To Wendell Latimer, the Berkeley chemistry professor who gingered up Ernest Lawrence to push for the Super, Oppenheimer was a Svengali:
You know, he is one of the most amazing men that the country has ever produced in his ability to influence people. It is just astounding the influence that he has upon a group. It is an amazing thing. His domination of the General Advisory Committee was so complete that he always carried the majority with him, and I don't think any views came out of that Committee that weren't essentially his views… Many of our boys [at Berkeley] came back from [wartime Los Alamos] pacifists. I judged that was due very largely to his influence.
Air Force Major General Roscoe Wilson wanted it understood that he was “a dedicated airman” and that “the USSR in the airman's view is a land power.” Yet not only was Oppenheimer “interested in what I call the internationalizing of atomic energy, this at a time when the United States had a monopoly”; he also favored the Navy over the Air Force:
Dr. Oppenheimer… opposed the nuclear-powered aircraft. His opposition was based on technical judgment. I don't challenge his technical judgment, but at the same time he felt less strongly opposed to nuclear-powered ships. The Air Force feeling was that at least the same energy should be devoted to both projects.
Wilson's response to these and other differences of opinion with Oppenheimer, the general testified, had been “to go to the Director of Intelligence to express my concern over what I felt was a pattern of action that was simply not helpful to national defense.”
At four in the afternoon — by now it was April 28 — after Kenneth Pitzer, Edward Teller was sworn in. He had brooded on his testimony for weeks. He had talked to Ernest Lawrence, who was also supposed to testify, and had found him “furious to explain how dangerous Oppenheimer is.” Both Lawrence and Alvarez, Teller recalls, “emphasized Oppenheimer's Communist associations, things that were clearly on the record: his wife, his brother, the Tatlock story — and made statements to the effect that a person of that kind cannot be cleared.” On a visit to New York, Teller had stopped in to see Lloyd Garrison, the attorney wrote some years later:
At my request he came to see me in my law office, not very long before the hearings were to begin. He was reluctant to come, and insisted on seeing me alone. I asked him about his associations with Robert and his opinion of Robert's loyalty. His feelings toward Robert were not warm, but he did not challenge his loyalty. He expressed lack of confidence in Robert's wisdom and judgment and for that reason felt that the government would be better off without him. His feelings on this subject and his intense dislike of Robert were so intense that I finally concluded not to call him as a witness… When Dr. Teller did take the stand, his testimony did not depart in any substantial respect from what he had said to me in our interview.
An AEC public information officer, Charter Heslep, had approached Teller innocently at Livermore on April 22 and gotten an earful. The startled Heslep wrote afterward in a confidential memorandum to Strauss that “Teller was interested only in discussing the Oppenheimer case.” Heslep explained to Teller that he was merely a speechwriter. He thought to himself that Teller's spill of confidences was none of his business. Teller told him to listen anyway. The lecture lasted more than an hour.
Teller told Heslep he regretted that the case was “on a security basis” because he felt that basis was “untenable.” Teller “has difficulty phrasing his assessment of Oppie's loyalty except a conviction that Oppie is not disloyal but rather… more of a ‘pacifist.’” But since the case was being heard on a security basis, Teller said, he wondered if some way could be found to “deepen the charges” to include documentation of the “consistently bad advice” that Oppenheimer had offered since the end of the war. Very few scientists knew the real situation, Teller went on; Oppenheimer was powerful “politically” among scientists. There was an “Oppie machine.” Teller discussed its mechanisms at length and named a long list of names — Oppenheimer's cohorts. Heslep's most revealing point in the light of Teller's subsequent testimony and recollections was his sixth:
Teller feels deeply that [Oppenheimer's] “unfrocking” must be done or else — regardless of the outcome of the current hearings — scientists may lose their enthusiasm for the [nuclear weapons] program.
In such a mood of determination, Teller proceeded to Washington to testify. The evening before he was scheduled to appear, he met with Robb. “Robb asked, ‘How will you testify? Should he be cleared?’ I said, ‘I will testify that he should.’ And then [Robb] said, ‘I want you to see a part of his testimony.’… He showed me that part where the implication of Chevalier became obvious… And then he asked, ‘Would you still testify that he should be cleared?’ And I said, ‘I don't know.’” Teller's story of his meeting with Robb has the great virtue from his point of view of blaming Oppenheimer for Teller's testimony against him, which is probably why he invented it. Garrison's recollection that Teller's “testimony did not depart in any substantial respect from what he had said to me in our interview,” and Teller's diatribe to Heslep are compelling evidence to the contrary that the physicist had planned all along to testify that Oppenheimer's security clearance should be revoked.
Hans and Rose Bethe happened to be in Washington at the time for a meeting of the American Physical Society. They spent the evening trying to persuade Teller to testify in favor of Oppenheimer. “There was not a chance to do that,” Bethe recalls. “He said, ‘Oppenheimer has made so many mistakes.’” It was a desperate discussion, says Bethe, filled with irrelevancies; the Cornell physicist concluded that Teller was absolutely set in his opinion that Oppenheimer had to be eliminated from his role as a government adviser. Princeton theoretician Freeman Dyson circumstantially corroborates the Bethe-Teller meeting in a memoir:
I met Hans by chance in a hotel lobby. He was looking grimmer than I had ever seen him… “Are the hearings going badly?” I asked. “Yes,” said Hans, “but that is not the worst. I have just now had the most unpleasant conversation of my whole life. With Edward Teller.” He did not say more, but the implications were clear. Teller had decided to testify against Op-penheimer. Hans had tried to dissuade him and failed.
Teller, Dyson said on another occasion, “thought Oppenheimer was somehow a Machiavelli who had far more influence than he really had in the real world. And Teller must have had, somehow, the feeling that if he could once destroy Oppenheimer's political power that somehow things would be all right. And at that time, Oppenheimer had hardly any political power to destroy.”
Roger Robb had a powerful weapon at his disposal with which to persuade Teller to testify that Oppenheimer was a security risk had Teller resisted doing so: Teller's secret 1952 FBI interviews. Harold Green had based the charges Robb was pursuing against Oppenheimer on Teller's statements in those interviews. In Teller's testimony, they became the dog that didn't bark.
Robb dispensed with the security-risk issue as soon as Teller was sworn in on the afternoon of April 28, 1954, first egregiously attributing to the Hungarian-born physicist a sense of fair play that Teller's secret FBI testimony decisively contradicts:
Q. I believe, sir, that you stated to me some time ago that anything you had to say, you wished to say in the presence of Dr. Oppenheimer?
A. That is correct.
After briefly reviewing Teller's curriculum vitae, Robb came directly to the point:
Q. To simplify the issues here, perhaps, let me ask you this question: Is it your intention in anything that you are about to testify to, to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States?
A. I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States —
Q. Now, a question which is the corollary of that. Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a
