Strauss and Robb's request for Hoover to intervene in the hearing

Strauss and Robb’s request for Hoover to intervene in the hearing was a last-minute effort to influence the outcome of the proceedings against J. Robert Oppenheimer. It followed Ward Evans’s unexpected movement toward a dissent supporting Oppenheimer, and revealed how far Strauss and Robb were prepared to go to prevent the board from restoring his security clearance. Hoover refused to see the board; years later, documentary evidence contradicted Robb’s categorical denial that he had sought the director’s influence.

Background and the Threat of a Reversal

The request arose after a month of proceedings before the AEC Personnel Security Hearing Board. Gordon Gray, the board’s chairman, had expected a verdict against Oppenheimer. In private discussions, Gray and the other members had treated Oppenheimer’s conduct as evidence of disloyal judgment: Gray cited the Chevalier affair, Oppenheimer’s defense of Bernard Peters, the hydrogen-bomb debate, and other atomic-policy positions. Evans had also remarked that Oppenheimer was guilty of very bad judgment. Gray therefore believed Evans was already disposed against restoring Oppenheimer’s clearance.

That expectation broke during a ten-day recess. On his return, Gray learned that Evans had penciled a draft dissent supporting Oppenheimer. Evans explained that he had reviewed the record and found nothing new in the charges. His shift unsettled the assumptions on which the expected decision had rested. Gray had privately believed Evans’s anti-Semitism would prejudice his judgment, noting Evans’s assertion that, in his experience, people with subversive backgrounds and interests were almost always Jewish. The reversal did not erase Gray’s concerns about his colleagues’ prior commitments; it made the board’s impending decision newly uncertain.

The Request to Hoover

Strauss reacted frantically to the possibility that Oppenheimer might be exonerated. The request came amid a series of measures that had already compromised the hearing’s appearance of fairness: Strauss and Robb had wiretapped Oppenheimer’s lawyers, obstructed Lloyd K. Garrison’s attempt to obtain a security clearance, confronted witnesses with classified documents, and used hearsay from FBI files before Gray’s panel. With Evans now seeming capable of shifting the balance, Strauss and Robb turned to the FBI director.

With Strauss’s approval, Robb called the FBI and told agent C. E. Hennrich that he considered it extremely important for Hoover to discuss the case with the board. Robb described the matter as urgent and warned that a decision in Oppenheimer’s favor would be a tragedy. At nearly the same time, Strauss appealed to Hoover aide A. H. Belmont, saying that the situation was “touch and go” and that a slight shift in the balance could lead the board to make a serious error. The parallel appeals show that this was not a routine inquiry: both men wanted the director’s involvement while the board’s judgment remained unsettled.

Hennrich recognized the significance of the request. In his assessment, Strauss and Robb wanted a finding that Oppenheimer was a security risk but doubted the board would reach that conclusion. He advised that Hoover should not see the board. The director himself agreed that intervention would be improper and refused to meet Gray’s board. The attempt therefore did not secure the encounter Strauss and Robb sought, but the documentary record preserves their effort and the pressure they tried to bring to bear.

The Record, the Denial, and the Verdict

Years later, when confronted with an FBI memorandum documenting the request, Robb denied that he had tried to get Hoover to influence the board. Speaking to filmmaker and historian Peter Goodchild, he categorically denied encouraging a meeting for that purpose, and denied telling Hennrich that intervention was urgently needed to prevent a ruling for Oppenheimer. The account of the episode states plainly that the documentary evidence showed Robb was lying. The denial turned the request into more than a procedural maneuver: it also became a test of the competing accounts of how the hearing had been conducted.

The episode’s pressure was reflected in another maneuver around the dissent. Gray thought Evans’s draft so poorly written that he asked Robb to rewrite it. Robb later explained that he did not want Evans’s opinion to be vulnerable, since that might make Evans appear to have been placed on the board as a plant. Even as Robb sought Hoover’s intervention against the possibility of an Oppenheimer-supporting outcome, he was helping shape the form in which Evans’s dissent could be presented.

On May 23, the board issued its verdict by a vote of two to one. Gray and board member Morgan concluded that Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen but a security risk, and recommended that his clearance not be restored. Their stated grounds included his conduct and associations, a perceived susceptibility to influence, and his behavior in the hydrogen-bomb program. The verdict did not make the attempt to involve Hoover disappear; instead, the episode exposes the contested process behind a decision that formally distinguished loyalty from security risk.

Significance

The request belongs to the wider struggle over Oppenheimer’s ability to challenge the nuclear policies favored by powerful officials. The book’s account places his public criticism of those policies against a national-security establishment increasingly troubled by his questions, and identifies Strauss and his allies as determined to silence a credible critic. In that setting, the call to Hoover was an effort to shape an administrative judgment at the moment its outcome seemed vulnerable—not simply a disagreement over Oppenheimer’s past conduct.

The episode also illustrates the gap between the hearing’s formal procedures and the actions surrounding them. The board was meant to decide Oppenheimer’s eligibility, yet the effort to enlist the FBI director, the use of classified material and hearsay, and the later denial of the documented appeal all bear on how that decision was pursued and remembered. Hoover’s refusal set a limit on the attempted intervention; it did not undo the other pressures or prevent the board from withholding Oppenheimer’s clearance. The request consequently stands as a sharply documented instance of the conflict between institutional authority and the effort to control the judgment exercised in its name.