THE OPPENHEIMER RIDDLE
New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist
A UC professor says he’s solved one of the darkest mysteries in U.S. history: Was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant Berkeley scientist known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” a secret member of the Communist Party?
Recently uncovered documents show that Oppenheimer belonged to a hidden Communist Party cell of professionals in Berkeley, according to UC Merced history Professor Gregg Herken.
Charges of Communist associations led to Oppenheimer’s downfall during the McCarthyist hysteria of the early 1950s, and he became, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the victim of a witch hunt.” In 1954, he was stripped of his security clearance and his position as a high-level U.S. government adviser.
Many colleagues leapt to his defense, saying he was ostracized because of his post-World War II advocacy of arms control and opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Historians ever since have clashed over Oppenheimer’s puzzling links to the party.
Herken’s findings will face public scrutiny today when a critical mass of Oppenheimer scholars convenes at UC Berkeley. The campus is celebrating the centennial of Oppenheimer’s birth with special exhibits and a two-day conference today and Saturday.
“The evidence is pretty compelling,” Herken said of two unpublished memoirs that recently came to light – one by a Berkeley professor and one by the wife of a close associate of Oppenheimer’s.
The two documents offer details about a small group of professionals that met regularly, sometimes at Oppenheimer’s home, in the far-left milieu of 1930s Berkeley. One manuscript calls it “a secret unit of the Communist Party” with six to eight members. The other says that the three UC faculty members of the group, including Oppenheimer, all saw themselves as Communist and produced a Communist newsletter.
“Oppenheimer had always denied membership in the Communist Party,” said Herken, who was a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution before joining the new Merced faculty. “Now, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t telling the truth.”
Still, Herken stressed that he didn’t believe that Oppenheimer, who guided the birth of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project, had betrayed his government.
“While he was a Communist, he was also a patriot,” said Herken, adding that he rejects FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s argument “that communism was synonymous with treason.”
Even with the new evidence, historians dispute Oppenheimer’s relationship to the Communist Party.
“We disagree with Herken,” said Tufts University history Professor Martin Sherwin, co-author with historian Kai Bird of an upcoming Oppenheimer biography.
It’s true that Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, belonged to a loose-knit group of like-minded professionals who shared some Communist views and had links to Communist Party members, but not all members of such groups were party members, Sherwin said.
Yale historian Daniel Kevles, who delivered a preconference lecture Thursday at Cal, said in an e-mail that he believed, “based on the available evidence, that Oppenheimer didn’t think of it (the Berkeley group) as a secret unit of the CP and that he didn’t think his participation in it constituted membership in the CP.”
But Stanford historian Barton Bernstein, another Oppenheimer expert who will join Herken, Sherwin and Bird to dissect the issue on a panel this afternoon, leans toward Herken’s view.
“On a jury, one could find the evidence not meeting a reasonable doubt,” Bernstein said, “but in the court of historical opinion, it seems to me far more likely than not from the amalgam of evidence that Oppenheimer was a member, at least covert, for a few years.”
An unpublished manuscript by the late Professor Gordon Griffiths, who was a UC Berkeley grad student at the time, said Griffiths had been the Communist liaison to the group, bringing party literature to the twice-a-month meetings and collecting dues.
“Nobody carried a party card,” he wrote, but “all three (UC professors in the group) considered themselves to be Communists.” He said he had not collected dues from Oppenheimer, having been “given to understand that Oppenheimer … made his contribution through some special channel.”
“The most important activity of the faculty group,” said Griffiths, who died in 2001, "was the publication of an occasional ‘Report to Our Colleagues’ " signed by unnamed Communist members of the faculty and “no doubt paid for by ‘Oppie’ (Oppenheimer).”
“The time has come to set the record straight,” Griffiths wrote in the manuscript, which Herken learned about in January after Griffiths’ family turned it over to the Library of Congress. Griffiths stressed, however, that the key question was not whether Oppenheimer was a Communist “but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.”
In the other manuscript, the late Barbara Chevalier, wife of Oppenheimer friend Haakon Chevalier, wrote of the group, saying her husband and Oppenheimer “joined a secret unit of the Communist Party. There must have been only six or eight members.”
The new evidence buttresses Haakon Chevalier’s description of the group included in Herken’s 2002 book, “Brotherhood of the Bomb,” about Oppenheimer and fellow A-bomb scientists Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller.
“Oppenheimer would later characterize the group as an innocent and rather naive political coffee klatch,” Herken wrote in his book, which cites Haakon Chevalier’s characterization of the assemblage as “a ‘closed unit’ of the Communist Party.”
But Haakon Chevalier, before he died, gave a more ambiguous answer when Sherwin asked him whether he and Oppenheimer had been Communist Party members. “We both were and were not, anyway you want to look at it,” Chevalier replied, according to Sherwin.
Oppenheimer’s grandson, Charles Oppenheimer of Reno, said he preferred to focus on what had happened to his grandfather in the 1950s rather than the Communist issue.
During the Red Scare, Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., announced that he had lists of suspected Communists, including Oppenheimer. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated suspected Communists and blacklisted those who refused to cooperate.
“Whether he was a member or not, it’s not against the law to be a Communist,” the grandson said at a preconference reception Thursday night. “I think it’s insulting what happened in the '50s. I wish people would concentrate on that. He served his country in every way possible.”
Herken rejects the claim that Oppenheimer was a spy and Soviet agent, a charge levied in “Sacred Secrets,” a 2002 book by the journalist-historian team of Jerrold and Leona Schecter that, according to Bernstein and Sherwin, is not highly regarded by most Oppenheimer scholars.
"In a way, it’s really like ‘Rashomon,’ " said Bird, referring to the famous Akira Kurosawa film on the elusiveness of truth based on conflicting accounts.
Information about the conference and other Oppenheimer Centennial events at Berkeley can be found on the Web at Oppenheimer as Scientific Intellectual: A Centennial Conference :: Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society. E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com