The Storm Breaks

As much as any other one man. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who bossed the Los Alamos project during World War II, created the atomic bomb. For the past several months, Oppenheimer has been the nucleus of a top-secret political Abomb. This week the New York Times --on information provided by Oppenheimer himself--broke the news. On Dec. 23, 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission suspended J. Robert Oppenheimer as a security risk.

Oppenheimer's move seemed to be an answer to Joe McCarthy, who last week asked if "traitors to our Government" had not caused an 18-month delay in U.S. development of the H-bomb. Oppenheimer turned over to the Times two letters.

One was from AEC General Manager K. D. Nichols, notifying Oppenheimer of the suspension. The other was Oppenheimer's 43-page answer. The charges against him:

P: That Oppenheimer in 1940-42 contributed regularly and generously to Communist causes.

P: That Oppenheimer before his marriage was in love with one Communist woman and that he married a former Communist, and that his brother and sister-in-law were Communists. Said the Nichols letter: "It was reported that in 1943 and previously you were intimately associated with Dr. Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party in San Francisco ... It was reported that your wife was formerly the wife of Joseph Dallet, a member of the Communist Party who was killed in Spain in 1937 ... It was further reported that during the period of her association with Joseph Dallet, your wife became a member of the Communist Party ... It was reported that your brother, Frank F. Oppenheimer, became a member of the Communist Party in 1936 . . . [and] that your brother's wife, Jackie Oppenheimer, was a member of the Communist Party in 1938 . . ."

P: That Oppenheimer gave contradictory testimony to the FBI about attendance at Communist meetings in the early '40s.

P: That Oppenheimer hired Communists or former Communists to work at Los Alamos during World War II.

P: That Haakon Chevalier, well-known translator of French literary works, approached Oppenheimer, either directly or through Frank Oppenheimer, in 1943 "for the purpose of obtaining information regarding work being done at the Radiation Laboratory for the use of Soviet scientists." Although, Nichols said, the request was refused, Oppenheimer did not report it until several months later, did not name himself as the person to whom the approach was made, and at first refused to identify Chevalier as the man who sought the information.

P: That Oppenheimer, as chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, strongly opposed the development in 1949 of the hydrogen bomb, and lobbied against it even after President Truman gave the go-ahead order.

An Unusual Life. Because of these charges, said Nichols, Oppenheimer would be denied further access to secret Government documents, and suspended from his position as AEC consultant.

Replied Oppenheimer, in his letter answering Nichols: "Though of course I would have no desire to retain an advisory position if my advice were not needed, I cannot . . . accept the suggestion that I am unfit for public service." He flatly denied that he had lobbied against the H-bomb after the Truman order, or that he had ever given any secret information to unauthorized persons.

He admitted past associations with Communists, but he asked that the derogatory information in his security file be judged in the context of his unusual life and work. With that, he launched into an autobiographical account.

"Smoldering Fury." As a professor at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology, said Oppenheimer, "My friends, both in Pasadena and in Berkeley, were mostly faculty people, scientists, classicists and artists . . .

I was not interested in and did not read about economics or politics. I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like TIME or like Harper's; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stock-market crash in the fall of '29 only long after the event ... To many of my friends, my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me with being too much of a highbrow."

But in 1936, his interests began to change, and he had "a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany ... I had relatives there . . . I saw what The Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs ... I began to sense the larger sorrows of the Great Depression. I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives."

This new outlook coincided with his meeting Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a California University English professor, who told Oppenheimer "about her Communist Party memberships; they were on-again-off-again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking." Jean Tatlock had many friends who were Communists and fellow travelers; Oppenheimer met them, but he said he did not want to give the impression that it was "wholly because of Jean Tatlock that I met left-wing friends." Oppenheimer said he saw little of Jean Tatlock between 1939 and 1944, when she died.

"I Never Was a Member." As for his wife, said Oppenheimer, when he met her, he "found in her a deep loyalty to her former husband, a complete disengagement from any political activity, and a certain disappointment and contempt that the Communist Party was not, in fact, what she had once thought it was."

Oppenheimer conceded that, "I might well have appeared at the time as quite close to the Communist Party--perhaps even to some people as belonging to it. As I have said, some of its declared objectives seemed to me desirable. But I never was a member of the Communist Party. I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me."

Most of the charges against Oppenheimer have been reviewed by the AEC, the White House and the Departments of State, Justice and Defense over a period of twelve years. Oppenheimer has publicly discussed his former political naivete. But the controversy over the decision to build the H-bomb revived the old story, and the AEC's letter to him was in line with the stricter security standards of the Eisenhower Administration.

This week a panel of the AEC's personnel security board, headed by Gordon Gray, president of the University of North Carolina and former Secretary of the Army, started hearings on the case of Robert Oppenheimer, the most important U.S. Government official ever seriously accused of Communist sympathies.

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