The suspense ended three days later, when the board, in a 2-to-1 vote, declared Oppenheimer a security risk and recommended that his clearance not be renewed.
As Nichols had predicted, the Gray board’s verdict was largely based upon the issue of Oppenheimer’s veracity as reflected by the Chevalier incident. While the board found that the account given by Oppenheimer to the FBI was “substantially true,” it therefore concluded that Oppie’s earlier admission of lying showed he recognized that the contact by Chevalier was not just an innocent conversation but, rather, “that it was a criminal conspiracy.”
“Loyalty to one’s friends is one of the noblest of qualities,” wrote Gray in the majority decision. “Being loyal to one’s friends above reasonable obligations to the country and to the security system, however, is not clearly consistent with the interests of security.”6
Ironically, the single dissenting vote had been Evans’s, who argued, in a minority opinion, that Oppenheimer’s clearance should be reinstated. Gray and Morgan noticed that Evans had seemed “morose” during the hearing’s last days and concluded that he was “probably ill.”7 During the recess the chemist had gone home to Chicago. When he returned to Washington, his attitude toward Oppenheimer seemed at such a variance with his earlier views that Robb and Rolander believed “someone had ‘gotten to’ Evans.” Like Lawrence, the professor had likely learned from academic colleagues what the personal cost might be of pillorying Oppenheimer.8
Robb learned of the verdict on May 23 and immediately notified Strauss. Bates informed the FBI that both the AEC chairman and his lawyer were “very happy” with the results.9
Not surprisingly, the scene at Princeton was altogether different, as captured by the bureau’s wiretaps: “[Oppenheimer] reported to be very depressed at the present time and has been ill-tempered with his wife.”10 At Mitchell’s order, Oppie’s secretary at the institute had returned the last of the AEC’s classified documents a few days earlier.11
Anticipating a long-deferred vacation in the Caribbean with his family, Oppenheimer felt obliged to send Hoover a registered letter telling of his plans, lest the bureau fear that he was about to flee the country.12 Hoover notified Strauss, Brownell, and the CIA, nonetheless, that Oppie might be preparing to defect to Russia via submarine.13
* * *
On June 29, 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission handed down its verdict on Oppenheimer. By a vote of 4 to 1—Smyth was the only holdout—the commission upheld the Gray board’s decision to strip Oppenheimer of his clearance, just one day before it was due to expire.14 In separate opinions appended to the majority report, Zuckert gave a lengthy and torturous justification for his decision to vote with the majority. Murray’s statement, reportedly coauthored with a Jesuit priest, was most notable for its moralistic fervor.15 Curiously, while the religion-minded commissioner thought Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb defensible on ethical grounds, he still declared the scientist “disloyal.”16
Garrison had not been allowed to make his case in person before the commissioners; nor was he permitted to see the letter that Robb and Nichols wrote in support of the board’s decision, which emphasized the Chevalier incident. (Oppie’s “misrepresentation and falsification constitutes criminal … dishonest … conduct,” Nichols intoned.)17 The AEC’s majority report, drafted by Strauss, found Oppenheimer guilty of “fundamental defects of character,” echoing Nichols in its emphasis upon Oppenheimer’s questionable “associations.”18
On the same day that he filed the majority report, Strauss paid a personal visit to the FBI, thanking Bates and the bureau’s director effusively for their assistance. For Hoover, however, the Oppenheimer case did not end officially until two weeks later, when the Justice Department ruled that Oppie could not be prosecuted for lies told in 1943 or at the hearing.19
On July 20, Hoover advised Strauss that so far as he and the bureau were concerned, the Oppenheimer case was closed.20
At Princeton, the Oppenheimers prepared for a life of academic exile. Although Oppie was still very much in demand as a speaker on campuses and at academic conferences, the familiar summonses from Washington had abruptly ceased.21 In an irony that perhaps only he was able to appreciate, the AEC’s verdict had made Oppenheimer himself one of the institute’s “solipsistic luminaries—shining in separate and helpless desolation” that he had disdained in a letter to Frank almost twenty years earlier.22
Finding more time to spend with the children—Peter, now fourteen, and Toni, eleven—Oppie and Kitty revived a favorite ritual: the family would search for four-leaf clovers on the New Jersey campus or wherever they might be visiting; the finder would Scotch-tape the little plant to an index card and present it, inscribed, to another family member—a gift of luck.
* * *
Elsewhere, the repercussions of the Oppenheimer case were just beginning to be felt. On June 9, 1954, journalist Drew Pearson reported in his syndicated column that Strauss had secretly recorded AEC meetings and tapped the telephones of individual commissioners. Strauss’s prompt denial was also an outright lie: “No tapping of Commissioners’ telephones or any other telephones has ever been made on my behalf by security officers or by anyone else,” he assured the president, Sterling Cole, and Pearson.23 Attacks upon Strauss for his role in the Oppenheimer case would continue throughout the coming weeks—including, most notably, in a series of articles by political columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop.24
Teller was also much affected by the controversy. “The people here are quite worked up about the whole thing,” Rabi wrote DuBridge in late June from a meeting at Los Alamos, where physicists stood in line to read the transcript of the hearing.25 Rabi thought the testimony “much worse than [he] thought possible”—including “some horrifying passages” from Alvarez—but Teller’s remarks, he felt, were the nadir: “It does take quite a lot of nerve for him to show up at this time.”
Edward, indeed, would have reason to regret his appearance at a picnic outside Fuller Lodge later that day. Approaching Robert Christy, a wartime colleague with whom he had once shared a house in
