Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz

Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz appears in the book at the intersection of theoretical physics, radical politics, and wartime security. A graduate student among J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Berkeley circle, he was drawn to Communist Party meetings and causes without, by his account, becoming a formal Party member. His experience shows how quickly association and political suspicion could overtake a young scientist’s work: after Army intelligence began tracking him, he was drafted and spent the remainder of the war in stateside Army camps.

Berkeley and Oppenheimer’s Circle

Lomanitz belonged to the group of theoretical-physics students who regarded Oppenheimer as a mentor and role model. They were intellectually daring, politically engaged young men: some acknowledged Communist Party membership, while others remained on its fringes. Lomanitz was likely in the Party briefly, the account suggests, but his own description of his involvement resists a firm label. He said he attended meetings when they were open and that, at the time, the distinction between official membership and sympathy did not seem clear to him. He could not say even later exactly what formal membership required.

The political and personal worlds of the students overlapped. In autumn 1942, Betty Friedan, then a psychology graduate student, began dating David Bohm, who was writing his doctoral dissertation under Oppenheimer. Bohm introduced her to Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman. The group spent weekends together and sometimes attended what Friedan remembered as radical study groups. Their political associations were part of a social life organized around friendship and intellectual exchange, not simply a concealed network of formal affiliations.

Lomanitz’s regard for Steve Nelson, the Communist Party’s liaison to the Berkeley university community, also reflected a political commitment shaped by public causes. Lomanitz had met Nelson at Party meetings and respected him as a labor organizer, a critic of racial segregation, and a supporter of the Spanish Republic. He described his own relation to the Party as sympathetic but informal. That distinction mattered to him, even as the officials who later investigated the Berkeley scientists treated political proximity as evidence of subversion.

The Bomb Project and the Union

By the end of 1942, Oppenheimer’s students understood that the mysterious wartime work around them concerned the development of a powerful weapon. Lomanitz recalled that some of them worried about what bringing such a weapon into the world might mean, including the possibility that it could destroy the world. When they raised those fears with Oppenheimer, he answered with the danger of the alternative: what if the Nazis obtained it first? Lomanitz’s recollection places his political and scientific concerns inside the urgent wartime argument that framed the project.

In early 1943, Lomanitz joined other Oppenheimer students—David Bohm, Bernard Peters, Max Friedman, and Irving David Fox—in Local 25 of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians. The circumstances did not resemble a conventional workplace dispute. Lomanitz was earning $150 a month at the Radiation Laboratory, more than twice his previous salary, and the students had no complaints about their working conditions. They were eager to work long hours. Looking back, he called the decision to organize a union dramatic, youthful, and even ridiculous in its rationale.

Max Friedman, whom Lomanitz and Joseph Weinberg persuaded to act as organizer within the laboratory, recalled that he did little beyond hold the title. But the argument for organizing was serious in principle: the scientists feared what the atomic bomb might be used for and believed they should have a voice in the consequences of their work. The union thus joined a practical act of organization to an unsettled question about scientific responsibility. Army intelligence, however, read the association differently. Its officers monitored the Radiation Laboratory, and an August 1943 warning described several people there as active Communists and Local 25 as dominated and controlled by Party members or sympathizers. The Roosevelt administration soon formally asked the Congress of Industrial Organizations to stop its organizing drive at the Berkeley laboratory.

Surveillance and Identification

Lomanitz became a target before investigators had established evidence connecting him to espionage. Army intelligence initially focused on him because it had information that he was a Communist Party member. In June 1943, an agent following him observed him outside Sather Gate at the University of California, Berkeley, posing for a photograph with friends. They had their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. After they left, the agent bought the negative from the campus photographer.

The photograph supplied investigators with a visual record of association. Lomanitz’s companions were identified as Joseph Weinberg, David Bohm, and Max Friedman, and the four men were thereafter marked as subversives. The investigation’s logic widened from the men’s frequent company to claims about their political affiliations. Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash later testified that investigators had identified Weinberg as the mysterious “Joe” in a monitored conversation and had sufficient information to name Weinberg and Bohm as Communist Party members. Lomanitz’s own presence in the group placed him within this widening field of suspicion, though the account does not establish that he passed project information to Nelson.

The episode’s defining image is not a clandestine exchange but a student photograph: friends posing together at a campus gate, their arms over one another’s shoulders. Once acquired by an intelligence agent, the negative served a purpose its subjects had not chosen. Ordinary proximity became a basis for official classification, and the record of friendship entered a security investigation.

Draft and Wartime Consequences

Lomanitz briefly received a consequential assignment when Ernest Lawrence appointed him liaison between the Radiation Laboratory and the Manhattan Project’s plant at Oak Ridge. Shortly afterward, he received an Army draft notice. Lawrence and Oppenheimer both intervened on his behalf, but their efforts did not prevent his removal from laboratory work. Lomanitz spent the rest of the war in various stateside Army camps.

The fates of the other students show the broader reach of the security response without making their experiences interchangeable with his. David Bohm was denied clearance to work at Los Alamos and remained at the Radiation Laboratory; Max Friedman was fired from laboratory jobs; Joseph Weinberg was surveilled and drafted to Alaska. Lomanitz’s own trajectory—from student and union participant to liaison, then drafted soldier—demonstrates how a political suspicion could disrupt scientific work even without a proven espionage case. His story contributes to the book’s larger account of how wartime security institutions treated activism and association as liabilities, while the students’ original concerns about the bomb and their wish for a voice in its use remained unresolved.