Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (46 page)

This is not how Chevalier had originally wanted to describe the group. What he had wanted to write, he told Oppenheimer in a letter written in 1964, was the ‘story . . . of your and my membership in the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942’. As Oppenheimer had always denied Party membership, Chevalier’s letter naturally horrified him. ‘I have never been a member of the Communist Party,’ he replied, ‘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.’ In the light of this, Chevalier spoke in his book of the ‘discussion group’ mentioned above. To another member of this unit/discussion group, the union organiser, Lou Goldblatt, Chevalier wrote: ‘I had originally planned to reveal the fact that O. had been, from 1937 to 1943, a CP member,
^fn37
which I knew directly. On thinking it over, I decided that I shouldn’t, even though the fact is of considerable historical importance.’

That Chevalier was not alone in regarding this group as a secret Communist Party unit has become apparent in two documents that have recently been made public on the website associated with Gregg Herken’s book,
Brotherhood of the Bomb
. The first of these is an unpublished manuscript by Chevalier’s wife entitled ‘Robert Oppenheimer and Haakon Chevalier: from the memoirs of Barbara Chevalier’. After telling the story of how Oppenheimer read Marx on a train, Barbara Chevalier adds:
‘Shortly thereafter he and Haakon joined a secret unit of the Communist Party. There must have been 6 or 8 members – a doctor, a wealthy businessman (maybe).’ Later in the memoir she writes: ‘Oppie’s membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed.’

The gist of Barbara Chevalier’s account is confirmed in another unpublished document made available on the same website, ‘Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor’ by the Berkeley history professor Gordon Griffiths. Griffiths describes how, in 1939, when he returned to Berkeley after studying at Oxford, he wanted to resume membership of the US Communist Party, but his new wife, Mary, was worried about the idea. A compromise, suggested by the graduate mathematician and Communist Party member Kenneth May, was adopted whereby Griffiths ‘could perform a useful function for the Party that involved little or no risk of exposure’. That function was to liaise between the Party and what Griffiths describes as ‘the faculty Communist group’, the Berkeley members of which were Chevalier, Oppenheimer and the Icelandic scholar Arthur Brodeur. To those three names, Chevalier, in private correspondence, has added names from outside the Berkeley faculty: Thomas Addis of Stanford, Robert Muir of the California Labor Bureau, Lou Goldblatt and the anthropologist Paul Radin.
^fn38

This group, Griffiths writes, ‘met regularly, to the best of my recollection, twice a month, in the evening at Chevalier’s or Oppenheimer’s house’. Griffiths’s job was to deliver party literature to the group and collect membership dues from Chevalier and Brodeur. Presumably alluding to Oppenheimer’s arrangements with Addis, Griffiths writes: ‘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,’ Griffiths remembers. ‘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.’

In the light of this evidence, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret communist unit at Berkeley, very like the one that his brother had helped to set up in Pasadena. It is perfectly possible, however, to square that with Oppenheimer’s repeated denials that he was a member of the Communist Party, if one uses as the criteria of membership the payment of dues and the
possession of a membership card. The question of whether Oppenheimer was a communist or not is thus rather like the question of whether he was or was not a German Jew. He did not consider himself to be German, Jewish or communist, and yet, as those words are commonly used, he was ethnically a German Jew and politically a communist. One does not have to accuse either Oppenheimer or common usage of being
wrong
here; one just has to be careful in distinguishing the
sense
in which he was and was not German or Jewish or a communist.

And to say that Oppenheimer was indeed a member of a secret communist unit is not to lend any support to the notion that Oppenheimer was engaged in anything subversive. Not everything secret is subversive. According to Griffiths, this secret group did not do very much ‘that could not have been done as a group of liberals or Democrats’. They encouraged each other to support the Teachers’ Union and the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War and they discussed current events from a broadly Marxist point of view. ‘In short,’ Griffiths concludes, ‘there was nothing subversive or treasonable about our activity.’ It should not be imagined, for example, that this ‘secret unit’ of the Communist Party took its orders from the Soviet Union, or even from the American Communist Party. True, Griffiths collected dues and delivered party literature, but there was no acknowledgement on anybody’s part that the Party could tell these people what to do or what to think. When Chevalier was asked what made this unit a Communist Party group rather than ‘just a group of people who were Left’, he replied: ‘We paid dues.’ Asked whether they received any orders, he answered: ‘No. In a sense we weren’t [regular party members]’.

Oppenheimer’s silence about the ‘secret unit’ to which he belonged is impressively resolute and unyielding. Never once, in all his subsequent interviews, interrogations and cross-examinations – some of which were conducted by people trained at the highest level in the skills required to prise secrets out of people – did he even hint at its existence. But then, as he himself said: ‘Look, I have had a lot of secrets in my head a long time. It does not matter who I associate with. I don’t talk about those secrets.’ Not revealing things about himself was something he was extraordinarily good at.

Leaving Oppenheimer’s impressive silence about the ‘secret unit’ aside, there is nothing in what has been revealed about it that does not square with his own statements about his attitudes towards the Communist Party. He himself acknowledged that, because of the groups he joined, the people he was friends with and the financial contributions he made to the Party, he ‘might well have appeared at the time as quite close to the Communist Party – perhaps even to some people as belonging to it’. However, one has to remember, he emphasised, that it was quite common
in the 1930s for communists and non-communists to work together: ‘This was the era of what the Communists then called the United Front, in which they joined with many non-Communist groups in support of humanitarian objectives. Many of these objectives engaged my interest.’ But: ‘I never was a member of the Communist Party. I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me.’

When pressed to confirm that he knew ‘that Communists stood for certain doctrines, and certain philosophies and took certain positions’, Oppenheimer replied:

Clearly, it was important to Oppenheimer to distinguish these two kinds of convictions. He might share with the Communist Party views on the Spanish Civil War or the rise of fascism or the unionising rights of workers, but this did not mean that he shared, or even found comprehensible, the general, philosophical views that communists were supposed to hold, such as ‘dialectical materialism . . . the more or less determinate course of history and the importance of the class war’ (which were the three that Oppenheimer named in addition to the ones mentioned above).

Of course, this still leaves undecided Oppenheimer’s views on a range of issues associated with communism. Did he believe in the inevitable collapse of capitalism? Did he look forward to a revolution that would result in the dictatorship of the proletariat? I think the implied answer to these two questions – implied by the above quotations – is ‘no’. And neither, as far as I know, is there anything in Oppenheimer’s recorded utterances to suggest otherwise. What he did believe in, and is on record as arguing for, is
socialism
, which he thought was the natural outcome of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In a political tract, published under the auspices of the Communist Party of California, which Oppenheimer is reliably said (by Chevalier and Griffiths) to have written, he quotes with approval a statement about the New Deal: ‘once start such things and you are on the road to socialism; once worry about the food and work and life of your poor, and you can’t stop’. ‘We agreed with that,’ Oppenheimer writes: ‘we regarded it as an argument for the New Deal, not against it.’ ‘We tend to believe,’ he goes on, ‘that any consistent effort to raise the standard of living, to promote the culture and freedom and political responsibility of the people as a whole will lead to socialism.’

In regarding the Communist Party as an ally of the New Deal, Oppenheimer was very far from being alone. Indeed, this was
precisely
how the American Communist Party presented itself in the 1930s, as primarily an
American
party, rather than as an agent of the Comintern. In 1937, its internal structure was reorganised so that it looked more like traditional American political parties. Its leader, Earl Browder, in the words of Maurice Isserman, a historian of the party, ‘wanted to be a leader of a national movement with power and influence of its own’. Under Browder:

The slogan that Browder adopted for his party in the period 1936–9 could hardly have been more suited to a man of Oppenheimer’s political outlook: ‘Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.’

Isserman’s analysis of the effectiveness of this slogan on its target audience during the late 1930s rings very loud bells for anyone familiar with Oppenheimer’s background:

In his 1936 essay ‘What is Communism?’ Earl Browder responded to the question asked of communists by the editorials in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst – ‘If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?’ – with the following exuberantly patriotic rhetoric:

This, one feels, is an outlook with considerable appeal to the man who grew up with the sermons of Adler on the meaning of America and the importance of the ‘Americanisation’ of Jewish immigrants, and who lectured, among others, Felix Bloch, George Uhlenbeck and Alfred Stern on the virtues of his home country.

With regard to the Soviet Union, Oppenheimer later said, ‘the talk that I heard at that time had predisposed me to make much of the economic progress and general level of welfare in Russia, and little of its political tyranny’. But his views on that changed, first by reading about the show trials, and then, more decisively, in the summer of 1938, when three physicists whose opinions he respected – George Placzek, Victor Weisskopf and Marcel Schein – talked to him about their own experiences of Russia. Placzek, Weisskopf and Schein were all from Central European Jewish backgrounds; Placzek from Moravia, Weisskopf from Vienna, and Schein from Bohemia. They were also all first-rate physicists. As life for Jews became unbearable under Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, the United States was not the only country to realise that some of those Jews could make extremely valuable contributions to its universities. The Soviet Union also extended a helping hand to Jewish scientists, and succeeded in attracting Schein and Guido Beck to the University of Odessa, and then, through Beck, persuaded Placzek and Weisskopf to work with the Russian physicist Lev Landau at his new institute in Kharkov, near Kiev.