Fear that the tide might be turning against him drove Strauss to increasingly desperate measures. While Bush was still on the witness stand, FBI agents acting on an anonymous tip were interviewing an Office of Naval Research employee who had once been Oppenheimer’s graduate student. The bureau questioned Harvey Hall about an alleged homosexual affair between Hall and his mentor. Hall denied it.75
Even Hoover and his aides were becoming tired of Strauss’s ceaseless demands—and worried by their ally’s growing recklessness. Informed that Strauss and Teeple wanted Ike’s national security adviser put under FBI surveillance—Cutler had last met with Oppenheimer at a gathering of Harvard overseers in March—Belmont finally drew the line: “No. I see nothing to be gained. We have given them all we have. They are making a mountain out of nothing.”76
Gray, too, was becoming uncomfortable with the direction the hearing was taking. The head of the Personnel Security Board asked Robb, anxiously, whether the proceedings could be speeded up. They could not, the lawyer replied. The most powerful witnesses for the prosecution had yet to be heard.
As if anticipating Robb’s next move, the board inquired on Friday, April 23, when it would hear from Oppenheimer’s former colleagues at Berkeley.77 Strauss and Robb already knew from FBI wiretaps that Oppie considered Lawrence and McMillan “encamped against him.”78
That same day, Nichols telephoned four of those previously interviewed by Rolander and Robb—Lawrence, Alvarez, Pitzer, and Latimer—to confirm that each would be in Washington to testify during the coming week.79 On Saturday, Nichols reached Teller in Berkeley. “He said he would be glad to testify,” wrote Nichols in his diary.80
* * *
Lawrence had also recently spoken with Teller, having summoned him to his Rad Lab office on April 14 to discuss what the two would say at the hearing. As they talked, Lawrence grew more animated and angry at Oppie—a generation’s worth of personal slights and suspicions coming to the fore.*81 Lawrence accused Oppenheimer of trying to shut down Los Alamos and Oak Ridge at the end of the war, and of later attempting to sabotage the hydrogen bomb, the long-range detection program, and Livermore.
However, stopping off in Oak Ridge on April 24 to attend a weekend meeting of laboratory directors on his way to Washington, Lawrence began to rethink the promise he had made to Strauss and Nichols. Angrily confronted at the meeting by Rabi, who asked what he would say about Oppenheimer, Ernest began to get an inkling of the high emotion that surrounded the case. (In his own testimony a week earlier, Rabi, growing frustrated at Robb’s assault upon Oppie, had finally blurted out: “We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it.… what more do you want, mermaids?”)82
Beyond the cost to his own reputation, Lawrence worried about the price that Livermore and the Rad Lab might have to pay for his testimony. Rabi and Smyth—“barely civil” to him at Oak Ridge—held the decisive votes on whether a new AEC-funded particle accelerator would be built at Berkeley.83 The Oppenheimer hearing also dominated discussions at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C., earlier that week, where Oppenheimer, celebrating his fiftieth birthday, had sat silent at the speaker’s table, an honored guest.84
Lawrence nonetheless called Nichols on Monday morning, April 26, to say that he would be arriving in Washington the following evening.85 That night, Ernest suffered his most severe colitis attack yet. Telephoning Strauss early Tuesday morning, Lawrence told the AEC chairman that he was returning home at his brother’s orders and would not be testifying after all.
Strauss was apoplectic. Failing at length to change Lawrence’s mind, he abruptly ended the call by branding him a coward.86 (Fearing that others might accuse him of malingering, Ernest summoned another physicist at the Oak Ridge meeting into the bathroom to witness the blood in the toilet bowl.)87 Before leaving for the airport, Lawrence telephoned Alvarez and implored Luie not to testify either, for the sake of the Rad Lab.
But Alvarez’s ambition, and his eagerness to settle scores with Oppenheimer, proved even stronger than his long allegiance to Lawrence. Hectored by Strauss in another late-night telephone call—“Lewis’s emotional intensity increased as he ran out of arguments,” Alvarez later remembered—Luie agreed to ignore Ernest’s order and boarded the next flight to Washington.88
Latimer had already testified, as scheduled, that afternoon. Speaking in a low and barely audible voice, he told of how Oppenheimer’s “astounding” and “extraordinary” influence with other scientists had persuaded them not to work on the hydrogen bomb.89
Pitzer testified to much the same effect on Wednesday, April 28. But with Lawrence hors de combat, there was no scientist of Oppenheimer’s stature to speak about the physicist—save Teller. Until almost the eve of Edward’s testimony, moreover, there was no certainty as to what he would say about the man that he had known for more than twenty years.
Ironically, Oppenheimer had originally thought of asking Teller to testify as a witness for the defense. Encountering Edward at a scientific conference in Rochester, New York, earlier in the year, Oppie had asked him if he believed that Oppenheimer had ever done anything “sinister.”90 When Teller averred that he did not, Oppenheimer suggested he speak with Garrison about testifying. But Teller’s meeting with the defense lawyers proved unproductive.91
Despite his obvious dislike of Oppenheimer, Teller also had reservations about Strauss which he had earlier expressed to Thomas Murray. “[Strauss] has one blind spot and that is security,” Edward had confided to Murray the previous January, citing the flap over Oppenheimer as “a case … in point.”92
Indeed, only a few days before his scheduled testimony—on April 22, when Teller was interviewed by Charter Heslep, a speechwriter for Strauss—Edward’s views had seemed to change once more. Heslep had come to Livermore to sound Teller out on the AEC’s Atoms for Peace program but found him “interested only in discussing the Oppenheimer case.”93 Believing that
