First proposed back in the summer of 1948, George was described by some at the lab as akin to using a blast furnace to light a match. Even proponents of the test conceded that it would do nothing to remove the current roadblock to the Super: the failure of the fusion flame to propagate in deuterium. Skeptics recognized that George was largely a symbolic step. Yet without it, Teller feared, the superbomb program might be canceled outright.93
After freezing the design of the device at a meeting in October 1950, without any clear idea of where to go next, the Family Committee agreed to disband.94
* * *
In another setback, Teller’s effort to bring other scientists to the lab was still stalled. To help with the task, he had recently persuaded a twenty-five-year-old acolyte, Vienna-born theorist Frederic de Hoffmann, to abandon a Paris sabbatical and return to the lab. Regularly commuting between Washington and Los Alamos, de Hoffmann assumed the role of Edward’s alter ego and general factotum.95
But even after enlisting the aid of the Joint Committee, few of those on the list that Teller and de Hoffmann had drawn up answered the call. Among those who agreed to come were Princeton’s John Wheeler and Edward’s former colleague, Emil Konopinski.96 Most scientists simply refused Teller’s summons, not sharing his sense of urgency or preferring academic research.97 Some, siding with the GAC, refused to work on the Super on moral grounds.98
Despairing, Teller had even turned for help to his old nemesis. Writing to Oppenheimer that February, he adopted an almost pleading tone—“things have advanced to a desperate urgency here and I should be most anxious indeed if you could come and help us.”99 But Oppenheimer remained unmoved. While refusing to return to the lab himself, Oppie nonetheless extended leave to a physicist at the institute whom Teller had requested.100
Privately, Teller hinted to the Joint Committee that there might be sinister motives behind the paucity of his results. “A man like Conant or Oppenheimer can do a great deal in an informal manner which will hurt or further our efforts,” he wrote Borden in April 1950.101 A few weeks later, Teller remarked to a committee staffer that Robert’s relationship with Frank seemed “unusually close.” Frank, Teller said, would never have joined the party without his brother’s tacit approval. Moreover, Oppie had been the one responsible for bringing Frank to the wartime lab, Edward pointed out.
“Teller,” wrote the staffer in a summary sent to McMahon,
was careful to explain that he did not himself have any idea that Robert was disloyal or intended to injure the best interests of the country according to his lights, however, he did say, that were Robert, by any chance found to be disloyal (in the sense of transmitting information) he could of course do more damage to the program than any other single individual in the country.102
PART FOUR
SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Sir, my dismay is great!
Those spirits that I called,
I now cannot control.
—Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
13
NUCLEAR PLENTY
THE NUMBER OF Oppenheimer’s friends in Washington was steadily dwindling by the spring and summer of 1950. John Manley resigned as secretary to the General Advisory Committee and returned to Los Alamos. (“We’ve run away,” Manley and his wife joked in a vacation postcard they sent to Oppie from Mexico.) Carroll Wilson, one of Oppenheimer’s few allies on the Atomic Energy Commission, quit his post as general manager in early August, shortly after Gordon Dean was appointed AEC chairman.1 “I regret that all of this will add to your troubles,” Wilson wrote to Oppie apologetically. Even James Conant, so outspoken on the H-bomb the previous October, would miss several GAC meetings on the Super that year because of illness.2
Another old friend of Oppie’s, visiting from Berkeley, was himself needy of help. Unemployed, his marriage in ruins, Haakon Chevalier was hoping to move to France but had been unable to obtain an American passport.3 Oppenheimer genially gave Haakon the name of a lawyer in New York. While a houseguest at Olden Manor, Chevalier had several “long heart-to-heart talks” with the physicist on the big lawn behind the mansion—away from hidden microphones. “I gathered,” Chevalier later wrote, “that [Oppenheimer] wanted to maintain a certain fiction regarding some important aspects of our past, that whole areas of our experience were to be considered as never having existed.”4
After his last appeal was denied by the State Department, Chevalier invoked his dual citizenship and obtained a French passport. That fall, he boarded an airliner bound for Paris. To the FBI, Chevalier’s actions looked suspiciously like flight to avoid prosecution.5
Oppie was in need of friends because of new charges against him that surfaced in May 1950. Testifying as a friendly witness before the Tenney Committee, Paul Crouch, a former Communist Party organizer in the Bay Area, claimed to have seen Oppenheimer as well as Joseph Weinberg at a secret meeting of the party’s professional section in the summer of 1941.6 Crouch claimed that the gathering had taken place at a house in Berkeley, during late July or early August, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Russia, and that Oppie had hosted the meeting.7
The previous month, Crouch had been driven around the Berkeley hills by Combs, Tenney’s chief investigator, and campus police until he identified a house that looked familiar—10 Kenilworth Court, where Oppie and Kitty had lived before moving to nearby Eagle Hill.8 Standing outside the residence, Crouch accurately described the interior and gave investigators details of the alleged 1941 meeting. Crouch’s wife, Sylvia, who also claimed to have been at the meeting, backed up her husband’s story.9
However, in FBI interviews and later, with a press release, Oppenheimer
