American Prometheus (86 page)
Strauss later portrayed himself as a man under siege, but in truth he knew he held the advantage. The FBI was feeding him daily summaries of Oppenheimer’s movements and conversations with his lawyers, thereby allowing him to anticipate all of Oppenheimer’s legal maneuvers. He knew Oppenheimer’s FBI file contained information that Oppenheimer’s lawyers would never see—because he was going to make sure that they were not given the necessary security clearance. Moreover, he was going to select the members of the hearing board. On January 16, Garrison requested a security clearance for himself and Herb Marks, and Strauss responded by denying a clearance for Marks, a former member of the AEC’s legal staff. Whether or not Garrison would have received his clearance in time to help him prepare the case is an open question. But he took the position that either the entire defense team should be cleared, or none, a decision he would soon regret, and try unsuccessfully to reverse.
Late in March, however, Garrison learned that the members of the hearing board were going to spend a full week studying raw FBI investigative files on Oppenheimer. Worse, Garrison learned to his dismay that the AEC’s “prosecuting” attorney would be present to help guide the board members through the derogatory items in the FBI file and answer their questions. Garrison had a “sinking feeling” that after a week’s immersion in the files, the board members would become prejudiced against his client. But when he asked for the same privilege, to be present during this weeklong briefing, he was flatly rebuffed. Simultaneously, Garrison tried to get an emergency security clearance for himself, so that he might at least read some of the same material. But Strauss told the Justice Department that “under no circumstances should we grant emergency clearance.” In Strauss’ view, neither Oppenheimer nor his lawyer had any of the “rights” afforded to a defendant in a court of law; this was an AEC Personnel Security Board Hearing, not a civil trial, and Strauss was going to be the arbiter of the rules.
Strauss was unfazed by the extraconstitutional nature of things he was doing to undermine Oppenheimer’s defense. He knew, but did not care, that the FBI wiretaps were illegal, telling one agent “that the Bureau’s technical coverage on Oppenheimer at Princeton had been most helpful to the AEC in that they were aware beforehand of the moves he was contemplating.” Such tactics so offended Harold Green that he told Strauss “that the case was not so much an inquiry as a prosecution and that he did not want to have anything to do with it.” He asked to be removed from the case.
One day, while visiting the Bachers in Washington, Robert made it clear to his hosts that he thought he was being monitored. “He’d come in the room,” recalled Jean Bacher, “and before he’d do anything else, he’d lift the pictures and look under them to see where the recording device was.” One night he took down a picture that was hanging on the wall and said, “There it is!” Bacher said the surveillance “terrified” Oppenheimer.
When an FBI agent in Newark suggested discontinuing the electronic surveillance on Oppenheimer’s home “in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney-client relations,” Hoover refused. The FBI’s surveillance, moreover, was not confined to Oppenheimer alone. When Kitty’s elderly parents, Franz and Kate Puening, returned by ship from a trip to Europe, the Bureau arranged to have their baggage thoroughly searched by U.S. Customs agents. They also photographed all the written material in the possession of the Puenings. Kitty’s father, who was confined to a wheelchair, and Mrs. Puening were so unnerved by the treatment that they had to be hospitalized.
Strauss elevated his scheme to end Oppenheimer’s influence on AEC affairs to a crusade for America’s future. He told the AEC’s general counsel, William Mitchell, that “if this case is lost, the atomic energy program . . . will fall into the hands of ‘left-wingers.’ If this occurs, it will mean another Pearl Harbor. . . . if Oppenheimer is cleared, then ‘anyone’ can be cleared regardless of the information against them.” With the country’s future at stake, Strauss reasoned, normal legal and ethical constraints could be ignored. Simply severing Oppenheimer’s formal link to the AEC as a contract consultant was insufficient. Unless the physicist’s reputation was smeared, Strauss feared that Oppenheimer would use his prestige to become a vocal critic of the Eisenhower Administration’s nuclear weapons policies. To foreclose that possibility, he proceeded to orchestrate a “star chamber” hearing guided by rules that would assure the elimination of Oppenheimer’s influence.
By the end of January, Strauss had selected Roger Robb, a forty-six-year-old native Washingtonian, to bring the case against Oppenheimer. With seven years of prosecutorial experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Robb had a well-deserved reputation as an aggressive trial lawyer with a flair for ferocious cross-examination. He had tried twenty-three murder cases and won convictions in most of them. In 1951, as the court-appointed attorney, he successfully defended Earl Browder against charges of contempt of Congress. (Browder called him a “reactionary” but praised his legal abilities.) Robb was politically conservative in every respect; his clients included Fulton Lewis, Jr., a vitriolic right-wing columnist and radio broadcaster. Over the years, he also had “cordial contacts” with the FBI and, Hoover was informed, always had been “entirely cooperative” with Bureau agents. On one occasion, Robb had taken the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the director by writing to congratulate him on his reply to the eminent civil libertarian Thomas Emerson, who had criticized the FBI in a
Yale Law Review
essay. It was no surprise, then, that Strauss was able to arrange a security clearance for Robb in just eight days.
As Robb prepared for the hearing in February and March, Strauss sent him information from his own notes from Oppenheimer’s file that Robb might use to impeach the testimony of potential defense witnesses. “When Dr. Bradbury testifies . . . When Dr. Rabi testifies . . . When General Groves testifies . . .” And in each instance, Strauss provided Robb with a document that he thought was sure to undermine what the witness might have to say in defense of Oppenheimer. In addition, and also at Strauss’ urging, the FBI provided Robb with its extensive investigative reports on Oppenheimer—including selective contents of the physicist’s trash from his Los Alamos residence.
Having chosen his prosecutor, Strauss now turned his attention to selecting the judges. He needed three men to serve on the AEC security review board and he sought candidates who could be counted on to be suspicious of Oppenheimer’s integrity once his left-wing past was revealed. By the end of February, he had settled on Gordon Gray to chair the board. Gray, who was then president of the University of North Carolina, had served as secretary of the Army in the Truman Administration. Strauss, an old friend, knew that Gray was a conservative Democrat who had voted for Eisenhower in the 1952 election. A Southern aristocrat whose family money came from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Gray had no idea what he was getting into. He seemed to think the assignment would last a couple of weeks and that Oppenheimer would be cleared. Unaware of the high stakes at issue, not to mention Strauss’ personal hostility to Oppenheimer, Gray naïvely suggested David Lilienthal as a prospective nominee to the security board. One can only imagine the look on Strauss’ face when he heard that suggestion.
In lieu of Lilienthal, Strauss selected another reliably conservative Democrat, Thomas Morgan, chairman of the Sperry Corporation. For the third member, Strauss chose a conservative Republican, Dr. Ward Evans, whose two major qualifications were his science background—he was a professor emeritus of chemistry at Loyola and Northwestern universities— and his unblemished record of voting to deny clearances on previous AEC hearing boards. Gray, Morgan and Evans shared an ignorance of Oppenheimer’s history as a fellow traveler, but they were sure to be shocked by what they would read in his security file. From Strauss’ point of view, they were the perfect empty vessels.
ONE DAY in January, by coincidence, James Reston, the New York Times’ bureau chief in Washington, boarded the flight that Oppenheimer was taking from Washington to New York City. They sat together and chatted, but afterwards Reston wrote in his notebook that Oppie seemed “unaccountably nervous in my presence and obviously under some strain.” Reston began making some phone calls around Washington, asking, “What’s wrong with Oppenheimer these days?” Soon the FBI wiretaps overheard Reston repeatedly trying to phone Oppie.
Oppenheimer was “highly irritated” that the suspension of his security clearance might soon become public knowledge. When he finally took one of Reston’s phone calls, Reston told him of the rumors he’d heard that his security clearance was suspended and that the AEC was investigating him. Moreover, he said this information had been passed to Senator McCarthy by someone in the government. When Oppenheimer said he didn’t feel that he could comment, Reston said he was on the verge of printing the story. Oppenheimer refused to comment but told him to talk with his lawyer. Reston saw Garrison in late January, and the two men came to an agreement. Knowing that the story would probably get out sooner or later, Garrison agreed to give Reston a copy of the AEC letter of charges and Oppenheimer’s prepared response. In return, Reston agreed not to print the story until it appeared that the news was about to break.
OPPENHEIMER’S PREPARATION for his defense became a grueling ordeal. Most days he sat in his Fuld Hall office with Garrison, Marks and other lawyers drafting his statement and discussing fine points of the case. Each evening at five o’clock, he would leave and walk across the field to Olden Manor; often the lawyers would follow him home, where they would work late into the evening. “They were very intense days,” his secretary recalled. Robert, however, seemed almost serene. “He looked as though he were holding up very well indeed,” Verna Hobson said. “He had that fantastic stamina that people often have who have recovered from tuberculosis. Although he was incredibly skinny, he was incredibly tough.” It was now well into February and Hobson, a loyal and highly circumspect secretary, had still not told her husband what was going on. It made her feel uncomfortable, so one day she asked Robert, “May I have your permission to tell Wilder what the trouble is?” Oppenheimer looked at her in astonishment and said, “I thought you had done so a long time ago.”
Oppenheimer worked “incredibly hard” on his letter in response to the AEC’s charges. Hobson recalled that it went through “draft after draft after draft, a painful attempt to be as clear and true as possible. I can’t think how many hours he put into that.” Sitting in his leather swivel chair, he would think in silence for a few minutes, jot a few notes, then rise and start dictating as he paced the office. “He could dictate in rounded sentences and paragraphs for an hour straight,” Hobson said. “And just when your wrist was about to give way, he would say, ‘Let us take a ten-minute break.’ ” And then he would come back and dictate for another hour. Robert’s other secretary, Kay Russell, typed Hobson’s shorthand in triple-space. Robert would review it and after Kay had retyped it, Kitty would edit it. Finally, Robert would go over all the changes once more.
If Robert was working hard to defend himself, he did so almost fatalistically. Late that January, he traveled to Rochester, New York, to attend a major physics conference. All the familiar faces were there, including Teller, Fermi and Bethe. In public, Robert gave no hint of his impending ordeal, but he confided in Bethe, who clearly saw that his old friend was in “distress.” Oppie confessed to Bethe his conviction that he was going to lose. Teller already had heard of Oppenheimer’s suspension and so walked up to him during a break in the conference and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your trouble.” Robert asked Teller if he thought there was anything “sinister” in what he (Oppenheimer) had done over the years. When Teller said no, Robert coolly suggested that he would be grateful if Teller would talk to his lawyers.
On his next visit to New York City, Teller saw Garrison and explained that, while he thought Oppenheimer had been terribly wrong about many things, in particular the H-bomb decision, he did not doubt his patriotism. Garrison sensed, however, that his feelings toward Oppenheimer were not warm: “He expressed a lack of confidence in Robert’s wisdom and judgment and for that reason felt that the government would be better off without him. His feelings on this subject and his dislike of Robert were so intense that I finally concluded not to call him as a witness.”
Robert had not been in touch with his brother for some time. Frank had intended to come East that winter, but work on the ranch forced a postponement. Early in February 1954, the two brothers talked on the phone and Robert revealed that he was in “considerable trouble.” He hoped they could meet soon, he said, because since returning from Europe he had tried, but was unable, to compose a letter that would “adequately discuss his problem.”
To his friends, Robert seemed distracted and inexplicably passive. One day, while listening to the lawyers talk about legal strategy, Verna Hobson lost her patience and began to push Robert. “I thought Robert was not fighting hard enough,” she recalled. “I thought Lloyd Garrison was being too gentlemanly, I was angry. I thought we should go out and fight.”
Hobson was often privy to the lawyers’ discussions, and as far as she could determine, they were not helping their client. “It seemed to me that the whole story was such an obvious piece of nonsense,” she said. Robert’s critics in Washington “were not open to sweet reason, and whoever was doing this must be using it as a tool and the thing to do was push back, kick back, attack.” Hobson was “too scared” to say what she thought before the whole group of lawyers, “but I kept muttering it at him.” Finally, Oppenheimer took her aside and, as they stood on the back steps of Olden Manor, he said very gently, “Verna, I really am fighting just as hard as I know how and what seems to me to be the best way.”
Hobson was not the only one who thought Garrison was not aggressive enough. Kitty, too, was unhappy with the direction the legal team was taking her husband. Kitty was a fighter. Twenty years had passed since as a young woman she had stood outside factory gates in Youngstown, Ohio, passing out communist literature. Now, perhaps for the first time since, this ordeal would require all her energy, tenacity and intelligence. Her past life, after all, was part of the indictment against her husband. She, too, would probably have to testify. It would be an ordeal for her as well as for him.
