The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Priscilla J. McMillan

Author:Priscilla J. McMillan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Hearing Begins

ONE MORNING IN JANUARY, a Scottish-born reporter for a famous newspaper was looking for a seat on an airplane out of Washington. He found one next to a rumpled-looking blue-eyed man who did not seem happy to see him. Well aware of the man’s identity, the reporter engaged Robert Oppenheimer in chitchat about Eisenhower’s first year in office. Although he steered away from topics he thought might be troublesome, the man noticed that his companion nonetheless seemed nervous and under strain.1

That was all James Reston needed. On his return to the capital, he started asking around. What he found was dynamite, and before long Lloyd Garrison confirmed Reston’s scoop: the government had confronted the scientist with charges, suspended his clearance, and scheduled a hearing. Garrison asked Reston, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, not to publish until Oppenheimer had had time to complete his response, so that charges and rebuttal could appear simultaneously. The Times’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, agreed, and for six weeks the paper held the story amid worries that Senator Joseph McCarthy or a Times competitor might break the news at any moment. Finally, only days before the Oppenheimer hearing was to begin, McCarthy charged on nationwide TV that Communist sympathizers in the government had caused a “deliberate eighteen-month delay” in the hydrogen bomb, a figure he had apparently lifted from Charles Murphy’s anonymous article in Fortune the year before. Eisenhower replied that he knew of no such delay.

Anxious to trump McCarthy, Lewis Strauss and presidential press secretary James Hagerty concocted a strategy to trigger publication, and on April 13, the second day of the hearing, Reston’s story appeared on page 1 of the New York Times. Gordon Gray, chairman of the hearing board, was outraged. Garrison had promised that he would try to restrain publication, and Gray thought Garrison had double-crossed him. Since no one at the AEC or the White House informed him that it was they who had double-crossed him, Gray scolded Garrison as the hearing opened and in the weeks that followed reprimanded him repeatedly for having—so Gray thought—broken his promise. The duplicity of this maneuver, whereby high officials of the AEC and the White House deceived their own handpicked chairman, was typical of what was to happen in the weeks ahead.2

Oppenheimer’s friend Joseph Volpe later said the proceeding was “like a hearing on your wife after you’ve been married twenty years.” In his dozen years of government service Oppenheimer had been through four high-level reviews, among them the 1947 review in which Hoover and Strauss had agreed to clearance.3 This new proceeding was unlike any of the others in that it resembled a criminal trial, with the burden of proof on one side only: the defense. It was held in a dilapidated government building with only lawyers, witnesses, and a handful of officials present. The location was not announced, reporters were not permitted—indeed, they were not formally told that it was happening—and each witness was informed as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.