PART THREE
SCIENTISTS IN GRAY FLANNEL SUITS
E. O. Lawrence, Louis Alvarez, Edward Teller—Madison Avenue–type scientists. Scientists in gray flannel suits.
—David Lilienthal, journal, March 1958
9
A WORLD IN WHICH WAR WILL NOT OCCUR
AS THE MOMENTUM behind the May-Johnson bill slowed to a crawl in the Senate, an ambitious freshman Democrat from Connecticut—Brien McMahon—rose to take advantage of the stalemate. Forty-two-years-old, dapper, and florid-faced, with a trademark diamond stickpin in his lapel, McMahon had a reputation as a crusading prosecutor. While an assistant attorney general, he had brought the Harlan Country Coal Operators to justice.1 McMahon had been in Congress barely a year.
After creating a special committee on atomic energy in December 1945, and making himself chairman, McMahon introduced legislation that called for a full-time, wholly civilian Atomic Energy Commission. Learning from Groves’s debacle, McMahon wisely enlisted the support of atomic scientists and key Republicans beforehand.2
But the progress of the McMahon bill through Congress abruptly stalled in mid-February 1946, with disclosure of an espionage ring operating out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada. Twenty-two suspected spies were arrested. In testimony before McMahon’s Senate committee, Groves used the spy scandal to cast doubt upon the wisdom of giving sole control over atomic energy to civilians.*3
Two weeks later, when a British veteran of the Manhattan Project who had worked in Canada, physicist Alan Nunn May, confessed to giving samples of enriched uranium to the Russians, the entire community of atomic scientists suddenly came under suspicion.4
* * *
Not surprisingly, those who had been the subject of previous security investigations became the focus of renewed attention. On May 8, 1946, the wiretap on Robert Oppenheimer’s home in Berkeley—deactivated shortly after the war by the army—was reinstalled by the FBI, upon the order of bureau director Hoover.5 FBI agents once again dogged Oppenheimer’s steps on visits to Washington and Los Alamos.6
The bureau’s wiretapping of Oppenheimer had been approved by Tom Clark, Truman’s attorney general, after Hoover presented Clark with what appeared to be incriminating evidence of Oppie’s continued association with Communists.
Returning to the Bay Area after the war, Oppie and his family had spent several weeks at his brother’s house in nearby Albany, where the FBI had also installed a bug. During a New Year’s Day party at Frank’s, the bureau’s bug picked up a conversation between Oppie and FAECT organizers Paul Pinsky and David Adelson. Afterward, a joking comment by Pinsky to Adelson about Oppenheimer—“shall we claim him as a member?”—was interpreted by bureau agents as confirmation that Oppie was still affiliated with the Communist Party.7
As the FBI was also aware, Oppenheimer had remained in touch with other known and suspected Communists since his return from Los Alamos. That spring, Oppie spent a weekend with Haakon Chevalier at the latter’s Stinson Beach house. Chevalier was now working full-time on his novel, For Us the Living, having been denied tenure by Berkeley the previous fall.8
Hoover had once again taken a personal interest in the Oppenheimer investigation—and was becoming increasingly frustrated at Groves’s lack of cooperation in the case.9 Asked to provide details about Oppenheimer’s wartime association with Eltenton, Groves flatly refused, claiming that Oppie had given him the information in “the strictest of confidence.”10 The head of the Manhattan Project was similarly closed-mouthed about the results of his December 1943 meeting with Oppenheimer, which the bureau already knew about from Lansdale, however.11
That summer, Hoover pressed Groves once more for the truth about the Chevalier incident, but the general again refused to talk. Even after the FBI director put his request in writing, Groves declined to cooperate—defending his unwillingness to provide “details concerning the information reported to me by Oppenheimer” on the grounds that it “would endanger our relationship which must, in the best interest of the United States, be continued in its present state.”12
“Bearing in mind General Groves’ thoroughly uncooperative attitude in this situation,” the FBI’s Lish Whitson urged his boss to interview Oppenheimer anyway, despite Groves’s objections.13 Hoover, whose memory in such matters was long, neither forgot not forgave Groves’s obstinacy.
His patience finally at an end, the FBI director ordered both Chevalier and Eltenton interviewed. On June 26, 1946, a pair of agents picked up Chevalier at his beach house and drove him to bureau headquarters in San Francisco. That same afternoon, agents Branigan and Cassidy went to Eltenton’s office at Shell Development, later taking him to a room in the Post Office building in Oakland. During both interrogations, behind the scenes, the agents stayed in touch by telephone, the better to exploit contradictions in the stories of the two men.
Chevalier told the FBI that he had approached only one individual—Robert Oppenheimer—at Eltenton’s instigation, and that he had been immediately rebuffed. When one of the agents bragged that he possessed signed affidavits from three scientists whom Chevalier had contacted to spy for the Russians, Haakon asked for the scientists’ names. The FBI man remained silent.14
Eltenton’s account essentially corroborated Chevalier’s version. “It is my impression that Haakon Chevalier did not contact any other persons connected with the Radiation Laboratory other than Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer,” Eltenton wrote in an unsigned statement.15 But Eltenton also provided additional details—the use of microfilm, the involvement of the Soviets’ San Francisco consulate—leaving the impression that the approach had been part of an elaborate espionage plot, and not the innocent inquiry that Chevalier described.
A few days afterward, on the occasion of a cocktail party at Eagle Hill, Chevalier informed Oppenheimer of the FBI’s visit. He later recalled how Oppie’s face darkened when he was told how the agents had asked repeatedly about three unnamed scientists. Chevalier said he had been puzzled by the G-men’s questions, but Oppenheimer made no reply. Instead, leading Chevalier to a wooded spot at the back of the yard, far away from the house and any hidden microphones, Oppenheimer quizzed him at length. Chevalier remembered his friend seemed “extremely nervous and tense.”
