Indeed, Strauss and Hoover were themselves uncertain about how to proceed. Six months earlier, when McCarthy and his chief counsel had broached with Hoover the possibility of a Senate inquiry focusing on Oppenheimer, the FBI director had discouraged such a step, cautioning that any such hearing would require “a great deal of preliminary spade work.”35 While Strauss told Hoover that he “felt that an inquiry into Oppenheimer’s activities might be well worthwhile,” he, too, “hoped it would not be done prematurely or by a group that did not thoroughly prepare itself for the investigation.”36 Strauss subsequently wrote Senator Robert Taft, a longtime friend and political ally, “[McCarthy’s committee] is not the place for such an investigation, and the present is not the time.”37 Nothing came of McCarthy’s threat.
But Borden’s letter had suddenly resurrected the possibility of an investigation of Oppenheimer. One option that had been raised at the White House meeting was convening, under AEC auspices, a Personnel Security Board hearing. Heretofore only applied on a regional basis, and in cases much less notorious than Oppenheimer’s, a PSB investigation of Oppenheimer’s “character, associations, and loyalty” promised to avoid the klieg-light publicity of an open congressional hearing. The fact that it would be conducted in secret and was not bound by the usual legal rules of evidence—indeed, was “not much more than a kangaroo court,” as former AEC attorney Volpe had observed—made it all the more attractive to Strauss.38
Hoover, however, had his own reasons for wanting to avoid a loyalty hearing. His real worry, the FBI director confided to Brownell, was that an investigation of Oppenheimer might reveal “a lot of information which could not be publicly disclosed”—i.e., the bureau’s illicit wiretaps. Hoover told Strauss that he had “grave doubts as to the wisdom of a hearing.”39
As expected, the FBI’s interview of Borden had yielded no dramatic new evidence to buttress the charges raised in his letter. (Agents found the ex-staffer “quite intelligent, extremely verbose and inclined toward generalities.”40 Borden, for his part, dismissed the interrogation as “a rather futile and diffuse discussion.”)41 An FBI analysis of Borden’s letter, done for Hoover, concluded that it went beyond the evidence in claiming Oppenheimer was a spy.42
Another who opposed a hearing was the AEC’s new general manager, Kenneth Nichols. Strauss had appointed Groves’s former aide to the post just two weeks after becoming chairman.43 Nichols feared that an Oppenheimer hearing might backfire, damaging the nation’s nuclear program by creating dissension within the scientific ranks and making Oppie into a martyr. He proposed that Strauss simply turn Oppenheimer’s files over to McCarthy instead.44
Strauss, too, worried that alienating the nation’s scientists might be too high a price to pay for destroying Oppenheimer’s influence. During a visit to Strauss’s office on the afternoon of December 3, Teller found the AEC chairman anxious and preoccupied with the case—“predicting disastrous consequences should Oppenheimer’s clearance be called into question.”45
* * *
But a long-suppressed secret, finally come to light, would promptly change this calculation. While Strauss was still at the White House on the morning of December 3, Allardice was at FBI headquarters, meeting with Hoover aide Louis Nichols. Allardice had learned from Cole about Borden’s infamous letter and wished to be helpful in the bureau’s investigation. (An apprentice fingerprint classifier at the FBI before the war, Allardice had subsequently tried, but failed, to join the ranks of special agents.) As Nichols wrote, in a rather breathless summary of the meeting:
Allardice told me in confidence he had been informed by a source whom he believed to be extremely reliable that J. Robert Oppenheimer had stated that his contact in the Eltenton–Haakon Chevalier espionage apparatus had been his own brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and that J. Robert had admitted that his brother, Frank, had approached him prior to the time the Bureau had ever interviewed J. Robert and that it was his, Allardice’s, opinion that J. Robert Oppenheimer did not want the Bureau to have this information, but he had also been led to believe the information had been furnished to the Bureau.46
Allardice had further noted that this particular version of events was not in the FBI files held at the Joint Committee, and volunteered that John Lansdale, Groves’s former chief of security, would be “one of the best sources of information about the case.”47
The following week, Hoover ordered the bureau’s Cleveland office to interview Lansdale, who since the war had returned to his private law practice.48 Allardice meanwhile reported that he had also contacted both Groves and William Consodine, Groves’s wartime lawyer, to obtain further details of the story.
Evidently alarmed that the secret was about to come out, Groves telephoned AEC headquarters on the morning of December 10 to assure Strauss and the commission’s head of security, Bryan LaPlante, that he was “checking further” into Allardice’s story.49 Strauss duly informed the FBI that Groves had contacted him and also that Consodine had identified Frank Oppenheimer, not Oppie, as the real “go-between.”50
On December 15, FBI agents interviewed Consodine; a day later it was Lansdale’s turn. While Lansdale’s recollection was “hazy,” he and Consodine independently described the meeting that had taken place ten years earlier in Groves’s office, where the general had admitted being duped by Oppenheimer into participating in a criminal conspiracy to withhold the truth from the FBI.51
On his own, Groves came to FBI headquarters on December 17. There he asked Hoover aide Alan Belmont for access to MED records in the bureau’s custody, in order “to refresh his memory.”52 Groves had actually wanted to see Hoover but was told by Belmont that the FBI director was out of
