The next scientist to appear before Berkeley’s board was Robert Serber, who, like Hurley, found himself in trouble because of his wife’s political associations. Unlike the unfortunate Hurley, however, Serber had the active support of Ernest Lawrence, who attended the August 5 hearing to speak on his behalf.117 Lawrence’s endorsement left Neylan’s verdict a foregone conclusion. Excusing Serber’s failure to publicly criticize the Soviet Union as “consistent with a retiring nature,” the board welcomed the physicist back into the fold.118
No such reception awaited Frank Oppenheimer. Hoping to spend the summer in California, Frank had written Lawrence from Minnesota, expecting the usual pro forma invitation extended to Rad Lab alumni. Instead, Ernest’s reply was quick, brusque, and negative, prompting this wounded response from Oppie’s brother:
Dear Lawrence:
What is going on? Thirty months ago you put your arms around me and wished me well, told me to come back and work whenever I wanted to. Now you say I am no longer welcome.
Who has changed, you or I?119
Frank came to Berkeley anyway. Risking Ernest’s wrath, Ed and Elsie McMillan invited the outcast to dinner at their home.120 When Oppie and his wife, visiting from Princeton, encountered Ernest at a faculty cocktail party, an inebriated Kitty loudly scolded him in front of the other guests for banishing Frank from the lab. Oppie simply looked on in silence, bemused at Ernest’s discomfort.121
Lawrence never gave a reason for his edict banning Frank. But his Scandinavian temper had flared upon learning that Frank lied about not being a member of the Communist Party. Ernest was no less angry at Oppie for hiding the truth about his brother.122 At the time of the Tenney hearings, when Ernest had quizzed Oppenheimer about the Chevalier affair, Oppie had cavalierly dismissed the question with an impatience that seemed to imply that Lawrence was too thickheaded to understand the answer.
* * *
Baited by Hoover, the trail being followed by Red-hunting investigators was leading inexorably closer to Berkeley. In July 1948, Thomas’s HUAC began a series of hearings whose star witnesses, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, promised to expose Communists at top levels of the U.S. government. Almost in passing, Bentley’s testimony identified Louise Bransten—a former Vassar classmate—as someone she had encountered at Communist Party meetings in New York during the late 1930s.
Alert reporters got a hint of the direction that HUAC’s next inquiry would take when the committee “inadvertently” released an executive session transcript containing testimony by Harold Zindel, one of the army agents who had shadowed Martin Kamen to his wartime rendezvous with Soviet diplomats at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.123 Both Zindel and a former bureau agent, Larry Kerley, were currently working for HUAC.124 Another former army agent, David Teeple, a colleague’s of Zindel’s, had meanwhile quit his high school principal’s job to join Hickenlooper’s personal staff. Retired FBI agent Harold Velde, who had been a member of King’s expanded “commie squad” in San Francisco during the war, was now a congressman from Illinois and a member of HUAC.
In mid-August, Louis Russell tipped off the bureau that HUAC’s next target would be Berkeley and Chicago scientists suspected of stealing wartime atomic secrets.125
Thomas’s hearings on Soviet espionage at the wartime Rad Lab began a few weeks later in executive session at the House Office Building. Excluded from the hearing room, reporters waited impatiently outside in the hall. First to be called was Kamen, who, up to a few days before, had been living the quiet life of a junior professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. Kamen’s subpoena had arrived on the same day that his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, broke the story of his 1944 dinner with Kheifets and Kasparov.126
Brandishing the FBI’s still-classified transcript of the recorded conversation, Stripling questioned Kamen for three hours about the rendezvous at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto. Throughout, Kamen denied passing any secret information to the Russians.
Steve Nelson was next to testify. HUAC’s subpoena had reached him in New York, where he was serving on the Communist Party’s National Board. Invoking the Fifth Amendment, Nelson refused to answer any of the committee’s questions. Later, outside the hearing room, he branded his interrogators “political pyromaniacs.”127
Louise Bransten, next in the lineup, also pleaded the Fifth upon the advice of her attorney. Joseph Weinberg, the last witness to be called for the day, denied for a second time ever having met or even talked to Steve Nelson.
More than two dozen other witnesses, including Groves and Lansdale, would testify before the closed hearings concluded in late September. At the end of the month, a twenty-three-page HUAC report on Soviet atomic espionage featured excerpts from Kamen’s testimony and urged the “immediate prosecution” of both Nelson and Bransten for espionage and contempt of Congress. Since the committee said it was considering perjury charges against him, Weinberg was identified in the publication only as “Scientist X.”128
Defying the wishes of his own party, Thomas vowed to resume the spy hearings following the presidential election, little more than a month away.129
11
A RATHER PUZZLED HORROR
TRUMAN’S UPSET VICTORY in the 1948 election and Parnell Thomas’s removal from Congress—on a conviction for payroll padding—promised a changed setting in Washington for the coming year. HUAC’s new chairman, John Wood, a moderate Democrat from Georgia, announced that the committee’s spy hunt was temporarily suspended.
But HUAC was no longer the only committee in Congress with an interest in pursuing “atom spies.”
Shortly after regaining the helm at the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Brien McMahon had appointed a twenty-eight-year-old recent Yale Law School graduate—William Liscum Borden—the committee’s executive director. Smart and driven—to the point of obsessiveness—Borden had come to McMahon’s attention for placing a newspaper ad that called upon America’s leaders to issue a nuclear ultimatum to Russia: “Let Stalin decide: atomic war or atomic peace.” Borden and his like-minded conservative friends called the ad their “Incendiary Document.”
While still at Yale,
