The Oppenheimer Riddle: New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist

[R. A. Hettinga]

Gee. I'm crushed.

Alger Hiss *was* a Spy.

The Rosenbergs *were* spies.

Oppenheimer *was* a Communist.

Gosh. Who'da thunk it?

;-)


Cheers,
RAH
---------


<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/23/MNG5I69UIJ1.DTL&type=printable>



 THE OPPENHEIMER RIDDLE
 New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist
 Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
 Friday, April 23, 2004


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 "The evidence is pretty compelling," Herken said of two unpublished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
http://ohst.berkeley.edu/oppenheimer/.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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