Oppenheimer vindicated? Not so fast

In a few weeks’ time Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer will premier in theaters. It is based on the book “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the book is nevertheless a work of hagiography. It is therefore an appropriate time to examine what we now know about Oppenheimer’s true record.

In 1954, Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, underwent a long hearing before a Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Board’s task was to determine whether Oppenheimer should continue to hold a top-level security clearance. In the event, his clearance was revoked on grounds he might be a security risk. The decision was later ratified by the entire AEC Board on written recommendation of the AEC General Manager, Major General Kenneth D. Nichols.

Just last year, in December 2022, the Department of Energy (successor to the AEC) ordered that the decision be vacated. The Department found that in conducting the hearing the AEC violated its own procedures, resulting in an unfair process. The Department noted substantial and prohibited ex parté communications before the case even began between Roger Robb, AEC counsel prosecuting the case, and the three-member Board assembled to hear it. It also focused on the fact that General Nichols’s written recommendation to the full AEC Board to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance was not based solely on the written opinions of the Board members who heard the case, but on the supposition that Oppenheimer had perjured himself during the hearing on a material point. Oppenheimer was given no opportunity to respond to this allegation. There were other transgressions not mentioned in the Department’s Order, such as the bugging of Oppenheimer’s lawyers’ offices by the AEC.

Finally, the motive for the hearing and the charges against Oppenheimer were largely political. Oppenheimer was opposed to the hydrogen bomb program: the AEC’s aim was to eliminate his influence on this front by revoking his security clearance.

Vacating the decision is a just result. However, it is not a vindication of Oppenheimer. The Department’s Order concludes, in part:

“The question of whether Dr. Oppenheimer, or any other individual of that time, ought to have been eligible for access to restricted data is not one that this Department can or should attempt to answer seventy years later. Security clearance adjudication proceedings necessarily depend on sensitive judgments regarding the credibility of oral testimony and other evidence best evaluated within its own context. Therefore, we will not reconsider the substantive merits of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

From approximately the late 1930s until sometime in 1942, at about the time he joined the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was a committed communist. He functioned as a key member of a closed, secret Communist Party cell in Berkeley, California. None of this elite group carried party cards – a practice common to members of high social rank whose usefulness might be diminished by the taint of declared party membership. Post-1999 evidence of this fact has been conclusively set out in scholar Gregg Herken’s 2002 book, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. Herken’s subsequent work has uncovered further confirming accounts of eyewitnesses who participated with Oppenheimer in the Berkeley cell. Oppenheimer’s communism survived both Stalin’s two treaties of 1939 with Hitler, as well as Russia’s invasion of Finland in November 1939. As to the latter, Oppenheimer wrote and personally financed a pamphlet supporting, along party lines, Russia’s invasion of Finland.

In “American Prometheus,” Bird and Sherwin airbrush out the proof of Oppenheimer’s communism by relying on the fact that he had no party card and otherwise ignoring compelling, indeed conclusive, evidence. As noted by Cold War scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in a 2012 article: “It is ironic that from among all the books written about Oppenheimer, the one that won the Pulitzer Prize is so lacking in accuracy and integrity on this critical point.”

Oppenheimer’s communism coincided with deliberate, criminal brutality inflicted by the Soviet regime. As noted by the late French Scholar, Jean-François Revel, this included mass deportations, class genocide, and other crimes against humanity. In 1941, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist H.R. Knickerbocker informed the world that it was a “conservative estimate” to say the five million kulaks had been liquidated. But Oppenheimer had firsthand knowledge of events. Three respected Jewish physicists who had escaped Soviet tyranny enlightened Oppenheimer personally as early as 1938 on the true nature of Soviet Communism. Oppenheimer himself wrote that they told him of “a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people.” Concerned, Oppenheimer went to see a Communist Party USA operative: she persuaded him to continue his efforts for the communist cause. He would later say that he was unaware of just how much control the Soviets exercised over the CPUSA.

Oppenheimer lied about his communism his entire life. He lied when he completed his Security Personnel Questionnaires for the AEC, a federal crime, and he perjured himself in his 1954 hearing when he testified as true his written submission to the hearing Board stating that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

Finally, there is the so-called “Chevalier Incident.” In 1943, Oppenheimer visited Colonel Boris Pash, then head of Army security for the Manhattan Project. He told Pash a long, complex story of multiple approaches to Manhattan Project scientists six months earlier by someone seeking to pass on information to the Soviets. The story was detailed, including the intervals in between approaches, the use of microfilm, and persons in the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco interested in gaining access to restricted data. In subsequent years, Oppenheimer told at least three different versions of these “facts.” By the time of his 1954 hearing, he testified that what he told Pash was a “cock-and-bull” story. Lying to a federal security officer is now, as it was then, a serious crime under federal law. Now, in 1954, he testified that the entire attempt to penetrate the Manhattan Project by the Soviets consisted of his close friend and fellow traveler, Haakon Chevalier, having approached him briefly at a party at Oppenheimer’s home and asking Oppenheimer whether there was some way to get information on the project to the Soviets. Oppenheimer testified that he immediately rebuffed Chevalier, telling him it would amount to treason. And that, according to Oppenheimer in 1954, was the end of it.

In his recommendation to the full AEC Board, General Nichols raised the possibility that what Oppenheimer told Pash in 1943 was true, and that he had perjured himself in the hearing by claiming that it was a cock-and-bull story. Bird and Sherwin express outrage that this was included in the recommendation as it was not a ground on which the three-member Hearing Board voted to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance. Yet, in “American Prometheus,” the authors make the very case, based on FBI investigations of various parties involved, that what Oppenheimer told Pash in 1943 was substantially true, and specifically concerning there having been multiple approaches to Manhattan Project scientists on behalf of the Soviets. Bird and Sherwin’s attempt to reconcile this with Oppenheimer’s unequivocal testimony that the entire story he told Pash was a “cock-and-bull” story is a tortured and failed attempt to make both stories appear to be true. This is not scholarship but advocacy, and poor advocacy at that. The fact is, we may never know which of the several versions of events told by Oppenheimer is true.

Oppenheimer did a superb job in administering the Manhattan Project and did his country a great service in the bargain. The 1954 hearing revoking his security clearance was flawed and prejudicial. However, whether he was fit, in 1954, knowing what we know today, to continue to hold the nation’s highest security clearance is something reasonable people will have to weigh against his conduct.