Frank also lacked both the ambition and the direction of his older brother. Until Robert kindled his interest in physics, Frank had been thinking about becoming a professional flutist.67
Mirroring the relationship between Ernest and John Lawrence, Oppie grew unusually protective of his younger brother—“in some ways perhaps part of a father to him,” as Robert would later observe.68 When Frank went away to study in England, the brothers corresponded regularly, Robert proffering advice from “the fruit and outcome of his erotic labors.”69
Robert’s letters also waxed philosophical. When Frank complained of a failed romance, Oppie volunteered a perspective that would later seem hauntingly apt to his own situation: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in the times of preparation that determines what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”70
Forever conscious of laboring in the shadow of his famous brother, Frank, not surprisingly, showed occasional flashes of a rebellious nature. (“Poor laddie, the mark is on you,” Oppie once wrote to Frank in commiseration.)71 Robert attributed his brother’s halting progress toward a physics doctorate at Caltech to the influence of Frank’s fiancée, Jacquenette Quann, an economics major at Berkeley who was active in the campus Young Communist League. Until he met “Jackie,” Frank had only skirted the edge of involvement in politics. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, he remembered attending a Carnegie Hall concert where the orchestra played without a conductor. (“It was a kind of ‘down with the bosses’ movement,” Frank explained.)72
Robert urged his brother to break off the engagement. Frank, defiant, married Jackie late in 1936, while he was still a graduate student.73 The couple joined the Communist Party together early in 1937, once again in defiance of Oppie’s wishes.74
As was customary for party members, Frank picked a fictitious last name—Folsom—under which he paid dues to the Pasadena chapter. He and Jackie also socialized and briefly shared a house with several other Communists likewise affiliated with Caltech.75 But Frank’s commitment to communism was apparently neither particularly passionate nor deep. While at Caltech, he and Ruth Tolman organized and performed at a benefit concert for Spain. Frank and Jackie joined the Pasadena chapter’s crusade to racially integrate the municipal swimming pool. Robert, visiting from Berkeley, attended the demonstration and professed to find it “pathetic.”76
In June 1941, a teaching job that Frank held at Stanford abruptly ended. Oppie told friends that his brother had been fired for radical talk and unionizing. (A Stanford colleague complained to the FBI that Frank had called him “a hopeless bourgeois not in sympathy with the proletariat.”)77 Robert thought Frank’s subsequent, brief period of unemployment “very, very salutary.”78
At Oppie’s urging, Lawrence agreed to hire Frank at the Rad Lab. To get the job, Frank assured Robert that he was no longer an active Communist, having withdrawn from the party that spring. Robert cautioned his brother that Ernest would fire him “if he was not a good boy.”79
While Oppie evidently told Lawrence something of Frank’s involvement with politics, he did not disclose his brother’s Communist past.80 As a condition of his employment at the lab, Frank promised Lawrence not to become involved in political causes.81 Ernest assigned him to the team of cyclotroneers converting the 37-inch with the thought that working fourteen- to sixteen-hour days would leave him no time for mischief. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Lawrence put Frank in charge of the night shift building the 184-inch. The boys remembered him nervously chain-smoking, pacing back and forth on the wooden latticework that rose above the big magnet.
It was no coincidence that Frank’s new job also made it easier for Oppie to keep a watch on his younger brother. Yet Robert’s intervention on Frank’s behalf was a reflection not only of his concern as the older sibling but of true affection. Years later, under much different circumstances, Oppie would say of Frank: “He is a much finer person than I am.”82
* * *
By spring 1941, Oppie’s own political dalliances were coming back to haunt him. Jack Tenney, the new chairman of the California legislature’s Committee on Un-American Activities, had recently announced an investigation of hiring practices at the university.83 Tenney was incensed that a teaching assistant in Berkeley’s math department, Kenneth May, was being kept on the university payroll after admitting to being a Communist.84 (May was ultimately not only expelled but disinherited by his father, a Berkeley dean.)85 An earlier investigation by the same committee had focused attention upon the AFT’s Local 349 in Berkeley, with which Oppenheimer and Chevalier were associated.86
The threat of being hauled before the Tenney Committee passed, and the scare seemed to have little effect upon Oppenheimer’s behavior. That fall, he attended a house-warming party at May’s new home in neighboring Albany.87
Oppenheimer’s near run-in with Tenney also did not discourage him from further behind-the-scenes unionizing. When Paul Pinsky, a Berkeley alumnus turned organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, encountered difficulty in organizing a chapter of the radical union at the Shell Development Corporation in nearby Emeryville, Oppenheimer brought Pinksy and Shell’s scientists together at his home.88 Pinsky would credit Oppenheimer for the creation of FAECT’s Local 25 at Shell.89
Later, when Berkeley’s teachers union split over factional differences, Oppenheimer sponsored another union meeting
