the accused himself could not be notified, Strauss felt no compunction at briefing Teller the same day Eisenhower ordered up his blank wall. “Strauss told me with real fervor of his hope that the President's decision would be reversed or at least modified,” Teller writes. “He foresaw disastrous consequences should Oppenheimer's clearance be called into question.” Eisenhower's National Security Adviser, Robert Cutler, actually proposed an appeal to the presumptive traitor's patriotism: “If you love your country enough, you will accept this situation and not plunge our world and our national secrets into a bitter, dirty fight.”
The solution that Strauss finally came to (after seeking “divine guidance,” his general counsel would recall) was to follow AEC security procedures: bring a formal list of charges, offer Oppenheimer the choice of resigning or requesting a security hearing and hope he chose to resign. The AEC general counsel, William Mitchell, set to work drafting the charges on Thursday, December 10. Two AEC members — Eugene Zuckert and Henry Smyth — criticized an early draft Mitchell prepared for questioning Oppenheimer's H-bomb advice. Without the H-bomb issue, Mitchell could find nothing in Oppenheimer's FBI files that had not already been reviewed and cleared in 1947 — by Lewis Strauss, among others. In some desperation, on Friday afternoon, the AEC counsel called in his young assistant Harold Green, swore him to secrecy and asked him to take over the work, cautioning him that the commissioners wanted to avoid including charges related to the H-bomb controversy, since dissenting on policy was not a crime.
Saturday morning, Green got to work. Oppenheimer's files surprised and shocked him. So did Kenneth Nichols, now the AEC general manager, when Nichols called the young attorney into his office twice that day to attack Oppenheimer and gloat that they had caught the “slippery sonuvabitch” at last; Nichols would sit in supposedly impartial judgment of Oppenheimer if a security board heard the case. By Sunday noon, Green had a list of thirty-one charges. He called Mitchell, who agreed to meet him at two that afternoon. Green thought over the H-bomb issue while he waited. Secret FBI interviews with Edward Teller dating from May 1952 offered a bounty of new allegations. Green decided he could use Teller's allegations if he framed them to raise questions about Oppenheimer's veracity rather than his judgment. (That is, Green proposed to compare various positions Oppenheimer had taken or actions he was alleged to have performed so as to emphasize their apparent inconsistency.) He set to work.
The Albuquerque FBI office had interviewed Teller on May 10, 1952, and again on May 27, following up on public allegations against Oppenheimer that Kenneth Pitzer had made shortly after he resigned as AEC director of research. Although the Sausage design incorporating the Teller-Ulam breakthrough was well in hand by then and would be tested the following November, Teller's grievances against Oppenheimer had continued to fester. He told the FBI agent that Oppenheimer had opposed the development of the H-bomb since 1945; that the H-bomb would have been a reality by 1951 or earlier if Oppenheimer had not opposed it; that Oppenheimer wrote the October 1949 GAC majority opinion and was the “dominating influence” (in FBI paraphrase) on the committee. Teller alleged a cascade of devious tactics:
Teller claims [Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered [the] development of [the] H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds. After [the] President announced [the] H-bomb [was] to be made, [Oppenheimer] opposed it on [the] ground that it was not feasible… After this, [Oppenheimer] changed his approach and opposed [the] H-bomb on [the] basis that there were insufficient facilities and scientific personnel to develop [it], which according to Teller is incorrect.
Teller accused Oppenheimer of convincing Hans Bethe not to join the H-bomb project. He said that Oppenheimer would not make any direct attempt to influence people not to work on the bomb “but would use psychology in the approach.” Oppenheimer's opposition, Teller thought, was not due to any subversive intent “but rather to [a] combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on [the] A-bomb done better on [the] H-bomb, and also because he does not feel [the] H-bomb is politically desirable. Teller also feels [Oppenheimer] [has] never gotten over the shock of [the] first A-bomb being dropped.”
Teller then offered a lay psychiatric profile of his former boss:
Teller also said that he has found Oppenheimer to be a very complicated person, even though an outstanding man. He also said that he understands that in his youth Oppenheimer was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected him. He has also had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.
Teller asked the FBI agent not to disseminate these profundities, since “the fact that he, Teller, was repeating such information could prove very embarrassing to him personally.”
Teller found a way to affirm Oppenheimer's loyalty to the FBI while implicitly calling it into question. He told the agent “that in all of his dealings with Oppenheimer he has never had the slightest reason or indication to believe that Oppenheimer is in any way disloyal to the United States.” But he followed that declaration by asking the agent to hold it in confidence “because he felt that he could be subject to considerable cross-examination on this point when people brought up certain instances like the fact that Oppenheimer's brother, Frank, is an admitted former member of the Communist Party.”
In conclusion, according to the FBI report, “Teller states he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from [the] General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of [the] H-bomb.”
(The Albuquerque interviews were not the first time Teller had informed on Oppenheimer to the FBI. A Bureau summary document prepared in April 1952 noted that at some earlier date, when asked about the physicist Philip Morrison, Teller had offered the information that “Morrison has the reputation among physicists of being extremely far to the left.” Teller then added gratuitously that “Oppenheimer, Robert Serber and Morrison are considered the three most extreme leftists among physicists. [Teller] stated that most of Oppenheimer's students at Berkeley had absorbed Oppenhei-mer's leftist views.” Since Philip Morrison had been revealed by then to have been a member of the Communist Party in his student days, Teller's linkage was especially damaging.)
By the time Mitchell arrived, Green had added seven more charges to his master list. All of them concerned Oppenheimer's position on the hydrogen bomb and all were based on Teller's allegations.
While Strauss and Nichols were preparing his fate, Oppenheimer was blithely visiting Haakon Chevalier and his new wife in Paris, where Chevalier worked as a translator. The Oppenheimers had dinner at the Chevaliers’ apartment; the next day Chevalier took them to meet Andre Malraux. Oppenheimer had identified Chevalier as the cut-out in an espionage contact; his continued relationship with the man looked highly suspect to Strauss and others in the government. When Eisenhower heard about it, some months later, he asked angrily, “How can any individual report a treasonable act [sic] on the part of another man and then go and stay at his home…?” It was a reasonable question, but Oppenheimer by 1953, after years of high-level government service, had either convinced himself that his loyalty was no longer in doubt or become fatalistic.
He was shocked, on Monday, December 21, 1953, meeting in Strauss's office with the AEC chairman and Nichols, when Strauss handed him a draft copy of the list of charges. Strauss fished for Oppenheimer's resignation; Oppenheimer fished for a request from Strauss that he resign. Neither bit. When Oppenheimer proposed to visit his attorney, Herbert Marks, before making up his mind what to do, Strauss volunteered his car. The shaken physicist went to see another attorney instead, Joseph Volpe, then moved on to Georgetown to have a drink with the Markses. Marks's wife Anne had been Oppenheimer's secretary at Los Alamos. “I can't believe this is happening to me!” he told her. “It was like Pearl Harbor — on a small scale,” he reflected later. “Given the circumstances and the spirit of the times, one knew that something like this was possible and even probable, but still it was a shock when it came.” Oppenheimer informed Strauss the next day that he wanted a security hearing. “I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested,” he wrote Strauss, still jockeying the resignation issue. “Under the circumstances, this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this Government that I have now served for some twelve years. This I cannot do.” Before Nichols signed the formal notification letter that contained the list of charges, he quipped, “Do we really have to go through with this? Why don't we just turn the files over to McCarthy?”
For the next three months, both sides marshaled their forces. The FBI tapped Oppenheimer's home and office phones at Strauss's specific request and followed the physicist whenever he left Princeton. When the phone taps began to pick up discussions between Oppenheimer and his attorneys, the supervising agent in Newark
