Oppenheimer told bureau agents that he and Kitty had been in New Mexico, at Perro Caliente, during the time that the Crouches claimed the Berkeley meeting took place. Their son Peter, barely six weeks old, had been left with a nurse in the care of the Chevaliers.
While the investigation of the so-called Kenilworth Court incident continued, Oppie received an unsolicited offer of assistance. “If at any time you should feel that it were wise, I would be pleased to have you make a statement of the general tenor of that which follows,” Leslie Groves wrote from his office at Remington Rand, where the general had gone following his retirement from the army. The letter continued:
General Groves has informed me that shortly after he took over the responsibility for the development of the atomic bomb, he reviewed personally the entire file and all known information concerning me and immediately ordered that I be cleared for all atomic information in order that I might participate in the development of the atomic bomb. General Groves has also informed me that he personally went over all information concerning me which came to light during the course of operations of the atomic project and that at no time did he regret his decision.
“I don’t believe that you will find any need to make use of any such statement, but you might,” Groves advised. “You might wish to show it to some individual for his use in handling unpleasant situations, if they arise.”11
The occasion did not arise. Unable to shake Oppenheimer’s story, and considering Paul Crouch a somewhat unreliable witness, the FBI decided against pressing the case.12
Once more for Oppenheimer, salvation had come from a most unlikely place. Campaigning in California, HUAC congressman Richard Nixon expressed “complete confidence in Dr. Oppenheimer’s loyalty” the day following Sylvia Crouch’s testimony. While the truth behind the Kenilworth Court incident remained a mystery, the story quickly faded from the headlines.*13
To Oppie, nonetheless, the effects lingered. “I took it all very badly and feel now like a man slowly convalescing from a serious illness,” he wrote Robert Bacher.14
Because of the controversy that continued to dog him, Oppenheimer briefly considered resigning the chairmanship of the General Advisory Committee that fall, shortly after the GAC’s new members were announced. Gordon Dean had elected to replace the committee members whose terms were expiring—Seaborg, Fermi, and Hartley Rowe—with three scientists who, in Borden’s words, “strongly believe in the necessity of the H program.”15 Ironically, one of those who had urged Oppenheimer not to step down from the GAC was Dean.16
Oppie’s brother was in far more serious trouble. Although no longer on the FBI’s Key Figure list, Frank was still being periodically harassed by bureau agents, who asked local ranchers why their neighbor seemed to have so few cattle. (“It seems such a waste of God’s talent to make a good physicist into a mediocre rancher,” wrote a former colleague.) Since his firing by Minnesota, he had been unable to find another job in academe. Despite Robert’s personal lobbying on Frank’s behalf, he was turned down for teaching positions at Chicago, Cornell, and MIT—where some faculty members were “overly impressed by ‘the great lie’ Frank told,” Oppie was confidentially informed. A visit by the younger Oppenheimer to Caltech that summer was “painful,” Bacher wrote Oppie.17
* * *
The fact that Robert Oppenheimer remained at the helm of the GAC and continued to serve on several other influential committees in Washington was a cause of increasing dismay to Borden, Strauss, and others in the capital.
On November 20, 1950, Borden requested Oppenheimer’s FBI file from Hoover. The staffer’s particular interest was the Chevalier affair and the alleged Kenilworth Court meeting. Bryan LaPlante, an AEC security official, borrowed the dossier the following day.18
Despite having new, more conservative members, the GAC had done nothing since the H-bomb decision to make it more popular with its critics, who were growing in both number and boldness. Among them was Ernest Lawrence, whom Acheson had recently appointed to a State Department panel advising on nuclear weapons policy. Distinguishing between “working scientists” like himself and “talkers,” Lawrence observed disdainfully that “those who once thought the atomic bomb was a terrible thing now have no such scruples about it but have transferred their sense of horror to the H-bomb.”19
Lawrence’s specific complaint was with the GAC’s lack of enthusiasm for his proposed giant accelerator. Oppie was not the first to find in Ernest’s latest project a hint of déjà vu. Like the original Calutrons, Lawrence’s MTA would use a stunning amount of outsized machinery to produce, by brute force, an almost infinitesimal yield—perhaps 1 gram of tritium a day. Expressing concern “over possible excessive cost from too ambitious a program,” the GAC had concluded that the project “should not be bulled through, irrespective of cost”—a clear and unmistakable reference to Lawrence and his methods.20
In subsequent meetings, too, Oppenheimer and his colleagues had urged the commission to go slow on the MTA. The AEC likewise favored a more economical approach to achieving what Borden and McMahon were calling “a situation of nuclear plenty”—by increasing the incentives for uranium mining in the American Southwest, for example, and by building more Savannah River–type reactors.21 Pointing out the obvious at one commission meeting, Smyth noted that if Teller’s H-bomb did not work, as seemed the case, there was no need for tritium and no justification for Lawrence’s huge machine.22
That summer, Oppenheimer and the GAC struck at another target close to Teller’s heart. Noting their misgivings “as to the value and relevance” of the upcoming George test, committee members feared that the thermonuclear experiment might interfere with research at Los Alamos into making smaller and more efficient fission weapons. In summary reports to Dean, Oppenheimer argued that the H-bomb model under consideration would likely fizzle and used far
