Alamos in 1946. The Walker document revealed highly classified weapons-design information, including references to radiation implosion — the most important secret the United States protected. Walker mailed the document to Princeton for Wheeler to review.
Wheeler promptly lost it. He believed he lost it on the overnight train between Princeton and Washington, and Borden had the Pullman car thoroughly searched and even partly dismantled, but the envelope in which Wheeler had kept the document later turned up empty in his office in Princeton. Borden contrived to avoid allowing the AEC to see a copy of the lost document until the agency appealed to Hoover. When Eisenhower found out about the loss, he lined up the AEC commissioners like errant schoolboys and blasted them with a full measure of his considerable rage. They blamed the Joint Committee. Eisenhower suspected espionage, as did Nixon, who proposed that Borden and his entire staff be investigated. AEC attorney Harold Green writes that Eisenhower approached Bourke Hicken- looper and Sterling Cole and “demanded that the Joint Committee's staff be reorganized so that such a thing could not happen again.” Borden left the JCAE under a cloud in May 1953- “Borden's departure,” concludes Green, “was a direct consequence of [Eisenhower's] demand.” (“Borden is the most indiscreet person I ever met,” an AEC security official would characterize him. “He is a greenhorn in the business of atomic energy… He doesn't know anything about the subject of security.”)
Borden testified later that he had given “increasing consideration over a period of years” to his doubts about Robert Oppenheimer's loyalty. Before he left the JCAE, he had gone over Oppenheimer's security files once more, listing his questions in the form of investigative leads: “Why is no signed PSQ [i.e., personal security questionnaire] of Oppenheimer available in AEC files?” “What were Oppenheimer's activities in Germany [as a graduate student]?” “What were Oppenheimer's activities during the period 1939 to 1942?” His final list extended to some five hundred questions, which he hoped would serve to alert his successor to the Oppenheimer problem. He went off then to a backwoods retreat near the St. Lawrence River for a month's vacation, but his obsession with Oppenheimer persisted.
Borden was well aware of Strauss's suspicions that Oppenheimer might be a spy. At some point before he left Washington, the thirty-three-year-old lawyer had approached Strauss, hoping that Eisenhower's chief adviser on atomic energy would find his services useful, but Strauss had not offered support. Borden was scheduled to take up work in July as assistant to the manager of the atomic power division of Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, a position Admiral Hyman Rickover had arranged for him. Rickover and Strauss had feuded after Strauss had advised Eisenhower to cancel the Large Ship Reactor that Rickover was developing for aircraft carriers. Evidently these various complications coalesced for Borden, away on his retreat, into a vision of another “Inflammatory Document” like the letter he had written Brien McMahon in 1947 that had won him appointment to McMahon's staff. He told historian Gregg Herken many years later that he hoped as a result of his efforts to be “prosecutor at Oppenheimer's trial for treason.” He spoke to Strauss only once between the time he left Washington and the end of the year, but he evidently believed an indictment of Oppenheimer would win the AEC chairman's support, since Strauss would obviously have a strong voice in choosing who might prosecute Robert Oppenheimer if such a trial were held. In Pittsburgh in October, Borden “crystallized [his] thinking” and drafted a letter to Hoover.
The Rosenbergs were executed while Borden was vacationing in the backwoods; while he mulled over Oppenheimer's perfidy, the Soviet Union tested Joe 4. “I couldn't live with myself,” he wrote a colleague a few months later, “until I finally got this thing off my chest.” He got it off his chest on November 7, 1953, when he finished his letter of denunciation and sent it by regular mail to the FBI for Hoover. “More probably than not,” it argued at length, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Borden listed a number of “factors” that led him to this shocking conclusion, including Oppenheimer's contributions to the Communist Party during the 1930s and early 1940s; the fact that his wife, his younger brother and his “mistress” — Oppenheimer's former fiancee Jean Tatlock, with whom he had spent the night in Berkeley in 1943, after he became director of Los Alamos — had been Communists; his contradictory information about the Haakon Chevalier espionage contacts; and at length, his “tireless” work “to retard the United States H-bomb program.” Borden concluded:
1. Between 1929 and mid-1942, more probably than not, J. Robert Op-penheimer was a sufficiently hardened Communist that he either volunteered espionage information to the Soviets or complied with a request for such information. (This includes the possibility that when he singled out the weapons aspect of atomic development as his personal specialty, he was acting under Soviet instructions.)
2. More probably than not, he has since been functioning as an espionage agent; and
3. More probably than not, he has since acted under a Soviet directive in influencing United States military, atomic energy, intelligence and diplomatic policy.
Hoover had heard such charges before. “Many of them are distorted and restated in his own words,” the Bureau immediately evaluated them, “in order to make them appear more forceful than the true facts indicate.” To AEC commissioner Thomas Murray, Hoover appeared to be “a little at a loss as to why Borden wrote such a letter.” Even Strauss, when he learned of Borden's accusations at the end of November, decided to review the Chevalier episode before proceeding further. But when Charles Wilson, the Secretary of Defense, saw the FBI report reviewing Borden's letter on December 1, he was shocked. He wondered if Oppenheimer might be in collusion with John Wheeler (of the lost document) and wanted Oppenheimer's security clearance suspended. That evening Wilson called Eisenhower, the President noted in his diary:
Charlie Wilson states that he has a report from the FBI that carries the gravest implications that Dr. Robert Oppenheimer is a security risk of the worst kind. In fact, some of the accusers seem to go so far as to accuse him of having been an actual agent of the Communists…
The sad fact is that if this charge is true, we have a man who has been right in the middle of our whole atomic development from the very earliest days… Dr. Oppenheimer was, of course, one of the men who has strongly urged the giving of more atomic information to the world…
On December 3, Eisenhower ordered Attorney General Herbert Brownell “to place a blank wall between [Oppenheimer] and all areas of our government operations” and requested advice on “whether further action, prosecutive or otherwise,” should be taken. In his diary that day, the President noted that “the so-called ‘new’ charges… consist of nothing more than… a letter from a man named Borden,” that the letter presented “little new evidence” and that “this same information… has been constantly reviewed and reexamined over a number of years, and that the overall conclusion has always been that there is no evidence that implies disloyalty on the part of Dr. Oppenheimer,” which did not however mean “that he might not be a security risk.” If he were, Eisenhower feared the worst:
Actually, of course, the truth is that no matter now what could or should be done, if this man is really a disloyal citizen, then the damage he can do now as compared to what he has done in the past is like comparing a grain of sand to an ocean beach. It would not be a case of merely locking the stable door after the horse is gone; it would be more like trying to find a door for a burned-down stable.
Eisenhower had reason as well to fear what McCarthy might make of Borden's charges, and since Borden had sent a copy to the Joint Committee, the President could assume someone would leak the document to the Wisconsin senator or his chief counsel, Roy Cohn. Brownell had attacked the Truman administration as recently as November 6 for nominating Harry Dexter White to the International Monetary Fund after Elizabeth Bentley had accused White of espionage; in Oppenheimer, the new Eisenhower administration might have a traitor of its own in its midst.
The immediate problem was how to build Eisenhower's “blank wall.” Hoover hoped Oppenheimer could be eased out of government quietly: the FBI files contained “a lot of information which could not be publicly disclosed” (that is, information obtained illegally) and if the case went public Oppenheimer “might get some very clever lawyer and end up by becoming a martyr.” The FBI director and Brownell told Strauss “that it was all right to go ahead with the suspension of [Oppenheimer's security clearance] but not to send the notifications around.” Oppenheimer was in England at the time, delivering the BBC's Reith Lectures; Strauss and Hoover both feared that if he learned of Borden's charges and the suspension of his Q clearance, “then it was very possible he would depart for the Iron Curtain, which would be most embarrassing, or he might issue a statement and fly back and create quite a furor.” If
