American Prometheus (27 page)

“The University of California was an obvious target,” observed Martin D. Kamen, a former graduate. “And Oppenheimer was very prominent because he was quite vocal and active. He would occasionally get somewhat alarmed about what was happening, and maybe he’d have to draw his horns in and he would become quiet. Then when something happened to provoke him . . . he became active. So he wasn’t consistent.”

In contrast to Chevalier’s assertions about Oppenheimer’s communist sympathies in 1940, other friends saw Oppie becoming disillusioned with the Soviet Union. By 1938, American newspapers regularly reported on the wave of political terror orchestrated by Stalin against thousands of alleged traitors within the Soviet Communist Party. “I read about the purge trials, though not in full detail,” Robert wrote in 1954, “and could never find a view of them which was not damning to the Soviet system.” While his friend Chevalier gladly signed a statement in the April 28, 1938,
Daily
Worker
commending the Moscow trial verdicts against Trotskyite and Bukharinite “traitors,” Oppenheimer never defended Stalin’s deadly purges.

In the summer of 1938 two physicists who had spent several months in the Soviet Union—George Placzek and Victor Weisskopf—visited Oppie at his ranch in New Mexico. Over the next week, they had several long conversations about what was taking place there. “Russia is not what you think it is,” they told an initially “skeptical” Oppenheimer. They talked about the case of Alex Weissberg, an Austrian engineer and communist who was suddenly arrested merely for associating with Placzek and Weisskopf. “It was an absolutely scary experience,” Weisskopf said, “We called up our friends, and they said they didn’t know us.” Weisskopf told his friend, “It’s worse than you can imagine. It’s a morass.” Oppie asked probing questions that showed how disturbed he was by their reports.

Sixteen years later, in 1954, Oppenheimer explained to his interrogators, “What they reported seemed to me so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that it made a great impression; and it presented Russia, even when seen from their limited experience, as a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people.”

There seemed no reason, however, why news of Stalin’s abuses should cause him to alter his principles or renounce his sympathies with the American left. It was clear, as Weisskopf remembered, that Oppie “still believed to a great extent in communism.” Oppie trusted Weisskopf. “He really had a deep attachment to me,” the latter recalled, “which I found very touching.” Robert knew that Weisskopf, an Austrian social democrat, was not saying these things out of any antipathy for the left. “We were very much convinced—both sides—that socialism was the desirable development.”

Nevertheless, Weisskopf thought that this was the first time Oppenheimer was really shaken. “I know that these conversations had a very deep influence on Robert,” he said. “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.” Weisskopf insists that Oppie “saw the Hitler danger very clearly. . . . And in 1939, Oppenheimer was already very far from the Communist group.”

Shortly after hearing from Weisskopf and Placzek, Oppenheimer expressed his concerns to Edith Arnstein, Jean Tatlock’s old friend: “Opje said he came to me because he knew I would not be shaken in my political loyalties, and he needed to talk.” He explained that he had heard from Weisskopf about the arrest of various Soviet physicists. He said he was reluctant to believe the report but neither could he dismiss it. “He was depressed and agitated,” Arnstein later wrote, “and I suppose now I know how he was feeling, but then I was scornful of what I saw as his gullibility.”

That autumn some friends noticed that he was no longer as loquacious about his political views, although privately he engaged his close friends in political discussions. “Opje is fine and sends you his greetings,” wrote Felix Bloch to I. I. Rabi in November 1938. “[H]onestly, I don’t think you wore him out but at least he does not praise Russia too loudly any more which is already some progress.”

WHATEVER THE STATE OF his associations with Communist Party members, Oppenheimer had always been enamored of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His friends saw him as an ardent Roosevelt supporter. Ernest Lawrence recalled being lobbied vigorously by his friend in the days just prior to the 1940 presidential election. Oppie was incredulous that his old friend was undecided. That evening he presented such a passionate defense of Roosevelt’s campaign for a third term that Lawrence finally promised to cast another vote for FDR.

Oppenheimer’s political views continued to evolve, in reaction chiefly to the disastrous war news. In the late spring and early summer of 1940, Oppie was clearly distressed by the collapse of France. That summer, Hans Bethe encountered him at a conference of the American Physical Society in Seattle. Bethe had an inkling of Oppenheimer’s political loyalties, so he was struck one evening when his friend gave a “beautifully eloquent speech” about how the fall of Paris to the Nazis threatened all of Western civilization. “We have to defend Western values against the Nazis,” Bethe recalled Oppenheimer saying. “And because of the Molotov–von Ribbentrop pact we can have no truck with the Communists.” Years later, Bethe told the physicist-historian Jeremy Bernstein: “He had sympathies to the far left, mostly, I believe, on humanitarian grounds. The Hitler-Stalin pact had confused most people with Communist sympathies into staying completely aloof from the war against Germany until the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941. But Oppenheimer was so deeply impressed by the fall of France [a year before the invasion of Russia] that this displaced everything else in his mind.”

ON SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 1941, the Chevaliers were driving back from a picnic at the beach with Oppenheimer when they heard the news over the radio that the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. That evening, everyone stayed up late listening to the latest news bulletins, trying to make sense of what had happened. Chevalier recalled Oppie saying that Hitler had committed a major blunder. By turning against the Soviet Union, Oppenheimer argued, Hitler had “destroyed at one stroke the dangerous fiction, so prevalent in liberal and political circles, that fascism and communism were but two different versions of the same totalitarian philosophy.” Now communists everywhere would be welcomed as allies of the Western democracies. And that was a development both men thought was long overdue.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the country was suddenly at war. “Our little group in Berkeley,” Chevalier recalled, “inevitably reflected the country’s changing mood.” Chevalier said the group “continued to meet irregularly”—though Oppenheimer himself rarely attended, owing to his busy travel schedule. “When we did meet,” Chevalier wrote, “our business was largely confined to discussing the progress of the war and events on the home front.”

Chevalier always insisted that Oppenheimer, the man he considered his closest friend, shared his own leftist political views right up to the moment Oppenheimer left Berkeley in the spring of 1943: “[W]e shared the ideal of a socialist society . . . there was never any wavering, any weakening of his position. He was firm as a rock.” But Chevalier was clear that Oppenheimer was not an ideologue. “There was no blindness in him, no narrow partisanship, no automatic hewing to a line.”

CHEVALIER’S DESCRIPTION of Oppenheimer essentially presented a left-wing intellectual not under Party discipline. But over the years, as he turned to writing about his friendship with Oppie, Chevalier tried to suggest something else. In 1948, he produced the outline of a novel in which the protagonist, a brilliant physicist working to build an atomic bomb, is also the de facto leader of a “closed unit” of the Communist Party. In 1950, Chevalier set aside the partially written manuscript after he was unable to find a publisher for it. But in 1954, after the Oppenheimer security hearing, he returned to the novel, and in 1959 G. P. Putnam’s Sons published it under the ponderous title
The Man Who Would Be God.

In the novel, the Oppenheimer character, one Sebastian Bloch, decides to join the Communist Party—but to his surprise, the local CP leader refuses to let him formally join. “Sebastian would meet with the unit regularly, and in every way act as though he were a bona fide member, and the other members would so regard him; but he would pay no dues—he could make his own financial arrangements with the party, but outside the unit.” Later in the novel, Chevalier describes the weekly meetings of this closed party unit as “informal seminars of the kind that were constantly being held on all sorts of subjects among professors and students on the campus.” The members discuss “ideas and theory,” current events, the “activity of this or that member of the Teachers’ Union,” and “support to be given to a labor union campaign, a strike, an individual or group under attack on a civil liberties issue.” In response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in November 1939, Chevalier has the Oppenheimer alter ego propose that the party unit publish essays that would explain the international situation “in language palatable to cultivated, critical minds.” The Oppenheimer character pays for the printing and postage costs and does most of the writing himself. “It was his baby,” writes the novelist. “A number of these ‘Reports to the Faculty’ appeared over the next few months.”

This thinly disguised roman à clef did not sell well, and Chevalier was unhappy with the reviews.
Time
magazine’s reviewer, for instance, thought the “novel’s underlying tone suggests an ex-worshipper stomping on a fallen idol.” But Chevalier could not let the matter drop. In the summer of 1964, he wrote Oppenheimer to say that he had nearly finished writing a memoir about their friendship. He explained, “I tried to tell the essential story in my novel. But readers in America were disturbed by the blend of truth and fiction, and it has become clear to me that for the record I have to tell the story straight. . . . an important part of the story concerns your and my membership in the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942. I should like to deal with this in its proper perspective, telling the facts as I remember them. As this is one of the things in your life which, in my opinion, you have least to be ashamed of, and as your commitment, attested among other things by your ‘Reports to Our Colleagues,’ which today make impressive reading, was a deep and genuine one, I consider that it would be a grave omission not to give it its due prominence.” Chevalier then asked whether Oppenheimer would have any objections to the telling of this story.

Two weeks later, Oppenheimer wrote back a terse note:

Your letter asks whether I would have any objections. Indeed I do. What you say of yourself I find surprising. Surely in one respect what you say of me is not true. I have never been a member of the Communist Party, and thus have never been a member of a Communist Party unit. I, of course, have always known this. I thought you did too. I have said so officially time and time again. I said so publicly in response to what Crouch said in 1950. I said so in the AEC hearings ten years ago.

As ever,
Robert Oppenheimer

Chevalier reasonably concluded that Oppenheimer’s denial also meant to warn him that he could face a libel suit if he wrote that Oppenheimer had joined the Communist Party. So the following year, he published
Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship
without the bald allegation. Instead, throughout the book, the alleged CP “closed unit” is described merely as a “discussion group.”

Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he had been compelled to write this book because “history, though coy, needs truth to be her handmaiden.” But in this case, the “truth” lies in each man’s perception. Were all members of the Berkeley “discussion group” also members of the CP? Apparently, Chevalier believed they were; Oppenheimer insisted that he, at least, was not. He would fund specific causes through the CP—the Spanish Republic, farm workers, civil rights and consumer protection. He would attend meetings, offer his advice and even help the Party’s intellectuals write position papers. But he did not have a Party card, he did not pay dues, he was totally free of Party discipline. His friends might have had reasons to think he was a comrade, but it was clear to him that he was not.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr—two historians of American Communism—have written that “to be a Communist was to be part of a rigid mental world tightly sealed from outside influences. . . .” This certainly does not describe Robert Oppenheimer at any time. He was reading Marx, but he was also reading the Bhagavad-Gita, Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud—and, in those years, the last was grounds for expulsion from the Party. In short, Oppenheimer never entered into that peculiar social contract expected of Party members.

Robert was probably closer to the party in the 1930s than he later admitted, or even remembered, but he was not nearly as close to it as his friend Haakon believed. This is neither surprising nor deceitful. The so-called “secret units” of the Party—the sort of association that Oppenheimer is alleged to have had—were organizations without formal rosters or established rules and with little, if any, regimentation, as Chevalier explained to Martin Sherwin. For obvious organizational reasons, the Party chose to see those individuals associated with “secret units” as having made substantial personal commitments. On the other hand, each “committed” member could set the limits of his commitment, and that commitment could change over time, even very short periods of time, as it did, for instance, with Jean Tatlock.

Chevalier seemed always to be committed to the Party, and in those days when he and Robert were close friends, it is not surprising that he considered Robert equally committed. Perhaps for a time he was, but we do not, and we cannot, know the extent of his commitment. But what we can say with confidence is that Robert’s period of high commitment was short and did not last.

The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices. Commitments have to be put in perspective to be understood, and the failure to do that was the most damaging characteristic of the McCarthy period. The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.