American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer became a national celebrity. Los Alamos scientists organized, drafted a statement opposing the proliferation of atomic weapons, and entrusted Oppenheimer with making their case to policymakers in Washington, DC. Oppenheimer, however, now straddled two worlds and moved uneasily between the Los Alamos scientific community and the Washington, DC, foreign policy establishment. The scientists were destined to lose their battle for openness and international control of atomic energy: In 1946, Congress would create the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a civilian regulatory board nonetheless subject to military-style security protocols.

In October 1945, Oppenheimer resigned as director at Los Alamos. He was unsure of his next step. In Washington, DC, former Vice President Henry Wallace encouraged Oppenheimer to seek a meeting with President Truman to explain his concerns about the bomb. Oppenheimer met with Truman in the Oval Office on October 25, 1945. However, the meeting proved disastrous. Oppenheimer pressed for international control, but Truman appeared more interested in securing legislation that would turn atomic energy over to the Army. The two men instantly disliked one another. Although he regarded Truman as a fool, Oppenheimer himself behaved foolishly in telling Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands”—a comment Truman later recalled as an impudent, self-serving gripe from a “cry-baby scientist” (332). Back in Los Alamos the following week, in a packed auditorium, Oppenheimer delivered an impromptu yet memorable talk on international control over atomic energy. A few days later, the Oppenheimers—Robert, Kitty, Peter, and Toni—left Los Alamos for Pasadena.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover intensified his agency’s surveillance and dogged pursuit of Oppenheimer and other suspected Communist sympathizers. In early 1946, Oppenheimer joined a board of consultants, headed by former New Dealer David Lilienthal, charged with helping the members of a special committee—chaired by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson—draw up a plan for a United Nations (UN) Atomic Energy Commission. Acheson and Lilienthal grew to admire Oppenheimer, whose passion and intellect shaped both the discussions and the final report. Oppenheimer even drafted the report, which Acheson called “a brilliant and profound document” (341). This document, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, called for full international control of atomic energy.

Secretary of State Byrnes, however, turned to Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch to tweak the report before the Truman administration presented it to the UN. Oppenheimer was incensed because he knew that Baruch would skew the plan to favor Wall Street interests—those, for instance, with a financial stake in uranium mines. Additionally, Baruch did not want to surrender the US monopoly on atomic weapons. Acheson and Lilienthal tried to salvage their plan, but Baruch, with the administration’s backing, took his US-friendly proposal to the UN. The Soviets promptly rejected it and countered with a treaty proposal to ban atomic weapons. Since this would eliminate the US monopoly, the administration rejected the Soviet plan. Oppenheimer sank into depression and even told Lilienthal that he had lost interest in teaching.

On July 1, 1946, a fourth atomic bomb, detonated for testing and demonstration purposes, exploded over the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands. Oppenheimer, who in May had written to Truman to protest the planned detonation, did not attend.

In the fall of 1946, Truman appointed Lilienthal chair of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and appointed a group of distinguished scientists—including Oppenheimer, Isidor Rabi, Enrico Fermi, and James Conant—to the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC). The GAC unanimously elected Oppenheimer as its chair. Significantly, Oppenheimer’s views began to change. He recovered from his despair over the Baruch fiasco and even conceded that the Soviet system of government under Stalin posed an obstacle to international control of atomic energy. His illusions about Communism were gone. Some friends believe that he had grown too comfortable with the nation’s foreign policy establishment.

In 1946, the FBI conducted separate interviews with Chevalier and Eltenton, and paid a visit to Oppenheimer at his Berkeley office, where the physicist admitted to having fabricated parts of the story he told Col. Pash in 1943.

Lewis Strauss, trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered Oppenheimer the Institute’s directorship. Oppenheimer took a while to decide, annoying the ambitious and prickly Strauss, but ultimately accepted. Kitty was thrilled to move east. Oppenheimer left behind numerous California friends, including Ruth Tolman, the wife of Richard Tolman, General Groves’s scientific adviser. Oppenheimer and she had an affair, and what little survived of their correspondence suggests that they loved one another; no evidence indicated that Kitty ever knew.

Despite the FBI’s concerns over the Chevalier Affair, the AEC unanimously approved Oppenheimer’s top-secret security clearance. However, FBI director Hoover remained pathologically obsessed with uncovering derogatory information about left-wing public officials, including Oppenheimer. FBI reports even included highly implausible gossip about Oppenheimer’s supposed homosexual proclivities.

In 1947, Oppenheimer assumed the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study, which had no students, only scholars. Oppenheimer’s office was in the same building as those of Neils Bohr, Paul Dirac, and the Institute’s most famous resident, legendary physicist Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer and Einstein developed an ambivalent relationship. Einstein did not respect Oppenheimer as a working physicist—Oppenheimer’s temperament and experience made him more of an administrator—but did respect his efforts to prevent a nuclear arms race.

Although scientists and mathematicians dominated the Institute, Oppenheimer envisioned a more interdisciplinary future. To represent the humanities, he successfully recruited luminaries such as poet T. S. Eliot and historian-diplomat George F. Kennan. Territorial disputes among the different disciplines, driven largely by self-involved mathematicians, plagued Oppenheimer’s tenure. In addition, he clashed with Strauss. The Institute had a reputation as a place where scholars thought much but produced little. In a magazine interview, Oppenheimer even called it “an intellectual hotel” (384), which annoyed some of the faculty. On the whole, however, Oppenheimer presided over a kind of scholarly paradise while maintaining his status as a celebrity physicist whose thoughts on public policy carried substantial weight.

In 1948, Oppenheimer began to worry about his brother, Frank (now an experimental physicist in his mid-thirties on the cusp of a promising career at the University of Minnesota) because he and his wife, Jackie, had at one time joined the Communist Party—and the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began targeting suspected Communists. HUAC investigated atomic spying at Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory during the war. Oppenheimer testified behind closed doors to six HUAC congressmen, including Rep. Richard Nixon of California. HUAC committee members asked about some of his old friends and students, including Bernard Peters. Oppenheimer described Peters as an ardent Communist.

Oppenheimer was horrified—as were his friends and former students, along with Frank—when his closed-session testimony was leaked to the press. In private and in public, Oppenheimer tried to correct the record of his statement about Peters, but the physicist appeared to be trying to distance himself from his left-wing past. In 1949, Oppenheimer gave Senate testimony on the subject of exporting radioisotopes, which further alienated him from Lewis Strauss. After HUAC questioned Frank about his Communist past, Frank lost his job at the University of Minnesota and could not get a job anywhere else in academia. He and Jackie purchased a cattle ranch in Colorado.

In Princeton, Oppenheimer’s home life was complicated. Kitty started drinking, though opinions differed about whether she had alcoholism. Friends and acquaintances share wildly varying recollections of Kitty as a person. She was intense, unhappy, and occasionally cruel. Princeton left her feeling stifled, which likely compounded her struggles with decades-old psychological demons. Nonetheless, she was intelligent and fiercely loyal. In difficult situations, she often rallied her strength more capably than her husband did. The children, Peter and Toni Oppenheimer, endured the extremes in their parents’ respective personalities and characters—Kitty’s relentless intensity and Robert’s self-absorbed aloofness. Kitty failed to bond with Peter, and the mother-son relationship never developed in a healthy way. Friends and acquaintances recall young Toni as the most stable Oppenheimer, though the young girl’s mental serenity would vanish in adulthood.

When the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, Truman was stunned. Military and civilian officials, including some scientists, began to discuss stockpiling atomic weapons while working to develop a thermonuclear device—a hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), or superbomb. As chair of the GAC, Oppenheimer welcomed all views on how best to proceed now that the US atomic monopoly had ended. According to Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer “had put himself in a listening mode” (420). At the end of a weekend-long meeting just before Halloween, Oppenheimer’s GAC unanimously agreed to recommend against a crash program to develop a superbomb. The GAC feared that a superbomb, exponentially more destructive than the original atomic bomb, “might become a weapon of genocide” (422).

The AEC voted 3-2 to endorse the GAC’s recommendation, with Lilienthal in the majority and Strauss in the minority. Nevertheless, the Truman administration, staunchly adhering to Cold War rhetoric, appeared determined to develop the superbomb. Oppenheimer met with diplomat and Soviet affairs expert George Kennan, the author of US postwar containment policy. Kennan drafted a memorandum strongly opposing the superbomb and imploring the Truman administration not to make nuclear weapons the centerpiece of US national security. However, Secretary of State Dean Acheson did not even show Kennan’s document to the president, instead warning Kennan that he was badly out-of-step with prevailing opinions. In January 1950, Lilienthal received an audience with Truman, but the president clearly intended to proceed with the superbomb program. Oppenheimer considered resigning from the GAC in protest. Above all, he objected to the government’s widening veil of secrecy.

In Princeton, Oppenheimer’s friendship with Kennan deepened. The physicist’s opposition to secrecy and massive armaments buildup, however, garnered the resentment and animosity of powerful people, both civilian and military. Strauss began looking for damaging information in Oppenheimer’s background. J. Edgar Hoover phoned Strauss to inform him that the spy Klaus Fuchs had admitted to conducting espionage at Los Alamos. In February 1950, Oppenheimer appeared before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and answered questions about his left-wing past.

William Liscum Borden, a Joint Committee staff member and anti-Communist, became interested in Oppenheimer’s history. Information from Strauss, Hoover, and superbomb enthusiast Edward Teller deepened Borden’s suspicions. In May, Borden learned that two former Communists, Paul and Sylvia Crouch, testified to having attended a meeting at Oppenheimer’s Berkeley home in July 1941. Crouch eventually proved a skilled liar, possibly a paid informant, but Borden believed him despite Oppenheimer’s demonstrable alibi showing that he was not even in Berkeley at the time. Borden and Strauss even interpreted Oppenheimer’s preference for tactical nuclear weapons as a mere “ploy to block the Super bomb” (443). Scientist and superbomb advocate Edward Teller complained to the FBI about Oppenheimer on similar grounds. David Tressel Griggs, chief scientist for the Air Force, likewise supported the superbomb and viewed Oppenheimer as an obstacle. On May 23, 1952, Griggs left a tense meeting in Oppenheimer’s Princeton office, convinced that the physicist posed a threat.

Oppenheimer resigned from the GAC but remained available as a consultant. Secretary of State Acheson asked Oppenheimer to sit on the State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament. The committee, which Oppenheimer chaired and which included Vannevar Bush, recommended a ban on the testing of thermonuclear weapons, by treaty if necessary. However, the Truman administration ignored the recommendation. On November 1, 1952, the US detonated the world’s first thermonuclear bomb on the Pacific island of Elugelab. Oppenheimer and others urging openness and restraint had lost the battle to shape nuclear policy, and the incoming Eisenhower administration inspired little hope for better prospects.

Federal authorities intensified their investigation of Joe Weinberg, Oppenheimer’s former student. Paul and Sylvia Crouch had identified Weinberg as “Scientist X,” an alleged Soviet spy. The Justice Department questioned Oppenheimer, surprising him by bringing in Paul Crouch from an adjacent room. Crouch confirmed that he had met Oppenheimer at his home in 1941, but Oppenheimer did not remember Crouch. A grand jury indicted Weinberg for perjury. Oppenheimer’s attorneys, Herbert Marks and Joseph Volpe, prepared their client for the possibility that he might be called to testify in the Weinberg case. However, the prosecution presented a weak case because much of the evidence against Weinberg came from illegal FBI wiretaps, and Oppenheimer never testified. On March 5, 1953, Weinberg was acquitted. Like Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, however, Weinberg lost his job at the University of Minnesota.

Haunted by a sense of impending doom, Oppenheimer gave a closed-door speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in February 1953. He lamented the government’s obsession with secrecy; everything was classified, and the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had adopted nuclear genocide as its first line of defense. According to Bird and Sherwin, “It is hard to imagine a more provocative speech” (465). President Eisenhower seemed receptive to many of Oppenheimer’s ideas; the foreign policy establishment, however, seethed with rage. Ominously, Eisenhower appointed one of his top campaign donors—Lewis Strauss—as AEC chair. On May 25, 1953, Strauss visited FBI headquarters and initiated a plan to destroy Oppenheimer, starting with poisoning the president’s mind against the physicist.

Later that summer, the Soviets tested their first superbomb. Eisenhower tried to steer atomic policy toward something resembling openness, but the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime posed an obstacle, as did the president’s having surrounded himself with advisers committed to secrecy and nuclear buildup. As AEC chair, Strauss built a case against Oppenheimer, enlisting Borden’s help; together they combed Oppenheimer’s security file for every derogatory tidbit. Oppenheimer spent the latter part of 1953 writing scientific essays and traveling to Europe with Kitty. In Paris, on December 7, he met Chevalier for the first time in three years. Borden wrote a brief alleging that Oppenheimer had acted “as an agent of the Soviet Union” (478). All of this occurred in the context of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s panic-fueled congressional hearings.

Eisenhower recognized that Borden’s brief contained no new information against Oppenheimer, but McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade complicated the president’s taking action that might make him appear soft on Communism. Strauss persuaded the president to appoint a panel to review Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The extrajudicial panel would not conduct a trial, so the normal rules of evidence and procedure would not apply. On December 21, 1953, Strauss confronted Oppenheimer with the news that the physicist’s security clearance had been suspended pending a review. Oppenheimer and Kitty visited the Marks’s home in Washington, DC. There, Oppenheimer decided to mount a defense rather than resign—and then collapsed in the Marks’s upstairs bathroom.