* * *
Oppenheimer returned to the United States from Paris on December 13, oblivious to the storm that was about to break.69 During the past few months, the physicist had done little to counter the rumors and suspicions that once again were growing up around him. In April, just weeks after Weinberg’s acquittal on the charge of perjury, Oppie had written a letter of recommendation for his former graduate student, attesting to Weinberg’s “loyalty, integrity, veracity.”*70
Invited to England to give the BBC’s prestigious Reith lectures that fall, Oppenheimer and Kitty afterward paid a visit to Haakon Chevalier and his new wife, Carol, in Paris. While there, Oppie offered to help his friend with a passport problem. Hoping to visit the United States as a translator for UNESCO, Chevalier was uncertain whether to renounce his American citizenship and travel on his French passport or to seek a visa. Oppenheimer paid a social call on Jefferies Wyman, the science attaché at the American embassy in Paris and Oppie’s former classmate at both Harvard and Cambridge. Oppenheimer advised Wyman that an unnamed friend might soon be contacting him for advice.71
Oppenheimer’s visit to Chevalier did not go unnoticed by American authorities. The London embassy’s legal attaché coordinated surveillance of the Oppenheimers while they were in England and the CIA took up the trail once the couple crossed the Channel. Alerted to Oppie’s imminent return to the United States, Bates assured Strauss that the “FBI will take care of him in their own way.”72 Bureau agents shadowed the couple from the airport to their home in Princeton.
On December 14, Oppie telephoned Strauss at Brandy Rock Farm, the AEC chairman’s retreat in the Virginia horse country, to schedule a visit two days hence. Oppenheimer wished to discuss the appointment of a Swedish scientist to the institute as well as candidates for the Einstein award. Strauss, who recorded the call, informed Bates that Oppenheimer suspected nothing.73
Originally, Strauss had hoped to confront Oppenheimer with the statement of charges at Brandy Rock on December 16. But Hoover’s delay in vetting the letter thwarted this plan.
Instead, the showdown with Oppenheimer occurred in Strauss’s AEC office on the afternoon of December 21. Nichols was also present. (“I had agreed with Strauss that he should do most of the talking.”)74 In a meeting that lasted half an hour, Strauss and Nichols showed Oppenheimer the letter of charges but refused to give him a copy. Having been warned by Mitchell not to offer the physicist any advice, the two demurred when Oppenheimer asked if they thought he should resign.
Obviously shaken by the charges against him, Oppenheimer told Nichols and Strauss that, while he was inclined toward resignation, rumors of a pending Senate investigation of the Kenilworth Court incident had convinced him that such an action “might not be too good from a public relations point of view.”75 Told by Nichols that he had only one day to make a decision on how to respond, Oppenheimer left to consult with the lawyers he had retained in the Weinberg case, Joe Volpe and Herbert Marks. When Oppie called Nichols at home that night to ask once more whether he should resign, Nichols, fearful that Oppenheimer was recording the call, again declined to give an opinion.76
Goaded by Strauss, Nichols telephoned Oppenheimer at Princeton the next afternoon to demand a decision. Persuading Nichols instead to grant him an extension, Oppie returned to Washington and talked to Volpe, who counseled his friend to fight the charges.
Even before Oppenheimer had notified Nichols of his response, however, Strauss had taken the first step toward collecting evidence for what would be, to all intents and purposes, a trial. On December 21, immediately following his meeting with Oppenheimer, the AEC chairman asked Hoover to install wiretaps on the telephones in Oppie’s home and office at Princeton.77
PART FIVE
ALL THE EVIL OF THE TIMES
[Oppenheimer] does not believe the case will come to a quiet end as all the evil of the times is wrapped in this situation.
—“Summary for May 7, 1954,” FBI wiretap
17
THE GOOD DEEDS A MAN HAS DONE BEFORE
BOTH SIDES SPENT the next two months preparing their case. After Volpe bowed out as Oppenheimer’s counsel, citing a conflict of interest with the AEC, Herbert Marks suggested the physicist retain Lloyd Garrison, a New York trial lawyer and descendant of the famous abolitionist. Garrison was well known for defending civil liberty cases.1
In late January 1954, Strauss and Nichols chose Roger Robb, a former prosecutor with a reputation for combativeness, to present the evidence against Oppenheimer. As an assistant U.S. attorney, Robb had sat in on the Weinberg case. Earlier, Robb had successfully defended Earl Browder, as the court-appointed lawyer in the U.S. Communist leader’s contempt-of-Congress trial.2
From the beginning, Strauss and Nichols had the advantage of knowing their adversaries’ moves in advance, thanks to the FBI wiretaps, which had been put in place on New Year’s Day.3
The taps had been operative less than a week, however, when the agent in charge of the bureau’s Newark, New Jersey, office threatened to pull the plug, on ethical grounds. He “wanted to be sure that the Bureau desired the technical surveillance continued in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney-client relations,” the conscientious G-man notified Hoover. The FBI director—after first checking with Strauss—replied that the wiretaps were “warranted.”4
The monitoring of Oppie’s conversations with his lawyers revealed, as Strauss had predicted, that Garrison intended to summon a parade of notables in Oppenheimer’s defense. All could be expected to attest to Oppenheimer’s selfless government service and sterling personal qualities. Manhattan Project veterans Rabi, Bacher, Conant, and Bush were among those whom Garrison had lined up as witnesses.5
But both sides surely recognized that the most important witness for the defense was almost certain
