J. Robert Oppenheimer

Priscilla J. McMillan

The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer

and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race

VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 100I4, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Lrd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-no 0I7, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Srurdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA McMillan, Priscilla Johnson. The ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer / Priscilla J. McMillan. p. ern. Includes index. ISBN 0-670-03422-3 I. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967. 2. Physicists-United States-Biography. 3. Manhattan Project (U.S.) 4- Atomic bomb-United States-s-History. 5. Nuclear physics- United States-Histoty-20th century. 6. Teller, Edward, 1908- I. Tide. QC16.062M362005 530' .092-dc22 2004066103

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0)( THE MORNING of April 12, 1954, readers of the New York Times

----0 ce to startling news. The security clearance of the nation's best- -'=lown nuclear scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had been sus- ?Ended in the face of charges that he was a security risk. The Timess scoop created a sensation, for Oppenheimer was a na- "':onalhero. He had been the leader of the Manhattan Project during -odd War II, and his name, more than that of any other American,

-='2S coupled with the building of the atomic bomb and the war's ~ orious end at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, as the gov- emrnent's number one adviser on atomic weapons, he had been privy :0 all its decisions about these weapons. If Oppenheimer was a secu- ziry risk, did the United States have a single important secret left? It was almost unthinkable that this man's loyalty should be in question. Except that as U.S. disagreement with the Soviet Union Jafdened into a state of permanent tension, the certainties that had sustained the American people during the war and the early years zhereafter ebbed away, and so did some of the nation's confidence. _-\frerthe defections of two people who had spied for the USSR (a So- +ier code clerk in Canada named Igor Gouzenko in 1946 and a "oman named Elizabeth Bentley from the U.S. Communist Party in =948), Americans learned that key parts of the government-State, -:::-reasury,and possibly even the White House-had been penetrated ~y Soviet agents. Then, in 1948, a rumpled-looking former writer for ~ime magazine named Whittaker Chambers rose in a crowded con- _ essional committee room and, in an unforgettable televised con- ::::-omation,accused the irreproachable Alger Hiss, president of the ,---,,-:----~~-~---.

2 The Ruin of]. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction 3

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of having handed u.s. weapons, Oppenheimer had chaired the October 1949 meeting at government secrets to Russia years before, while he had been a State which the GAC had voted 8 to 0 (a ninth GAC member was out of Department official. The confidence of Americans was shaken again the country) against a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb. in the late summer of 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first Oppenheimer's committee had cited both technical and moral argu- atomic bomb, an event the CIA had not expected for at least two ments. It had before it only one design for the weapon, and despite more years. Its atomic monopoly broken, the country learned in early several years of research, it was not clear that it could ever be made to 1950 that Hiss had been convicted on charges of perjury and that a work. To launch a new stage of the arms race by committing the na- serious-looking, bespectacled ex-Manhattan Project scientist named tion to build a weapon that had so far been proof against every effort Klaus Fuchs had confessed in England to having passed atomic secrets at invention seemed to the committee members supremely irresponsi- to Russia. ble. Nor did they think it would be ethical. The new weapon, should After only four short years, the United States found itself shorn of it ever prove feasible, could be designed to carry unlimited destructive its monopoly on the weapon that had given it a feeling of omnipo- power. It would be a weapon not of warfare but, quite possibly, of tence, and learned that the key to its unrivaled ascendancy-the se- genocide. As an answer to Russia's newfound possession of the atomic crets of the atomic bomb-had been stolen. It was not long before bomb it was, all too literally, overkill. ambitious politicians started to capitalize on the nation's new sense of Oppenheimer agreed with the committee, but, contrary to accusa- vulnerability, and no accident that the most strident of those who tions that were brought against him later, he had not led the GAC to tried to do so was a hard-drinking senator from the heartland of tra- its conclusions. He came to his view only in the last few days before ditional isolationism. Within days of the Hiss conviction and the the meeting, partly under the influence of Harvard president James Fuchs confession, Joseph McCarthy stood up in Wheeling, West Vir- B. Conant, a committee member for whom he had almost filial re- ginia, and brandished a piece of paper purportedly containing the pect, and in the course of the meeting itself, as the consensus took names of 205 "known" Communists who he claimed were working hape. His feelings were less vehement than Conant's and he did not for the Department of State. write the majority opinion, as he very often did. Nevertheless, the As McCarthy spoke, a debate that had been waged in secret about four-month behind-the-scenes debate over the hydrogen bomb a possible next step in the arms race reached its decisive point, as arned him bitter foes. One was Lewis Strauss, a highly partisan Re- President Harry Truman ordered the nation's scientists to find out publican banker and businessman who was one of five AEC commis- whether a new weapon, the so-called hydrogen bomb, could be built sioners. Another was Edward Teller, the Hungarian-bern scientist in response to the Soviet success. Such a bomb would, if feasible, whom Oppenheimer had known well during the Manhattan Project have a thousand times the explosive power of the atomic bomb. And, y ars, and whom he had disappointed in 1943 by declining to make in subsequent directives, Truman made clear that the effort to build a him head of Los Alamos's Theoretical Division. A brilliant adminis- hydrogen bomb was to be an all-out affair, and that everything about trator, Oppenheimer had kept Teller on the reservation throughout the program was to be held in utmost secrecy. rhc war by allowing him to form a small group of his own. But Teller, Robert Oppenheimer had been at the center of the debate over nIrcady obsessed by the idea of the hydrogen bomb, nursed his re- whether to try to build the hydrogen bomb. As chairman of the Atomic scnrments and concluded that Oppenheimer was motivated not by

Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee, the group which, IIC)n .st onviction but by ambition, not wanting his success, the more than any other, made the government's decisions about atomic .uorni bomb, to be trumped hya bigg r weapon. III i 4 The Ruin of']. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction The enmities Oppenheimer incurred during the H-bomb debate of study commissioned by the Air Force in 1951,which urged that tacti- 1949-50 became deeper afterward, for as part of his H-bomb decision, cal nuclear weapons be made available to defend Western Europe I Truman also decreed that the very fact of the debate, plus everything against Soviet land armies if necessary. Instead of relying on a small that had been said in the course of it, was to remain supersecret, No number of thermonuclear bombs with which the Air Force could pul- one who had taken part was permitted even to describe the proceed- verize targets in the far-off USSR, "Vista" recommended that a large ings to anyone who did not have a "Q" clearance, a clearance to see top number of smaller bombs be spread among the services so that, if secret nuclear data. As a result Oppenheimer and the rest of the Gen- need be, war could be fought on the ground in Europe. The Air Force, eral Advisory Committee were not permitted to explain why they had a young and cocksure branch of the armed services, took umbrage at reached their conclusions. Yet the GAC had urged that the American the notion of sharing the powerful new weapons with the other ser- people be kept more fully informed about atomic matters, and its vices and assumed once again that Oppenheimer was the villain. members were almost as disheartened by Truman's secrecy order as by A brilliant, charismatic man with the gift of seeing further into the the H-bomb decision itself. A few days after Truman's announcement future of nuclear weapons than anyone else, either then or later, Op- Oppenheimer spoke on Mrs. Roosevelt's special television program penheimer also had glaring vulnerabilities, chief among them the pos- I against the excessive secrecy, but he was the last Q-cleared insider to sibility that he had been a member of the Communist Party. do so. From then on, it was only the scientists who no longer had any Certainly, several of those closest to him had been: Jean Tadock, a I official portfolio who spoke out publicly against the dangers of the woman he cared about deeply, and Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer, thermonuclear bomb, men such as Hans Bethe of Cornell, Victor Robert's brother and sister-in-law. Katherine Puening, whom Robert Weisskopf of MIT, retired AEC commissioner Robert Bacher, and married in 1940, had belonged to the Party, as had one of her former Ralph Lapp, an expert on the effects of radiation. Oppenheimer was husbands, Joe Dallet, who died a hero in the Spanish civil war. Com- aware of their efforts and no doubt approved, but he had to maintain munists and Communist sympathizers were numerous in Depression- public silence. Much later, however, his early opposition to the crash era Berkeley, and some were physics students of Oppenheimer's who program was metamorphosed into the charge that because his oppo- joined the Party believing him to be a member and who paid dearly sition had become known, it had discouraged other scientists and for it afterward. Robert Oppenheimer himself made monthly contri- slowed down the program-all to the benefit of the Russians. butions to the Party up to 1942 and, by his own admission, "belonged Following Truman's silencing decision, Oppenheimer took other to nearly every fellow-traveling organization on the West Coast." But stands that earned him enemies in high places. First, like Conant and he denied that he had ever joined the Party, and the testimony of a most of the government's other scientific advisers, he opposed a pet number of close witnesses of his political activity bears him out. project of the Air Force, the building of a nuclear-powered aircraft. Jean Tatlock was the daughter of a highly regarded professor of Second, like Gordon Dean, chairman of the AEC, and nearly all his English literature at the University of California at Berkeley. By all own colleagues on the General Advisory Committee, he defended the accounts she was a beautiful woman, generous and warmhearted, in ongoing work of Los Alamos and opposed pressure from Teller and training to be a doctor. She and Robert Oppenheimer met in the the Air Force to build a second nuclear weapons laboratory to com- spring of 1936 and by the fall of that year he began to court her. With pete with it, the laboratory that exists today in Livermore, Califor- Ih courtship, a change was observed in Oppenheimer. His lectures nia. After his and the GAC's defeat on this issue, Oppenheimer was h· arne simpler and more accessible. And he was happier, he said forced off the GAC. Finally, he helped write the "Vista" report, a l.ucr, be ausc he now felt more a part of his time and country. Much 6 The Ruin of]. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction 7

of this he owed to Jean, an on-again, off-again member of the Com- at the house of one or the other of them. In a letter to another histo- munist Party who introduced him to her activist friends in Berkeley. rian in 1973, Chevalier, who had been a Party member and insisted At least twice, Oppenheimer was to say, he and Jean were "close that Robert had been as well, gave the names of four deceased friends enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged." He was anx- who, he claimed, had belonged to their unit." ious to marry her, but Jean, one friend said, "out of troubles of her Oppenheimer steadfastly denied that he had ever belonged to the own," refused to marry him. Robert and Jean broke up in the fall of Communist Party, and the U.S. government, despite its efforts, never 1939, after he had met Kitty Harrison, and a year later he and Kitty proved that he had. But he conceded that he had been an active fellow were married. 1 traveler and had, through the Party, contributed to Spanish war relief II In early 1943, before he left for Los Alamos, he had a telephone and other causes favored by the Communists. At his home in Truro, I call from Jean that he failed to answer. Through a mutual friend he Massachusetts, in 1985, Steve Nelson, head of the Party in San Fran- soon had a message that she was in distress and needed to see him. So cisco during the early 1940s, told the author, "Absolutely I would I in June of that year he found an excuse to go to San Francisco, where have known if he was in the Party, and I have no reason to deny it he saw Jean. The FBI followed him during every moment of the visit, now that he is dead." If Oppenheimer had belonged to the Party, and on one of the two evenings he spent with Jean, FBI agents in a added the eighty-four-year-old Nelson, "I'd have been the one to col- car outside her apartment building observed that he spent the night. lect his dues." Instead, the Party assigned Isaac "Doc" Folkoff, an The night he spent with Jean Tatlock in 1943 was brought up at his older man who knew how to discuss "philosophical questions," to hearing eleven years later, always as part of the charge that he was an collect Robert's donations to the war in Spain." adulterer who disregarded demands of security by spending the night Nelson said that he first met Oppenheimer in 1939 at a fund-raiser with a known Communist. "Was that good security?" someone asked in Berkeley. After they had made their speeches, Oppenheimer went at the hearing. "No," he admitted. up to Nelson to shake his hand. "I am going to marry a friend of Kitty Oppenheimer knew about the meeting in advance. Knew of yours," he said. The friend was Kitty, who had been married to Joe it, didn't like it, and accepted it. But when Robert got into trouble over Dallet, a comrade of Nelson's in the Spanish war. In 1936 or so, Nel- it at the hearing, his relatives were amused. "There were dark secrets in son, Dallet, and Kitty had spent a week together in Paris when the his life on Shasta Road," said his cousin, Hilde Stern Hein, years after- men were on their way to Spain; eight months later, it feU to Nelson ward. (Shasta Road was where he had lived as a bachelor.) "And one of to break the news to Kitty that DaUet had been killed. Later, Kitty them was that Jean was lesbian." The "secret" was evidently true, but lived briefly in New York City with Nelson and his wife, Margaret. we can only speculate about the role played by Jean's lesbianism in her "My association with Spain and with his wife's former husband made feelings toward Robert and her decision not to marry him.? a bond that's a little hard to explain," Nelson said of his relationship Whether Oppenheimer joined the Communist Party in Berkeley with Oppenheimer. "I admired him. I respected him. He was an out- during the late 1930S was a question scrutinized intently by the FBI standing figure whom people, especially his students, looked on with and Army security. The issue has been revived from time to time, most awe. He was a figure with a glow. Why on earth should he have recently when historian Gregg Herken unearthed the diary of Haakon .ared about the anti-Fascist cause?" Nelson thought it had something Chevalier's first wife. She wrote that Haakon, a lecturer in Romance La do with Oppenheimer's exposure to anti-Semitism during his stu- languages at the university, and Robert had belonged to a closed unit d .nt years in Germany. But the question of asking him to join the of the Party that met every other week or so during the academic year COll1lllunist Parry did not aris , Nelson claimed, in any discussion he r--n;~-m;"11------.--.- !/:'1 I

Ii 8 The Ruin of]. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction 9

II took part in. "He's a good person, fine. He made contributions to the have a top-level security clearance, dismissed the possibility of his I Party, fine. There are people who want to squeeze every drop out of a spying and called him "unusually discreet" with secrets of the atomic lemon. I didn't put the question to Robert. Our relationship was sen- project. The question, then, is one of truthfulness. If Oppenheimer, I sitive. I didn't want to be told no." despite his many denials, did in fact join the Party, even brietly, The Oppenheimers and Nelsons saw each other three or four then he was carrying a terrible burden-both of membership and of times "on a personal basis," Nelson said, and other times at parties dishonesty-during the hearings and throughout his postwar years as II and fund-raisers. But in early I943 Robert told Nelson he'd have to a government adviser. say good-bye. "I already suspected that it might be something special, Oppenheimer was not one to submit to the demands of Party maybe connected with the war effort, so I said nothing but good-bye discipline. And whether membership in what, in the parlance of the III and good luck." Robert left for Los Alamos, and they never saw each day, was called a "professional section" amounted to Party member- other again.s ship, as the Chevaliers claimed, may be a matter of definition. Given I Nelson's picture of Oppenheimer as close to the Party but not of Oppenheimer's character and the years of scrutiny he weathered, it it is echoed by Philip Farley, later a State Department adviser on arms seems fair to assume that for a time he was, as he admitted, close to control. As a graduate student in English at Berkeley, Farley saw Op- the Party, but that he did not belong to it. penheimer licking envelopes nights at the teachers' union, and re- Still, how could a man with so radical a record have been cleared membered him as someone, unlike lowly graduate students such as for the Manhattan Project? The answer is that the country needed himself, whom the Communists backed for office-Oppie was elected him. General Leslie R. Groves, director of the project for the Army, recording secretary-because he was a non-Party member who was a knew of his past connections but decided early on that Oppenheimer hero to others." was the man to lead the effort and cleared him despite the objections Philip Morrison, a devoted student of Oppenheimer's, and David of subordinates. Throughout the war Oppenheimer was subjected to Hawkins, the Party's education director in the Bay Area, carefully loser surveillance than anybody else at Los Alamos: whenever he distinguished their roles inside the Party from Oppenheimer's outside went outside the gates, he was driven in a government car by an Army it. Morrison remembers lecturing on Marx:, Engels, and Lenin at an security agent who listened in on his conversations. When Jean Tat- old Loew's Theater in San Francisco as one of his assigned tasks, and lock in deep depression appealed to him and he went to her in Berke- I he and Hawkins raised funds from individual donors as well. Oppen- I y in I943, FBI agents parked outside her apartment recorded the fact ! I heimer donated funds but was never asked to solicit them. Years af- rhat he had spent the night. terward, Hawkins observed that Oppenheimer was content to leave After the war the surveillance continued. In the J. Edgar Hoover "a certain calculated ambiguity" about his relationship with the Party. B ulding on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington there are thousands Possibly it was a manifestation of his overall style of leaving things of pages of transcripts of Oppenheimer's telephone conversations unsaid, a style which lent him an air of mystery but led others to with his wife, Kitty, and others from 1946 on, all recorded by the FBI. wonder about his motives'? And throughout this time he was advising the government on its poli- Today, nearly seventy years later, does it matter whether Oppen- ci 'S about atomic weapons and, inevitably, its foreign policies as well. heimer, along with other liberals who felt that the New Deal was not Oppenheimer knew he was being watched. Countless times, when he far enough left, actually belonged to the Communist Party? The Gray :ind Kitty were on a picnic or were stranded beside an airstrip some-

board, the government panel that in I954 ruled on whether he should where, Ih y and their two children would scour the ground for the The Ruin of]. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction II

four-leaf clovers they knew they would be needing someday. Although J. Edgar Hoover charging that Oppenheimer was "more probably he expected lightning to strike, Oppenheimer did not trim his advice than not" a spy for the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower quickly to the government. In the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, which he and his ordered that the scientist's clearances be suspended pending a hearing associate I. I. Rabi drafted at the end of 1945, he proposed interna- to determine whether he represented a danger to the nation's security. tional control of all fissionable materials although he was aware that Behind the scenes, the president was pursuing two related pur- II this could-as it did-give rise to the charge that he wanted to give poses. One was to break McCarthy's power; the other, to keep Me- away the "secret" to the Russians. He opposed the H-bomb crash Carthy as far as possible from the atomic energy program. As it I program although his position could-as it did-lead to the official happened, these purposes came together during the heartbreakingly charge that he had failed to advocate "the strongest offensive military beautiful Washington spring of 1954. After he had assaulted one gov- III posture for the United States." Beneath the debates, in minutes and ernment agency after another for alleged security lapses, McCarthy's letters that were classified for decades but are at long last available to- unfriendly gaze had at last fallen upon Eisenhower's favorite institu- I day, it is clear that he unfailingly took positions that he believed tion, the U.S. Army. The commanding officer at Fort Monmouth, would optimize the nation's military posture. New Jersey, had inadvertently countenanced the promotion of a den- Oppenheimer had other vulnerabilities besides his left-wing past. tist named Irving Peress, who was charged by McCarthy with having Ordinarily solicitous, even courtly, toward others, he also had a cruel been a Communist Party member. For this, McCarthy decided, the streak. Sometimes, for no discernible reason, he would lash out at a Army would have to pay. And so for the first ten days of May the sec- student, a colleague, even a powerful official, with an acerbity bound retary of the Army, Robert Stevens, occupied the witness stand in to humiliate. This earned him enemies with power to retaliate and, televised hearings before Congress that riveted the nation's attention. just as much as his left-wing past or positions he had taken on major Each day after testifying, Stevens, whose career as a textile manufac- issues, paved the way to his downfall. turer had in no way prepared him for his ordeal, was driven back to And there were questions about his character. While Oppenheimer the Pentagon to go over the testimony he had just given and be did not trim his political advice in an effort to protect himself, in at oached for his appearance the next day. least five instances he informed the government that he suspected a For three weeks that April and May, about the same time Stevens former student of being, or having once been, a Party member. And, was suffering under the klieg lights on Capitol Hill, Oppenheimer spectacularly, by his own admission he had lied to Army security offi- was undergoing a comparable ordeal far out of public sight, in a di- cials in 1943 in describing a feeler as to whether he might be willing to lapidated government building close by the Washington Monument. reveal atomic secrets to Russia-the so-called Chevalier affair. 1\frer he had testified each day and listened to the testimony of oth- Given these attributes, his enormous personal magnetism, his .rs, Oppenheimer, too, was driven across town, to the house of an at- contempt for anyone he regarded as stupid or pompous or hypocriti- torney in Georgetown, to review the day's events and prepare for the

cal, the fact that he was known to have lied on occasion, plus a 11 .xt day's torment. delphic way of expressing himself that could make his pronounce- '[he ordeals the two men were undergoing were by no means sym- I ments seem puzzling or double-edged, Oppenheimer was bound to mctri a], for the Army secretary enjoyed the president's enthusiastic become a point of anxiety to an administration which wanted to pro- heh j nd-rhe-scenes support, while the scientist endured just the oppo- tect itself against charges that it was sheltering Communist spies. .~jt" The government placed obstacle after obstacle in the way of Thus, when a one-time congressional aide wrote a letter to FBI director ()pp 'lib .im 'I"'S lawy TS, Th y wer denied access to documents they 12 The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction 13 needed, witnesses for the defense were subjected to entrapment, and H-bomb crash program, it recommended by a vote of 2 to I that his when his attorneys conferred with their client or with one another in clearance be withdrawn. Next, the five AEC commissioners, to whom person or by telephone, their conversations were recorded by the FBI Oppenheimer appealed the verdict, upheld the Gray board's decision and transmitted to the prosecution. by a vote of 4 to I, this time on the entirely new ground that the sci- This wiretapping was illegal and would have caused a scandal had entist did not take the requirements of the security system seriously it been known at the time (it became public knowledge only after enough and that he had "defects of character" that made him a secu- passage of the Freedom of Information Act more than twenty years rity risk. later). In addition, nearly all the charges against Oppenheimer were By the conclusion of the parallel proceedings that spring, the public wildly out of date. One accusation was that the scientist had contin- hearing on Capitol Hill and the secret one in the run-down building ued to oppose the H-bomb program after it had become official pol- just off the Mall, Eisenhower's purposes had been achieved. In the icy and that his opposition had slowed down the program. Only a few course of the Army-McCarthy hearings the demagogic senator from days before the hearing began, however, the Atomic Energy Commis- Wisconsin overreached himself, and a few months later his colleagues sion detonated a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific so powerful that it voted to censure him, thereby ending his power. And, dominating the caused a diplomatic incident with Japan and gave rise to fears that headlines as they did, the hearings over the Army drowned out the Op- thermonuclear explosions could no longer be controlled. Not only penheimer hearing and stifled debate over the momentous questions was the program successful, it was embarrassingly successful, and it that had led to it. As Stephen Ambrose, one of Eisenhower's biogra- had plainly outpaced that of the Russians. phers, pointed out, such was the furor over McCarthy that the presi- Another of the accusations was that Oppenheimer had advocated dent and Lewis Strauss got rid of Robert Oppenheimer without any the dispersal of small atomic weapons in Europe so that the West public discussion of whether he had been right: whether it had been a could fight a defensive war there as an alternative to mass bombing of breach of morality to build the H-bomb. The McCarthy hearings also civilians in the USSR. Testimony on this issue took up about a quar- distracted the public from fears stirred by the "Bravo" test in the Pacific ter of the transcript, yet by the time of the hearing in the spring of that spring-the second U.S. thermonuclear test and one so enor- 1954, the measures Oppenheimer had advocated in 1951 were already mous that it almost seemed out of control-and obscured the fact that the official policy of the administration that was conducting the thanks to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, the United States was prosecution. If Oppenheimer had committed heresy, it was the now embroiled in an all-out H-bomb race with the Russians. heresy of being right a year or two too soon. But for the president, and the country, the hearing held in secret During the hearing, Oppenheimer was not accused of ever having had its costs. Eisenhower respected Oppenheimer, shared his moral given away a government secret, nor did either of the panels that qualms about nuclear weapons, and knew that he was not disloyal. judged him find that he had done so. To the contrary, the court of By allowing his officials to deceive him about Oppenheimer's al- first instance, the Gray board (so named after its chairman, former leged foot-dragging over the H-bomb and about methods used dur- secretary of the Army Gordon Gray), concluded that the defendant ing the hearing, Eisenhower countenanced a travesty of justice that had shown "extraordinary discretion in keeping to himself secrets," rankles in the American conscience to this day. Early in the year adding that had it been allowed to apply "mature common sense 2000, at a fiftieth-anniversary observance at the National Archives of judgment" instead of the government's tangled security regulations, M Carthy's West Virginia speech, no one-not a single member of it would have cleared him. Nevertheless, citing his opposition to the I'~is.nhowcr's family or administration-took issue with the verdict 14 The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer of the historians in attendance that the Oppenheimer heating was the single worst blot on Eisenhower's record in domestic affairs.

In writing this book, it was not my intention to write a parable for our time. But the story I tell is an old one, the story of what happens when some institution-a church, say, or a government-decides to rid itself of someone who has become anathema to it, or when it wants to change course without saying so openly. Stories like this one do not take place in the open. Secrecy is at their heart, and so is the exclusive claim to orthodoxy. The people must be protected, whether from the taint of alien ideology or from the threat of military attack. The result is always the same. The fever passes, and most people never find out what was really at stake. In the case of Robert Oppenheimer, the deviations from what we consider basic rules of our democracy were so egregious that even today, half a century later, the story still stirs our consciences and makes us wonder what it was all about. It was about many things. One of them was our government's decision to move to a new and deadlier level of the nuclear arms race without telling the American people. Not only was the hearing an extraordinary display of ingrati- tude toward a man to whom the nation owed much, but it resulted in the removal from public life of the one individual who might have helped restrain our catastrophic rush to overarmament. This book is a look at the people and events that led to the de- struction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. There are stories like it today.