Reached by telephone by Walter in the early morning hours before the story appeared, Frank had emphatically denied ever being a party member. A follow-up story by the Associated Press, which included Frank’s denial, ran in newspapers across the country the following day.39 Wrote Willie Higinbotham to Frank in sympathy: “The sons-o’-bitches are sure going hog wild.”40
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That summer at Berkeley, Lawrence and Birge were still trying to find a replacement for Oppie. Hans Bethe, who was first on Lawrence’s list, could not be lured from Cornell. A second candidate, Stanford’s Felix Bloch, was uninterested in cyclotrons and hence unacceptable to Ernest. Birge finally offered the job to Gian Carlo Wick, an Italian theorist and former colleague of Fermi’s. Until Wick arrived on campus early in 1948, Serber continued to teach Oppenheimer’s quantum mechanics class.41
As his interview with the FBI showed, Lawrence had managed to temporarily submerge his differences with Oppenheimer—if only out of sheer pragmatism. Oppie’s place on the GAC gave the latter a powerful voice on vital questions affecting the Rad Lab, as the Bohemian Grove meeting had shown.42
At Lawrence’s lab, Oppenheimer’s absence had thus far been no impediment to progress, as several projects long in the works finally came to fruition. Just after the stroke of midnight on October 16, 1947, Alvarez’s Linac produced its first beam.43 A few weeks later, Lawrence sent the AEC his outline for the lab’s next two years of operation. The plan announced Ernest’s next big machine: the “Bevatron,” a Synchrotron 120 feet in diameter, theoretically capable of accelerating protons to 6 billion electron volts. Lawrence’s ambitious plan left no doubt that he intended Berkeley to remain the dominant power in high-energy physics: the money he requested for the coming year was nearly two-thirds of the total that the AEC had promised to spend on accelerators.44
But the commission’s tepid response showed that Lawrence and his laboratory still faced significant political obstacles in Washington. Replying to Berkeley’s proposal, Fisk spoke ominously of a “modest effort,” the need for “paper studies,” and of a decision some six months hence.45
Ten days later, Lawrence was back in Washington to lobby for his Bevatron. Opposing Berkeley’s new machine was a prominent member of the GAC and a former ally of Ernest’s: Isidor Rabi. Rabi’s interests were no less parochial; he wanted the commission to build a smaller and cheaper accelerator nearer Columbia, at the AEC’s new Brookhaven laboratory on Long Island.46 Underhill, also in Washington, quickly sent Sproul a warning note: “General conversations around one of the eastern institutions is that it is time to break the University of California atomic trust.”47
But Lawrence knew that his ace in the hole remained the university’s contracts with the AEC, which were due to expire by July 1, 1948.
On the morning of December 31, 1947, Lawrence, Sproul, and Underhill assembled in Sproul’s office to consider whether to renew Contracts 36 and 48. When Underhill objected that Bradbury’s actions showed the Los Alamos director to be still beyond Sproul’s control, Lawrence countered that the university gained much more than it lost from its relationship with the commission. Told that AEC support for the Bevatron might be the quid pro quo for renewing the contract, Sproul sided with Lawrence.48
Bacher and AEC general manager Carroll Wilson arrived in Berkeley a week later to seal the deal. While what went on at Los Alamos would continue to be determined by the AEC—“exclusively,” Wilson emphasized—the commission agreed to “give Mr. Lawrence, if he is chosen by the University to be its scientific representative, a free run of the place.”49 In a concession to Underhill, Wilson let the university pick the lab’s next director, subject to the commission’s approval.
It was a wary and guarded partnership at best. Wrote Sproul in his office diary: “My final word was, ‘we are now engaged, but the banns are not to be published until each party has had an opportunity to investigate the background and intentions of the other more thoroughly.’”
At the end of January 1948, the regents voted to extend the Los Alamos contract for four more years.50 Sproul agreed to a faculty appointment at Berkeley for Bradbury, who was about to be dropped from his teaching post at Stanford, having been away from the campus for the past seven years.51 Bowing to the inevitable, Underhill finally took the step he had long resisted and bought a business license for the University of California in the state of New Mexico.52
As part of the vows exchanged in Sproul’s office, Lawrence got his Bevatron. But the machine had been scaled down to one-quarter of its original size to make it more palatable to Fisk and the AEC’s auditors. In another compromise, Brookhaven received funding for its own, nearly identical accelerator. Designed by Stanley Livingston, Ernest’s long-ago collaborator—and now his rival—Brookhaven’s machine was dubbed the “Cosmotron.”53
As Lawrence had hoped, Oppie’s help proved to be key in the battle over the accelerators. Fisk had finally left the decision of which of the competing machines to fund up to the General Advisory Committee. At a climactic moment, when Rabi appeared to have swayed the GAC in favor of Brookhaven, Oppie saved the day by arguing that “discouragement of the Berkeley group would result in the loss of something valuable to the national scientific health.”54 Oppenheimer’s Solomonic decision had kept the West Coast atomic trust intact, while giving the new East Coast lab a promising start.
Ernest celebrated his good fortune by purchasing a new Cadillac convertible, using money from the Loomis fund.*55 When mesons—the long-sought binding force of the nucleus, previously seen only in cosmic radiation—were observed on the Rad Lab cyclotron later that month, even Lawrence’s critics seemed won over.
“Isn’t physics wonderful?” cabled Rabi from Columbia.56
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His close call over the Bevatron convinced Lawrence anew of the importance of having powerful allies in Washington. A Joint Committee survey of the Rad Lab the previous year had noted that
