Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy is presented less through private biography than through the pressure his anti-Communist politics exerted on the world around J. Robert Oppenheimer. A senator from Wisconsin whose public attacks could unsettle the Eisenhower administration, McCarthy was both a symbol of the era’s witch-hunt atmosphere and a political danger that other officials tried to manage. His prospective investigation of Oppenheimer never becomes the principal proceeding against the physicist; its importance lies partly in how it prompted Lewis Strauss to pursue a different, more carefully orchestrated course.

Political Reach and the Climate of Suspicion

By the autumn of 1953, Washington was gripped by a climate in which careers could be destroyed on flimsy charges and few officials seemed willing to confront McCarthy. His influence was not simply a matter of formal investigations: his speeches, public accusations, and capacity to threaten political allies made other people anticipate what he might do next. On November 24, 1953, he delivered a blistering radio and television speech accusing the Eisenhower administration of appeasement. The following day, C. D. Jackson told a reporter that McCarthy had declared war on the president. When the remark appeared in a New York Times column without Jackson’s name, an Eisenhower aide criticized him, arguing that such statements would make McCarthy and his allies less likely to support the administration’s program. Jackson saw the administration’s caution as disastrous appeasement and feared that its lack of leadership would exact a political price.

Oppenheimer had already become a conspicuous target for suspicion. His past political associations, his disagreements over nuclear policy, and his opposition to building the hydrogen bomb could all be turned into accusations of disloyalty. In May 1953, McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn asked J. Edgar Hoover how he would react if the Senate committee began investigating Oppenheimer. Hoover considered Oppenheimer a controversial figure but also recognized his standing among American scientists. He warned that a great deal of preliminary work would be needed before a public inquiry into so formidable a subject. McCarthy indicated that he would back away from the case for the moment. The pause was temporary, but it mattered: McCarthy’s reach was sufficient to make the possibility of an investigation a concern even before one formally began.

Strauss and the Attempt to Control the Case

Strauss treated McCarthy not as a reliable instrument but as an unpredictable competitor. In June 1953, while Oppenheimer was in Brazil on a lecture trip, Strauss met privately with Hoover and discussed McCarthy’s interest in investigating the scientist. Strauss hoped to maintain a close relationship with the FBI director, and the conversation made clear that an inquiry by McCarthy’s committee might erupt for reasons of publicity rather than evidence. Strauss and Hoover agreed that the case should not be taken up prematurely merely to generate headlines.

Strauss also learned that Oppenheimer had influential friends. He told Hoover that the columnist Joseph Alsop had delivered a letter to the White House urging the Eisenhower administration to prevent a McCarthy investigation. Strauss understood that Oppenheimer’s supporters could complicate a public campaign. Rather than leave the matter to the Wisconsin senator, Strauss pressed Senator Robert Taft to block McCarthy if he tried to proceed. He argued that some of the evidence would not withstand scrutiny, that McCarthy’s committee was not the appropriate venue, and that the timing was wrong. The point was not to abandon an investigation: Strauss intended to direct one himself. McCarthy’s threat thus helped sharpen the distinction between a sensational congressional inquiry and the security proceedings Strauss was preparing through the Atomic Energy Commission.

By December 2, 1953, the possibility of McCarthy going public remained part of the administration’s calculations. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson told Dwight D. Eisenhower that Strauss had warned him McCarthy knew about the Oppenheimer material and might use it. Eisenhower said he would not let McCarthy dictate his response, but he directed that the case be brought to Attorney General Herbert Brownell and insisted that Oppenheimer’s character not be assassinated without substantiating evidence. Wilson also described Oppenheimer’s brother and wife as Communists, a claim the account identifies as erroneous. In this exchange, McCarthy’s influence operates through anticipation: officials weigh what he might expose even as they debate what the evidence actually establishes.

The Oppenheimer Hearing and Public Spectacle

The formal security hearing that began in April 1954 was not McCarthy’s proceeding. Strauss had reason to fear, however, that the senator could disrupt his plans. On April 6, after Edward R. Murrow criticized him on television, McCarthy accused the hydrogen-bomb project of having been deliberately sabotaged. His charge raised the possibility that he might publicly reveal what he knew about Oppenheimer’s case. Strauss was relieved when the Atomic Energy Commission hearing board convened on April 12, bringing Oppenheimer’s case into an official process he could oversee rather than leaving it to McCarthy’s political theater.

McCarthy nevertheless remained part of the atmosphere in which the hearing was understood. The publication of the charges and Oppenheimer’s response polarized public reaction. Liberals saw the attack on an eminent scientist as encouragement for witch-hunting; conservative commentator Walter Winchell used the controversy to amplify claims that a prominent atomic figure had opposed the hydrogen bomb and had been an active Communist. The allegations against Oppenheimer were therefore entangled with the broader political language of the period, even when McCarthy was not conducting the hearing himself.

While Oppenheimer and Katherine (Kitty) Oppenheimer awaited the board’s decision, they watched the Army–McCarthy hearings on their black-and-white television set. Beginning on April 21, in the middle of Oppenheimer’s own ordeal, the televised proceedings drew an estimated 20 million viewers each day. McCarthy and the Army’s counsel, Joseph Nye Welch, exchanged barbs before a national audience. For Oppenheimer, the spectacle offered a painful comparison with the security hearing he had just endured: another public drama involving accusation and power, but one whose televised form made its conflict visible to millions.

Defeat, Death, and Narrative Significance

McCarthy’s political presence continued to cast a shadow after the immediate hearing crisis. At Harvard in 1957, Oppenheimer gave six William James Lectures under the title The Hope of Order. On the opening day, 1,200 people filled Sanders Theater and another 800 listened in a nearby hall; armed police stood at the doors in anticipation of protests. McCarthy had died four days earlier. As Oppenheimer rose to speak, he paused, went to the blackboard, and wrote R.I.P. The gesture was a silent rebuke to the dead senator, placed before an audience assembled to hear Oppenheimer address public questions after his own political defeat.

The contrast between that gesture and Oppenheimer’s later public reticence is telling. At the beginning of the 1960s, while Americans built backyard bomb shelters, he did not speak out against the popular alarm. When David E. Lilienthal pressed him, Oppenheimer said that he could do nothing about what was happening and would be the worst person to speak publicly about it. As the Vietnam War escalated in 1965 and 1966, he likewise remained silent in public, though he privately expressed skepticism to his son, Peter, about the administration’s increasing commitment. These later silences cannot simply be attributed to McCarthy, but they belong to a life shaped by the political punishment and scrutiny that his era represents. In the account of Oppenheimer, McCarthy is therefore less a biographical portrait than a measure of the climate: a senator whose capacity to threaten exposure helped make political fear an instrument of government, and whose death could still be marked, years later, in a single word on a blackboard.