Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter appears in the biography as a legal authority and trusted adviser whose interventions touched two consequential settings: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s appointment to lead the Institute for Advanced Study and the contentious debate over the Baruch plan for international atomic control. The episodes show him working through personal counsel and professional networks, rather than as a central participant in Oppenheimer’s scientific or political work.

Legal and Institutional Standing

Frankfurter was a justice and had himself once served as a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study. That experience made him a useful source of advice when Oppenheimer was weighing the institute’s directorship. He was also among Oppenheimer’s newer friends in Washington, a relationship that gave the physicist a sounding board beyond the institute’s own trustees and scholars.

The biography also records a small but telling connection between Frankfurter’s legal world and the institute’s daily administration: one of the secretaries Oppenheimer inherited there, Mrs. Eleanor Leary, had previously worked with Frankfurter. The detail places his professional network near the institution even as his more direct influence came through advice and correspondence.

Advice on the Institute Directorship

Oppenheimer consulted Frankfurter while still undecided about moving to Princeton. Frankfurter discouraged him from accepting the directorship on the grounds that it would leave little freedom for his own creative work, and suggested Harvard instead. Oppenheimer bristled at that alternative, saying he knew why he should not go there. Frankfurter then referred him to another person familiar with Princeton, who offered a more favorable assessment: “Princeton was an odd sort of place, but if one had an idea of what to make of it, it was fine.”

The exchange captures Frankfurter as a candid adviser rather than an advocate for the appointment. He raised the professional cost he believed Oppenheimer might incur, but did not press the argument after Oppenheimer resisted Harvard; instead, he connected him with someone who could speak to Princeton’s possibilities. Oppenheimer ultimately accepted the directorship, which suited his administrative abilities and kept him within reach of Washington and New York.

Correspondence on the Baruch Plan

Frankfurter also entered the biography’s account of the dispute over Bernard Baruch’s proposed terms for international atomic control. Baruch’s plan included punitive provisions and conditions that would preserve the American atomic monopoly; John J. McCloy and Dean Acheson objected that this approach would undermine cooperative control and would be unacceptable to the Soviet Union. The day after a heated confrontation, Frankfurter wrote McCloy: “I am told that it was a real bullfight—and that you were so disgusted with the gentleman on the other side that you just sputtered ‘dust in the air.’ ”

The letter reports the scene through what Frankfurter had been told; it does not establish him as a participant in the meeting or as the author of the objections. Its inclusion nevertheless reveals how the conflict circulated through Washington’s legal and political circles. In the biography’s portrait, Frankfurter links private counsel about an academic appointment with the broader network through which the postwar atomic-control debate was discussed.