Read Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer Online
Authors: Ray Monk
Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (116 page)
The rest of the article is taken up mostly with the testimony of the anti-Oppenheimer witnesses, such as Alvarez, Griggs, Latimer and Teller, and it ends with an account of Robb’s cross-examination of the banker John McCloy. It concludes: ‘The majority of Gordon Gray’s security committee wound up feeling about Oppenheimer the way McCloy felt about Roger Robb’s hypothetical bank manager.’
On 7 July, Chevalier wrote to Oppenheimer:
Dear Robert,
I have been shattered by the revelations in the June 28th issue of
Time
Magazine.
I need not tell you what this means to me – the light it casts on the past, the implications for the present and the future.
Before making any decisions, which must in the nature of the case be irrevocable, I would like to hear directly what you have to say. And I suspend, as best I can, any final judgment. But I must hear soon.
Haakon
Oppenheimer’s reply was dated 12 July, and read:
Dear Haakon,
Your letter of July 7th has just come. In answer I am sending to you by airmail today a set of documents. These will tell you all that I have to tell.
These documents are public, and they are the whole of the public record. Some I made public myself: General Nichols’s letter of December 23rd, my answer of March 4th, the report of the Gray Board, and the letters and arguments of counsel. The transcript was made public by the Atomic Energy Commission. There are substantial deletions. These have mostly to do with military or technical matters.
With every good wish,
Robert Oppenheimer
When Chevalier read the whole transcript, he was struck by how unfamiliar the Oppenheimer that emerged from the hearings seemed: ‘This was not the Oppenheimer I knew.’
The Oppenheimer I knew was brilliant, incisive, measured, resourceful, imaginative, challenging, always in command of the situation, and everything he said had the unmistakable stamp of his personality. The Oppenheimer of the
Transcript
is completely depersonalized . . . Not once in the course of the whole three-week hearing does he come out with a statement that reflects his inner self – his ideals, his purpose, his sense of destiny.
On 27 July, Chevalier wrote again to Oppenheimer, ‘hoping – without believing – that in a burst of confidence he might reveal something that would in some measure justify the inexplicable violation of friendship’. After telling Oppenheimer that the documents he had received failed to explain what he felt needed explaining, Chevalier went on:
For the subjective observer – myself – the picture is this: I have regarded you as my very dear friend for upward of 15 years. I have loved you as I have loved no other man. I placed in you an absolute trust. I would have defended you to the death against malice or slander. Now I learn that eleven years ago, according to your own admission, you wove an elaborate fabric of lies about me of the most gravely compromising nature. During all these years you continued to show me the signs of an unaltered friendship. In 1948, after my interview with the FBI, I told you, in the garden on Eagle Hill, of my being grilled about those three scientists I was supposed to have approached. You gave me no indication that you knew of what was involved.
During all these years that story, without my knowing it, has hounded me, plagued and blocked me and played untold havoc with my career and my life. With what today looks like the most consummate cynicism, you wrote me on February 24th 1950, ‘As you know, I have been deeply disturbed by the threat to your career which these ugly stories could constitute’ – referring to stories that were as fairy tales compared to the ones you had already put into the record seven years before.
. . . I do not subscribe to the naïveté theory, nor to the ‘idiocy’ theory. I believe that that story, and the consciousness of it that you have carried about with you for eleven years, and your awareness of what it was doing to me, represent for you something rational and coherent, that hangs together and makes sense, and that you can explain and perhaps in a measure justify.
Before I finally make up my mind about the several matters involved in all this I am asking you, as perhaps the last act of
friendship, to explain what the mind conceived and to what the heart consented.
It seems somehow typical of the nightmare in which Chevalier now found himself that this deeply personal letter, crying out for an intimate, emotional response, should have been opened and read not by Oppenheimer himself, but by his secretary, Katharine Russell, who, after making several copies of it, sent it to Lloyd Garrison, who in turn wrote to Chevalier explaining that Oppenheimer and his family were away on the Virgin Islands, ‘on a desperately needed rest’. ‘I appreciate the fact that it calls for a personal response by Dr Oppenheimer,’ Garrison told Chevalier, but ‘I am taking the liberty of referring you to a few passages from them [the transcripts] which you may not have noticed and which seem relevant to the subject-matter of your letter.’ Copies of the letter were sent to Herb Marks, Katharine Russell and Oppenheimer himself, to whom Garrison wrote that he hoped ‘that this might suffice to hold the fort until you get back’.
On 5 August, Chevalier replied to Garrison, telling him: ‘There is much in this whole case that is strange and baffling.’
One extraordinary thing about this case is that, since I seem to occupy such an important role in it, no one has seen fit to ask me to contribute my two-bits’ worth. It is, to me, a striking weakness in your defense of Oppenheimer as his attorneys that you made no attempt to use me as an asset rather than a liability, and throughout the hearings allowed me and my name to hover somewhere backstage as a vague and disreputable ghost.
. . . All the passages in the record that you refer to I had read. I have, in fact, gone through it quite thoroughly. But I am afraid neither you, nor the Board, nor the Commission, went into me quite thoroughly enough.
On 3 September 1954, Chevalier finally had a response from Oppenheimer himself to the letter he had sent on 27 July. The response was, however, rather disappointing. ‘It is not nearly as clear to me as it appears to be to you,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘how much, in the past, at present, or in the future the shadow of my cock and bull story lies over you.’ ‘In December of 1943, when I first mentioned your name I thought the story dismissed. I had supposed that for a long time it had been recognised for the fabrication that it was.’
‘This letter,’ Chevalier writes in his memoir, ‘seems to have been his final word.’ He did not reply directly to it. Rather, having decided that ‘I must make my side of the story public,’ Chevalier chose instead to write
an open letter to Oppenheimer to be published in the
Nation
. He sent the piece to the magazine on 26 September, but two months later it remained unpublished. The French magazine
France-observateur
was more enthusiastic and published it on 2 December with a headline on its front cover announcing: ‘Un document exclusif: Robert Oppenheimer pourquoi avez-vous menti? par Haakon Chevalier.’
fn70
Having thus been scooped, the
Nation
declined to publish the letter.
Worried that Oppenheimer would thus read his open letter ‘in a truncated and perhaps distorted form’, Chevalier wrote to Oppenheimer on 13 December, telling him:
I have no doubts about your intentions. But the effect of your words and acts has been incalculably disastrous (whether it is clear to you or not) both to me and to yourself. You have, I hope, found out how hard it is to untell a lie.
. . . This is not a trivial mistake, a casual error of judgment. It is something weighty, monstrous and calamitous borne in knowledge and conscience for years, during which time it was breeding its poisonous mischief.
‘Do what we may,’ Chevalier told Oppenheimer, ‘by your unfathomable folly, you and I are linked together in a cloudy legend, which nothing, no fact, no explanation, no truth will ever unmake or unravel.’ He also warned Oppenheimer that he was hard at work on a novel designed to resolve the worries and problems Oppenheimer had caused him: ‘I hope to finish it in the spring. It is entitled
The Man Who Would be God
.’
Oppenheimer did not reply to this letter and spent the rest of his life determined to free himself from the ‘cloudy legend’ to which Chevalier continued to feel inextricably linked. He did not speak to or about Chevalier again and, both privately and publicly, said as little as he could about the security hearing that had attached so much importance to that legend.
Meanwhile, the world at large continued to be fascinated by the ‘Oppenheimer case’ and everything associated with it.
Life
magazine on 6 September 1954 carried a long profile of Edward Teller, heralded on the front cover with the words: ‘Dr Teller who stood up to Oppenheimer and achieved H-Bomb for US’. Inside the story was headed ‘Dr Edward Teller’s Magnificent Obsession’, and portrayed Teller as the man without whom the H-bomb would never have been made. ‘In that event,’ it said, quoting Eisenhower, ‘Soviet power would today be on the march in every
quarter of the globe.’ The article devoted several paragraphs to Teller’s testimony against Oppenheimer, representing it as something that Teller did with a heavy heart, but felt obliged to do because of his loyalty to the US.
As was made clear on the first page of the article, it was based largely on a book that came out at about the same time called
The Hydrogen Bomb
, written by two Time-Life reporters called James Shepley and Clay Blair. ‘This book,’ said Gordon Dean, reviewing it for the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, ‘is in one sense a sort of “Valentine” presented to Dr Edward Teller – but it has blood stains upon it – the blood of Dr Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, the entire staff of that laboratory, Dr Oppenheimer, and many others.’ What Shepley and Blair presented was the story of the hydrogen bomb as seen by Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, a story of noble persistence triumphing – for the good of the United States and the entire Free World – over perverse, and possibly sinister, prevarication. ‘These two boys have done a serious disservice,’ thundered Dean. ‘Their book may very well do what the Communists would love to do – undermine the atomic energy program of this country.’ Isidor Rabi, meanwhile, dismissed the book as ‘a sophomoric science-fiction tale, to be taken seriously only by a psychiatrist’.
In the October 1954 edition of
Harper’s Magazine
appeared an article by Joseph and Stewart Alsop that was a kind of mirror-image of the Shepley/Blair book, presenting the Oppenheimer case as a struggle between good and evil, but this time Oppenheimer was the hero and Strauss the villain. In an echo of Emile Zola’s famous article, ‘J’Accuse’, published in 1898 in defence of the wrongfully condemned Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfuss, the Alsops called their essay ‘We Accuse!’
We accuse the Atomic Energy Commission in particular, and the American government in general, of a shocking miscarriage of justice in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
We accuse Oppenheimer’s chief judge, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Admiral Lewis Strauss and certain of Oppenheimer’s accusers, of venting the bitterness of old disputes through the security system of this country.
And we accuse the security system itself as being subject to this kind of ugliness, and as inherently repugnant in its present standards and procedures to every high tradition of the American past.
Both the Shepley/Blair book and the Alsops’ article gave rise to heated controversies that kept the Oppenheimer case in the newspapers and magazines of both the US and the world beyond it for the next few years.
One person who showed no inclination whatever to take part in those
controversies was Oppenheimer himself. When, immediately after the AEC announced its decision, he was asked for his reaction, he gave a studiedly bland answer that would remain his final word on the subject for many years:
Dr Henry D. Smyth’s fair and considered statement, made with full knowledge of the facts, says what needs to be said. Without commenting on the security system which has brought all this about, I do have a further word to say. Our country is fortunate in its scientists, in their high skill, and their devotion. I know that they will work faithfully to preserve and strengthen this country. I hope that the fruit of their work will be used with humanity, with wisdom and with courage. I know that their counsel when sought will be given honestly and freely. I hope it will be heard.
To another reporter shortly afterwards Oppenheimer said that he was looking forward to returning to a ‘cloistered life’.
If Strauss had had his way, the ‘cloistered life’ of the Institute for Advanced Study would have been closed to Oppenheimer. In July 1954, Strauss told an FBI agent that he and the Board of Trustees had decided to delay a decision about Oppenheimer’s position as director of the institute until the autumn, since, if Oppenheimer were to be asked to resign straight away, it would look like ‘a direct result of personal vindictiveness’ on Strauss’s part. When the Board met in October, however, it was clear to Strauss that there was so much support for Oppenheimer among the Trustees there was no point pushing for his resignation. He therefore switched tactics and, with a show of ‘magnanimity’, urged the Board to reappoint Oppenheimer, which they did.
‘So far as I was concerned,’ Freeman Dyson has written, Oppenheimer ‘was a better director after his public humiliation than he had been before. He spent less time in Washington and more time at the institute . . . He was able to get back to doing what he liked best – reading, thinking and talking about physics.’ Dyson is here choosing his words carefully: Oppenheimer got back to reading, thinking and talking about physics, but not to
writing
it. He wrote a lot of popular lectures on physics during these years, but he did not return to being an active research physicist. Back in the summer of 1952, he had written to Frank: ‘Physics is complicated and wondersome, and much too hard for me except as a spectator; it will have to get easy again one of these days, but perhaps not soon.’
