SPEAKING
FREELY The tragedy of J Robert
Oppenheimer By C Mott Woolley
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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In American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert
Oppenheimer [1], Toni, Oppenheimer's "very
sweet" daughter, is described as having "acquired
a near-perfect command of West Indian Calypso, the
Creole English common in the islands. She loved
the island's steel-band music. As a young
adolescent, she was a dead-serious child, with
beautiful smooth features, tragic dark eyes, long
lustrous dark hair, and the condescending
politeness of a princess. Extremely shy, she hated
to have her
photograph taken." In 1977 on
the island of St John in the US Virgin Islands,
Toni hanged herself. She was 33 years old.
A graduate of Oberlin College, proficient
in German, French, Italian and Spanish, Toni had
wanted to become a translator at the United
Nations but could not because the US government
denied her a security clearance. This may be the
closest Toni ever got to her father: he, too, had
been denied a security clearance in 1954.
That year, the Atomic Energy Commission,
in scrutinizing Toni's father, found him to be
loyal to the United States, but unfit to be
entrusted with atomic secrets because of his past
communist associations and opposition to
developing a hydrogen bomb. Never mind that her
father had earlier been entrusted to lead the
development and successful detonations of the
first atomic bombs during an hour of grave peril.
At the time of her father's ordeal in
1954, Toni was 10 years old; she, along with her
older brother Peter, was sent to Rochester, New
York, to the home of Dr Louis and Eleanor
Hempleman; there they remained throughout the
inquiry as to their father's trustworthiness.
Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, mother of these small
children, did not visit or call Rochester; she
limited her care and time to Robert and bottle on
bottle of whiskey.
After being denied a
security clearance, Oppenheimer repaired with his
family to St John, where he bought land and built
a bungalow. As was his wish, when he died, his
ashes were spread in a bay beyond the bungalow -
well beyond the border of the United States.
Wanting to be closer to her father, Toni had
earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to drown herself in
the bay where she knew her father's ashes to be,
or at least to have been.
How can it be
that such a profound mind - arguably the greatest
scientist in US history, would shun his nation and
elect not to be entombed in his once-beloved
United States? What hidden secrets lie behind his
escaping to a bungalow far from US shores - the
bungalow in which Toni hanged herself?
The bomb goes off At the
instant the first atom bomb detonated over
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, scores of thousands
of families were incinerated. At the instant the
second atom bomb detonated over Nagasaki three
days later, thousands and thousands more families
were incinerated. To put a finer point on it: the
first bomb killed 66,000-78,000 people, injured
80,000, and exposed 300,000 more to the effects of
radiation. The second bomb killed 74,800 people,
and so on.
Visiting Tokyo in 1960,
Oppenheimer, asked how he felt, said, "I do not
regret that I had something to do with the
technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn't
that I don't feel bad; it is that I do not feel
worse tonight than I did last night."
Shortly after Toni's birth in Los Alamos,
New Mexico, on December 7, 1944, her mother,
Kitty, a woman with communist leanings, left Los
Alamos and stayed away for several months. During
her mother's absence, Toni was left in the care of
Patricia Sherr, a Los Alamos friend whom
Oppenheimer would visit as time allowed. As
Prometheus notes:
Robert of course was working long
hours, so he came by only twice a week to visit
his baby daughter ... "It was all very strange,"
remembered Pat Sherr: "He would come and sit and
chat with me, but he wouldn't ask to see the
baby. She might as well have been god knows
where, but he never asked to see her." Finally,
one day I said, "Wouldn't you like to see your
daughter? She's growing beautifully." And he
said, "Yeah, yeah." Two months went by, and then
during one of Robert's visits, he said to Sherr,
"You seem to have grown to love [Toni] very
much" ... Sherr was stunned when Oppenheimer
then asked, "Would you like to adopt her?"
Kitty was married to another man when
she first met Oppenheimer. Her husband was
teaching at the same university in California
where Oppenheimer taught. During a break in the
academic year of 1939, without her husband, Kitty
and Oppenheimer spent two months in Pecos, New
Mexico, at his mountain cabin. Shortly after
learning she was pregnant with Oppenheimer's
child, Kitty divorced her husband in Las Vegas,
Nevada, and married Oppenheimer the next day. When
his son Peter was born, Oppenheimer nicknamed him
"Pronto".
Shortly after Peter's birth,
Prometheus notes: "Oppie and Kitty
approached the Chevaliers [friends of Oppenheimer]
to ask an enormous favor. Kitty badly needed a
rest, Robert explained. Would the Chevaliers take
two-month-old Peter while he and Kitty escaped to
[New Mexico] for a month?"
In an interview
during the war with army counterintelligence
officer Boris Pash in 1943, it was this same
Chevalier, also a teacher at Oppenheimer's
university in California, whom Oppenheimer
identified as the person he knew to be a communist
seeking secret information to be passed to Josef
Stalin; for that reason Chevalier had approached
Oppenheimer during his directorship of the Los
Alamos bomb project. This interview, and the man
Chevalier, would come to figure prominently later.
Torrid affairs Before meeting
Kitty, Oppenheimer had been entangled in a horrid
relationship with Jean Talock, a brilliant medical
student at Oppenheimer's California university.
Three times, Oppenheimer asked her to marry him
but she refused. While married to Kitty,
Oppenheimer had last seen Jean Talock in
California in June 1943 during one of his trips
from Los Alamos to California on bomb business.
On the 12th of that month of June 1943,
Oppenheimer and Jean spent the night together in
her California apartment. Outside her apartment,
all that night, a government agent monitored them.
In January 1944, Jean Talock committed suicide.
Before the war, while a professor in
California, Oppenheimer befriended physics
professor Richard Tolman, who was married to a
particularly attractive woman, Ruth. During the
war, Oppenheimer and Ruth commenced an affair
while Oppenheimer was married to Kitty. This
devastated Richard Tolman. Not all of the letters
between Ruth and Oppenheimer were destroyed; those
that survive are quoted in the Prometheus
biography. They leave little to the imagination.
After Oppenheimer died in 1967, Kitty took
up living with a former student of Oppenheimer,
and later his closest friend, Robert Serber, whose
wife, a close acquaintance of Oppenheimer, had
also committed suicide years earlier. After
Oppenheimer's death, Kitty and Robert Serber spent
time together on St John island in the Caribbean
bungalow. They had planned to sail together around
the world, but never did.
A highlight of
Kitty's life after Robert's death was the 1985
sale of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh that
Oppenheimer had inherited from his father. It
fetched US$9 million. The inherited art had been
collected by Oppenheimer's mother, an artist
herself but one born without a right hand. When
Robert's younger brother Frank fell on hard times
during World War II, he too sold valuable
inherited art. An admitted member of the Communist
Party, Frank used his money to buy a cattle ranch
near Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
Because
Frank was a member of the Communist Party, when he
was in Colorado, federal agents in Pagosa Springs
monitored him closely. Ironically, the smooth
transfer of this art, these monies, and their
enjoyment by the Oppenheimer family may be the
simplest and most direct explanation for why the
atomic bomb was built and later detonated.
Kitty's first husband, predecessor to her
second husband at the time of Peter's conception,
was also a communist; that husband was killed in
Spain fighting Francisco Franco. Jean Talock, as
noted, was also a member of the Communist Party.
She had asked Oppenheimer to join the party, but
he opted instead, repeatedly, to give money to the
party rather than join officially.
The
Chevaliers, Peter's custodians soon after his
birth, were also members of the Communist Party.
After Oppenheimer became director of the war
effort to build the atomic bomb, Chevalier
approached Oppenheimer at the behest of a
British-born KGB agent to obtain bomb secrets for
use by Stalin. What Oppenheimer did when so
approached would figure largely, as Oppenheimer's
security clearance was taken away by the US
government in 1954.
The essential fact to
bear in mind is that everything related above was
known by the US government, unequivocally, at the
time Oppenheimer was selected to lead the effort
to build the atomic bomb.
General Leslie
Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, although
aware of Oppenheimer's background, stated in a
letter on July 20, 1943: "In accordance with my
verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that
clearance be issued for Julius Robert Oppenheimer
without delay, irrespective of the information
which you have concerning Mr Oppenheimer. He is
absolutely essential to the project."
Jeremy Bernstein says in his biography
Oppenheimer:
It is important to emphasize that
when Groves appointed Oppenheimer, he had seen
the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]
reports on him. He knew that Oppenheimer's
brother Frank had been a member of the Communist
Party, as had Frank's wife. He knew that
Oppenheimer's own wife, as well as his former
lover Jean Talock, had been members. He knew
that some of Oppenheimer's students had been
members and that he had contributed sums of
money to communist front organizations.
During the 1954 Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) security-clearance hearing,
Groves testified that Oppenheimer's security
clearance should be terminated. This change in
attitude was not due to new information about
Oppenheimer; in 1954 Groves and the AEC hearing
panel had before them the same information Groves
had had when selecting Oppenheimer in 1943. Why,
then, was Oppenheimer's security clearance taken
away? The short answer is: Oppenheimer refused to
support building the more powerful hydrogen bomb,
which Edward Teller (a man Oppenheimer despised)
advocated.
Moreover, Oppenheimer had taken
to advocating a halt to further nuclear
development until all nations first ceded
jurisdiction over such development to an
international body; otherwise, he said, nuclear
proliferation would ensue, increasing the risk of
errant use. Of this concern Prometheus
notes:
Asked in a closed Senate hearing
room "whether three or four men couldn't smuggle
units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow
up the whole city", Oppenheimer responded, "Of
course it could be done, and people could
destroy New York." When a startled senator then
followed by asking, "What instrument would you
use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in
a city?" Oppenheimer quipped, "A screwdriver"
[to open each and every crate or suitcase].
There was no defense to nuclear terrorism and he
felt there never would be.
Historians
agree that Oppenheimer cannot be implicated in the
passage of atomic secrets to Stalin. Why then did
Groves in 1954 switch his views - under oath - and
testify that Oppenheimer had become a security
risk? In a nutshell, Groves was coerced by the US
government to testify against Oppenheimer. He
changed his view because AEC chairman Lewis
Strauss (who pronounced his name "Straws") reached
a different conclusion about Oppenheimer than did
Groves when reviewing FBI files.
Unlike in
1943, when the US military had exclusive
jurisdiction over all atomic questions, by 1954
such matters were under civilian control as
provided in the Atomic Energy Act - a board of
five members appointed by the president. Lewis
Strauss headed that board.
Unfit for
duty Oppenheimer's wartime affair with
Ruth Tolman, his illicit evening with Jean Talock
while married to Kitty, his contributions of money
to communist causes, and his disinclination to
bring his talent to bear in developing the
hydrogen bomb despite Stalin's atomic capability,
condemned Oppenheimer in Strauss' mind.
In
Strauss's view, the FBI files showed Oppenheimer
to be an immoral, cruel man who put his selfish
interests first. Yet the more intriguing question
is, how did Strauss get Groves to recant and
testify against Oppenheimer? Strauss uncovered new
information about Groves, not Oppenheimer.
A close review of the Oppenheimer file
showed that Oppenheimer, during the war, had
informed Groves of contacts Oppenheimer had had
with known communists, which Groves failed to pass
on to the FBI. This was a felony, potentially, and
Strauss knew it. Strauss put the matter to Groves
bluntly: either testify against Oppenheimer or
face felony charges.
Oppenheimer's lawyers
in the hearing (there were four of them, working
pro bono) did not have access to the secret
files utilized by Lewis Strauss to pressure Groves
because Strauss would not grant to them a security
clearance. Consequently, they could not be sure
what the FBI files said. This is memorably
recounted by Jeremy Bernstein:
The AEC had chosen as its attorney a
tough prosecutor named Roger Robb, who had been
an assistant US attorney. They had obtained for
Robb, in eight days, an emergency Q clearance.
Once the hearing got under way, Garrison [Lloyd
Garrison, Oppenheimer's lead lawyer] asked for
the same, but he was never cleared. This led to
the following Orwellian situation. When
classified information was discussed, Garrison
and the rest of Oppenheimer's attorneys were
required to leave the room. But Oppenheimer,
whose clearance had been suspended, was allowed
to stay.
If Oppenheimer had shared
with his lawyers what had occurred in the hearing
during their absence, he would have been in breach
of security regulations.
In point of fact,
during the war while Oppenheimer was at Los
Alamos, a particular communist did solicit secret
information from him. This was Chevalier, the man
who had taken care of Oppenheimer's baby boy,
Peter. During the war, Oppenheimer told Groves
that Chevalier was seeking secret information for
Stalin. However, before disclosing Chevalier's
identity to Groves, Oppenheimer had exacted from
Groves a promise that Groves would not disclose
Chevalier's identity to the FBI. Oppenheimer did
not want to hurt Chevalier. On that condition, but
only on that condition, Oppenheimer told Groves
that Chevalier had asked Oppenheimer for secret
bomb information.
Honoring Oppenheimer's
condition - Groves needed Oppenheimer on the bomb
project - Groves never did tell the FBI what
Oppenheimer had revealed; however, Groves did tell
John Lansdale, a fellow Manhattan Project military
man, what Oppenheimer had revealed. Lansdale
passed this information on to the FBI, but did not
tell Groves he had done so. In Lansdale's mind,
duty to country came first.
As noted,
Oppenheimer's Byzantine condition was exacted
because he did not want to hurt the person who had
approached him - Chevalier was Oppenheimer's
friend. Instead, Oppenheimer tried simultaneously
to protect Chevalier and comply with the
regulatory requirement to report to Groves
possible security breaches. There is in this some
decency. Thus Groves was told by Oppenheimer that
an illicit approach had been made, but,
Oppenheimer assured Groves, no information had
been transferred. Groves trusted Oppenheimer. For
that reason, Groves honored Oppenheimer's
condition and did not disclose to the FBI what he
had learned. To Groves, this complication was
acceptable because Oppenheimer's bomb work was
indispensable; also, Oppenheimer's every move was
being watched by the FBI on Groves' order.
A further constraint plagued Oppenheimer's
lawyers. When Oppenheimer first alerted Groves of
the approach that had been made to Oppenheimer,
Groves did alert army counterintelligence officer
Boris Pash, and Pash set up an interview with
Oppenheimer. Unbeknownst to Groves and
Oppenheimer, Pash taped this interview.
Oppenheimer gave to Pash a version of how he had
been approached that differed from the version
given to Groves. In the version given to Pash,
Oppenheimer did not disclose Chevalier's identity,
but Oppenheimer did tell Pash that he,
Oppenheimer, and "three others" had been
approached by Chevalier for secret information.
Despite Pash's insistence that Oppenheimer
disclose identities, Oppenheimer refused to do so.
Pash complained bitterly to Groves about this and
recommended that Oppenheimer be removed from the
bomb project. In the event, to halt further
investigation of Oppenheimer by a now suspicious
Pash, Groves ordered Pash to Europe to head up the
Alsos mission to determine how far Germany had got
in developing an atom bomb. Groves wanted Pash
gone to keep Oppenheimer at Los Alamos; without
Oppenheimer, Groves feared, Germany might develop
an atomic bomb first. Oppenheimer was that
important.
When asked about this on
cross-examination during the hearing, the
transcript reflects:
Q: Did you [Oppenheimer] tell Pash
that X had approached three persons on the
project? A: I am not clear whether I said
there were three Xs or that X approached three
people. Q: Didn't you say that X had
approached three people? A: Probably. Q:
Why did you do that, Doctor? A: Because I
was an idiot.
Poisoned apples
When Oppenheimer was a graduate student at
Cambridge in England (having completed his Harvard
undergraduate study in three years), he developed
a dislike of a certain Professor Patrick Blackett.
Prometheus states:
In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer
poisoned an apple with chemicals from the
laboratory and put it on Blackett's desk ... As
Robert's parents were still visiting Cambridge,
the university authorities immediately informed
them of what had happened. Julius Oppenheimer
[Robert's father] frantically - and successfully
- lobbied the university not to press criminal
charges. After protracted negotiations, it was
agreed that Robert would be put on probation and
have regular sessions with a prominent Harley
Street psychiatrist in London. This Freudian
analyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now
archaic label for symptoms associated with
schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was
a hopeless case and that "further analysis would
do more harm than good".
Jean Talock
at the time of her death was a psychiatrist.
Describing Oppenheimer at Cambridge,
Jeremy Bernstein says in his biography
Oppenheimer:
Whatever dam had been holding his
psyche burst. The most dramatic manifestation of
this occurred on a vacation trip to Paris in the
fall of 1925. There Oppenheimer met with a good
friend, Francis Fergusson. In the course of a
conversation about personal matters he suddenly
made an attempt to strangle Fergusson. This was
not a joke. Fergusson was able to fight him off.
This episode has never really been explained ...
Of this Prometheus says:
Soon, Robert's emotional crisis took
another violent turn. Sitting in his Paris hotel
room with Robert, Fergusson sensed that his
friend was in "one of his ambiguous moods".
Perhaps in an attempt to divert him from his
depression, Fergusson showed him some poetry
written by his girlfriend, Frances Keeley, and
then announced that he had proposed to Keeley
and she had accepted. Robert was stunned with
this news, and he snapped. "I leaned over to
pick up a book," Fergusson recalled, "and he
jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and
wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for
a little while. We must have made some noise.
And then I managed to pull aside and he fell on
the ground weeping."
Nuclear
fallout During his postwar directorship of
Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, in a
variety of settings, Oppenheimer articulated why
the US government, along with all other nations,
should cede exclusive jurisdiction over
development and use of atomic power to a newly
created international body.
This
conviction - that all matters nuclear be ceded to
an international body - grew out of Oppenheimer's
discussions with his mentor, Niels Bohr. Like
Oppenheimer, Bohr met with little success in
promoting the idea. As explained by Bernstein:
The following May [Bohr] was able to
explain his vision to [British prime minister]
Winston Churchill. The meeting, which was a
disaster, inspired Churchill to contemplate
having Bohr locked up.
As noted by
Prometheus, when Oppenheimer explained the
same idea to president Harry S Truman in the Oval
Office, "An awkward silence followed this
exchange, and then Truman stood up to signal the
meeting was over ... He [Truman] later told Dean
Acheson [under secretary of state], "I don't want
to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever
again."
It is now known that while Alger
Hiss served as president Franklin Roosevelt's
translator at Yalta for the meeting with Churchill
and Stalin in 1945, he was a Soviet agent
routinely passing classified information to
Stalin. This betrayal continued during Hiss's
tenure at the Department of State in Washington,
and enabled Stalin to proceed more boldly in
Eastern Europe with a reduced fear of reprisal.
Stalin was being told by Hiss, and others,
that the West would not wage war to end Soviet
domination of Eastern Europe. Hiss's treachery did
not become known until the mid-1950s. By that
time, Klaus Fuchs' delivery of atom-bomb secrets
to Stalin during Oppenheimer's watch at Los Alamos
had enabled Stalin to build and detonate his own
atomic bomb. No link between Fuchs and Oppenheimer
has ever been established.
To many
Americans, the postwar international-agency idea
of Oppenheimer and Bohr seemed inconsistent with
the measures needed against Stalin. Had
Oppenheimer's idea been possible to implement, the
nuclear danger now posed in the aftermath of
September 11, 2001, might not exist.
In
Oppenheimer's time, however, it was feared a
complacent United States would embolden Stalin to
do to the US what Adolf Hitler had done to Europe
and what Stalin was doing, undeniably, in Eastern
Europe. Those who would doubt the ambition of
Stalin were able, with some force, to cite the
example of Hitler and the error of the West in
appeasing Hitler.
To many, Hitler and
Stalin had become interchangeable. The price paid
in failing to assess timely and correctly the
nature of Hitler had resulted in untold death and
destruction. It had brought within view a return
to the Dark Ages. The measure taken to prevent a
recurrence of this was to not let Stalin do what
Hitler had done. Thus, in addition to the felt
need not to appease, there was a felt need
steadily to arm further because Stalin was doing
so. There was also a felt need to find and expel
persons in the US government sympathetic to
Stalin.
By the time of Oppenheimer's
security hearing it was known that there had been
several such persons who had escaped detection,
Hiss and Fuchs to name a few.
Moreover, by
the time of the Oppenheimer hearing, China had
been "lost" to Mao Zedong (the US had backed the
wrong horse, a corrupt Chiang Kai-shek). Indeed,
the same Mao, with material and financial aid from
Stalin, dispatched communist Chinese into Korea to
chase the US Army as it retreated, ignominiously,
southward. This retreat, said Dean Acheson, by
then secretary of state, was the worst defeat the
United States had suffered since Bull Run in the
American Civil War. And it was.
Yesterday's man Shortly after
being elected, the file of J Robert Oppenheimer
was brought to the attention of president Dwight D
Eisenhower. After this briefing, Eisenhower
ordered that Oppenheimer's access to classified
material be terminated. In Eisenhower's phrase, "a
wall" had to be erected between Oppenheimer and
the nation's secrets. This "wall" was erected, at
Eisenhower's behest, in the 1954 security hearing.
Oppenheimer's disinclination to support
Teller in the development of a hydrogen bomb
baffled Eisenhower. Whereas the atomic bomb
Oppenheimer had built represented 10,000 tons of
TNT, the hydrogen bomb represented 10 million tons
of TNT. In Eisenhower's time, Stalin had
test-detonated both.
Oppenheimer, in
several public statements, contended the atomic
bomb was well suited for military targets, but the
hydrogen bomb could only be used effectively
against larger civilian targets: use of the
hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer contended, would be an
act of genocide. Eisenhower's concern was that
Stalin would prefer the hydrogen bomb for just
that reason.
Immediately on Eisenhower's
order, it became known that Oppenheimer kept next
to his bed at Princeton a loaded .22-caliber
pistol. This was duly noted by a government agent
as he illegally tapped Oppenheimer's Princeton
home telephone. This new wiretap was needed by the
government to gather up-to-date evidence for use
in its hearing to terminate Oppenheimer's security
clearance.
Strauss wanted current
information to use against Oppenheimer at the
upcoming security-clearance hearing. Although the
FBI knew this tapping of Oppenheimer's phone was
unlawful, the step was approved because of the
exigencies of the day. Despite the FBI's
misgiving, Strauss also ordered a wiretap to be
put on the phone of the lawyers engaged by
Oppenheimer in the April 1954 hearing.
Certainly, the public knew nothing at the
time of Strauss's unlawful wiretaps. Neither did
Oppenheimer. Neither did his lawyers. It is
troubling to picture Strauss, the AEC staff, AEC
legal counsel and FBI agents listening in as
Oppenheimer and his lawyers prepared for and
conducted Oppenheimer's evidence during the
hearing. This specter, however, has reappeared in
the United States in the wake of the September 11
attacks.
Climates of fear To
the United States' founders, none of this would
have come as a surprise. What the Russian
Revolution was to 20th-century America, the French
Revolution had been to 18th-century America: in
the Cold War, the Soviet Union was to Eisenhower
and Strauss what the Quasi-War with France
(1798-99) had been to John Adams and Alexander
Hamilton.
Fear that the ideology ignited
by the French Revolution would spread to America
moved some of the United States' founders to enact
the Alien and Sedition Acts. These barred all
dissent from president John Adams' decision to put
the US on a war footing for what he and many
Americans believed was an imminent French
invasion.
Recall that French agents were
active at this time throughout America, recruiting
Americans aggrieved by the tilt toward England.
Their charge was to raise an army on American soil
to further France's imperialistic cause. France
was at war with England; and the US, despite its
avowed neutrality, had tilted in the Jay Treaty
toward England.
Recall further that
Napoleon Bonaparte had vanquished Italy (sending
to Paris the entire archive of the papacy) and was
on the march along the Nile while Edmond Charles
"Citizen" Genet was in the US imploring the
populace to oust president George Washington from
office and join France in seizing British ships
and Spanish territory along the Mississippi River.
In the 1798 Congressional Report Defending
the Alien and Sedition Laws, reasons are given for
Adams' suspension of the Bill of Rights as a way
to counteract the seditious threat posed by
France. To grasp the American mind of 1954, one
need only substitute the Soviet Union for France
in the 1798 Report, which states:
The alien and sedition acts,
so-called, form a part of, and in the opinion of
the committee an essential part, in these
precautionary and protective measures adopted
for our security. France appears to have an
organized system of conduct towards foreign
nations, to bring them within the sphere and
under the dominion of her influence and control.
It has been unremittingly pursued under all the
changes of her internal polity.
Her
means are in wonderful coincidence with her
ends: among these, and not least successful, is
the direction and employment of the active and
versatile talents of her citizens abroad as
emissaries and spies ... The necessity that
dictated these acts [Alien and Sedition Acts],
in the opinion of the committee, still exists.
So eccentric are the movements of the French
government, that we can form no opinion of their
future designs towards our country. They may
recede from the tone of menace and insolence to
employ the arts of seduction, before they
astonish us with their ultimate designs.
Unfortunately for the present generation
of mankind, a contest has arisen, and rages with
unabated ferocity, which has desolated the
fairest portions of Europe and shaken the fabric
of society through the civilized world. From the
nature and effects of this contest, as developed
in the experience of nations, melancholy
inferences must be drawn, that it is
unsusceptible of the restraints which have
either designated the objects, limited the
duration, or mitigated the horrors of national
contentions. In the internal history of France,
and in the conduct of her forces and partisans
in the countries which have fallen under her
power, the public councils of our government
were required to discern the dangers which
threatened the United States, and to guard not
only against the usual consequences of war, but
also against the effects of an unprecedented
combination to establish new principles of
social action, on the subversion of religion,
morality, law and government.
Reading
this, the measures taken against Oppenheimer in
1954 are not entirely at odds with part of
America's heritage. The American public, on
learning Stalin had atomic weapons, was
terror-ridden. So too was the nation terror-ridden
in 1798: it had no army or navy to withstand the
feared invasion by a demonstrably expansionist and
powerful France. Indeed, the ground for fear in
1798 was greater by many degrees than the ground
for fear in 1954: at least in the fifth decade of
the 20th century the nation had in its arsenal
some 20 nuclear weapons and a standing army and
navy.
As compared with the relative power
of the Soviet Union in 1954, France in 1798, then
on the march, and having dispatched agents to the
US to do harm, was decidedly more powerful and
certainly just as threatening. Lest there be doubt
as to the reality of the threat, one need only
recall that the Alien and Sedition Acts, signed by
Adams, were the supreme law of the land.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
rejected the Congressional Report Defending the
Alien and Sedition Acts. To their mind, the idea
that in 1798 France posed a threat to the United
States was utter hysteria. It was the McCarthyism
of their day. In their view, the threat to the
nation was embodied in the Alien and Sedition
Acts, not the French Revolution or Napoleon. To
address the real danger, Jefferson and James
Madison went underground.
Being more
suspicious of the US government than Oppenheimer
had been, they encoded their correspondence so
that federal agents could not track their plotting
to resist the supreme law of the land by state
legislation they planned to introduce in Virginia
and Kentucky declaring void the federal Alien and
Sedition Acts; and, if need be, calling for an
outright dissolution of the Union.
In a
letter delivered by hand to Madison, Jefferson
said that failure to rally the people around "the
true principles of our federal compact" would
compel that we "sever ourselves from that union we
so much value, rather than give up the rights of
self government which we have reserved, and in
which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness".
Because both Madison and Jefferson were
convinced that federal agents, on order of
president Adams, were reading their
correspondence, they also stopped using the United
States Postal Service. As noted by James Morton
Smith in Volume II, The Republic of Letters:
The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison 1776-1826:
For almost six months - between
March and late August - Madison and Jefferson
exchanged no letters. Throughout January and
February, while Jefferson was in Philadelphia,
both men suspected that their mail was being
tampered with. "The suspicions against the
government on this subject," Jefferson
cautioned, "are strong." When Madison failed to
receive his newspapers on time, he concluded
"that there is foul play with them". A close
inspection of the seals on Jefferson's letters
showed that they were not "very distinct".
"I [Jefferson writing to Madison
November 22, 1799] shall trust the post offices
with nothing confidential, persuaded that during
the ensuing 12-month [leading to the election of
1800] they will lend their inquisitorial aid to
furnish matter for new slanders."
In
Jefferson and Madison: The Great
Collaboration, Adrienne Koch suggests that
"there were probably frequent meetings and secret
messages exchanged, which may have been instantly
destroyed and were never recorded in Jefferson's
epistolary ledger, in order to guard the secrecy
they so much required".
In the mid-1950s
when Oppenheimer found himself called on to defend
his views, he failed. So did his lawyers.
Oppenheimer did not heed the example of Jefferson
and Madison in repudiating the US government. It
is at times a government well worth resisting. No
more than Jefferson's having bedded a slave and
sired mulattos diminishes his greatness can
Oppenheimer's philandering diminish his.
At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer gave his life's
breath to save his nation. Regardless of
Oppenheimer's silly condition in the Chevalier
affair, the fact is no secrets got from
Oppenheimer to the enemy: not one. The tragedy of
Oppenheimer is how he derived an almost perverse
pleasure in witnessing his government's folly.
As most everyone realized at the time,
what the government had in the way of classified
information about atomic weapons was in large part
known to the government only by reason of
Oppenheimer himself. In the words of Eric
Sevareid, spoken after the government's finding
that Oppenheimer had become a security risk: "He
[Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to
secrets in government files, and government,
presumably, will no longer have access to secrets
that may be born in Oppenheimer's brain."
Oppenheimer and his lawyers should have
fought their government with the vigor of
Jefferson. They should have conversed in code.
Perhaps Oppenheimer's ultimate revenge was enough
- selecting for his ashes a final resting place
outside the United States.
Note 1.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy
of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and
Martin J Sherwin, Knopf (April 5, 2005).
C Mott Woolley is a
practicing lawyer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a
graduate of the School of International Service at
the American University in Washington, DC, and,
prior to entering law school, served as an intern
in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Near
East/South Asia Division, Department of State.
(Copyright 2006 C Mott Woolley.)
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