Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

Alternatively, Chevalier may have approached Frank rather than Robert, in which case Frank filled his brother in and Robert presumably warned Frank off. There the matter rested for six months while Oppenheimer took up his duties as director of Los Alamos.

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer became more aware of security. Eltenton's activity worried him. He decided to report the British engineer so that security could watch him, but when he did so he tried to avoid implicating anyone else. Eventually he had to tell Groves the truth. Then, remarkably, the official AEC history reports, Groves joined in the cover-up:

On December 12, 1943, [Groves] learned that Oppenheimer had family concerns as well: apparently Chevalier had also talked to his brother, Frank. As the plot thickened, the truth was irretrievably lost. Had Chevalier actually approached both Oppenheimer brothers, or had he spoken only to Frank, who then turned to his older brother for advice? Was Oppenheimer trying to shoulder the entire burden for his brother and friends? Obviously, a great deal was at stake, including the [Los Alamos] project. Thus, whatever his motives, Oppenheimer secured Groves's pledge not to report his brother's name to the FBI, thereby incredibly implicating the head of the Manhattan Project in his story.

Groves testified to the security board on the morning after Oppenheimer admitted to a “cock-and-bull story.” The retired general told the board that his conclusion about the Chevalier affair “was that there was an approach made, that Dr. Oppenheimer knew of this approach, that at some point he was involved, in that the approach was made to him — I don't mean involved in the sense that he gave anything — I mean he just knew about it personally from the fact that he was in the chain, and that he didn't report it in its entirety as he should have done.” Groves felt Oppenheimer “was doing what he thought was essential, which was to disclose to me the dangers of this particular attempt to enter the project… ” The general testified that he thought “that Dr. Oppenheimer wanted to protect his friends of long standing, possibly his brother. It was always my impression that he wanted to protect his brother, and that his brother might be involved in having been in this chain, and that his brother didn't behave quite as he should have, or if he did, [Robert Oppenheimer] didn't even want to have the finger of suspicion pointed at his brother, because he always felt a natural loyalty to him, and had [a] protective attitude toward him.” But Groves did not admit having heard directly from Oppenheimer that Frank was involved. Roger Robb, evidently unaware of the general's complicity in this evasion, did not explore how Groves had arrived at his “impression.” In any case, the AEC attorney got everything from Groves he could have wanted: when he asked the general if he would have cleared Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project “if you had not believed him to be essential to the project,” Groves answered reluctantly, “I would not have cleared him if I had not felt that he was essential and if he had not already been so thoroughly steeped in the project… ”

Nor do these various explanations, contemporary and historical, completely explain Oppenheimer's 1943 statement to Boris Pash that “a man… attached to the Soviet consul” — presumably Peter Ivanov — had indicated indirectly “through people concerned with the project” that he could transmit information. Oppenheimer told Pash in 1943 that he knew of “two or three cases,” that “two of the men” were “with me at Los Alamos,” were “men who are closely associated with me” and had been “contacted for that purpose… ” Lawrence and Alvarez had not been contacted. Presumably one of the “two or three men” was Frank Oppenheimer. Who else had been contacted? Robb did not pursue these contradictions; they are probably unresolvable.

If the security hearing had stopped at that early point, its inquiry might have been justified; Oppenheimer's contradictory statements had long festered on the record unexamined and unresolved and an espionage approach had indeed occurred. The security board would have had to weigh the physicist's contradictions against the evidence that whoever approached him got nothing from him — the evidence, that is, of his basic loyalty and discretion, to which his successful direction of Los Alamos in wartime and his years of government service after the war (whatever his opinions) gave powerful support. But the AEC's letter of charges raised questions about his conduct during and after the divisive H-bomb debate as well and had to be addressed. Answering those questions occupied much of the rest of the hearing.

One by one, that April spring of 1954, the men of the nation's scientific elite entered the close room and sat down in the witness chair with Oppenheimer behind them on his couch, staring at their backs through the blue smoke of his misery and his indignation. Most were his friends. Seven were his enemies and testified against him.

His friends came first: Gordon Dean, Hans Bethe, David Lilienthal; George Kennan, who called him “one of the great minds of our generation” and insisted that security lay not in “the mathematics of whatever power of destruction we could evolve” but in “our ability to address ourselves to the positive and constructive problems of world affairs… ” Rabi, confident in himself and confident in his judgment that the hearing was a travesty, had no difficulty handling Robb's cross-examination:

Q… Perhaps the board may be in possession of information which is not now available to you about the [Chevalier] incident.

A. It may be. On the other hand, I am in possession of a long experience with this man, going back to 1929, which is twenty-five years, and there is a kind of seat of the pants feeling [upon] which I myself lay great weight. In other words, I might even venture to differ from the judgment of the board without impugning their integrity at all.

“You have to take the whole story,” Rabi went on. “… That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment in the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man's life.”

After Rabi came Norris Bradbury, Hartley Rowe, Lee DuBridge. An infuriated Vannevar Bush: “I feel that thisJjoardJiasjnade-a-mistake and that it is a serious one. I feel that the letter of General Nichols which I read, this bill of particulars, is quite capable of being interpreted as placing a man on trial because he held opinions, which is quite contrary to the American system, which is a terrible thing.” (After that assault, Gordon Gray asked Robb privately if there was a way to end the hearing. No, Robb told him, there was not.) Briefly, Kitty Oppenheimer, the only woman to testify, on her marriage to the Communist Joe Dallet and his death in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Oppenheimer's wife answered succinctly and to the point as one of the defense attorneys led her through the story. Robb had no questions. Gray wanted her help with the mechanics of Communist Party membership, gumshoe hocus-pocus; she withered him with her answers:

Mr. Gray. Mrs. Oppenheimer, how did you leave the Communist Party?

The Witness. By walking away.

Mr. Gray. Did you have a card?

The Witness. While I was in Youngstown; yes.

Mr. Gray. Did you turn this in or tear it up?

The Witness. I have no idea.

Robb managed to find error in most of the witnesses. Bethe's division at Los Alamos had housed Klaus Fuchs. Senior physicist Charles Lauritsen of Caltech was not aware that Frank Oppenheimer had been a Communist. Robert Bacher had hired Philip Morrison. No one could know, Robb reminded Oppenheimer's friends sharply, what evidence the board had seen that the witnesses had not.

Then came an unprecedented parade of “government” witnesses through what was supposed to be an impartial inquiry, not a trial. It had become a trial and an ordeal, Garrison remembered:

A man's life was at stake. It was like a murder trial and a murder trial in which the evidence was murky and half-known. We spent most evenings back at the Georgetown house [of an Oppenheimer friend, Randolph Paul, where the Oppenheimers were staying]. All we had the energy for was preparation. We were too weary to do much post-morteming.

Of course, Robert was in the most overwrought state imaginable — so was Kitty — but Robert even more so. He would pace his bedroom floor at night, so Randolph Paul told me, and he was just an anguished man. Then his anxieties were added to our own and it was a great torture really.