* * *
Oppenheimer had briefly returned to teaching on the Berkeley campus in fall 1946, having already spent much of the year commuting between committee assignments in Washington and his other job at Caltech. (“I did actually give a course, but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.”)107 The experience was less than the triumphant homecoming he may have expected. Because Oppie’s affiliation this time was with the Radiation Laboratory rather than the physics department, he suffered the humiliation of having to report to Lawrence. Once, when Ernest uttered a good-natured if insensitive remark about clipping Oppenheimer’s wings, Oppie asked sarcastically whether he now needed Lawrence’s permission to order office supplies.108
Oppenheimer also found it difficult to return to academic life for another reason. Shortly after arriving back in Berkeley, Oppie confided to Birge that he already missed Washington’s corridors of power.109 Offered the directorship of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in early 1947, Oppie welcomed the chance to return to the East.110 The offer came from Lewis Strauss, who served on the institute’s board of directors.
Kitty was likewise delighted to be leaving Berkeley. When a salesman called about renewing their automobile club membership, the FBI agent monitoring the call heard her say that they “would not be gone long—only 15 or 20 years.”111 After dithering for several more weeks about whether to leave California, Oppie finally accepted the institute job that April. At a special meeting of the Berkeley physics department, a tearful Birge described Oppenheimer’s leaving as “the greatest failure of my life.”112
Lawrence learned of Oppenheimer’s decision from a radio news broadcast. To Rabi, Oppenheimer’s leaving Berkeley a second time amounted, in Ernest’s eyes, to a kind of treason.
* * *
At the Rad Lab, the 184-inch Synchrotron finally sparked to life just after midnight on November 1, 1946. In its first week of operation, Lawrence’s machine produced a beam of 200-million-volt deuterons, twice the energy that he had set as the goal for the great cyclotron back in 1939.113
Despite such successes, Lawrence was worried anew about how the Rad Lab would fare in the transition from the army to the AEC. The cozy personal relationship that he had built up with Groves over the years did not guarantee good relations with Lilienthal, who remained an unknown quantity to Ernest. That winter, Lawrence submitted a last budget request to the army, asking almost $8 million for the coming year.114
Lawrence bid adieu to Groves at a farewell party in Washington on January 17, 1947, amid talk that there were already warning flags flying for the Rad Lab at the AEC.115 The commission had recently balked at funding John’s biomedical clinic and had approved money for only half of Alvarez’s Linac.116
Yet there were other, worse shocks to come. Most worrisome to Ernest was the news that James Fisk, the AEC’s recently appointed director of research, opposed using government funds to support further work on particle accelerators.117 The utility of his machines was “indefinite,” Lawrence bristled in a letter to Fisk, and “the value of such information to be obtained does not require justification.”118
Adding to Ernest’s anxiety was his uncertainty whether Oppie would be an ally or a foe in the coming struggle. When consulted about the Rad Lab budget, the GAC chairman had candidly said that he thought Lawrence’s figure too high. Recently, Oppenheimer had also surprised Ernest—and the AEC—by throwing cold water on the commission’s exaggerated claims concerning the future of civilian atomic power.119 At the same time, what had previously been Lawrence’s trump card—the university’s close ties to the army—was about to be taken out of his hand. Both Contract 36 and Contract 48 were finally scheduled to expire that summer.120
The university’s much-delayed “roundup and showdown” with the AEC occurred in mid-August, at a meeting of laboratory directors.121 Hoping to undercut commission bureaucrats, Lawrence had invited Lilienthal out to California a week before the meeting for several days of hiking in Yosemite. Lilienthal was facing his own problems at home: his confirmation was still being held up by Senate Republicans, who had attacked his stewardship of the TVA as pro-labor and even “communistic.”122 (“I am so glad to get away. A change of scene should help,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal on the way out west.)123
From the mountains, the pair drove to the Bohemian Grove, where Lawrence had moved the lab directors’ meeting from Berkeley. Loomis and Gaither had volunteered their respective camps at the Grove for Ernest’s guests.124 (In a letter, Cooksey assured Loomis that the cabins were stocked with “Bourbon, Scotch, vermouth, and gin”—as well as “plenty of red meat.”)125
The AEC commissioners stayed at Gaither’s “Friends of the Forest” camp. Lawrence, Underhill, and the Berkeley contingent bunked at “The Sons of Toil”—Loomis’s camp. The remaining lab directors slept in a clubhouse alongside the Russian River. Tellingly, Oppenheimer deserted his former Berkeley colleagues to join his new friends in the AEC.
No formal agenda had been set for the meeting, nor were minutes kept. Informally, however, Fisk had made it clear that the future of government support for the national labs—Lawrence’s lab in particular—was at stake.
On August 19, 1947, Alvarez and McMillan began the meeting with presentations on the Linac and Synchrotron. In discussions that occupied the morning, Oppenheimer sided with Lawrence, who argued forcefully that the commission should continue the tradition of support for basic research set by Groves and the army.126 A protest by Strauss—who accused the university of “running out of the duty it owed”—was countered by Neylan, who claimed that the AEC contracts put too great a strain on Lawrence.127
In the course of a walk
