Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (107 page)

It was during this month, May 1952, that Teller gave his interviews to the FBI, telling them that he would do anything to get Oppenheimer off the GAC and handing them gossip that some people believed Oppenheimer to be taking his orders from Moscow. At the end of the month, Hoover sent transcripts of those interviews, together with transcripts of interviews with Pitzer and Libby, to the Justice Department, the White House and the AEC.

Oppenheimer, of course, knew what was afoot, and a meeting he had with David Griggs on 23 May shows how much the campaign against him was unsettling him. The origin of this meeting lay in a lunch Griggs had attended during the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. Over lunch, Griggs had met DuBridge and Rabi and expressed the view that the GAC was not doing enough to push through the accelerated H-bomb programme ordered by the President. Rabi told him that if he could read the minutes of the GAC meetings, he would see that this was not true and suggested that he ask Oppenheimer to show him the minutes.

So the next time he was in Princeton, which was 23 May, Griggs called on Oppenheimer. ‘I didn’t really expect that I would be allowed to read the minutes of the General Advisory Committee,’ Griggs later said, ‘and it turned out that this was not offered by Dr Oppenheimer.’ The two spoke for about an hour, during which Oppenheimer, referring in particular to the Princeton meeting of June 1951, attempted to convince Griggs that the GAC was fully committed to the H-bomb project. The conversation took a somewhat uncomfortable turn when Griggs moved on to the subject of a bit of tittle-tattle about Thomas Finletter. A story was going around that Finletter, at a meeting with the Secretary of Defense, had been heard to remark that if the US had a certain number of hydrogen bombs it could rule the world. Griggs was concerned about this story circulating, because it ‘suggested that we had irresponsible warmongers at the head of the Air Force at that time’. He therefore asked Oppenheimer if he himself had been spreading the story and, if so, what grounds he had for thinking it true. Oppenheimer replied that he had heard this story from an unimpeachable source and dismissed Griggs’s vehement insistence that it was false.

The discussion got even more tense when Oppenheimer asked Griggs if he thought he, Oppenheimer, was pro-Russian or just confused. ‘As near as I can recall’, Griggs said, ‘I responded that I wished I knew.’ Oppenheimer then asked Griggs whether he had impugned his loyalty to high officials in the Defense Department, ‘and I believe I responded simply, yes, or something like that’. The meeting ended with Oppenheimer calling Griggs a ‘paranoid’.

Four days later, Bethe went to see Griggs in order to lighten the increasingly tense atmosphere between the air force and some of America’s leading atomic scientists. Bethe later recalled that the occasion was surprisingly pleasant:

On all the issues that divided Griggs and Oppenheimer – the alleged need for a second weapons laboratory, the importance of strategic bombing, the hydrogen bomb, the value of openness versus the need for secrecy, and so on – Bethe’s sympathies were, in every case, with Oppenheimer, and yet Griggs clearly did not regard Bethe as a dangerous subversive, nor did he appear to dislike him. Why the difference?

The answer seems to be twofold. First, Griggs seems to have thought that Oppenheimer was not just – as, presumably, he believed Bethe to be – expressing a series of misguided opinions; rather, his opinions were part of a ‘pattern of behaviour’ (a phrase used often by Oppenheimer’s detractors at this time) that identified him as someone working actively against US interests. Second, on a personal level, Oppenheimer seems to have aroused in Griggs something close to hatred. Leona Libby, Willard Libby’s wife, describes their friend ‘Dave’ Griggs in glowing terms: ‘a pillar of honesty, a fine scientist, a strong servant of the military and of the weapons laboratories, very careful to think clearly, and devastatingly outspoken’. He was, she says, ‘strongly built, with blue eyes that could become very cold and fierce when he encountered bad science, hypocrisy, or other unpleasantness’. Recounting some of the details of Griggs’s testimony against Oppenheimer at the security hearing, Leona Libby writes: ‘I remember how his blue eyes blazed coldly when he felt strongly on an issue, as he surely did on this one.’

Though Oppenheimer, when he felt so inclined and the occasion
demanded it, was capable of charming almost anyone, he seemed to go out of his way during this period to antagonise and offend his political opponents. Having twice publicly humiliated Lewis Strauss, and having offended Griggs by calling him ‘paranoid’, Oppenheimer, a few weeks after this latter incident, seemed determined to antagonise one of the most powerful people in the US military establishment: Thomas Finletter. The occasion was a lunch that Finletter’s aides, William Burden and Garrison Norton, had arranged in the hope that meeting face-to-face would help Oppenheimer and Finletter overcome some of their disagreements. Griggs was also invited, and a few days before the meeting provided Finletter with an ‘eyes only’ memo, describing in detail his own recent encounter with Oppenheimer. The lunch was, one of its participants later recalled, one of the most uncomfortable events at which he had ever been present. Oppenheimer arrived late and was steadfastly unresponsive to any attempt to engage him in conversation. His manner seemed to suggest contempt for everyone in the room, and, as soon as the meal was over, he turned his back on his fellow diners and walked away. After Oppenheimer had gone, Finletter laughed and said to his aides: ‘I don’t think you fellows have convinced me I should feel any more positively about Dr Oppenheimer.’

Oppenheimer’s term as a member of the GAC was coming to an end in the summer of 1952. There is some uncertainty about whether he wanted to renew his position on the committee or whether, like Conant and DuBridge (whose membership of the GAC was also coming to an end), he was looking forward to freeing himself from the pressures and unpleasantness that surrounded US nuclear politics at this time. On 14 June 1952, Conant wrote in his diary with evident delight: ‘Lee DuBridge and I are through as members of the GAC!! 10½ years of almost continuous official conversations with a bad business now threatening to become really bad!!’ Two days earlier Oppenheimer had told Dean that he, too, would not be seeking reappointment after his term came to an end, but in his case there is no indication that he was delighted to leave.

On the contrary, there are signs that Oppenheimer’s resignation was forced upon him, or, at the very least, that it was made clear to him that he would not be reappointed even if he wished to be. By the time Oppenheimer told Dean he no longer wished to serve on the GAC there was a formidable campaign against his reappointment. In April 1952, Kenneth Pitzer had told the FBI that one of the reasons he alerted them to his suspicions about Oppenheimer was that, as an FBI memo puts it, ‘he is very much concerned about the above at the present time inasmuch as it is his opinion that J. Robert Oppenheimer is now “making a play” to be reappointed’. The following month, Willard Libby let it be known to the FBI that he, too, ‘believed it would be extremely wise not to reappoint Oppenheimer to the General Advisory Committee’. In the light of
these views, together with those of Teller, Strauss, Griggs, Finletter, Borden and others, Oppenheimer’s chances of being reappointed were extremely slim. Indeed, Brien McMahon told the FBI at the end of May that he ‘is personally going to talk to the President’, to tell him that he had ‘worked out a plan whereby Oppenheimer would take the initiative and decline to serve another term by an exchange of letters and everybody will be happy’.

The exchange of letters in question was read out at Oppenheimer’s security hearing. It included one from Gordon Dean to Oppenheimer, thanking him for his ‘magnificent’ contribution to ‘the Commission and the country’, and another, ostensibly from President Truman, but in fact drafted by Dean, expressing the President’s ‘deep sense of personal regret’ that Oppenheimer had chosen to step down from the GAC and his gratitude for the ‘lasting and immensely valuable contribution to the national security and to atomic energy progress in this Nation’ that Oppenheimer had made.

More surprising than Oppenheimer’s decision not to seek reappointment as a member of the GAC was his appointment by Dean on a one-year contract as a consultant to the AEC. Since this made it necessary to extend Oppenheimer’s security clearance for another year, it meant that the campaign by his many enemies to separate him from the military secrets of the US would continue. It is natural to assume that this appointment was part of the deal mentioned by McMahon to get Oppenheimer off the GAC. Whether this was so, or whether Oppenheimer was persuaded against his own inclinations to stay as a consultant, the fact that he accepted the position shows on his part a desire, or anyway a willingness, to stay in the line of fire and to keep on fighting a series of battles that, he surely knew by this time, he had no chance of winning.

Griggs, Strauss and others thought that the explanation for this willingness to continue the fight was that Oppenheimer was determined to maintain access to military secrets so that he could betray them to the Soviet Union. However, despite all the efforts of the FBI and Oppenheimer’s political enemies, not a shred of evidence for this suspicion emerged, unless, like Griggs and Strauss, one regards Oppenheimer’s political views and the advice he gave to government departments as evidence of disloyalty, in which case one has to explain why the many people who shared those views – Bethe, Rabi, Conant, DuBridge, and numerous others – were not also regarded as potential security risks. The explanation offered for this by many of Oppenheimer’s enemies is that he exerted some kind of mysterious control over these people in order to get them to accept obviously muddle-headed political opinions. The idea that men with the intellectual power and strength of character of Bethe, Conant and Rabi could possibly be controlled in this way is so ludicrous that one has to
regard this ‘explanation’ as a
reductio ad absurdum
of the whole view, and one is forced to offer a different explanation as to why Oppenheimer would subject himself to the constant attacks upon him that accompanied his involvement in political questions.

In the immediate post-war period that explanation might well have been the appeal of the prestige, glamour and intoxicating sense of importance that went with being on close terms with America’s political leaders – being able, for example, to call the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense by their first names. But by 1952, when Oppenheimer was disliked, or at the very least held in suspicion by nearly every person in high office in Washington, this explanation fails. Fortunately, another explanation is lying to hand, forcing itself upon one as the simple and obvious truth: Oppenheimer continued to act as a consultant to government projects, thereby exposing himself to all sorts of exhausting conflicts and crushing unpleasantness, precisely
because
of his love of, and loyalty to, his country. He did it for the same reason that he underwent the extreme rigours of leading Los Alamos: because he felt that it was, using the word that underpins the morality of the Bhagavad Gita, his
duty
to do it.

In July 1952, immediately after his decision to leave the GAC and to accept the one-year consultancy appointment, Oppenheimer was involved in a project that was regarded by David Griggs – as he emphasised in his 1954 testimony against Oppenheimer – as further evidence of his disloyalty, but which is much more naturally seen as an expression of his patriotism and his desire to see America well protected against the possibility of nuclear attack. That project was a summer school at the Lincoln Laboratory, organised by Jerrold Zacharias, the laboratory’s associate director.

The Lincoln Laboratory was then a fairly new establishment, having been set up as the result of a study, to which Oppenheimer had contributed, called ‘Project Charles’. The aim of Project Charles had been to investigate the feasibility of building an air-defence system to protect the United States against nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. The conclusion reached was that such a system
was
feasible, which led to the launch in 1951 of ‘Project Lincoln’, a huge programme, funded by the air force to the tune of $20 million, charged with the task of making such a system a reality. The Lincoln Laboratory, which was housed on the grounds of MIT and then on a purpose-built site about fifteen miles north-west of Boston, opened in September 1951 with Francis Wheeler Loomis as its first director. After a year – by which time the laboratory was employing more than 1,000 people – Loomis handed over to Albert G. Hill, who, like Loomis, had spent the war working on radar at MIT’s radiation laboratory.

Indeed, the reason the Lincoln Laboratory had originally been based at MIT was to make use of the considerable expertise on radar that had been developed there during the war by scientists such as Loomis, Hill and, most notably, Oppenheimer’s friend Isidor Rabi. For radar was at the very heart of the Lincoln Project, its guiding concept – soon to acquire the acronym SAGE (‘Semi-Automatic Ground Environment’) – being to build a network of radars designed to provide early warning of air attacks. The data from these radars would be tracked by a series of computers that would then be used to guide weapons to destroy the enemy aircraft before they were able to drop their bombs.

The idea of the summer school at the Lincoln Laboratory emerged from discussions that Jerrold Zacharias had with another friend of Oppenheimer’s, Charlie Lauritsen, in the spring of 1952. As Zacharias later recalled, he and Lauritsen were concerned about the ‘technical, military, and economic questions’ that arose from the programme of providing America with air defence against nuclear attack, and ‘decided that we should talk this over with certain others whom we knew very well’. First they talked to Albert Hill, who was then the associate director of Lincoln Laboratory, and then: ‘We decided we would talk it over with Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Rabi.’