To the Editors:
Daniel Kevles has written a fair and balanced review of my book, Brotherhood of the Bomb [NYR, December 4, 2003]. He correctly notes that my conclusion that Robert Oppenheimer was a member of a closed unit of the Communist Party’s professional section in the Bay Area, from 1938 to 1942, rests in part upon the evidence that Oppenheimer had a major role in writing, in 1940, the two Reports to Our Colleagues which are signed simply, “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Haakon Chevalier—who had once been Oppenheimer’s friend, and was also a member of that closed unit—claimed that not only was Oppenheimer the principal author of the Reports, but that he paid for their printing and distribution.
Professor Kevles’s review asserts that my book “offers only circumstantial contemporary evidence of Oppenheimer’s participation in either [Report],” and concludes that “the degree of Oppenheimer’s involvement with communism remains murky.”
In fact, there were three reasons why I concluded, while researching my book, that Oppenheimer had a significant role in writing both Reports, and was a member of this closed Party unit. Since the book appeared, additional evidence of Oppenheimer’s involvement with both the Reports and the Communist Party has surfaced—evidence which confirms the claims made in Brotherhood of the Bomb.
First, concerning the Reports, as Chevalier once noted in an interview, they “sounded like Oppie.” Indeed, the first Report has an unusual use of language—the phrase “more and more surely,” for example—that is similar to wording used in Robert Oppenheimer’s letters to his brother Frank. (See Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, edited by A. K. Smith and Charles Weiner, p. 155).
Second is the fact that MIT physics professor emeritus Phillip Morrison, who had been Oppenheimer’s student before 1940, and whom I interviewed in 2000, remembered Oppenheimer as the author of an earlier political pamphlet, which took the strict Party line in defending the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. Morrison distinctly remembers that pamphlet, because he delivered it to the printers for Oppenheimer, who also paid for its distribution.
The third reason concerns a clue that Chevalier himself was unaware of. Chevalier wrote that Oppenheimer picked as an epigram for each Report a line from poems by the modern British poets, who were among Oppie’s favorites. The epigram for the second Report is indeed from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” I searched in vain for the source of the first epigram, until I discovered that it is the last line of “The Maid’s Tragedy,” a play written in 1622. The playwrights, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, were contemporaries and friends of John Donne, Oppenheimer’s favorite poet. Oppie had been introduced to Donne’s works by Jean Tatlock a few years earlier. It was Tatlock who likewise introduced Oppenheimer to communism.
A fourth reason for believing that Oppenheimer was a Communist surfaced in the course of my research, but I felt I could not mention it until now. Shortly before my book was published, Barbara Chevalier, Haakon’s widow, allowed me to read a private journal and memoir she had begun writing in the 1980s. In it, she confirmed that Haakon had approached Oppenheimer to spy for the Soviet Union during the war, that both had been members of the Party’s professional section—which often met at the Chevaliers’ residence—and that “Oppie’s membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed.” Barbara asked that I not mention her journal in my book, and I respected her wish. However, since Barbara passed away last July, I feel I can quote from it now. I have also written to Barbara’s closest heir, asking that she donate the journal to the Library of Congress, which has the Oppenheimer papers.
The final piece of evidence for Oppenheimer’s involvement with both the Reports and the Communist Party arrived, Perry Mason–like, in a telephone call I received in early January 2004 from the Library of Congress, with news that the Library has just received an unpublished memoir by a former Berkeley professor, Gordon Griffiths, who claims that, from 1940 to 1942, he served as the Party’s official liaison with the campus unit to which Robert Oppenheimer and Haakon Chevalier belonged.
The Griffiths manuscript confirms, in detail, the information in Brotherhood of the Bomb concerning the Berkeley unit’s membership, frequency of meeting, and activities—as well as Oppenheimer’s part in writing the two Reports to Our Colleagues. As Griffiths notes, “He [Oppenheimer] was not their sole author, but he took special pride in them.”
Griffiths died in January 2001. As his children wrote in their deed of gift to the Library of Congress, the decision to make their father’s manuscript public was taken, in part, because “Brotherhood of the Bomb has reopened the question of whether Oppenheimer was ever a member of the Communist Party.”
I believe the Griffiths manuscript, and the other evidence cited above, finally settles that question. But I also agree with Griffiths himself that the more relevant question is “not whether [Oppenheimer] 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.” A recent book has alleged that Robert Oppenheimer was both a Communist and a Soviet agent, based upon the evidence of a single document found in the former KGB archives. (See Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History, p. 316.)
I see nothing in Griffiths’s account, in Oppenheimer’s record, or in the Schecters’ KGB document to suggest that Oppenheimer ever betrayed the trust placed in him by our government.
For the evidence behind that conclusion—as well as for excerpts from Barbara Chevalier’s journal and the Griffiths manuscript, “Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor,” readers are invited to visit the book’s Web site, www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com. The Woodrow Wilson Center also has posted the latest concerning the Oppenheimer “spy debate” on their Web site, at www.wwcis.si.edu.
Gregg Herken
University of California, Merced
Merced, California
Daniel Kevles replies:
The evidence presented by Gregg Herken in his book about Oppenheimer’s membership in the Communist Party remains circumstantial and inconclusive. For example, that he wrote and paid for the publication of a pamphlet in 1939 defending the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland does not necessarily make him a member of the CP at the time. The poetic epigram in the second Report may or may not have come from Oppenheimer; the authors of The Maid’s Tragedy were not “modem” poets. In contrast, the new evidence that Herken is now able to offer—copies of which he has generously sent me—does clear away much of the murkiness surrounding Oppenheimer’s relationship to communism. According to Barbara Chevalier’s journal, shortly after reading Marx on a cross-country train trip Oppenheimer joined what she calls, following her husband, Haakon, “a secret unit of the Communist Party,” comprising “6 or 8 members.” Gordon Griffiths confirms the existence of the group, recalling that he brought Party literature to its twice-monthly meetings. However, Herken too quickly declares this evidence to support the claim that Oppenheimer was a member of a Communist Party unit. Griffiths reports that the group had only three members—Oppenheimer, Chevalier, and a Berkeley English professor, who could also have been a source of obscure epigrams, and he refers to it as a “communist group,” not a secret unit of the Party. Indeed, Griffiths says that none of the members carried a Party card, and while he collected dues from Chevalier and the English professor, he got none from Oppenheimer, who, he was “given to understand,” as a wealthy man “made his contribution through some special channel.” Griffith adds, “If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three men considered themselves to be Communists.”*
Still, if, as now seems to be the case, Oppenheimer did embrace communism for a time, his commitment to it appears to have been of the intellectual variety, not that of the Party member or activist. The faculty group’s meetings were devoted to discussion of national and world events, with Oppenheimer, Griffiths recalls, always providing “the fullest and most profound explanations, in the light of his understanding of Marxist theory.” He was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, growing teary-eyed when he read aloud the text of Stalin’s speech calling on the Soviet people to resist the Nazi invasion. He contributed to but did not solely write the two Reports (which accounts for why some of their phrasing sounds like him and some does not).
In all, Oppenheimer’s participation in the tiny faculty group would seem to have been another form of his fellow traveling, his contributions to the Reports and their publication being something akin to his support of labor activists and the Spanish Loyalists. He was likely truthful in repeatedly insisting later that he had never been a member of the CP. He kept some distance from it, and during the war he came to see the Soviet Union with clear, dry eyes. In her journal, Barbara Chevalier recalls Oppenheimer’s telling her husband during a wartime dinner: “Haakon, Haakon, believe me, I am serious, I have real reason to believe, and I cannot tell you why, but I assure you I have real reason to change my mind about Russia. They are not what you believe them to be. You must not continue your trust, your blind faith in the policies of the USSR.”
Herken rightly emphasizes that Oppenheimer revealed no secrets to the Soviets. Although once an intellectual Communist, he remained a loyal American and gave immense service to his country.
English (US) · 