The Oppenheimer Case

by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

IT is not likely that a great many people will bother to read In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (United States Atomic Energy Commission), though it is available for $2.75 from the Superintendent of Documents. Its 992 pages are in the finest of the Government Printing Office’s fine print; its form is meandering and discursive; its points are often confused and obscure. Yet it is a work of the greatest fascination and the highest significance. It offers an unequaled picture of the paradoxes of national security. It provides, in addition, the first authentic series of glimpses into the new, post-atomic, scientific-military world which in the past dozen years has risen behind and beyond and above lay American society.

Without our fully realizing it or their fully desiring it, this new community of weapons scientists has become in many ways the arbiter of our destinies. One regrets that no American novelist seems to have been attracted by this phenomenon; we do not even have the picture which C. P. Snow and Nigel Balchin have provided of its British counterpart. This lack of a sense of human background makes the impression which emerges from the Oppenheimer record all the more strange and shadowed. The record is not only fragmentary in its portrayal of the new technocracy; but too much of what is portrayed is unintelligible to the layman, because of both the difficulty of the scientific ideas and the excisions of the security officer.

Yet an impression does emerge — a singular, tantalizing, incomplete impression of this new world where science and policy intersect at the point of maximum destruction; where the life and death of civilization may hang on incomprehensible equations fed into giant calculating machines; where yet the old human emotions — love, loyalty, envy, hate — are still alive and powerful. It is a world of machines and processes — cyclotrons and reactors, heavy water piles and neutron diffusion. But it is also a world of men. What sort of men are these who inhabit tins world, where so little can be freely communicated save images of destruction and death?

Their names have been known long enough — Oppenheimer, Rabi, Fermi, Teller, Bethe, Bacher, Zacharias, and the rest; but they have been words in headlines, faces flashing by in newsreels, the agents of catastrophic but vague experiments in distant places, shadowy magicians of the atomic age. One merit of the Oppenheimer transcript is that it presents these men to us in action, and not so much as scientists, impersonal and unchallengeable, but as human beings, involved in the inquiry into the loyalty and security of the one among them who more than any other was considered by the public to be their archetype and their leader. Inquisition both reveals and diminishes them. At the same time, it admits sharp light (too much, according to some specialists in security) into those debates in the back rooms which may already, by now, have shaped the future or non-future of civilization.

Copyright 1954, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

2

THE scientists, it must be said, have long resented the secrecy in which they must live; that is one of the counts the state has against them. One feels almost, at moments, that the final struggle of our time will be between the scientists and the security officers — between those whose business it is to discover and propagate truth, and those whose business it is to conceal it. But science, now that it has invaded the world of policy and power, cannot hope to escape the burden of security. These scientists are not fools. They know that their secrets in the hands of others — in the hands of the Communists — might be fatal; so the tension between dissemination and suppression is deep in themselves. They form a compact, taut community — brilliant men working under indescribable pressure on unimaginable weapons, cut off by “security” from the rest of society, thrust in terribly upon themselves and their science. Los Alamos during the war only carried this isolation to its logical extreme — the troop patrols around the perimeter, the monitored phone calls, the censored mail, the surveillance of personnel away from the base. But all scientists working in the higher reaches of the weapons field continue to dwell in Los Alamoses of their own construction.

For such men, science and life must become in the end almost indistinguishable. Each is joined indissolubly with his colleagues in the excitement and beauty of the scientific passion. Each may be divided irrevocably from them as technical divergences turn, under the pressure, into intolerable differences of personality and philosophy. The line between fusion and fission is close, for humans as well as for atoms. So Oppenheimer, who loathed the thermonuclear bomb as a dreadful weapon, could exult, “From a technical point of view it was a sweet and lovely and beautiful job.” So Teller, who admired Oppenheimer and helped drive him from public service, could say with sincere regret, “There is no person whose friendship I’d value more than Oppie’s if the circumstances of our deep technical disagreements would permit it.”

These were the men now presenting their testimony to the AEC’s Personnel Security Board — to Gordon Gray, former Secretary of the Army, president of the University of North Carolina, brisk, competent, unassuming, and businesslike; to Dr. Ward V. Evans, the aging chemist from Loyola, with his seemingly aimless but sometimes piercing questions and his sociable inquiries about old friends or students the witnesses might have encountered; to Thomas A. Morgan, former president of the Sperry Corporation, silent and enigmatic.

Witnesses friendly to Oppenheimer sought to prepare the Board for the queer inhabitants of this post-atomic scientific world. One such witness was General Groves, the wartime commander of the Manhattan District. Before the Board, he was an odd and not unimpressive mixture of candor and arrogance, essentially banal and unimaginative in his judgments, but still trailing the glory of the great war experience which for a moment had brought out the strength within him and in which he had played so honorable, if at times so reluctant, a role. He spoke of the scientists as one might of one’s children — they were men “who would become violently excited about the most minor thing. . . . They were tense and nervous and they had to be soothed all the time.” He understood that scientists could have little sympathy with security requirements. “I never held this against them,” said General Groves, “because I knew that their whole lives from the time they entered college almost had been based on the dissemination of knowledge.” They had fought the General incessantly, forcing him into the position of having to accept things they knew he disapproved. Yet “they were the kind of men that made the project a success. If I had a group of yes men we never would have gotten anywhere.”

John Lansdale, Jr., said much the same thing — Lansdale who had been a lieutenant colonel and security officer at Los Alamos and is now a lawyer in Cleveland; in 1944 exercised over the commissioning of Communists by the Army, in 1954 exercised over other matters (“I think that the hysteria of the times over communism is extremely dangerous”). Like Groves, Lansdale had been much exasperated by the sciontists. In crisp and effective testimony, he described as “almost maddening” the tendency of the “more brilliant people to extend in their own mind their competence and independence of decision in fields in which they have no competence.” Yet Lansdale, again like Groves, was prepared to accept arrogance as the price of genius and to take calculated risks. Both had agreed in rejecting the original recommendations of security officials that J. Robert Oppenheimer be barred from atomic work. Both believed that he should be placed in charge of Los Alamos in 1943. Neither, in the spring of 1954, saw any reason to regret this decision.

Oppenheimer was, of course, the first of the scientists to appear. Not always his own best witness, he gave precise, fluent, impatient testimony, filled with the wonder and disgust which might afflict a man of reason compelled to contemplate past imbecilities. The AEC counsel, Roger Robb, vigorous and bludgeoning, intent not to comprehend but to indict, took full advantage of Oppenheimer’s predicament. Most of the hammering came over the indication to Oppenheimer in 1943 by his friend Haakon Chevalier that, if he wanted to transmit secrets to Soviet scientists, channels were available; Oppenheimer’s attempt tip off the Manhattan District security officers to espionage possibilities without implicating his friend had resulted in a miserable botch of falsehoods, though it could not be clear whether he had uttered them in 1943 or was uttering them in 1954. Robb, pitiless, pressed every advantage, extorted every concession: “You lied to him?” “Yes.” . . So you lied to him, too?” “ That is right. . This also was a lie?" “Yes, sir.” “. . . Was that part of what you call a cock and bull story, too?” “It certainly was.” “... According to your testimony now you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?” “Right.” Why, oh why? “Because! was an idiot” was all Oppenheimer could say, perhaps despairing to convince anybody, perhaps despairing to convince himself. “This whole thing is a piece of idiocy. I am afraid I can’t explain why there was a consul, whv there was a microfilm, why there were three people on the project, why two of them were at Los Alamos. ... I wish I could explain to you better why I falsified and fabricated.”

Out of such perplexity, hard questions emerge. Could Oppenheimer have been telling the truth to Colonel Pash in 1943? Could he be lying now? Could he still be shielding atomic scientists involved in an espionage ring? Practical judgment on this had to rest on analysis, not of this episode alone, but of Oppenheimer’s total career.

3

ON the basis of the written record, it is hard to tell how effective Oppenheimer was before the Board; apparently not enough. Yet the Berkeley scientists, when they came to testify, argued that Oppenheimer’s powers of persuasion surpassed all normal bounds — that, as Dr. Wendell Mitchell Latimer, professor of chemistry at the Universily of California, put it, “He is one of the most amazing men that the country has ever produced in his ability to influence people. It is just astounding the influence that he has upon a group. It is an amazing thing.” No one could resist this influence, said Professor Latimer, not even General Groves; “not only General Groves, but the other members of the commit - tee, Conant and the other members, they were under the influence of Dr. Oppenheimer, and that is some influence, I assure you"; only geographical remoteness, added Professor Latimer, had saved himself; “I might have been [under Oppenheimer’s influence] if I had been in closer contact.”

Another Berkeley scientist. Dr. Luis Walter Alvarez, professor of physics, reported, “Every time I have found a person who felt this way [that is, against the thermonuclear bomb] I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer’s influence on that person’s mind . . . one of the most persuasive men that has ever lived.” The Gray Board, however, found in Oppenheimer not the qualities of Svengali but rather those of Trilby and criticized him for showing an undue “susceptibility to influence.”

Yet Oppenheimer’s persuasiveness had certainly worked in the past. Groves and Lansdale had known of the Chevalier episode in 1943 and had not withdrawn Oppenheimer’s security clearance; David Lilienthal and the AEC had known about it in 1547, when Oppenheimer’s clearance was confirmed; Gordon Dean, Lilienthal’s successor as AEC chairman, had known about it. Indeed, Lilienthal and Dean headed a remarkable group of public officials, not scientists themselves but men who had exercised grave responsibilities in the weapons field, who now appeared to testify for Oppenheimer. The testimony of both Lilienthal and Dean revealed traces of past friction with Oppenheimer; but both men Lilienthal, precise and cautious, carefully referring to documents and memoranda; Dean, vivid, lucid, definite, pointed —swore their utter confidence in Oppenheimer’s loyalty and his reliability. Other such men appeared: George F. Kennan; John J. McCloy; General Frederick Osborn: Sumner T. Pike one after another praising the man and pledging their reputation to his probity. Even Bernard Baruch offered an affidavit on Oppenheimer’s behalf.

And then the scientists: Dr. Vannevar Bush, dean of the American scientific community, said of Oppenheimer: “More than any other scientist that I know of he was responsible for our having an atomic bomb on time,”and affirmed his entire faith in his character. Dr. Hans Bet he said, “I believe lhat Oppenheimer had absolutely unique qualifications for this job [Los Alamos] and that the success is due mostly to him.”Dr. James B. Conant said, “He is 1 of the 3 or 4 men whose combination of professional knowledge, hard work, and loyal devotion made possible the development of the bomb.’ Dr. Norman Ramsey said, “He did a superb technical job, and one which also made all of us acquire the greatest of respect and admiration for . . . his loyalty and his integrity.”Dr. I. I. Rabi said, “Oppenheimer set up this school of theoretical physics which was a tremendous contribution. In fact, I don’t know how we could have carried out the scientific part of the war without the contributions of the people who worked with Oppenheimer. Dr. L. A. DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology, said, “I feel that there is no one who has exhibited his loyalty to this country more spectacularly than Dr. Oppenheimer. He was a natural and respected and at all times a loved leader.” And Bacher, Bradbury, Compton, Fermi, Fisk, Lauritsen, Yon Neumann, Whitman, and Zacharias spoke to the same effect—all eminent scientists who had played the most essential roles in the American weapons program.

Yet from the start another note sounded: other men — other eminent scientists — had different things to say. The discordant theme had its origin in three places — in Dr. Edward Teller; in the scientists clustered around Professor Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley (whom Teller has since joined); and in the Strategic Air Command and especially in the former Air Force scientist, David Griggs.

Teller had received his first mention in Oppenheimer’s own testimony. He appeared there as a brilliant and stormy figure, dissatisfied with the progress of research at Los Alamos, anxious that Fermi or Bethe or Oppenheimer himself take charge of the thermonuclear work. Then Gordon Dean described Teller as “a very, very able, man ... a genius . . . a very good friend of mine ... a very difficult man to work with.” Dean added; “You can’t break up a whole Los Alamos laboratory for one man, no matter how good he is.” Said Hans Bethe, “He did not want to work on the agreed line of research. . . . He always suggested new things, new deviations.”Said Sumner Pike, ” Dr. Teller was never one to keep his candles hidden under bushels ... a very useful and a very fine man, but . . , lopsided.” Dr. Bradbury, present head of Los Alamos, told of the circumstances which led to Teller’s final departure from Los Alamos. And yet Professor Latimer of the Berkeley group, when asked whether Teller was a hard man to work with, replied vigorously, “I can hardly think of a statement that is further from the truth. ... In any friendly climate, Dr. Teller is a perfect colleague, scientifically and personally .”

It was ‘Teller who believed in the thermonuclear bomb, worked for it from 1044 on, strove singlemindedly on its behalf, resented any diversion from it, and, in 1951, produced the invention which made it possible. But the great battle over the thermonuclear bomb—over Super, as it was termed in the scientific-military world—had been fought two years earlier. The Soviet achievement of an atomic explosion in September, 1949, had detonated the American thermonuclear effort. Simultaneously Professor Lawrence and his Berkeley colleagues and the generals of the Strategic Air Command saw in Super the only means of recapturing American weapons superiority; and Teller now had the chance to make his dream come true.

The Gray Board made a great deal of Oppenheimer’s opposition to Super; the Atomic Energy Commission, in the end, excluded it as a factor in the case. But, whether a formal factor in the final decision, it was certainly the primary factor in setting in motion the train of events which brought Robert Oppenheimer to Room 2022, Building T-3, of the Atomic Energy Commission, on April 12, 1954. For the opposition to Super fixed in Teller’s mind the belief that Oppenheimer was acting “in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand”; after the Super debate Teller concluded that the vital inicrests of this count ry should be “in hands which 1 understand better, and therefore trusi more.”The opposition to Super persuaded Ernest Lawrence and the Berkeley group that there was a doubtful if not sinister pattern in Oppenheimer’s behavior. And the opposition to Super launched David Griggs of the Air Force on his campaign to save the Strategic Air Command from Oppenheimer’s ideas and influence.

From a dramatic viewpoint, Teller’s eventual appearance before the Board, after all the build-up, must have been something of an anticlimax. A Hungarian by birth, a student in Germany, a teacher in England, a research fellow in Denmark, a professor at American universities since 1935, Teller seemed troubled, earnest, and, in obvious intent, fair-minded, torn between his concern for the United States and his desire not to do an injustice to Oppenheimer. He said of Oppenheimer at the start, “I have always assumed, and I now assume, that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and 1 shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.” In his testimony, he tried hard to draw a just balance sheet on Oppenheimer’s activities, Gordon Gray, seeking something more clear-cut, finally put the direct question: would it endanger the common defense and security to grant clearance to Oppenheimer? Teller replied that, so far as loyalty was concerned, he saw no reason to deny clearance; but “if it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance. I must say that I am myself a little bit confused on this issue.”He did, indeed, seem confused about the nature of the security problem, since the giving of bad advice has not usually been considered to make a man a security risk. But Gordon Gray replied: “I think that you have answered my question.

The Berkeley group — Alvarez, Latimer, Pitzer; Lawrence himself was prevented by illness from testifying — added to this only the emphasis on Oppenheimer as the great persuader. The more intense attack on him came from a man who had only been a minor and transient figure in the early testimony -from David Griggs, formerly Chief Scientist of the Department of the Air Force.

4

THE broad Air Force view had been first presented by General R. C. Wilson, en route from command of the Air War College at Maxwell Field to the Third Air Force in England. But General Wilson had begun by saying firmly that he wanted the record to show “that I am appearing here by military orders, and not on my own volition,”and that he had no question concerning Oppenheimer’s loyally. He did feel, he conceded under questioning, that Oppenheimer’s advice on strategic questions had threatened to jeopardize the national defense. But by this, it became clear, General Wilson simply meant that Oppenheimer’s strategic views were opposed to the theory of the Strategic Air Command — the theory that the central reliance of our national defense should be on SAC and the hydrogen bomb. “I am first of all a big bomb man,” General Wilson explained.

The General remained a reluctant and reserved witness, testifying only because he had been ordered to do so by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. David Griggs was less inhibited. A geophysicist, now at the University of California at Los Angeles, Griggs had served as Chief Scientist of the Air Force from September, 1951, to July, 1952.

His testimony was nervous, detailed, and copious. He announced his suspicions of Oppenheimer’s loyalty and further alleged the existence of a scientists’ conspiracy, headed by Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and Lauritsen, which operated, he said, under the name of ZORC, and which was pledged to the destruction of the Strategic Air Command. His words, as he candidly warned the Board, throbbed with strong emotion. He even produced a memorandum describing an occasion when he told Oppenheimer face to face that he could not be sure whether or not Oppenheimer was proRussian. Oppenheimer “then asked if I had ‘impugned his loyalty.’ I replied I had. He then said he thought I was paranoid. After a few more pleasantries our conversation came to an end.”

Those who used to know Griggs when he was around Harvard in the late thirties remember him as a man of violent feelings, working out aggressions against a world which he conceived to have injured him. He told now of watching Zacharias write the initials ZORC on a blackboard before fifty or a hundred people in a meeting in Cambridge in September, 1952; yet Zacharias and other participants at the meeting deny that such an episode ever took place; Zacharias, indeed, swore that he had never heard of the initials until he read them many months later in an article in Fortune. Similarly Griggs imputed to Zacharias, as the proponent of continental defense, the statement that it was necessary to give up American strategic air power, at a time when a strengthening of the Strategic Air Command was an essential part of Zacharias’s theory of continental defense. And he similarly charged Thomas k. Finletter, then Secretary of the Air Force, with making remarks about Oppenheimer’s loyalty which Finletter has since said he never made.

Griggs strongly favored the thermonuclear bomb, and it is certainly true that Oppenheimer opposed it. It is even true that Oppenheimer opposed it —and the strategy of making atomic retaliation the main reliance of our defense — with passion and anger. Oppenheimer thus seems to have believed, and perhaps even to have repeated, stories about Finletter as a bomb-brandishing imperialist which were patently false and vicious. Yet many other responsible people opposed the bomb, too — some, like Conant, before Oppenheimer had crystallized his own opinion. One ground for opposition was the reasonable belief that the cost of the thermonuclear effort in terms of plutonium bombs might well result in the weakening of American defense.

Opprnheimer’s own reasons were more complicated than that —so complicated, indeed, that the problem of his motives thoroughly fascinated the Gray Board, which concluded that he had not been “entirely candid” in his statements on the issue. There are real puzzles here. Oppenheimer, for example, expressed in 1949 a moral distaste for Super which he did not seem to feel for the atomic bomb; yet in 1945 he had supported the research which led to Super, and in 1951, after Teller’s brilliant invention, he seemed, according to some witnesses, wholly sympathetic to the thermonuclear project; others thought he was still dragging his feet. To complicate the affair, the thermonuclear bomb, as it was finally built, was, because of Teller’s invention, a quite different matter from the bomb which had been discussed in 1949. By Teller’s own testimony, Oppenheimer said that if the new style of bomb had been suggested earlier, he would never have opposed the project. Oppenheimer’s record of vacillation here is manifest, though it would, of course, be a hopeless government in which officials did not feel free to change their minds or to express their dissenting opinions. Vannevar Bush stated the issue with eloquence when he discussed before the Gray Board the original bill of particulars against Oppenheimer. The AEC letter, Bush said, “is quite capable of being interpreted as placing a man on trial because beheld opinions, and had the temerity to express them. . . .

“I think this board or no board should ever sit on a question in this country of whether a man should serve his country or not because he expressed strong opinions. If you want to try that case, you can try me. I have expressed strong opinions many times, and I intend to do so. They have been unpopular opinions at times. When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state.”

In the end, the H-bomb problem settled itself. Truman, Acheson, McMahon, Finletter, Louis Johnson, Teller, Griggs, and the other supporters of the thermonuclear effort were vindicated. And, in the end, Oppenheimer’s opposition to the effort was not to be formally held against him by Lewis Strauss and the AEC. Vet few who read the record are likely to doubt that, if Oppenheimer had not opposed Super in 1949, he would not have had to stand trial in 1954.

5

IF the thermonuclear debate was eliminated, what was left in the record to cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty or security? One would presume something fairly weighty; for the Gray Board by a 2-1 vote and the Atomic Energy Commission by a 4-1 vote concluded that Robert Oppenheimer was a security risk, not to be trusted with secret information without danger to the United States. The AEC majority, which had the final say, rested its decision on 1 wo main allegations: “imprudent and dangerous associations" and “substantial defects of character.”

On the question of associations, the AEC majority reproached Oppenheimer not only with his early and admitted Communist relationships, but with “persistent and continuing association with Communists” in the years since the war. In terms of the record, this last phrase is perplexing; and the AEC itself only specified one association — that with Chevalier — to support the “persistent and continuing” charge. As for Chevalier, whom the AEC assumed without proof to have been still a Communist in 1953, Oppenheimer dined with him one night in Paris that year, and on the next day drove with him to meet with André Malraux. Malraux, of course, is not only the pre-eminent literary man of France but is also an intimate political adviser of General de Gaulle and a fanatical ant i-Communist. It seems unlikely that any friend of Malraux would be an active Communist today. (But Cordon Gray and Thomas Morgan, in discussing this incident, could only refer vaguely to the distinguished writer and notable anti-Communist as “a Dr. Malraux.”)

Beyond the Chevalier incident, the record reveals no other post-1946 associations with Communists or even ex-Communists on Oppenheimer’s part, save for occasional chats with his brother, a chance meeting in 1949 with two Fifth Amendment physicists while leaving the barbershop in Princeton, a scolding of the Harvard ex-Communist, Dr. Wendell Furry, for having employed the Fifth Amendment, and perhaps brushes with persons at scientific conventions. Did these brief and random meetings over a decade really constitute a sinister and deliberate pattern of association with Communists? If so, one wonders what will now happen to Vannevar Bush, Bethe, Fermi, Rabi, and the other scient ist s who will doubtless continue to associate with Oppenheimer — and thus will have far more of a record of “persistent and continuing” association with a certified security risk than Oppenheimer himself has had since the war.

On this whole problem of associations, George Kennan reasonably remarked to Gordon Gray, “I suppose most of us have had friends or associates whom we have come to regard as misguided with the course of time, and I don’t like to think that people in senior capacity in the Government should not be permitted or conceded maturity of judgment to know when they can see such a person or when they can’t.” Kennan added, “I myself say it is a personal view on the part of Christian charity 1o try to be at least as decent as you can to them.” But neither the Gray Board nor the AEC majority were prepared to accord to high government officials the exercise of mat urity, or to indulge them in impulses of charity. The higher the government official, contended the AEC, the less latitude should be permitted him.

Oppenheimer’s truly damaging pattern of association took place, of course, before the war and might be presumed to have been offset by his war and post-war record. That record, as unfolded in the hearings, was, after 1943, a not unimpressive one. Before 1943, he was, like so many scientists (and like some of his colleagues who retain clearance today), a political sentimentalist, soft-headed and unsuspecting. But as early as 1943 he could tell the Los Alamos security officer that present membership in the Communist Party was in his judgment incompatible with loyally to the atomic bomb project. After the war he ignored even liberal opinion in the scientific community to testify in favor of t he May-Johnson bill, fearing lest the disintegration of Los Alamos might weaken. American defense, He resigned from the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Brofessions in 1946, when its pro-Communist tendencies became apparent to him. He helped formulate the principles in the Baruch plan which the Communists found least acceptable; and when General Osborn took over the job of negotiating for atomic control in the United Nations, Oppenheimer flew from San Francisco to urge him to discontinue negotiations because of the hopeless altitude of the Communists. When his counsel was sought by scientists in trouble for past political associations, he told them not to plead the Fifth Amendment; and in 1949 he freely testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee concerning the Communist relationships of at least one atomic scientist. As hostile witnesses testified, he was more responsible than anyone else for educating the Army and even the Air Force to the potentialities of tactical atomic weapons and for integrating such weapons into military plans; and, as they also testified, he played a substantial role in the fight for adequate air defense against possible Soviet attack. No one before the Board charged him with a “soft” or pro-Communist utterance in the last half dozen years. In writing, in speech, and in conduct. Oppenheimer would seem to have acted like a passionate and even obsessed anti-Communist through most of the last decade; Dr. Rabi even told the Board that Oppenheimer had seriously discussed the advisability of preventive war.

6

THE problem of “substantial defects of character" is even harder to pin down. The AEC majority assembled half a dozen apparent ambiguities and equivocations, purporting to demonstrate Oppenheimer’s basic unreliability. Some of these had to do with lapses of memory. Nor, judging by the hearing, was Oppenheimer the only scientist liable to such lapses. Indeed, noting the fallible memory exhibited by one scientist after another, one began to wonder whether there was something about the scientific focus which, in the purity of its concentration, left human relationships in a vague and easily forgotten penumbra. In one such incident, Oppenheimer denied having received a letter from Dr. Seaborg though the government had the letter in its possession, having taken it from Oppenheimer’s files. Obviously, if Oppcnheimer had recalled the existence of the letter, he would have gained no advantage by denying it, for he would have known tat the government had it. With the exception of the Cheva Her episode, the six examples cited by the AEG majority were about of this weight. On the basis of this, would Oppenheimer’s character as disclosed in the hearing seem more detective, say, than Griggs’s? At least Oppenheimer’s demonstrated lies were in the past and were freely conceded. Yet, despite the misrepresentations in Griggs’s testimony, it can be assumed that Lewis Strauss had made no move to withdraw Griggs’s Q clearance.

The whole concept of “defects of character seems a hazardous one. The American govern, ment from 1789 on has always had a large share of people — including some of the ablest men in it —who had, by AEC standards, “substantial defects of character.” Yet even if characters become so deplorable that one fears contamination from them, one still shudders to have the concept of “security risk” so tortured that it becomes a synonym for a character less righteous than one’s own. By the Lewis Strauss interpretation of “security risk” Alexander Hamilton and Grover Cleveland would have been fired out of government service as adulterers, U. S. Grant as a drunkard, and so on. Would such exclusions have improved the safety of the republic? Bureaucratic infighting in the government has always been bitter and acrimonious; it is likely to be, when dedicated men strongly believe that the safety of the republic depends on their policies; and each side characteristically regards the other as deficient in morality. But when the winning side starts trying to outlaw the losers as “security risks,” as happened in the China service and is now beginning to happen in the scientific-military world, one wonders what sort of people our future governments will attract.

7

THE culmination of the AEC case against Oppenheimer’s character had to do with something else: it had to do with Oppenheimer’s attitude toward the security system — as the AEC majority put it, his “persistent and willful disregard for the obligations of security.” But once again the AEG was astonishingly weak in bringing forward concrete evidence. The decision mentioned only the Chevalier case— which was, after all, eleven years old — and referred, without specification, to “other instances.”

It is true that there had been ambiguous incidents during the war, and the Chevalier episode was certainly much more than that. But, as General Groves testified, all the scientists chafed under security restrictions; and, as others testified, Oppenheimer was far more security-conscious than most. General Groves told how he had once warned Niels Bohr not to talk about certain things at Los Alamos; “he got out there and within 5 minutes after his arrival he was saying everything he promised he would not say.” Groves had a similar experience with Ernest Lawrence; and he also reported that Lawrence had bucked when Groves told him to get rid of a security risk in the Berkeley laboratory. Colonel Lansdale recalled that Lawrence “yelled and screamed louder than anybody else about us taking Lomanitz [a Communist for whose draft deferment Oppcnheimer made perfunctory intercession] away from him.” Yet, in 1954, only illness prevented Lawrence from bearing testimony against Oppcnheimer. Similarly, as much substantial testimony was brought forward in the hearing to show that David Griggs had tried to retard and sabotage the project for continental defense as was brought forward to show that Oppcnheimer had tried to retard and sabotage the hydrogen bomb project.

The AEC majority had begun by defining the issue as whether Oppcnheimer should continue to have access to “some of the most vital secrets in the possession of the United States.” This definition suggested that a security risk was a person who could not be trusted with vital secrets because, deliberately or inadvertently, he mighl allow them to reach the enemy. Yet no serious person faintly contended that Oppenheimer’s defects of character and associat ion, over a period of a dozen years, had been responsible for the loss of a single secret. Colonel Pash, a hostile witness, swore that he had no information “of any leakage of restricted data through Dr. Oppcnheimer to any unauthorized person.

Nowhere was Oppcnheimer charged with doing concrete injury to the national security through mishandling of secrets. His essential crime, as the Gray Board finally suggested, was lack of “enthusiastic support of the security system”; as Commissioner Murray argued at length in an AEG concurring opinion, “loyalty’ should mean, not just loyalty to the nation, but “obedience to the requirements of [the security] system.” Oppcnheimer thus became a security risk, not because anything he had done had harmed national security, but because he had declined at times in the past to collaborate with professional security officers. Yet even here the AEC majority cited no specific instance of such noncollaboration later than 1943!

When Groves kept Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in 1943, he overrode the recommendations of the professional security officers. Possibly if the Gray Board and Lewis Strauss’s AEC had been in existence then they would have kept Oppenheimer well out of the Manhattan District. Yet it seems hard to believe that our national security over the past dozen years would have been greater today if Oppenheimer had been barred from atomic work. And, unless one would argue this, it would seem even harder to argue that our national security is now to be greatly strengthened by barring an older, wiser, and more chastened Oppenheimer in 1954.

The Gray Board was prepared to excuse Groves’s 1943 decision on the ground that there might then have been an “overriding need" for Oppenheimer’s services; such a need, the Board contended, no longer exists in 1954. Conceivably our weapons program will not suffer unduly from the climination of Oppenheimer; physicists are said to age fast (though Oppenheimer is only four years older than Teller) and a new generation has come along to take up the research burden. But is it not an error to construe the Oppenheimer decision as having no greater effect than subtracting a single overage scientist from government weapons work? Will the new generation of physicists now flock so eagerly into the government laboratories? And what will the consequences be for American security if they don’t? It is of importance that the two official protests against the purge of Dr. Oppenheimer by Dr. Evans of the Gray Board and by Dr. Smyth of the AEC — came from the only scientists to take part in the review of the case. Dr. Smyth, point ing to the role of “powerful personal enemies" in bringing the action against Oppenheimer, could only conclude with a despairing appeal to thoughtful citizens to read the record.

The AEC made its decision at just the point when we have begun to realize that the Soviet Lnion is fast cutting down our lead in the weapons race (or at least so the man in charge of these things at the Pentagon, Donald Quarles, has said; his boss, Charles E. Wilson, has denied it). This is surely a race which may mean life or death for us all. At just this point, one would think, the government might be doing what it could to enlist the ardor and devotion of the seientific community in our weapons program. Instead, one of our great scientists has been struck from the program, not because of any specific harm he has brought — or is considered to be likely to bring — to national security, but because his character and his associations are disapproved by professional security officers. In so doing, the administration has evidently spread consternation through the scientific community and has made it harder than ever for our allies to trust our judgment and accept our leadership. In the name of a wholly ritualistic conception of “security,”the administration may have done irreparable injury to the substance of America’s national interest. “Our internal security system has run wild,” Dr. Vannevar Bush has said. “It is imperative to our real security that the trend be reversed.”

John J. McCloy, speaking before the Gray Board, pointed to what he called the “relative character of security.” Security had two aspects, he proposed: the negative aspect of preventing the loss of secrets, and the affirmative aspect of making sure that we have a continuous supply of secrets to be protected. The fervor which stimulates thinking, the freedom which gives it scope —these, McCloy contended, were just as much a part of the security problem as the blocking of espionage. “If anything is done which would in any way repress or dampen that fervor, that verve, that enthusiasm, or the feeling generally that the place where you can get the great est opportunity for the expansion of your mind and your experiments in this field is the United States, to that extent the security of the United Stales is impaired. ... If the impression is prevalent that scientists as a whole have to work under such great restrictions and perhaps great suspicions in the United States, we may lose the next step in this field, which I think would be very dangerous for us.”

McCloy made this point with great earnestness; but the Board (except perhaps Dr. Evans) did not react. “I don’t want to cut you off at all,” said Gordon Gray, cutting him off, “but you were getting back about something of the Nazis during the war.” And, in his own report, Gray emphatically rejected McCloy’s notion of the relative character of security. National security, said the majority of the Gray Board in solemn language, “in times of peril must be absolute.”

Absolute security? Might this not be the most subversive idea of all? Dr. Evans in his dissent demurred: “All people are somewhat of a security risk.” George Kennan has elsewhere observed that “absolute security” is an unattainable and selfdevouring end — that its frenzied pursuit must incline toward absolute tyranny. The problem of security, as hennan sees it, is not to seek “a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each.”

Is absolute security possible short of an absolute slate? Robert Oppenheimer was doubtless at moments a cocky, irritating, even arrogant man. But surely no arrogance of Oppenheimer equals the arrogance of those, who, in t he frightening words of the Gray Board, affirm that “it has been demonstrated that the Government can search . . . the soul of an individual whose relationship to his Government is in question.”

The government which claims to do this would hardly seem a government for Americans.