Oppenheimer security clearance hearing
Over four weeks in 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission explored the background, actions, and associations of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The hearing resulted in Oppenheimer's Q clearance being revoked. This marked the end of his formal relationship with the Eisenhower government and generated considerable controversy regarding whether the treatment of Oppenheimer was fair, or whether it was an expression of anti-communist McCarthyism.
Doubts about Oppenheimer's loyalty dated back to the 1930s, when he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations and was associated with Communist Party USA members, including his wife, brother and sister-in-law. These associations were known to Army Counterintelligence at the time he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942 and chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the AEC in 1947. In this capacity, Oppenheimer became involved in bureaucratic conflict between the Army and Air Force over the types of nuclear weapons the country required, technical conflict between the scientists over the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, and personal conflict with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss.
The proceedings were initiated after Oppenheimer refused to voluntarily give up his security clearance while working as an atomic weapons consultant for the US government, under a contract due to expire at the end of June 1954. Several of his colleagues testified at the hearings. As a result of the two-to-one decision of the hearing's three judges, he was stripped of his security clearance one day before his consultant contract was due to expire. The panel found that he was loyal and discreet with atomic secrets, but did not recommend that his security clearance be reinstated.
The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer's role in government and policy. He became an academic exile, cut off from his former career and the world he had helped to create. The reputations of those who had testified against Oppenheimer were tarnished as well, though Oppenheimer's reputation was later partly rehabilitated by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The brief period when scientists were viewed as a "public-policy priesthood" ended; thereafter, they would serve the state only to offer narrow scientific opinions. Scientists working in government were on notice that dissent was no longer tolerated.
The fairness of the proceedings has been a subject of controversy, criticized in the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus and dramatized in film and television. On December 16, 2022, United States secretary of energy Jennifer Granholm nullified the 1954 decision, saying that it had been the result of a "flawed process" and affirming that Oppenheimer had been loyal.
Background
Before World War II, Robert Oppenheimer had been professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. The scion of a wealthy New York family, he was a graduate of Harvard University and had studied in Europe at the University of Cambridge in England, the University of Göttingen in Germany, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. As one of the few American physicists with a deep understanding of the new field of quantum mechanics, he was hired by the University of California in 1929.As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer had considerable achievements. In a 1930 paper on the Dirac equation, he predicted the existence of the positron. A 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber explored the properties of white dwarf stars. This was followed by one co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff, in which they demonstrated that there was a limit, the so-called Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, to the mass of stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars and would undergo gravitational collapse. In 1939, with another of his students, Hartland Snyder, he went further and predicted the existence of what are today known as black holes. It was decades before the significance of this was appreciated.
Still, Oppenheimer was not well known before World War II, and certainly not as renowned as his friend and colleague Ernest O. Lawrence, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. As an experimental physicist, Lawrence had come to rely on Oppenheimer, and it was Lawrence who brought Oppenheimer into the effort to develop an atomic bomb, which became known as the Manhattan Project. Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., who became director of the Manhattan Project on September 8, 1942, met Oppenheimer at Berkeley, where Oppenheimer briefed Groves on the work done so far on the "Super" bomb. Oppenheimer told Groves on October 8 that the Manhattan Project needed a dedicated weapons development laboratory. Groves agreed, and after a second meeting with Oppenheimer on a train on October 15, decided that Oppenheimer was the man he needed to head what became the Los Alamos Laboratory, despite Oppenheimer's lack of a Nobel Prize or administrative experience.
The end of the Pacific War in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made scientists into heroes. Oppenheimer became a celebrity, with his face appearing on front pages of newspapers and the covers of magazines. Life magazine described him as "one of the most famous men in the world, one of the most admired, quoted, photographed, consulted, glorified, well-nigh deified as the fabulous and fascinating archetype of a brand new kind of hero, the hero of science and intellect, originator and living symbol of the new atomic age."
Chevalier incident
Several of Oppenheimer's associates in the years before World War II were Communist Party USA members. They included his wife Kitty, whose second husband Joe Dallet had been killed fighting with the Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War; his brother Frank Oppenheimer and Frank's wife Jackie; and his girlfriend Jean Tatlock. One of his communist associates was Haakon Chevalier, an assistant professor of French literature at the University of California. The two had met during a rally for Spanish Loyalists, and had co-founded the Local 349 branch of the American Federation of Teachers at Berkeley. The FBI opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941, after he had attended a December 1940 meeting at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary William Schneiderman and its treasurer Isaac Folkoff, both of whom were targets of FBI surveillance and wiretaps. Agents had recorded the license plate of Oppenheimer's car. The FBI noted that Oppenheimer was on the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which it considered a communist front. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency.File:HD.4G.039.jpg|thumb|left|The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947; left to right: James B. Conant, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Brigadier General James McCormack, Hartley Rowe, John H. Manley, Isidor Isaac Rabi and Roger S. Warner
In January or February 1943, Chevalier had a brief conversation with Oppenheimer in the kitchen of his home. Chevalier told Oppenheimer that there was a scientist, George Eltenton, who could transmit information of a technical nature to the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer rejected the overture, but failed to report it until August 1943, when he volunteered to Manhattan Project security officers that three men at Berkeley had been solicited for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union, by a person he did not know who worked for Shell Oil, and who had communist connections. He gave that person's name as Eltenton. When pressed on the issue in later interviews at Los Alamos in December 1943 with Groves, who promised to keep the identity of the three men from the FBI, Oppenheimer identified the contact who had approached him as Chevalier, and told Groves that only one person had been approached: his brother Frank. In any case, Groves considered Oppenheimer too important to the ultimate Allied goals of building atomic bombs and winning the war to oust him over any suspicious behavior. He had ordered on July 20, 1943, that Oppenheimer be given a security clearance "without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project."
Oppenheimer was interviewed by FBI agents on September 5, 1946. He related the "Chevalier incident", and gave contradictory and equivocating statements, telling the agents that only he had been approached by Chevalier, who at the time had supposedly said that he had a potential conduit through Eltenton for information which could be passed to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer claimed to have invented the other contacts to conceal the identity of Chevalier, whose identity he believed would be immediately apparent if he named only one contact, but whom he believed to be innocent of any disloyalty. The 1943 fabrication and the shifting nature of his accounts figured prominently in the 1954 inquiry.
The McMahon Act that established the Atomic Energy Commission required all employees holding wartime security clearances issued by the Manhattan Project to be investigated by the FBI and re-certified. This provision had come in the wake of the February 16, 1946 announcement in Canada of the arrest of 22 people exposed as a consequence of the defection the previous September of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko. President Harry S. Truman appointed Oppenheimer to the AEC General Advisory Committee on December 10, 1946, so the FBI interviewed two dozen of Oppenheimer's associates, including Robert Bacher, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and Robert Gordon Sproul. Groves and Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson supplied written statements supporting Oppenheimer.
AEC chairman David Lilienthal and Vannevar Bush discussed the matter with Truman's sympathetic aide Clark Clifford at the White House. They found John Lansdale Jr. particularly persuasive; he had interrogated Oppenheimer over the Chevalier incident in 1943, and strongly supported him. On August 11, 1947, the AEC unanimously voted to grant Oppenheimer a Q clearance. At the first meeting of the GAC on January 3, 1947, Oppenheimer was unanimously elected its chairman.