Sept. 8, 2002

Oppenheimer was communist, author says
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times wire story [abbreviated]

Adding a startling chapter to the long-running historical debate over the secret laboratory that developed the atomic bomb in World War II, a new book concludes that its leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, belonged to the American Communist Party in the late 1930s and early '40s.

Contrary to his repeated denials, Oppenheimer belonged to a cell of the party that discouraged members from disclosing their membership, says the book, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, by Gregg Herken, a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution. It is being published today by Henry Holt.

The book rests its case on a cache of newly discovered letters, Oppenheimer's reaction to work on an accusatory memoir and the discovery of communist literature that the author links to Oppenheimer. Most of the letters are from Haakon Chevalier, a colleague of Oppenheimer's at the University of California at Berkeley.

While Herken says he doubts Oppenheimer ever spied for the Soviet Union, as some scholars have asserted, it seems likely that he would have been barred from the leadership post if his communist past had been known.

Oppenheimer, who died in 1967 at 62, acknowledged that he had joined many communist front organizations in the 1930s and that his wife, his former fiancée, his brother and his sister-in-law were all party members. But he denied ever joining the party itself.

The issue arose most famously in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, at federal hearings over whether his security clearance should be revoked. Though no evidence of his membership was presented, he lost his clearance and influence in the nation's atomic affairs.

The new book presents evidence that Oppenheimer was a member not only of the party but of a secret cell at the University of California that helped set policy and write party literature. Herken cites several documents in the book, and he said in an interview last week that since its completion he had obtained more confirming evidence.

"I don't think he was a spy," Herken said. "The significance of his being a communist was that it gave him something he had to hide, and may be one explanation of why he was so quiet after 1954" -- when the security clearance was revoked.

Herken details the evidence of Oppenheimer's membership in the book and in documents on his Web site, www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com. The main accuser who emerges is Chevalier, who gained notoriety as an intermediary in the Soviet atomic espionage rings of the 1940s.

Chevalier taught French literature at UC-Berkeley, where Oppenheimer taught physics before the government made him director of Los Alamos, the atomic laboratory built in the mountains of New Mexico in 1943.

The book says they joined a secret unit of the American Communist Party made up primarily of Berkeley professors, Chevalier said in letters from the 1960s that Herken has uncovered. Chevalier wrote from France, where he went in 1950 after being accused of anti-American activities.




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