oppenheimer as a comrade—not that he was in fact a Party member.

193
He spent the war years:
Peat,
Infinite Potential,
p. 64.

193
Max Friedman was called:
Friedman, interview by Sherwin, 1/14/82.

193
Army intelligence:
In 1949, Irving David Fox—by then a teaching assistant in physics at Berkeley—was called to testify before HUAC. He refused to name names and subsequently was called before the university regents to explain his political beliefs. Fox frankly explained that while he had attended some Communist-sponsored meetings, he had never joined the Party. Fox was nevertheless fired, an action that precipitated a furious controversy over loyalty oaths at Berkeley for several years. (Griffiths, “Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower,” unpublished manuscript, shorter version, LOC, pp. 18–19.)

193
As for Weinberg:
Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel,
Bombshell,
p. 106.

194
“He appeared excited”:
Steve Nelson, interview by Sherwin, 6/17/81, p. 17; Steve Nelson, et al.,
American Radical,
p. 269.

Chapter 14: “The Chevalier A fair”

196
“He was visibly disturbed”:
Chevalier,
Oppenheimer,
p. 55; Chevalier said Kitty never entered the kitchen while he and Oppenheimer discussed Eltenton’s proposition (Chevalier, interview by Sherwin, 6/29/82, p. 2).

196
“I saw George Eltenton recently”:
JRO hearing, p. 130.

197
“But that would be treason!”:
Verna Hobson, interview by Sherwin, 7/31/79, p. 22. Hobson, Oppenheimer’s secretary at the Institute for Advanced Study and a friend of Kitty’s, observed that the “treason” comment “sounds like Kitty and doesn’t sound like Robert.”

197
“I was not, of course”:
Barbara Chevalier “diary,” 8/8/81, 2/19/83 and 7/14/84, courtesy of Gregg Herken,
www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com
.

197
Oppenheimer knew Eltenton:
JRO hearing, p. 135.

197
a thin, Nordic-featured:
Oppenheimer told Col. Pash on 8/27/43 that Eltenton was “certainly very far ‘left,’ whatever his affiliations” (JRO hearing, p. 846). There is no hard evidence that Eltenton was a member of the Communist Party although Priscilla McMillan in
The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer
asserts that he was; see chap. 18. Herve Voge thought Eltenton’s wife, Dolly, “was probably more radical than he was” (Voge, interview by Sherwin, 3/23/83, p. 9). In 1998, Dolly privately published a memoir,
Laughter in Leningrad,
of their five years in Leningrad. While working at the Leningrad Institute of Chemical Physics, Eltenton became friends with many Russian scientists, including Yuli Borisovich Khariton, a nuclear physicist who later helped to develop the Soviet Union’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs.

197
Chevalier had first met:
Haakon Chevalier FBI file, part 1 of 2, SF 61-439, p. 33; Haynes and Klehr,
Venona,
p. 233.

198
“I told him [Ivanov]”
and subsequent quotes:
FBI (Newark) synopsis of facts, 2/12/54, pp. 19–22 (Eltenton and Chevalier signed statements, 6/26/46), contained in JRO FBI file, doc. 786.

199
In 1947, when the details:
Interestingly, he kept up his friendship with Chevalier, and even attended Chevalier’s eightieth birthday party in Berkeley, as did Frank Oppenheimer (Herken,
Brotherhood of the Bomb,
p. 333). Sherwin contacted Eltenton in London in the early 1980s, but he declined to be interviewed.

200
“I would like Russia to win”:
Voge, interview by Sherwin, 3/23/83, p. 3.

200
“a dupe of the Russian consulate” . . . “We were never able to convince”:
Voge, interview by Sherwin, 3/23/83, p. 18. Voge read portions of this FBI document into Sherwin’s tape recorder.

201
“If he’d really been”:
Voge, interview by Sherwin, 3/23/83, pp. 4, 8. The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr flatly state that Eltenton was a “concealed Communist,” but they offer no evidence of this beyond an FBI report that he met on several occasions with the GRU officer Peter Ivanov (Haynes and Klehr,
Venona,
p. 329). Voge said he doubted that Eltenton was a Communist but that “it’s conceivable” (Voge, interview by Sherwin, 3/23/83, p. 10). Eltenton’s son, Mike Eltenton, later wrote, “So far as I know, neither of my parents ever became members of the Communist party—though their views on several issues came close to the party line” (Dorothea Eltenton,
Laughter in Leningrad,
p. xii).

Chapter 15: “He’d Become Very Patriotic”

205
a “lovely spot”:
Smith and Weiner,
Letters,
p. 236.

206
“We were arguing about this”:
Gen. John H. Dudley, “Ranch School to Secret City,” public lecture, 3/13/75, in Lawrence Badash, et al., eds.,
Reminiscences of Los Alamos,
1943–45;
Norris,
Racing for the Bomb,
pp. 243–44; Lawren,
The General and the
Bomb, p. 99; Marjorie Bell Chambers and Linda K. Aldrich, Los Alamos, New Mexico, p. 27; John D. Wirth and Linda Harvey Aldrich,
Los Alamos,
p. 155.

206
It was already late:
Founded in 1917, the Los Alamos Ranch School recruited no more than forty-four boys from wealthy families in the East and subjected them to a strenuous life. Its alumni include a Colgate (Colgate products), Burroughs (Burroughs adding machines), Hilton (Hilton hotels), and Douglas (Douglas aircraft). Each boy had his own horse and was responsible for its maintenance. Gore Vidal, who attended in the 1939–40 school year, later wrote that “reading was discouraged at Los Alamos in the interest of strenuousness” (Gore Vidal,
Palimpsest,
pp. 80–81).

206
“This is the place”:
John H. Manley, “A New Laboratory Is Born,” unpublished manuscript, p. 13, Sherwin Collection; Edwin McMillan,
Early Days of Los Alamos,
unpublished manuscript, p. 7, Sherwin Collection; Dudley, “Ranch School to Secret City,” in Badash, et al., eds.,
Reminiscences of Los Alamos.
See also Leslie Groves to Victor Weisskopf, March 1967, Weisskopf folder, box 6, RG 200, Papers of Leslie Groves, courtesy of Robert S. Norris.