San Francisco, California, is more than a backdrop in the account of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is a place where political argument, personal loyalties, and wartime intelligence work repeatedly converged. Fundraisers and pamphlets gave left-wing ideas a public voice; meetings in the city connected Oppenheimer to people whose associations would draw federal scrutiny; and surveillance turned ordinary movements through its streets into evidence in a national security inquiry.

A polarized political setting

The city’s political atmosphere was shaped by sharp conflict between left and right. Longshoremen’s strikes had hardened those divisions, and the conservative backlash made Oppenheimer alert to the possible cost of his public political activity. In the spring of 1941, he confided to Willie Fowler that he feared losing his job because the University of California was about to be investigated for radicalism and committee members reportedly disliked him. Martin D. Kamen remembered Oppenheimer as vocal and active, but not politically consistent: alarmed by the consequences of his activism, he might draw back, then become active again when events provoked him.

This unsettled local climate also frames Oppenheimer’s possible involvement with left-wing publications. A February 1940 report, issued under the name of the College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California, argued that the war in Europe was changing American political life and that reaction was mobilizing. Chevalier considered the phrase “more and more surely” characteristically Oppenheimer’s, and other testimony suggested that Oppenheimer may have helped edit or produce the reports. The evidence does not establish that he authored the pamphlet. Its importance is instead that it places the question of his political participation in a specific setting: a West Coast campaign to defend the New Deal and oppose the direction of American policy as war approached.

Public meetings and private ties

In autumn 1940, Oppenheimer shared a platform with Steve Nelson at a Berkeley fundraiser for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Oppenheimer linked the fascist victory in Spain to the outbreak of general war in Europe and described the volunteers who had served in Spain as having fought a delaying action. Afterward, he told Nelson that he planned to marry Kitty, whom Nelson had known previously. The exchange reunited Kitty with her old friend and led to a picnic dinner at the Oppenheimers’ home. The episode shows the overlap between public political gatherings and Oppenheimer’s private circle, even as the fundraiser itself took place in Berkeley rather than San Francisco.

The city became more directly significant in Oppenheimer’s continued relationship with Jean Tatlock. Although married to Kitty, he kept seeing Tatlock between 1939 and 1943; their emotional attachment endured. On June 14, 1943, after traveling from Berkeley to San Francisco, he was met by Tatlock, who kissed him. They walked arm in arm to her 1935 green Plymouth coupe, drove to the Xochimilco Café for drinks and dinner, and later went to her top-floor apartment at 1405 Montgomery Street. The next morning they left the building together. On a later evening during the same visit, Tatlock met him at the United Airlines office downtown; they went to dinner at Kit Carson’s Grill before she drove him to the airport. Oppenheimer never saw her again. Years later, he explained to his interrogators that she had wanted to see him because she was still in love with him.

From local contacts to suspected espionage

San Francisco’s political networks also formed part of the chain of contact behind the Chevalier affair. George C. Eltenton said that Peter Ivanov, whom he believed to be connected to the Soviet consulate, had asked whether he knew scientists including Oppenheimer and whether an acquaintance could approach Oppenheimer about sharing scientific information with Soviet researchers. Eltenton turned to Haakon Chevalier, who in turn approached Oppenheimer. According to both men’s later accounts, Oppenheimer rejected the proposal; Eltenton said Chevalier told him there was no chance of obtaining data and that Oppenheimer disapproved. The approach was discussed through a local social and political network, but the accounts presented to the FBI identified Oppenheimer’s refusal as decisive.

The city’s significance changed when the relationship with Tatlock was viewed through the lens of counterintelligence. Military agents followed Oppenheimer during his June 1943 visit and reported his affectionate meeting with Tatlock and overnight stay. Because she was known to be active in Communist Party affairs, the FBI treated her as a possible channel through which secrets might reach Soviet intelligence. In September, J. Edgar Hoover described her as the partner of a man with vital wartime information and recommended that her telephone be tapped. Colonel Boris Pash had already urged that Oppenheimer be denied a clearance and dismissed, citing his visit to Tatlock and other circumstantial associations. The same San Francisco streets that had carried a private reunion thus entered official reports as a map of suspected access and risk.

Interrogation, reputation, and aftermath

The inquiry returned to San Francisco after the war. On June 26, 1946, FBI agents took Chevalier from his home to their downtown office; on the same day, another team brought Eltenton to the FBI field office in Oakland. The two men were questioned simultaneously for about six hours about their earlier conversations concerning Oppenheimer. Though neither knew the other was being interviewed, their accounts were similar. Eltenton again said that Chevalier had reported Oppenheimer would not provide information. The location therefore became not only a site of political association and surveillance, but also a venue where investigators tested whether separate recollections supported the same account.

In the postwar climate, local Communist Party members’ claims about Oppenheimer further complicated his public reputation. FBI wiretaps recorded California activists discussing whether they could claim him as a member and describing him as sympathetic or formerly close to them. The recorded conversation itself left doubt about actual Party membership; the claims reveal how different groups sought to place the famous physicist within their own political story. San Francisco’s role in the book is ultimately this double one: it sustains the close-knit political and personal relationships that made Oppenheimer influential, then supplies the streets, meetings, and contacts through which those relationships were recast as questions of loyalty and security.