Frank also agreed to teach a night class—“The Social Implications of Modern Scientific Development”—the following spring at the California Labor School, which shared quarters with Communist Party headquarters on Haight Street.66 During the day, Oppie’s brother worked with Serber on Alvarez’s Linac.67
Lawrence’s own plans focused upon completing the long-deferred great cyclotron. For the interim, however, he enjoyed playing the role of conquering hero. Intent upon ensuring that the record of Berkeley’s contribution to the war effort would not be eclipsed by Chicago’s, Neylan commissioned an official history of the Rad Lab, paid for by the regents.68 Following suit, Sproul solicited private funds for an official portrait of Lawrence—a project inspired by Ernest himself. A bronze bust by Alfred Loomis’s wife, Manette, would soon follow.69
But, beyond the trappings of empire, Lawrence’s postwar fame and the promise of more money from Groves and Sproul meant that a whole new generation of “boys” had joined the Rad Lab’s veterans in the days just after the war.70 Among the recent additions was Wolfgang Panofsky, a twenty-six-year-old German émigré physicist who had worked with Alvarez at Los Alamos and was nicknamed “Pief.” Since the diminutive Panofsky was the only researcher small enough to fit comfortably between the poles of the 184-inch magnet, Pief spent his first days at the lab doing measurements for Duane Sewell.71
Herbert York, a twenty-three-year-old experimentalist from Rochester University, whom Ernest had sent to Y-12 to improve the performance of the Beta Calutrons, returned to Berkeley after the war to finish his graduate degree. Lawrence put York to work on the graveyard shift running the 60-inch, which was once again being used to make medical radioisotopes.72 The peacetime Rad Lab, Ernest had recently written Groves, “should be devoted primarily to the problems of pure science.”73
Lawrence even revived the Journal Club, whose meetings had been suspended for the duration. In a move symbolizing the return to the status quo antebellum, his red leather chair was restored to its original place of honor in LeConte Hall.
Unwilling to wait until funding for his new projects had been approved, Lawrence ordered that the Rad Lab’s cavernous Building 10, home of the prototype Calutron, be made ready for Alvarez’s Linac.74 Ed Lofgren joined Bernard Peters in converting the 37-inch to a scale-model Synchrotron, to be used in a test of McMillan’s phase stability concept. Sewell and Panofsky supervised the dismantling of the old 184-inch, in preparation for its conversion to a phase-stabilized cyclotron.
That October, at a convocation in the open-air Greek theater on campus, Groves conferred the army-navy “E”—for “Excellence”—award upon Sproul. But, tellingly, the general had already signaled who would call the shots in the renewed army-university partnership. Groves had chosen Oppenheimer’s replacement without consulting either Sproul or Underhill.
Norris Bradbury was a Berkeley-trained physicist and reserve navy commander whose duties at the wartime lab had included supervising the assembly of both the Trinity gadget and the Fat Man bomb. Although Bradbury had received Oppenheimer’s endorsement, Underhill balked at what he took to be yet another infringement upon the university’s prerogatives.75 Nonetheless, a few weeks later, the regent’s representative was once again on his way to New York, to negotiate another six-month extension of the army contracts with Nichols.76
Lawrence, for his part, remained unperturbed by the cost of empire. He had already let Groves know that the postwar Rad Lab would look to the army for at least $1 million annually.77 In the months between the Calutrons’ success and the Trinity test, Ernest’s estimated yearly budget for the peacetime lab had ballooned a hundredfold; it climbed higher still following V-J day.78
With peace also came the return of familiar customs. On December 7, 1945, Lawrence hosted a cocktail party for the Rad Lab’s returnees at Berkeley’s elegant Claremont Hotel, followed by dinner at Trader Vic’s. (Ernest’s favorite restauranteur invented a new drink for the occasion—a lurid, smoking concoction of rum, blue Curacao, and dry ice dubbed the “A-bomb cocktail.” “It was ghastly,” Molly remembered.)79
The day before departing for a New Year’s vacation in Palm Springs, Lawrence received the long-awaited word from Groves: the army agreed to provide the money necessary to complete the 184-inch and authorized the start of construction on McMillan’s scale-model Synchrotron. But Groves wanted more details on the cost of Alvarez’s Linac. The general agreed to send Nichols out to Berkeley to discuss the $1.6-million appropriation that Ernest had requested for the Rad Lab in 1946.
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Where Oppenheimer fit into all these plans remained mysterious. The previous September, when Sproul had hosted a strategy session with Ernest and Birge on how to lure Oppie back to Berkeley, all three men agreed that the physicist was “disaffected.”80 Lawrence even candidly admitted that he was probably one of the reasons why Oppenheimer was playing the part of the reluctant bride.81
Ernest seconded Birge’s suggestion that they begin by doubling Oppie’s salary—rationalizing, unsentimentally, that “how much we pay Professor Oppenheimer really means nothing because the Government will place such large sums at our disposal if Oppenheimer is here, that his salary will be insignificant.”82 When Sproul hesitated, Ernest promised to go out and raise the money himself.83 The university president finally agreed to make the offer to Oppenheimer in person, at the “E”-award ceremony scheduled for Los Alamos on October 16.
Sitting next to the grim-faced physicist on the bunting-covered dais, Sproul was surprised by Oppie’s icy reserve. Oppenheimer had officially resigned as director just that morning; Bradbury had been acting head of the lab since the first of the month. Between the set speeches, Oppenheimer complained that a letter he had recently received from Birge was “cold,” whereas telephone conversations with Lawrence had left the impression that Ernest did not want him back in the physics department.84 Oppie said that he understood the president himself was reluctant to have him back on campus, “because of his difficult temperament and poor judgment”—a charge
