American Prometheus by Kai Bird

Author:Kai Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424730
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“He Couldn’t Understand Why He Did It”

He told me that his nerve just gave way at that moment. . . . He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things.

DAVID BOHM

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948, Robert returned to Europe, which he had last visited nineteen years earlier. He was then a promising young physicist from whom great work was expected. He returned as surely the best-known physicist of his generation, the founder of the most prominent school of theoretical physics in America—and the “father of the atomic bomb.” His itinerary took him to Paris, Copenhagen, London and Brussels, in all of which he gave talks or participated in physics conferences. As a young man, he had come of age intellectually studying in Göttingen, Zurich and Leiden, and he had eagerly anticipated the trip. But by the end of September, he was writing his brother that he was somehow disappointed at what he had found. “The Europa reise is,” he told Frank, “as it was in the old days, a certain time for inventory. . . . In physics the conferences have been good, yet everywhere—Copenhagen, England, Paris, even here [Brussels], there is the phrase ‘you see, we are somewhat out of things. . . .’ ” This led Robert to conclude, almost wistfully, “Above all I have the knowledge that it is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in.”

Robert then turned to the primary purpose of his letter: to urge Frank to seek “the comfort, the strength, the advice of a good lawyer.” The House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had been holding hearings that summer, and Robert was worried for his brother—and perhaps himself. “It has been hard,” he wrote Frank, “since we left to follow in detail what all is up with the [J. Parnell] Thomas Committee. . . . Even the Hiss story seemed to me a menacing portent.”

That August, a Time magazine editor and former communist named Whittaker Chambers had testified before HUAC that Alger Hiss, a New Deal lawyer and former high-ranking State Department official, had been a member of a secret communist cell in Washington. Chambers’ accusations against Hiss quickly became the centerpiece of the Republican case that Roosevelt’s New Dealers had allowed communists to worm their way into the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. Hiss sued Chambers for libel in September 1948—but by the end of the year Hiss was indicted for perjury.

Oppenheimer was right to think the Hiss case a “menacing portent.” If someone of Hiss’ stature could be brought down by HUAC, he feared what the Committee could do to his brother, whose Communist Party affiliation was well known. Robert knew that back in March 1947, the Washington Times-Herald had run a story charging that Frank had been a Party member. Frank had foolishly denied the truth of the story. Without being explicit, Robert observed that Frank had “thought about it a lot these last years.

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