If you've had the good fortune to watch the film "Oppenheimer", it might intrigue you to learn that a top expert on Oppenheimer, Gregg Herken, resides right in Santa Cruz.

Mr. Herken is an emeritus professor of American diplomatic history at the University of California, and author of Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. Some of the documents cited here are reproduced on the book’s website, www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com.

Mr. Herken recently posted this update about the “Oppie”.

Robert Oppenheimer is a more complex--and conflicted--figure than Christopher Nolan knows. Despite the light shone upon its subject by Nolan’s amazing new movie, Robert Oppenheimer remains an enduring enigma. Why did the obviously brilliant scientist so suddenly and completely collapse under hostile interrogation at the 1954 loyalty hearing? Why, unlike Andrei Sakharov—the Russian nuclear physicist with whom he is often compared—did Oppenheimer, following the hearing, cease speaking out against the weapons of mass destruction that he had helped to create; and, until then, denounced?

"Oppie" was a man of many secrets—secrets of state, and even secrets of the heart. But one secret he defiantly kept throughout his life; indeed, Oppenheimer took it to the grave.

There has long been a nagging question about Oppenheimer’s prewar political views. Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature at Berkeley and Oppenheimer’s close friend, claimed that he and “Oppie” had belonged to a secret “closed unit” of the Communist Party’s professional section in Berkeley, from 1937 to early 1942.

The Party’s closed units were not espionage “cells.” Rather, their members met every couple of weeks to discuss recent international events; on occasion, they were briefed by a senior Party official on the latest shifts in communist dogma. Chevalier claimed that he, Oppenheimer, and Arthur Brodeur—a professor of Scandinavian literature at the University—all belonged to the Berkeley faculty unit.

Oppenheimer vehemently—and repeatedly—denied ever being a member of the Party or “a Communist Party unit.” Sometimes his denials were under oath.

Who was telling the truth: Oppenheimer or Chevalier? American Prometheus, and Nolan’s movie, sides with Oppie. But if Chevalier is right, Oppenheimer had perjured himself—lying not only on the Army security questionnaire he filled out in 1943, but to FBI agents in 1946, and again to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at the 1954 hearing.

Haakon Chevalier, who died in 1985, provided details about the Berkeley unit in an unfinished memoir he left with his daughter in France. In it, Haakon claimed that the faculty group produced and distributed two “Reports to Our Colleagues” in early 1940. Both mirrored the “Party line” at the time. Each was signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Chevalier wrote that the idea for the Reports had come from Oppenheimer, who helped to write them, and even chose literary references for the epigrams.

Haakon was not the only one in the Chevalier household to write about Oppenheimer and the closed unit. In her own unpublished memoir, Barbara Lansburgh—Haakon’s wife when the couple lived in Berkeley—recalled it was shortly after Oppenheimer had read Marx’s Das Kapital during a cross-country train trip [in summer 1936] that “he and Haakon joined a secret unit of the Communist Party.”

My interview, in early 2000, with physicist Philip Morrison provided additional clues about the closed unit. Morrison had been Oppenheimer’s graduate student at Berkeley in the late 1930s. He remembered attending animated political discussions at Chevalier’s house; among others present were Oppenheimer and Arthur Brodeur. Morrison also recalled arranging the publication and distribution of a Young Communist League pamphlet at Berkeley’s 1939 Charter Day ceremony. The YCL broadside urged the United States to join with other nations—including “Soviet Russia, which has shown itself to be the most consistent and determined force for peace in the world”—in confronting fascism. Although Morrison no longer had a copy of the pamphlet, he believed Oppenheimer was its principal author. I subsequently found the faculty unit's "Reports," and Morrison's YCL broadside, at the University's Bancroft Library.

But when I was putting the finishing touches on my 2002 book, Brotherhood of the Bomb, I remained uncertain who was telling the truth, Chevalier or Oppenheimer? Accordingly, I treated the question a bit like Rashomon—the truth was a matter of perspective. For Oppenheimer, I wrote, the Berkeley unit was simply “an innocent and rather naïve political coffee klatch.”

The final piece of evidence for the existence of Berkeley’s closed unit—what I came to regard as the “smoking gun”—did not surface until after Brotherhood was already in print. In 2004, the children of Gordon Griffiths contacted the Library of Congress about their father’s unpublished memoir, which they wished to make “available to responsible historians.” Gordon Griffiths, who died in 2001, had been a graduate student at Berkeley in 1936-42, when he served as liaison between the local Communist Party and the closed campus unit. Griffiths had replaced Philip Morrison in that role in 1940, when the latter took a teaching job across the Bay. Griffiths’s draft memoir—“Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor”—independently confirmed the accounts given by the Chevaliers and Morrison.

Griffiths’ memoir likewise confirms that the closed unit’s activities continued into at least mid-1941: “I remember especially the meeting that took place shortly after the German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941. Stalin had delivered a radio address calling upon the Soviet people to resist. It was an eloquent speech, and ‘Oppie’ had brought the text to our meeting to read out loud. He was so moved that his eyes filled with tears.”

If—as now seems evident—Robert Oppenheimer was indeed a “closet communist,” the question needs to be asked: So what? Chevalier himself said that the unit voluntarily disbanded in early 1942, shortly after America entered the war. Haakon likewise acknowledged that Oppenheimer came to him in 1946 to confess his complete disillusionment with the communist cause. And, as Griffiths wrote of the closed unit: “There was never any discussion of the exciting developments in theoretical Physics, classified or otherwise, let alone any suggestion of passing any information to the Russians. In short, there was nothing subversive or treasonable about our activity.”

Ironically, the best evidence that Oppenheimer never spied for the Russians comes from Soviet intelligence sources. KGB documents that surfaced following the collapse of the USSR in late 1991 reveal repeated, failed efforts to recruit Oppie as a spy.

But Oppenheimer’s membership in the closed unit was a secret he felt compelled to hide from the Army, the FBI, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The “cock-and-bull story” Oppenheimer admitted telling the counter-intelligence officer during the war had been to deflect attention from the fact that he had been asked to pass atomic secrets to the Russians. Although he had rejected Chevalier’s entreaty, Oppenheimer feared that further investigation might reveal a connection and a past he desperately wanted to keep hidden. Even after the statute of limitations made it impossible for Oppenheimer to be prosecuted for the lie he told in 1943, the possibility that his secret Party membership would come to light haunted him the rest of his days.

The Oppenheimer story is proof that the Cold War and its Red Scare left an indelible mark on this country; one whose consequences are still being felt. The ghost of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover--who equated communism with treason—haunts us still.

Anticipating the reaction to his memoir, Griffiths wrote: “[Oppenheimer’s] defenders have always stoutly denied that he was ever actually a member of the Communist Party...A great deal of energy was spent by well-intentioned liberals who felt that this was the only way to defend his case. Perhaps at the time—at the height of the McCarthyite period—it was…But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put the question as it should have been put: not whether he had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.”

The important point, Griffiths emphasized, was that while Robert Oppenheimer had been a secret communist, he was also, and always, a loyal American. As such, Oppenheimer was someone that Hoover and Joe McCarthy categorically insisted could not exist: an American communist who was likewise a patriot.

Copyright 2023

Gregg Herken