Oppenheimer security clearance hearing
Over four weeks in 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 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 government of the United States and generated considerable controversy regarding whether the treatment of Oppenheimer was fair, or whether it was an expression of anti-communist McCarthyism.
Date
April 12 – May 6, 1954
Temporary building near the Washington Monument housing offices of the AEC
Washington, D.C.
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Loyalty-security
Revocation of the security clearance of Oppenheimer
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 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 acclaimed 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.
Hearing[edit]
Board composition and procedures[edit]
On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer was told by Lewis Strauss that his security file had been subject to two recent re-evaluations because of new screening criteria, and because a former government official had drawn attention to Oppenheimer's record. Strauss said that his clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter, and discussed his resigning his AEC consultancy. Given only a day to decide, and after consulting with his attorneys, Oppenheimer chose not to resign and requested a hearing instead. The charges were outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, general manager of the AEC. Pending resolution of the charges, Oppenheimer's security clearance was suspended. Oppenheimer told Strauss that some of what was in Nichols' letter was correct, some incorrect.[58][59] Nichols wrote that he was "not happy with the inclusion of a reference concerning Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb development." He considered that "in spite of his record he is loyal to the United States."[60]
AEC action nullified[edit]
Over the years, the physicist Fred Ribe, who had organized the 1954 petition, worked towards having the Oppenheimer charges undone,[124] as did other scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.[125] Historians also pressed for revocation to be reversed, without success.[126][127] Oppenheimer biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin joined this effort in 2006,[128] in conjunction with the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee,[129] with the assistance of attorneys at WilmerHale and Arnold & Porter, both of which believed no legal remedies were possible.[128][129] Despite the assistance of Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, their effort was rebuffed by two secretaries of energy in the Obama administration, Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz.[128][129]
The effort gained momentum during the Biden administration, with support from forty-three U.S. senators;[130] and Thomas Mason, the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory;[125][93] and by all living past directors of the laboratory.[130][128][131] Tim Rieser, a senior congressional aide to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, played a key role in moving the action through the federal government.[131][128]
On December 16, 2022, Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) – the successor organization to the AEC – vacated the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance.[126] Her statement said Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked "through a flawed process that violated the Commission's own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed."[132]
Granholm's order did not say that the charges against him were erroneous,[130][127] nor did it posthumously restore Oppenheimer's security clearance.[128][133] Granholm wrote that whether Oppenheimer "ought to have been eligible for access to restricted data is not one that this Department can or should attempt to answer seventy years later. Security clearance adjudication proceedings necessarily depend on sensitive judgments regarding the credibility of oral testimony and other evidence best evaluated within its own context. Therefore, we will not reconsider the substantive merits of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer." But while not ruling on those merits, Granholm concluded that the AEC failed to "follow its own rules" and that "these failures were material to the fairness of the proceeding."[130]
Historian Alex Wellerstein said the action did not "go as far as Oppenheimer and his family would have wanted. But it goes pretty far."[126] The action was praised by supporters of the revocation effort,[126][134] as well as Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,[135] but drew criticism. In The American Spectator, Daniel J. Flynn said "The evidence overwhelmingly supports the AEC stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance."[136] Historian Barton J. Bernstein wrote in The New York Sun that Granholm's report had "glossed over" evidence that Oppenheimer had been a member of the Communist Party.[137] Bernstein said in another article that Granholm had "ignored important parts of the substantial 21st-century scholarship on Oppenheimer and on the Oppenheimer loyalty-security case" and that her order vacating the decision had been "greatly flawed, and fundamentally errant".[133]
Dramatizations[edit]
Most popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Edward Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. Many historians have contested this as an oversimplification.[138]
Haakon Chevalier fictionalized the affair, and his self-exculpating view of the whole preceding history, in the roman à clef The Man Who Would Be God in 1959; the Oppenheimer-like protagonist was renamed "Dr. Sebastian Bloch". The translations sold well in France, where he had moved by then, and throughout the Soviet bloc. He returned to the topic in Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (1965).[139]
The hearing was dramatized in a 1964 play by German playwright Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer objected to the play, threatening suit and decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved", including its portrayal of him as viewing the bomb as a "work of the devil". His letter to Kipphardt said, "You may well have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden and Tokyo. I have not."[140] Of his security hearing, he said: "The whole damn thing was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it."[141]
In a response, Kipphardt offered to make corrections but defended the play,[142] which premiered on Broadway in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius".[143]
Kipphardt's play was also made into a Finnish television film Oppenheimerin tapaus ("The Case of Oppenheimer") in 1967.[144]
Oppenheimer was played by Sam Waterston in a 1980 BBC miniseries that culminated in the security hearing. The series was broadcast in the U.S. in 1982.[145] In 2009, David Strathairn starred as Oppenheimer in the American Experience PBS anthology series documentary, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, centering around the security hearing.[146][147] Christopher Nolan's 2023 biopic Oppenheimer portrays both the security hearing and the Lewis Strauss confirmation hearing.[148][149]