American Prometheus (26 page)

Griffiths’ memoir adds few details to Chevalier’s description of what he called the “closed unit.” Understandably, Griffiths clearly believes that the mere fact of Oppenheimer’s attendance in these meetings qualified him as a Communist. He writes that the group met regularly, twice a month, either at Chevalier’s house or at Oppenheimer’s house. Griffiths usually brought along recent Party literature to distribute, and he collected dues from Brodeur and Chevalier,
but not from Oppenheimer.
“I was given to understand that Oppenheimer, as a man of independent wealth, made his contribution through some special channel. Nobody carried a party card. If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three men considered themselves to be Communists.”

The faculty group, Griffiths recalls, didn’t actually do very much “that could not have been done as a group of liberals or Democrats.” They encouraged each other to devote their energies to such good causes as the Teachers’ Union and the plight of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. “There was never any discussion of the exciting developments in theoretical physics, classified or otherwise, let alone any suggestion of passing information to the Russians. In short, there was nothing subversive or treasonable about our activity. . . . The meetings were devoted mainly to the discussion of events on the world and national scene, and to their interpretation. In these discussions, Oppenheimer was always the one who gave the fullest and most profound explanations, in the light of his understanding of Marxist theory. To describe his attachment to left-wing causes as the result of political naïveté, as many have done, is absurd, and diminishes the intellectual stature of a man who saw the implications of what was happening in the political world more deeply than most.”

Kenneth O. May, the Berkeley CP functionary who assigned Griffiths to this group, later told the FBI that Haakon Chevalier and other Berkeley professors attended its meetings, but that he “did not consider the people who participated in these gatherings to consist of a CP group.”

Once a graduate student in Berkeley’s math department, Ken May was a friend of Oppenheimer’s. May joined the Communist Party in 1936, and he visited Russia for five weeks in 1937 and again in 1939 for two weeks. He returned enamored of the Soviet political and economic model. During local elections in Berkeley in 1940, May gave a speech before the school board defending the right of local Communist Party candidates to hold a meeting on the grounds of a public school. When the speech drew coverage in the local press, his father, a conservative UC Berkeley political scientist, publicly disinherited him and the university canceled his teaching assistantship. The next year, May campaigned as a Communist for a seat on the Berkeley city council while still a graduate student in the math department. His affiliation with the Communist Party was thus no secret when he first met Oppenheimer. May was a friend of Jean Tatlock’s, and the two men were probably introduced at a meeting of the Teachers’ Union sometime in 1939.

Years later, after he had left the Party, May told the FBI he had visited Oppenheimer’s home on several occasions to talk politics and recalled seeing him at “informal gatherings . . . which were held for the purpose of discussing theoretical questions concerning Socialism.” He added that he did not consider Oppenheimer to be either a Party member or someone “under CP discipline.” Oppenheimer was an independent intellectual, and, May explained to the FBI, “the CP tended to distrust intellectuals as a group in the management of CP affairs, but at the same time, the Party was anxious to influence the thinking of such people along CP lines and to gain the prestige and support of Communist objectives which they would lend to the Party. For this reason, May would keep in touch with the subject [Oppenheimer] and other professional people; he would discuss Communism with them and would provide them with CP literature.”

Oppenheimer, May explained to the FBI agents, was the kind of man who was quite willing to “agree with CP aims and objectives at any particular time if he had decided in his own mind that they had merit. He would not, however, condone those objectives with which he did not agree.” May observed that the “subject openly associated with whomever he pleased, Communists or not.”

The FBI would never resolve the question of whether or not Robert was a CP member—which is to say that there was scant evidence that he was. Much of the evidence in the FBI files on this issue is circumstantial and contradictory. If a few of the FBI’s informants claimed that Oppenheimer was a Communist, most of its informants merely painted a portrait of a fellow traveler. And some emphatically denied that he was ever a Party member. The Bureau had only its suspicions, and the conjectures of others. Only Oppenheimer himself knew—and he always insisted that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

CHAPTER TEN

“More and More Surely”

This was a very decisive week in his life, and he told me
so. . . . That weekend started Oppenheimer’s turning away
from the Communist Party.

VICTOR WEISSKOPF

ON AUGUST 24, 1939, the Soviet Union stunned the world by announcing that on the previous day it had signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. One week later, World War II commenced when Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously invaded Poland. Commenting on these momentous events, Oppenheimer wrote his fellow physicist Willie Fowler: “I know Charlie [Lauritsen] will say a melancholy I told you so over the Nazi Soviet pact, but I am not paying any bets yet on any aspect of the hocuspocus except maybe that the Germans are pretty well into Poland. Ca stink.”

No issue of the day was more vigorously debated within left-intellectual circles than the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Many American Communists resigned from the Party. As Chevalier put it with marked understatement, the Soviet-German pact “confused and upset many people.” But Chevalier remained loyal to the CP and defended the pact as a necessary strategic decision. In August 1939, he and four hundred others signed an open letter, published in the September 1939 issue of
Soviet Russia Today,
which attacked the “fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike.” Oppenheimer’s name did not appear on the letter. According to Chevalier, it was in the fall of 1939 “that Opje proved himself to be such an impressive and effective analyst. . . . Opje had a simple, lucid way of presenting facts and arguments that allayed misgivings and carried conviction.” Chevalier claimed that, at a time when communists were suddenly extremely unpopular even among Californian intellectuals, Oppenheimer patiently explained that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not so much an alliance as a treaty of necessity motivated by the West’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

Chevalier was deeply alarmed by the wave of war hysteria that seemed to be turning “seasoned liberals into reactionaries and peace-lovers into war-mongers.” One evening after midnight, on his way home from a meeting of the League of American Writers, Chevalier dropped by Oppenheimer’s home. Robert was still awake, working on a physics lecture. After Robert offered him a drink, Hoke explained that he needed his help in editing an antiwar pamphlet, sponsored by the League. Obliging his friend, Robert sat down and read the manuscript. When he had finished, he stood up and said, “It’s no good.” He told Hoke to sit before his typewriter and then he proceeded to dictate new language. An hour later, Hoke left with “a completely new text.”

Robert was not himself a member of the League of American Writers, so his editing of the pamphlet was simply a favor to his friend. As redrafted, the pamphlet made an impassioned argument for keeping America out of the European war. Robert may have similarly helped to write or edit two other pamphlets in February and April 1940, respectively. Both were titled
Report to Our Colleagues,
and were signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Their purpose was to explain the consequences of the war in Europe. More than a thousand copies were mailed to individuals at various universities on the West Coast.

According to Chevalier, Oppenheimer not only drafted the reports but also paid for their printing and distribution. Not surprisingly, their discovery—combined with Chevalier’s claim—has made them part of the debate as to whether or not Robert was a member of the CP.
⁷
Gordon Griffiths corroborates Chevalier’s assertion of Oppenheimer’s involvement with the production of these pamphlets. “They were printed on expensive bond, no doubt paid for by Oppie. He was not their sole author, but he took special pride in them. . . . Free of jargon, these letters were stylistically elegant and intellectually cogent.”

“The outbreak of war in Europe,” the pamphlet dated February 20, 1940, states, “has changed profoundly the course of our own political development. In the last month strange things have happened to the New Deal. We have seen it attacked, and
more and more surely
we have seen it abandoned. There is a growing discouragement of liberals with the movement for a democratic front and red-baiting has grown to a national sport. Reaction is mobilized.”

Chevalier, in an interview, insisted that the language here is distinctively Oppenheimer’s. “You can recognize his style. He has certain little mannerisms, using certain words. ‘More and more surely.’ That’s very characteristic of him. You wouldn’t ordinarily find use of ‘surely’ in such a context.” Chevalier’s claim is too thin a reed on which to rely for a positive identification of Oppenheimer as
the
author of the pamphlet, but it does suggest that Robert might have had a hand in editing a draft of it. While “more and more surely” does sound like Oppenheimer, much else in the pamphlet decidedly does not.

But what do these “reports” propose? More than anything else, a defense of the New Deal and its domestic social programs:

The Communist Party is being attacked for its support of the Soviet policy. But the total extermination of the Party here cannot reverse that policy: it can only silence some of the voices, some of the clearest voices, that oppose a war between the United States and Russia. What the attack can do directly, what it is meant to do, is to disrupt the democratic forces, to destroy unions in general and CIO unions in particular, to make possible the cutting of relief, to force abandonment of the great program of peace, security and work that is the basis of the movement toward a democratic front.

On April 6, 1940, the College Faculties Committee of the Communist Party of California issued another
Report to Our Colleagues.
Like the first pamphlet, this report carried no by-line. But again Chevalier insisted that Oppenheimer was among the pamphlet’s anonymous authors.

The elementary test of a good society is its ability to keep its members alive. It must make it possible for them to feed themselves and it must protect their persons from violent death. Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.

As in February, domestic issues are the focus of this report. The plight of the nation’s millions of unemployed is examined, and the decision of California and national Democrats to cut the budget for welfare relief is attacked. “The cutting of relief and the simultaneous increase in the budget for armaments are connected not only by arithmetic considerations. Roosevelt’s abandonment of the program for social reform, the attack, where once there had been support, on the labor movement, and the preparation for war, these are related and parallel developments.” From 1933 to 1939, the pamphlet observes, the Roosevelt Administration had “followed a policy of social reform.” But since August 1939, “not a single new measure of progressive purpose has been proposed . . . and the measures of the past have not even been defended against reactionary attack.” Where once the Roosevelt Administration had voiced its “disgust” for the antics of the House Un-American Activities Committee under Martin Dies, now it was “coddling” these reactionaries. Where once it had defended organized labor, civil liberties and the unemployed, now it was attacking labor leaders like John L. Lewis and pouring money into armaments.

Roosevelt himself, a man whom the pamphleteers once thought “something of a progressive,” had now become a “reactionary” and even a “war-monger.” This transformation has happened because of the war in Europe. “It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out.”

If Oppenheimer had anything to do with this second pamphlet, his rational style had abandoned him. Is it possible that he really thought of Roosevelt as a “war-monger”? The one reference to the president in Oppenheimer’s correspondence during this period suggests that he was disappointed with FDR, but hardly ready to denounce him.
⁸
If Oppenheimer had something to do with drafting these pamphlets, his words reveal someone primarily worried about the impact on domestic politics of a world teetering on the brink of a great disaster.

BY THE LATE 1930S, Oppenheimer was a senior professor with a fairly prominent public persona. He was giving speeches on political issues and signing public petitions. His name appeared on occasion in the local newspapers. San Francisco was then a fiercely polarized city; the longshoremen’s strikes in particular had hardened the political extremes on both the left and the right. And when the conservative backlash began, Oppenheimer was sensitive to the effect, or potential effect, of his political activities on the reputation of the university. Indeed, in the spring of 1941 he confided to his Caltech colleague Willie Fowler that “I may be out of a job . . . because UC is going to be investigated next week for radicalism and the story is that the committee members are no gentlemen and that they don’t like me.”