Cornered by reporters at his home in Stinson Beach, Chevalier described Russell’s story as “greatly garbled” and denied that he had approached Oppenheimer “in order to obtain information of any kind.”95 Contacted in England, where he had moved from Berkeley just three weeks earlier, Eltenton refused comment.96 From Princeton, Oppenheimer declared that he would likewise “withhold comment, either confirmation or denial”—an equivocation that both angered and perplexed Chevalier.97
Next to jump on the internal security bandwagon was California’s “little HUAC”—the Tenney Committee. Even before HUAC’s Oppenheimer story broke, Tenney had notified the FBI that he planned to subpoena Haakon Chevalier to appear before his own committee hearings, in Oakland, the following week.98
Like Thomas, Tenney had spent the previous year dealing with public ridicule and a hostile press. (His committee’s investigation into sex education at Chico High School was interrupted by picketing students holding signs that read: “The Birds and the Bees; Mr. Tenney, please!”)99
For the past month, Tenney’s reclusive chief investigator, attorney Richard Combs, had planned hearings on links between the Communist Party and the CIO-affiliated Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Combs also intended to expose Communist ties to the California Labor School in San Francisco.100 Following HUAC’s revelations, however, Tenney and Combs hurriedly expanded the Oakland hearings to include charges of Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory.101
Tenney’s latest investigation opened on November 1, 1947, the day after Thomas’s closed. Amid name-calling between government informers and hostile witnesses, the question of wartime spying at Berkeley was largely ignored. Instead, Combs told of his own recent nocturnal visit to the Rad Lab, where, equipped with a flashlight, he had climbed under a security fence and approached the giant cyclotron undetected.102
Almost a week passed before Chevalier was finally called to the stand. But the drama quickly turned anticlimactic when Chevalier was dismissed without ever being questioned about his approach to Oppenheimer.103 Like Thomas’s Hollywood hearings, Tenney’s investigation ended abruptly and without resolution.
As subsequent events would show, moreover, neither event clouded the aura that surrounded Oppenheimer, who continued to be lionized by the press as well as the public. So well known and admired a figure was Oppie that when the inaugural issue of Physics Today appeared the following May, the editors needed only to put a porkpie hat on the cover for their lead article on recent trends in American science. That July, Oppenheimer spoke defiantly about his left-wing past in a cover story for Time magazine. “The Thomas Committee doesn’t like this, but I’m not ashamed of it,” Oppie boasted. “I’m more ashamed of the lateness.… If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education, I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos at all.”104
Lilienthal thought it a telling sign of the times that Oppenheimer’s security file—now 1 foot high and weighing some 12 pounds—was once again back on his desk at the AEC later that summer. Wrote the AEC chairman of the prevailing mood: “Suspicion, suspicion, suspicion. And what an opportunity to gouge a man you don’t like, one who has disagreed with you. Godalmighty!”105
* * *
With the exception of Tenney’s abortive hearings, Lawrence’s laboratory had thus far escaped the security mania that seemed to be sweeping the country.
But an early warning sign had been the government’s denial of a security clearance for Charlotte Serber. Refused the job of Rad Lab librarian, she was eventually given another post at the lab that did not require a clearance.106
Although security at the Berkeley lab had been described as “poor” in a 1946 army report, the only physical changes imposed since then was a new fence around the giant cyclotron—erected at the AEC’s insistence following Combs’s nighttime raid. Lawrence had successfully resisted the installation of additional barriers as “giving the laboratory area an industrial appearance.”107
Behind closed doors and out of the headlines, however, another kind of security investigation was about to get under way at Berkeley. Caught between the need to grant hundreds of new Q clearances on the one hand and congressional charges of lax security on the other, the AEC in April 1948 had issued an “Interim Procedure” containing guidelines for the investigation of suspected security risks.108
The new rules created regional Personnel Security Boards staffed by locally prominent citizens. Each board was asked to decide whether prospective AEC employees and contractors deserved a security clearance based upon three so-called fields of inquiry: “character, association, and loyalty.”109 Since the PSB was not a court of law, the usual rules of evidence did not apply. Subjects might not even be informed of specific charges against them; nor were they allowed to confront their accusers. There was usually only forty-eight hours’ advance notice of a hearing, and no appeal of the board’s ruling outside the commission was possible.110 As the AEC’s Joseph Volpe frankly admitted to the Joint Committee, the PSB was “not much more than a kangaroo court.”111
The University of California’s Personnel Security Board held its first hearing that summer. At Lawrence’s request, Neylan agreed to head Berkeley’s PSB. Its other members were two war heroes: Admiral Chester Nimitz and Major General Kenyon Joyce.112
The first person to be investigated by the board was a young Los Alamos chemist who had come to Berkeley to work with Wendell Latimer. A pall of suspicion had fallen over Robert Hurley because he and his Latvian-born wife had opposed U.S. entry into the war while graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.113
Summoned to Neylan’s law office on August 4, 1948, Hurley faced the board in the company of his sole defender: Latimer.114 Three hours later, Neylan handed down the verdict in longhand notes written on a yellow legal pad. The board found Hurley “lacking in frankness and, in many instances, evasive in relation to substantive issues.” He
