American Prometheus (25 page)

COMPARED WITH HIS GUILELESS BROTHER, Robert was an enigma. All of their friends knew where his political sympathies lay—but the exact nature of his relationship to the Communist Party remains to this day hazy and vague. He later described his friend Haakon Chevalier as “a parlor pink. He had very wide connections with all kinds of front organizations; he was interested in left-wing writers . . . he talked quite freely of his opinions.” The description might easily have been applied to Oppenheimer himself.

Without question, Robert was surrounded by relatives, friends and colleagues who at some point or other were members of the Communist Party. As a left-wing New Dealer, he gave considerable sums of money to causes championed by the Party. But he always insisted that he was never a card-carrying member of the CP. Instead, he said, his associations with the Party were “very brief and very intense.” He was referring to the Spanish Civil War period, but afterwards he continued to participate in meetings in which dues-paying Communist Party members discussed current events. These meetings, encouraged by the Party, were specifically designed to involve independent intellectuals like Oppenheimer and blur the boundaries of Communist Party identity. But never having been a formal, card-carrying member left Oppenheimer the option of deciding for himself how he wished to define his relationship to the Party. For a brief time, he may well have thought of himself as an unaffiliated comrade. There is no doubt that in later years he minimized the extent of his associations with the Party. Quite bluntly, any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a Party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years.

In fact, his associations with Communists were a natural and socially seamless outgrowth of his sympathies and his station in life. As a professor at the University of California in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer lived in a politically charged environment. Moving in such circles, he inevitably left the impression with many of his friends who were formal Party members that he was one of them. Robert, after all, wanted to be liked and he certainly believed in the social justice goals the Party espoused and worked for. His friends could think what they wanted. Not surprisingly, some in the Party did think he was a comrade. And naturally, when the FBI used wiretaps to monitor the conversations of these people talking about Oppenheimer, they occasionally heard bona fide Party members discuss him as one of their own. And yet again, other FBI wiretaps record Party members complaining about Oppenheimer’s aloofness and unreliability. Most importantly, there is no evidence that he ever submitted himself to Party discipline. Given his strong personal alignment with much if not most of the Party program, where he did disagree he never trimmed his views to conform to the Party line. Tellingly, he expressed qualms about the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime. He openly admired Franklin Roosevelt and defended the New Deal. And while he was a member of various Popular Front organizations dominated by the Communist Party, he was also a staunch civil libertarian and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union. In short, he was a classic fellow-traveling New Deal progressive who admired the Communist Party’s opposition to fascism in Europe, and its championing of labor rights at home. It is neither surprising nor revealing that he worked with Party members in support of those goals.

All this ambiguity is compounded by the fact that during these years of the Popular Front, the Communist Party’s very organizational structure, particularly in California, led to a blurring of the distinction between casual affiliation and actual membership. As Jessica Mitford wrote in her irreverent memoir of her experiences in the San Francisco branch of the Party, “In those days . . . the Party was a strange mixture of openness and secrecy.” The conspiratorial-sounding “cell” of three to five members had been replaced by “branches” or “clubs”—“a nomenclature deemed more consistent with American political tradition.” Hundreds of people might belong to these “clubs,” in which Party business was conducted in a fairly open and informal manner; everyone was welcome and people, often including FBI informers, attended weekly meetings in rented halls without too much attention paid as to whether their party dues were up-to-date. On the other hand, Mitford reports that she and her husband “were at first assigned to the Southside Club, one of the few ‘closed’ or secret branches, reserved for government workers, doctors, lawyers, and others whose occupations could have been jeopardized by open affiliation with the Party.”

Many left-of-center, pro-union, anti-fascist intellectuals in the late 1930s never affiliated with the Communist Party. And yet, many who did join the Party chose to hide their affiliation even if, like Oppenheimer, they were politically active on behalf of causes supported by the Party. So numerous were the Party’s secret members that Communist Party chief Earl Browder griped in June 1936 about too many prominent figures in American society hiding their Party identity. “How shall we dissipate the Red Scare from among the Reds?” he asked. “Some of these comrades hide as a shameful secret their Communist opinions and affiliations; they hysterically beg the Party to keep as far away from their work as possible.”

Years later, Haakon Chevalier insisted that Oppenheimer was one such secret Party member. But when closely questioned about the unit Robert allegedly belonged to, Chevalier described an innocuous gathering of friends more akin to the “discussion group” he reported in his 1965 memoir than the sort of official “closed unit” described by Mitford. “We/he initiated it,” Chevalier, referring to Oppenheimer, told Martin Sherwin. “It was a closed unit and unofficial. There’s no record of it. . . . It was not known to anyone except one person. I don’t know who he was, but [he was] in the top echelon of the party in San Francisco.” This “unofficial” group known only to “one person” initially contained just six or seven members, though at one point as many as twelve were participating in its discussions. “We discussed things that were going on locally and in the state and in the country and in the world,” recalled Chevalier.

It is Chevalier’s version of this story that is reflected in the FBI files. The FBI first opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941. His name had come to the Bureau’s attention quite by accident the previous December. For almost a year the FBI had been wiretapping the conversations of William Schneiderman, the California Communist Party’s state secretary, and Isaac “Pops” Folkoff, the state treasurer. The wiretaps were not authorized by any court or by the Attorney General, and were therefore illegal. But in December 1940, when one of the Bureau’s agents in San Francisco overheard Folkoff referring to a 3:00 p.m. appointment at Chevalier’s house as a meeting of “the big boys,” an agent was sent to jot down license plate numbers. One of the cars found to be parked outside Chevalier’s home was Oppenheimer’s Chrysler roadster. By the spring of 1941, the FBI was identifying Oppenheimer as a professor “reported from other sources as having Communistic sympathies.” The FBI noted that he served on the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union—which the Bureau labeled “a Communist Party front group.” Inevitably, an investigative file was opened on Oppenheimer which would eventually grow to some 7,000 pages. That same month, Oppenheimer’s name was put on a list of “persons to be considered for custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency.”

Another FBI document, citing the investigative documents of “T-2, another Government agency,” claimed that Oppenheimer was a member of a “professional section” of the Communist Party. One of these “T-2” documents found in Oppenheimer’s FBI file included a two-page excerpt from a longer unidentified report listing the membership of various branches of the Communist Party. Names and addresses are provided for the “Longshoreman’s Branch,” the “Seaman’s Branch” and the “Professional Section.” Nine members are listed for this “Professional Section”: Helen Pell, Dr. Thomas Addis, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier, Alexander Kaun, Aubrey Grossman, Herbert Resner, George R. Andersen and I. Richard Gladstein. Oppenheimer clearly knew some of these individuals (Pell, Addis, Chevalier and Kaun), and it is equally clear that at least some of them were in fact Communist Party members. But it is impossible to evaluate the credibility of this undated document.

According to Chevalier, who spoke with Martin Sherwin at length and in detail, each member of this alleged “closed unit” paid dues to the Communist Party—except for Oppenheimer. “Oppenheimer paid his separately,” Chevalier speculated, “because he probably paid a lot more than he was supposed to.” Or, as Robert always insisted, he made contributions to causes, but never paid dues at all. “But the rest of us paid to one member who was also a known member, an open member [of the Party],” Chevalier continued. “I’m not supposed to say, but it was Philip Morrison.” Otherwise, according to Chevalier, the group took no “orders” from the Party and functioned simply as a group of academics who met to share ideas about international affairs and politics. Morrison, of course, has long acknowledged that he joined the Young Communist League in 1938 and the CP itself in 1939 or 1940. When asked about Chevalier’s recollection, Morrison flatly denied that he had been in the same Party unit as Oppenheimer. As a student, he pointed out, he would never have been assigned to a unit with faculty members.

When asked by Sherwin in 1982, “What made you a member of the Communist Party as opposed to just a group of people who were Left?” Chevalier replied, “I don’t know. We paid dues.” When Sherwin pressed him again, “Did you receive any orders from the Party?” Chevalier said, “No. In a sense we weren’t [regular Party members].” At the time, he explained, it was possible for men like himself and Oppenheimer to think of themselves as politically committed intellectuals who were nevertheless free from Party discipline. Members of this group contributed money to the Party’s causes; they gave speeches at Party-sponsored events; and they drafted articles and pamphlets for Party publications. And yet, explained Chevalier, “
We both were and were not. Any way you want to look at it.
” Pressed further to explain this ambiguity, Chevalier said, “It had a kind of shadowy existence. It existed, but it wasn’t identified, and that had some influence because we had our views about certain things that were happening which were transmitted to the center, and we were consulted about certain things. . . . Apparently, the same thing happened in many other parts of the United States, closed units for professionals or people who didn’t want to be identified in any way.”

The ambiguous nature of Oppenheimer’s relationship to the CP, as described by Chevalier, is corroborated by Steve Nelson, a charismatic Communist Party leader in San Francisco and a friend of Oppenheimer’s in the years 1940–43. Nelson saw Oppenheimer socially, but it was also his job to serve as one of the Party’s liaisons to the university community. “I met socially with this group,” Nelson explained in a 1981 interview, “that included some Party members and some non-Party people where they discussed freely what’s ahead of us. . . . This group was discussing questions of foreign policy. The general mood, which included Oppenheimer’s mood, was that it would be tragic if the United States, England and France do not form some kind of alliance against Italy; it would be tragic. I don’t remember now whether it was Chevalier or Bob [Oppenheimer] or any other member who expressed himself along these lines. But this was the tone of the meeting.”

Nelson reinforced Chevalier’s ambiguous description of Oppenheimer’s party membership. “I don’t know that I could prove or disprove the point,” Nelson said. “So I’ll just leave it at that—that he was a close sympathizer. I know that to be a fact because we had a number of discussions of policies of the left. . . . Now that doesn’t mean that he was a member of the Party. I think he was a close friend of a number of Party members on campus.”

Nelson himself left the Communist Party in 1957. In 1981 he published a memoir in which he briefly discussed his relationship to Oppenheimer. When he showed the manuscript to one of his old California comrades, still a Party member, this old communist thought he had been “too easy” on Oppenheimer—Nelson should have attacked Oppenheimer for having denied his affiliation with the Party. “My own estimate of Oppenheimer,” Nelson remarked, “was that he had this association with the left. Whether one had a Party card or not didn’t matter. He was associated with the causes of the left, and that was enough to murder him politically. . . .”

All the members of this allegedly closed Party unit are dead. But one of them left behind an unpublished memoir. Gordon Griffiths (1915–2001) joined the Communist Party in Berkeley in June 1936, just before leaving for Oxford. Upon his return in the summer of 1939, Griffiths quietly renewed his Party membership. But because his wife, Mary, had become disillusioned with the Party, Griffiths asked for a low-profile assignment. Eventually, he was given the job of “liaison with the Faculty group at the University of California.” Griffiths took the assignment in the autumn of 1940 and left it in the spring of 1942. In his memoir, he writes that out of the several hundred faculty members in Berkeley, only three were members of this “faculty Communist group”: Arthur Brodeur (an authority on Icelandic sagas and Beowulf in the English department), Haakon Chevalier—and Robert Oppenheimer.

Griffiths acknowledges Oppenheimer’s denial of ever having been a Party member. Oppenheimer’s defenders, Griffiths points out, have always explained Oppenheimer’s fellow-traveling with the assertion that he was politically naïve. “A great deal of energy was spent by well-intentioned liberals who felt that this was the only way to defend his case. Perhaps at the time—at the height of the McCarthyite period—it was. . . . But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put the question as it should have been put: not whether or not he had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.”