Inevitably, their attention soon turned as well to the Super, and the security of the nation’s atomic secrets.3 One result of the Thomas hearings had been to persuade Lilienthal to open the AEC’s personnel security files to the Joint Committee.4
Borden took a personal interest in the dossier on Robert Oppenheimer, about whom he had heard rumors from the day he joined the Joint Committee. The two men met for the first time on April 6, 1949, in the committee’s suite of offices at the Capitol. After introducing the GAC to the Joint Committee’s new members, Oppenheimer had outlined the scientists’ case against proceeding with Project Lexington, the air force’s proposed nuclear-powered bomber.*5 He also warned about the danger of accidents at civilian nuclear power plants, which the AEC was busy promoting. (“It is a dangerous engineering undertaking. I was astonished to know that many people were wishing for this proving ground in their state.”)6
Although McMahon and Borden fervently supported both nuclear power and the air force project, they remained silent at this meeting. Borden’s impression of Oppenheimer was that of “a born leader and a manipulator.”7
* * *
Six months after the Thomas hearings, Lawrence had reason to hope that the Rad Lab would avoid being dragged into the morass of Washington politics. In late April, he attended the weeklong Joint Orientation Conference for AEC laboratory directors at the Pentagon. Participants in the conference toured an aircraft carrier at Norfolk, Virginia, watched a flyover of air force jets at Eglin Field in Florida, and witnessed a practice airborne assault by army paratroopers at Fort Benning, Georgia. Lawrence returned to Berkeley sunburned and relaxed, bearing a souvenir photograph of the sailfish he caught in Florida.8
Just two days later, on April 22, 1949, HUAC’s long-postponed spy hearings resumed. In an executive session at New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Chairman Wood, acting as a subcommittee of one, questioned a thirty-two-year-old chemist who had been a technician at the Rad Lab back in 1943. Like many students of the day, Russell Davis had been drawn to the Communist Party as a way of making new friends. (He was disappointed, Davis admitted, to find “mostly girls with thick glasses and empty faces, who looked like psychology students.”)9 Davis and his wife later testified to seeing various Berkeley scientists at party meetings, including Rossi Lomanitz and Max Friedman.
Wood next summoned Lomanitz, who had meanwhile gotten a job teaching physics at Tennessee’s Fisk University. Also called upon to testify were the other three in the picture taken at Sather Gate. David Bohm was then an assistant professor at Princeton. Max Friedman, who had changed his name to Ken Manfred after the war, was back at Berkeley on sabbatical from the University of Puerto Rico when HUAC’s subpoena reached him. Lomanitz, Friedman, and Bohm all pled the Fifth in response to Wood’s questions. Joe Weinberg—brought face-to-face with Steve Nelson in the hearing room—denied under oath having previously met him.10
The dramatic highlight of the three-month hearings occurred on June 7, when Robert Oppenheimer was called before HUAC in executive session. The committee was only asking for the physicist’s help in its investigation of the Radiation Laboratory, Wood explained. Indeed, other committee members took pains to point out that Oppie was not the subject of the hearing, since his loyalty had been “vouched for by General Groves.”11
Asked about the Chevalier incident, Oppenheimer gave the same version of the story he had told the FBI in 1946: he was the sole person who had been approached. It was only when Wood’s queries shifted to Frank that Oppie grew evasive, asking HUAC’s chairman “not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg you not to ask me these questions.” Wood, unexpectedly, demurred.12
Oppie emerged from the hearings unscathed. Before the session was adjourned, HUAC member Richard Nixon even warmly thanked Oppenheimer for his testimony, adding, “I think we all have been tremendously impressed with him and are mighty happy we have him in the position he has in our program.” The entire committee descended from the dais to shake the physicist’s hand.
Frank Oppenheimer received very different treatment when he and Jackie appeared before HUAC’s executive session a week later.13 After consulting with their lawyer, Clifford Durr, the couple had decided to admit to their own previous membership in the Communist Party but not to answer questions about the political views of others. Following an afternoon break, Wood opened the hearing room to reporters, and Frank’s testimony admitting that he had lied about his party membership was released to the press.14
Earlier that day, Oppie’s brother had testified in detail about his brief and somewhat haphazard career as the Communist known as Frank Folsom. (He had once absentmindedly left his party identification in a shirt he sent to the cleaners. The laundry returned the pale green card in “a little envelope,” Frank remembered.) But neither he nor Jackie would identify any others they knew as Communists, despite Wood’s insistent prompting. “I cannot talk about my friends,” Frank told the committee.
On the question of whether he had been asked to spy during the war, Frank’s reply was direct and unequivocal: “I knew of no Communist activity, nobody ever approached me to get information and I gave none, and I worked very hard and I believe made a valuable contribution.”15
That evening, the headline of the Oakland Tribune read, “Ex-U.C. Bomb Worker Reports Early Ties with Communists.” Frank learned from reporters that he had been fired by the University of Minnesota while he was still on the witness stand. The school accepted his resignation, which he had submitted beforehand as a pro forma gesture, less than an hour after he admitted to lying about
