Between Friday morning, July 25, when Oppie—who had been kicked by a horse the day before—was x-rayed at a Santa Fe hospital, and late Monday afternoon, July 28, when the couple’s Packard (with Kitty at the wheel) collided with a New Mexico Fish and Game truck on the road leading to Pecos, the Oppenheimers’ whereabouts are unaccounted for. Interviewed by the FBI in 1952, Mrs. Damon recalled meeting with the Oppenheimers to discuss the furniture about a week after she accepted their terms.
Whether—and how—the Oppenheimers made the 2,200-mile round-trip journey in less than eighty hours remains a matter of speculation, however.
* Strauss’s interest in wiretaps and black-bag operations dated from a bizarre, Watergate-like incident in 1930. Believing Democratic Party officials were in possession of damaging information about his administration, President Herbert Hoover requested that Strauss, formerly his private secretary, secretly retrieve the file, authorizing him “to utilize the services of any one of our various government secret services.” Strauss, in turn, approached Paul Foster, the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence in New York City, who assigned an agent to the task. While no incriminating documents were found, Strauss was evidently impressed with the potential of such clandestine—and illegal—operations.
* Section 80, Title 18 of the U.S. Code specified that any individual who “knowingly or willfully falsifie[d] or conceal[ed] … a material fact … in any matter within the jurisdiction or agency of the United States” was guilty of a felony. In 1943, Groves had lied to Nichols by repeating Oppenheimer’s original story that Chevalier had approached three scientists.
* Having meanwhile abandoned his original vocation for another branch of physics—optics—Weinberg was seeking a job at Spero’s House of Vision in New York.
The political climate had another of Oppenheimer’s former students in more desperate straits. Late in December 1953, the personnel director of an oil company in Ponca City, Oklahoma, informed Oppie that Rossi Lomanitz had given his name as a job reference: “Quite frankly, we could use a man having his technical background; but because of his past public record, I find it hard to believe that his loyalty is all that it should be.… For your information, he has been living in a hovel on the edge of a swamp for the past three years. He has worked as a day laborer since Jan. 1950.”
* Ironically, the focus of Joint Committee investigators upon Oppenheimer as the “second Fuchs” caused them to miss another real spy at Los Alamos: Harvard-trained physicist Ted Hall. In September 1954, security officials at the lab told Frank Cotter that Hall—who left the lab in spring 1946—was probably the Soviets’ other source for secret documents obtained from Los Alamos.
* At one point in this testimony, Oppenheimer seemed about to tell the story of Groves’s December 1943 visit, but Robb quickly intervened to get the questioning back on track:
ROBB: “Then you were interviewed in 1946; is that right?”
OPPENHEIMER: “In between I think came Groves.”
ROBB: “Yes. But you were interviewed in 1946; is that right?”
* Shortly before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer recited a passage from Hindu scripture, which had so impressed Bush that he wrote it down on a slip of paper and kept it in his wallet throughout the war: “In the forest, in battle, in the midst of arrows, javelins, fire / Out on the great sea, at the precipice’s edge in the mountains / In sleep, in delirium, in deep trouble / The good deeds a man has done before defend him.”
* There was also a new and personal element to Lawrence’s animosity. A week or so earlier, at a cocktail party in Balboa, he learned from a friend of the Tolmans that Oppenheimer had carried on an affair with Ruth while her husband, Richard, was still alive. Molly remembered her husband returning to their house in a rage. Ernest evidently passed the story along to Strauss, who would write to Teller, years after the hearing: “Did Ernest Lawrence ever tell you what [Oppenheimer] did in the Tolman household?”
* In his memoirs, published in 2001, Teller claimed that his reservations concerning Oppenheimer’s “judgment” referred not to the latter’s advice on the H-bomb but to a proposal Oppie had supposedly made to Eisenhower, shortly after the Mike test, urging that consideration be given to using the H-bomb in Korea. While no corroborating evidence could be found for Teller’s claim, Rabi did confirm, during the Oppenheimer hearings, that his friend had at one time in the early 1950s entertained the notion of preventive war.
* Several weeks after the hearings, William Borden wrote Teller a confidential letter containing words of encouragement. In it, Borden offered this explanation for why he had sent his famous missive to Hoover: “In weighing the danger of having a probable subversive continue to orient our national policies against the danger of ‘alienating our scientists,’ it struck me that someone had to take the first unequivocal step toward belling this cat and that I was the logical nominee, not only because I knew more about the cat than others … but because I am outside the scientific fraternity.”
* For Lawrence at least. The Sony corporation would later develop and market the three-gun picture tube under its “Trinitron” trademark.
