The details were subsequently sorted out in telegrams and telephone calls between Neylan and Lilienthal.129 In the revitalized alliance between the government and the university, Fisk’s reservations were simply swept away. Observed a university attorney who witnessed the documents signed by Sproul, in wonderment: “This is not a contract. This is a treaty between sovereign powers.”130
Less than two weeks after the Bohemian Grove meeting, Lawrence received a promise of $15 million from the AEC for his accelerators during the coming year. Even the money for Seaborg’s controversial “hot lab” on campus was reinstated, as was funding for John Lawrence’s medical physics clinic. Cooksey informed Loomis in a letter at the end of August that the meeting at the Grove had proven to be “of inestimable value to the country in the phase of atomic energy.”131
10
CHARACTER, ASSOCIATION, AND LOYALTY
FOLLOWING THE BOHEMIAN Grove meeting, Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss flew back to Washington together. Part of their conversation en route focused on the charges, newly resurfaced, that Oppie was a security risk. Cooksey wrote to Loomis that Oppenheimer and Strauss had “come to a mutual understanding of each other’s problems.”1 But Cooksey’s conclusion was premature; and his sense that Oppenheimer’s troubles were in the past, wholly mistaken.
Under the McMahon Act, all AEC employees who had received wartime clearances from the army’s Manhattan Project had to be reinvestigated by the FBI. The security checks assumed a new urgency in the wake of the Canadian spy scandal. Prominent among the individuals whose cases needed to be reviewed was Oppenheimer. From the outset, Lilienthal realized that Oppie’s past was likely to set off alarm bells with the commission’s security officials.2
The previous November, Groves had dumped the problem of what to do about Oppenheimer’s clearance in Lilienthal’s lap. When Lilienthal tried to duck the issue, Groves persisted. In a letter that December, the general suggested that the AEC chairman-designate resolve the matter by simply firing the scientist, removing him from the GAC.3
At the FBI, the order to reinvestigate Oppenheimer presented Hoover with another opportunity—“since we don’t have to be discreet or cautious in the inquiries that we make when we are conducting an open investigation,” an aide reminded the bureau’s director.4
During February 1947, FBI agents interviewed almost two dozen of Oppenheimer’s friends and associates. Agents also talked to Willie Higinbotham and Robert Bacher in Washington and Enrico Fermi in Chicago.5 On the Berkeley campus, Sproul, Lawrence, and Kenneth Pitzer were interviewed.
Sproul told the bureau that Oppenheimer “had been a fool about fifteen years ago due to immature judgment” but was “now thoroughly embarrassed by his past indiscretions.”6 Lawrence said much the same about the physicist—“he has had the rash and is now immune with reference to any similar experiences”—adding that Oppenheimer was “a grand person in every way.”
On February 28, Hoover sent the latest dossier on both Oppenheimer brothers to Truman’s military aide, Harry Vaughan, asking him to pass them along to the president.7 A few days later, the FBI director called Lilienthal at home to say that he would be forwarding the Oppenheimers’ files to the commission. Hoover pointedly asked Lilienthal to give the matter his personal attention.8
On Saturday morning, March 8, a courier from the bureau delivered the files to the AEC building.9 The twelve pages devoted to Robert Oppenheimer were a compilation of previous FBI reports and contained nothing from the previous month’s investigation.10
Dutifully, however, the AEC chairman assembled the commissioners around a table in his office on Monday morning to consider the case against the man some of them knew as a friend. That afternoon, James Conant and Vannevar Bush appeared before the commission with assurances that they had heard—and dismissed—the FBI’s charges as far back as 1942. They also warned that denying Oppenheimer a clearance “would have very serious consequences in the attitude of his fellow scientists toward this project.”11
Lilienthal had tried to get Groves to appear at the impromptu hearing, to explain why he had chosen Oppenheimer as Los Alamos director in the first place. But the general, returning from a vacation in Florida, could not be reached.12 Instead, Bush and Conant asked Patterson to write on Oppie’s behalf. (Groves’s letter arrived in due course, at month’s end. The Manhattan Project director noted that, while he had learned many disturbing things about Oppie since 1942, there was “nothing which, if known to me at that time, would have changed my decision.” However, Groves urged the commission to “exercise its own independent judgment based on current circumstances.”)13
* * *
The commissioner most surprised and disturbed by the FBI reports was Lewis Strauss. The AEC’s deputy counsel, Joseph Volpe, later remembered spending several hours with Strauss discussing the materials in Oppie’s FBI file.14 Strauss recalled that when he had offered Oppenheimer the directorship of Princeton’s institute weeks earlier, Oppie had vaguely alluded to “derogatory information” about his past.15 At the time, Strauss had dismissed such concerns with a wave of his hand. Strauss told Volpe that he now wished that he had paid more heed to the warning.
Lilienthal, on the other hand, found the allegations in the bureau’s file vague, unsubstantiated, and—in some instances—downright ridiculous.16 Little of the information dealt with the period when Oppenheimer was working on the bomb; most of the bureau’s anonymous informants had obviously not known Oppie well.
But Lilienthal also recognized that his own reputation as well as that of the fledging AEC might be at stake. He remained the target of partisan attacks by two of the most powerful figures
