Eisenhower, worried that he might come under attack for security lapses following the lost-document fiasco, had made Strauss his special assistant for atomic energy a few weeks earlier.83 (One of Strauss’s early actions in that role was to head off Oppenheimer’s planned meeting with Ike.) Strauss had welcomed Borden to his office in the old Executive Office Building in late April, where the two men almost certainly discussed Oppie.84
Strauss had also been one of the sources for an attack upon Oppenheimer that appeared in the May 1953 issue of Fortune magazine. Fortune editor Charles Murphy, the anonymous author of “The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb,” was a reserve air force officer and personal friend of Finletter’s.85 Strauss and Murphy would likewise collaborate on a subsequent Fortune article, designed to counteract an essay by Oppenheimer in the July 1953 issue of Foreign Affairs. Approved in advance by the president, Oppie’s article praised Ike’s new policy of candor about the arms race.86
As Borden and Strauss were now forced to admit, not only had their campaign against the physicist been ineffective, but the tide of events seemed to be running strongly in Oppie’s favor. The Weinberg trial, which Borden originally hoped would implicate both Oppenheimer and his former grad student in espionage, had instead made the mysterious “Scientist X” something of a folk hero.
In March 1953, Weinberg had been found not guilty of lying under oath four years earlier, when he had denied to HUAC ever belonging to the Communist Party. The government had been unwilling to reveal the wiretap evidence that gave proof of Weinberg’s meeting with Steve Nelson and Weinberg’s party membership. Likewise, the Justice Department had been too fearful of the Crouches’ vulnerability as witnesses to even raise the Kenilworth Court episode during the trial.87 Although the presiding judge voiced his dismay at the jury’s verdict, Weinberg went free.88
With the aid of Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover—the driving force behind the navy’s nuclear submarine program, and a long-time Joint Committee ally—Borden had meanwhile lined up a job as special assistant to the vice president of Westinghouse’s reactor division in Pittsburgh.89 Before leaving the government, however, Borden had also arranged though his successor on the Joint Committee—Corbin Allardice, a former AEC public relations man—a consultancy contract as well as a security clearance for another year.90
On May 14, 1953, Borden checked out Oppie’s security file one last time from the AEC document vault.91 Retreating to the family’s vacation home on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, Borden would spend the next three months brooding over Oppenheimer’s voluminous dossier.92
On his last day at the Joint Committee, Borden had handed Allardice a short memo on unfinished business. Among his suggestions—“members should contribute money to a fund for coffee served during Committee meetings,” and “re-interviewing Fuchs”—was an attached list that contained thirty-eight questions regarding Oppenheimer.93
“In the 1940–1942 period, did Dr. Oppenheimer have any close friends who were not identified with Communism?” Borden wondered.94
16
NOT MUCH MORE THAN A KANGAROO COURT
IN EARLY JUNE 1953, Strauss told Hoover that he intended to accept the post of AEC chairman, which Eisenhower had offered him three months earlier. Strauss had originally demurred, in part because he suspected those around the president of being too liberal or at least too sympathetic to Oppenheimer. He was particularly suspicious of Ike’s national security adviser, Robert Cutler, who still served with Oppie on the board of the Harvard Corporation. In accepting the job, Strauss had warned Ike that he was going to approach Cutler and “‘lay the cards on the table’ concerning Oppenheimer.”1
The only “bright part in his taking over these new difficult duties,” Strauss told the FBI’s Charles Bates, “was the fact that the FBI had been most cooperative with him and he felt he could rely on the Director and the Bureau in matters of mutual interest.” Indeed, later that day Strauss requested and received Oppenheimer’s security file from Hoover.2
Less than a week after being sworn in as AEC chairman, Strauss ordered the classified documents library at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study eliminated and replaced with a facility under the commission’s control.3 But Strauss discovered that he was one day too late to cut Oppenheimer off entirely from atomic secrets. In one of his last acts as chairman, Dean had renewed Oppenheimer’s consultancy contract for another year—to June 30, 1954—on the grounds that Oppie needed a Q clearance to help implement the recommendations of the disarmament panel.4
Strauss was also doing what he could to block the administration’s push for greater “candor.” Early on, he had proposed that all official statements on the hydrogen bomb be cleared first with his office—a form of censorship that Eisenhower resisted. By that fall, when Ike proposed an ambitious plan of his own to share civilian atomic power with the world, Strauss effectively hijacked the administration’s “Operation Candor,” transforming it—during breakfast meetings at the Metropolitan Club with presidential adviser and speech writer C. D. Jackson—into what Jackson called “Operation Wheaties.” What had begun as a sincere effort to inform the public about the dangers of nuclear war was being transformed into a cynical public relations campaign.5
As AEC chairman, Strauss showed an almost paranoid obsession with Oppenheimer: passing along to Hoover, for example, the gossip that Earl Browder’s son had secured a position at the institute because of Oppie, and claiming that Oppenheimer was cheating on his AEC expense accounts. (“Admiral Strauss stated that while this was a small matter in itself, he thought it did indicate an interesting sidelight upon the character of Dr. Oppenheimer.”)6
That fall, Strauss hired David Teeple, one of the former army CIC agents who had shadowed Martin Kamen to the rendezvous with Soviet diplomats at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto, and later worked for Hickenlooper. Teeple’s job was to dig up derogatory information on Oppenheimer.7 Strauss also put McKay Donkin, an investigator in the AEC’s Office of Security, on “special assignment” to assist Teeple. The AEC chairman even personally helped line up interviews for FBI agents investigating the physicist.8 Increasingly, Strauss
