Second Red Scare

The Second Red Scare appears in the book not as an abstract climate of fear but as a chain of investigations that made political association, silence, and policy disagreement consequential. Federal surveillance fed congressional inquiries; hearings placed scientists and their families under pressure; and professional punishment extended well beyond those accused of espionage. The ordeal surrounding J. Robert Oppenheimer and his former students reveals how suspicion could travel through institutions even when the evidence was difficult to use in court.

Suspicion becomes an official inquiry

In the spring of 1946, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was investigating scores of senior officials in the Truman Administration and circulating allegations based on what it called “reliable informants.” Among those whose loyalty Hoover questioned were John J. McCloy, Herbert Marks, Edward U. Condon, and Dean Acheson, all connected in different ways to atomic policy. The investigation thus reached into government well beyond the circle of people later caught up in the Berkeley atomic-spying inquiry.

By 1948, congressional investigations had become a source of direct anxiety for J. Robert Oppenheimer. In a letter urging his brother Frank to consult a lawyer, Robert referred to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), whose hearings that summer included testimony by Whittaker Chambers accusing Alger Hiss of belonging to a secret Communist cell in Washington. Hiss’s case rapidly became a weapon in the argument that Communists had penetrated the foreign-policy establishment. Hiss sued Chambers for libel in September; by the end of the year, he had been indicted for perjury. Robert saw the affair as a menacing sign of what congressional scrutiny could bring.

The Berkeley investigation and the Oppenheimers

In the spring of 1949, HUAC opened a major investigation of alleged atomic espionage at Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory. Four former students of Oppenheimer—David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Max Friedman, and Joseph Weinberg—received subpoenas. Investigators knew that Weinberg had been overheard in a 1943 wiretap conversation with Steve Nelson about the atomic bomb. Yet the committee’s lawyers also knew the warrantless wiretap would not hold up in court. On April 26, HUAC brought Weinberg face-to-face with Nelson, and Weinberg denied ever meeting him. The investigators believed he had lied, but proving it was another matter.

Oppenheimer later described his encounter with the former students as a brief, two-minute conversation. He recalled advising them to “tell the truth”; they answered, “We won’t lie.” Bohm appeared before HUAC in May and again in June. Following advice from his lawyer, Clifford Durr, he refused to cooperate, invoking the First and Fifth Amendments. Princeton University initially issued a statement supporting him.

On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer himself appeared at a closed executive session. Six congressmen, including Richard Nixon, questioned him. Although he was present as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, the congressmen wanted to ask about atomic spies, not nuclear-weapons policy. He chose not to bring a personal lawyer. Instead, he brought Joseph Volpe and introduced him as the Commission’s general counsel. Over two hours, Oppenheimer answered cooperatively and at length. The episode placed a prominent scientific adviser inside the same inquiry that was bearing down on his former students.

Frank Oppenheimer testified the following day. Two years earlier, after a reporter telephoned him late at night with a story due to run the next morning, Frank had denied a report that included his past Communist Party membership. He later explained that the membership was the only true element in the story, but that he had wrongly called the whole thing false. Before HUAC, he acknowledged that he and his wife had left the Party in 1940, disillusioned, and denied knowing of atomic espionage or having been asked to provide information. Barely an hour after his testimony, he learned that the University of Minnesota had accepted his resignation as an assistant professor. He was three months short of tenure; after meeting the university president, he left the office in tears.

Punishment beyond the hearing room

The consequences for the scientists around Oppenheimer continued after testimony ended. More than a year after the Berkeley inquiry, Bohm and Lomanitz were indicted for contempt of Congress. Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950, and released on $1,500 bail. Princeton suspended him from teaching and barred him from campus. He was acquitted six months later, but the university did not renew his contract when it expired that June.

Lomanitz’s professional collapse was more prolonged. Fired by Fisk University after his HUAC testimony, he spent two years as a day laborer, tarring roofs, loading burlap bags, and trimming trees. Acquitted after a 1951 contempt trial, he found work repairing railroad tracks for $1.35 an hour; he did not obtain another teaching job until 1959. He did not blame Oppenheimer for what the FBI and the political culture had done to him, and did not consider Oppenheimer malicious. But the man he had once regarded as “almost a god” had, in his view, shown personal weaknesses that left him sad.

Other cases show that the pressure was not confined to Oppenheimer’s circle. Irving David Fox, a Berkeley physics teaching assistant, told HUAC that he had attended some Communist-sponsored meetings but had never joined the Party. After he refused to name names, the university regents questioned his political beliefs, and Berkeley fired him. The dismissal provoked a prolonged controversy over loyalty oaths. At Brooklyn College and the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, Melba Phillips was dismissed after refusing to cooperate with the McCarran Committee; Brooklyn College publicly apologized to her in 1987. The different cases shared a pattern: political inquiry could itself become a route to exclusion from academic work.

Frank’s exclusion lasted beyond the university decision. For the next decade, he and his family made a living as ranchers, twenty miles from the nearest town. FBI agents periodically questioned their neighbors and sometimes visited the ranch to ask Frank about other people in the Communist Party. One agent told him that cooperation was necessary if he wanted a university job. Frank refused. In a 1950 letter, he concluded that the FBI was not trying to investigate him so much as “poison the atmosphere” around him—to make friends, neighbors, and colleagues suspicious and thereby punish him for being left wing.

Security, spectacle, and the limits of dissent

The campaign’s reach also surfaced in the formal charges against Oppenheimer. On Christmas Eve in 1953, two FBI agents arrived at Olden Manor and took control of his remaining classified papers. That day he received the Atomic Energy Commission’s formal letter, dated December 23. It questioned whether his continued work would endanger national security and revived allegations about his associations with Communists, contributions to the Communist Party of California, and the Chevalier affair. The proceeding turned past political associations into an official security judgment about whether he could continue serving the government.

As the panel considered his case in 1954, Oppenheimer and Kitty watched the Army-McCarthy hearings on their black-and-white television. The televised contest between Senator Joseph McCarthy and Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch drew an estimated twenty million viewers a day. For Oppenheimer, watching the hearings during his own ordeal made the spectacle a pointed reminder of the proceedings he had just endured. The book presents the public drama not as a distant parallel but as something he watched while awaiting judgment on his own case.

The verdict was celebrated by some of the same political voices that had treated suspicion as proof of danger. The American Mercury hailed the downfall of the once-glamorous atomic scientist and attacked his supporters as people who would coddle potential traitors; some representatives stood and applauded when the ruling was announced in the House. The public response reinforced the sense that the proceeding concerned more than one man’s access to classified work.

The book’s broader consequence is a narrowing of the scientist’s permitted public role. In the years after the war, scientists had been treated as a class of public advisers whose expertise could extend into policy and public philosophy. Oppenheimer’s removal from that role signaled a retreat from that expectation. Scientists could serve the state, the book argues, as specialists on technical questions, but could not safely dissent from government policy and expect to remain trusted advisers. His 1953 criticism of policy in a Foreign Affairs essay illustrates the boundary at issue: expertise did not guarantee protection when it became public disagreement. In that sense, the Second Red Scare’s effect was not only to punish individuals, but also to make the institutional cost of dissent visible to the scientific community.