you,” Silverman chatted amiably with Oppie’s brother in the tiny room on East Palace Avenue.24 Eventually, Frank invited Silverman to the ranch at Blanco Basin, a few hours’ drive over the mountains. The lawyer later reported to Garrison that he and Frank had sat together on the porch overlooking the snow-covered peaks, while Frank spoke of the difficulty of running a cattle ranch.25 Silverman drove his rental car back to Albuquerque and flew home to New York, little enlightened.

*   *   *

Alerted by the wiretaps to the impressive array of character witnesses that Garrison had lined up for Oppenheimer, Robb and Rolander traveled to Berkeley in early March, seeking witnesses for the prosecution. Strauss’s lawyer had already decided that he and Rolander would only interview those the FBI had not already talked to, with one exception: Oppie’s former colleagues at Berkeley. (As Pitzer had earlier confided to bureau agents, “We know this man.”)26

The two lawyers arrived in California armed with a lengthy list of questions, based in part upon the Joint Committee’s 1950 interview with Teller, which Cole and Allardice had helpfully provided.27 Additionally, Bates had given Robb transcripts of the bureau’s spring 1952 interviews with Teller and Pitzer.28

After talking to Pitzer and Latimer, Rolander and Robb interviewed Lawrence in his office on campus.29 Ernest spoke with some heat of how his colleagues had been “taken in” by Oppie, but—“giving him the benefit of doubt”—he believed that “everything [Oppenheimer] did can be attributed to bad judgment.”30 Lawrence also told Robb, emphatically, that his former friend “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy.”

Robb and Rolander interviewed Alvarez twice, at Berkeley and Livermore, probably because he was not as circumspect about Oppenheimer’s motives. Blaming Oppie for the termination of the Benicia reactor project and the MTA—as well as for the fact that both Livermore and the Rad Lab were now “on the black list” with scientists—Luie hinted that there was more behind Oppenheimer’s opposition to the superbomb than moral qualms. “Alvarez said that if a star basketball player suddenly started to miss shots as Oppenheimer did in this instance, everybody would think there was something wrong,” Rolander wrote in notes of the interview. The head of British intelligence had once told him, Luie confided, that “Oppenheimer was a Russian agent, worse than Fuchs.”*31

Teller had since had a charge of heart about being an anonymous informant and told Rolander and Robb that he wanted to be identified as the source for any information of his that might be used in the hearing. Robb’s questions to Teller focused upon Oppie’s role vis-à-vis the hydrogen bomb: “[Teller] said there is no question that Oppenheimer tried to impede the H-bomb program.” As to the reason for this interference, however, Edward seemed ambivalent.

Teller stated that he did not know what motivated Oppenheimer, nor could he prove that he had not acted in good faith.… He said that Oppenheimer has given a great deal of bad advice in the matter of the H-bomb, and that in the future his advice should not be taken and he should never have any more influence.… He said he hoped Oppenheimer’s clearance would not be lifted for a mere mistake of judgment.32

*   *   *

By the time that he returned to Washington in late March, Robb was confident of victory.33 (Warned that Oppenheimer was too “fast” and “slippery” to be caught in a cross-examination, the former prosecutor replied: “Maybe so, but then he’s not been cross-examined by me before.”)34

Strauss, too, no longer feared that the hearing might be more an embarrassment for the commission than for Oppenheimer. Hoover had sent the AEC chairman a copy of Frank Oppenheimer’s FBI interview in early January.35 For weeks, Strauss had known that both Oppenheimer brothers as well as Groves were ensnared in a tangled web of deception over the Chevalier incident: Oppie by having told Pash and Groves two different and conflicting versions of what happened, and then a third to the FBI; Groves by his failure to report Oppenheimer’s admission concerning Frank to the FBI at the time; and Frank by denying to bureau agents any involvement whatsoever.

Wherever the truth lay, Strauss and Robb realized that Oppie would either have to admit to lying about the incident or else implicate his brother in the plot, whereas Groves’s own complicity ensured his silence in Oppenheimer’s defense. Moreover, Robb’s recent interview with Lawrence meant that the prosecution would be able to counter Garrison’s big guns with witnesses of equal caliber, especially on such highly technical questions as whether Oppenheimer had tried to sabotage the superbomb.

Still, Strauss was taking no chances. Smyth and Rabi had urged that Eisenhower be the one to pick the three-member Personnel Security Board that would sit in judgment of Oppenheimer. Instead, Mitchell had already chosen two members of the board, a scientist and an industrialist. Ward Evans was a chemistry professor at Chicago’s Loyola University who had previously served on the AEC’s regional board, almost always voting to deny clearance. Thomas Morgan had been president of Sperry Gyroscope before being appointed by Truman to a presidential commission on defense preparedness.

But the most important member of the board—its chairman—was Strauss’s choice. Gordon Gray, the president of the University of North Carolina, was an attorney who, following a brief career in Democratic state politics, had been appointed secretary of the army by Truman. Perhaps the most salient of Gray’s qualifications from Strauss’s point of view, however, was his public defection from Adlai Stevenson’s camp in the 1952 campaign. Then, as later, Gray had attacked Stevenson for being too liberal.36

*   *   *

In early March 1954, before the Gray board met for the first time, Strauss was compelled to travel to Bikini atoll, where the latest round of U.S. nuclear tests—Operation Castle—was taking place. The first test, code-named Bravo, was of a “dry” thermonuclear device, a crucial step toward development of an H-bomb small enough for a missile warhead.37

Like Mike, Bravo turned out to be far more powerful than its designers expected—exploding with a force more than twice the

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