Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [68]
Having digested much of the abundant recent biographical literature on Oppenheimer, Thomas Powers concludes that ‘Oppenheimer’s politics were ... —like his physics—mainly theoretical’. Oppenheimer had a streak of righteousness and a willingness to support groups that seemed to him to promote good causes, even while he naively blocked out other, less savory features of these groups. Communists supported social justice and the right side in Spain; that the ones running the Soviet Union murdered millions of their fellow citizens and signed on with Hitler in 1939 either did not register or did not signify. David Cassidy argues that Oppenheimer probably added ‘the cachet of communism to his portfolio as an intellectual bohemian’, and, though the metaphors mix awkwardly, the sentiment seems right. The Party’s ethos established a sense of community attractive to Americans left rootless by the experience of discrimination or religious assimilation, and this may have been its appeal for Oppenheimer. Many of his friends were Communists, and Oppenheimer’s ‘associations with Communists were a natural and socially seamless outgrowth of his sympathies and his station in life’, write Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Cassidy doubts that Oppenheimer actually joined the Communist Party. It was the folly and the tragedy of the Cold War to divide the world into strict categories of guilt (card-carrying Communists and fellow travelers) and innocence (patriotic Americans) and finally to sort Oppenheimer into the first. It is tempting to compare Oppenheimer’s politics to his sexuality: in his youth, he wrote wistfully erotic-sounding letters to his friend Francis Fergusson, and in Pasadena he evidently developed a crush on the chemist Linus Pauling. Yet he had girlfriends, married, and fathered children. As he defied simple sexual categorization, so he was intimate with Communists and liked some of what they were about. He did not, however, so far as one can tell, betray to the Soviets any secrets, or any information at all, concerning the bomb.27
6. Groves
The man who gave Oppenheimer leadership of the bomb program, who brushed aside fears that Oppie was a security risk despite what he termed the scientist’s ‘very extreme liberal background’, was Leslie Groves, who was chosen, in September 1942, to take charge of what was now guardedly called the Manhattan Project. The atomic program had not been Groves’s choice. He was 46 years old in 1942 and still a colonel. He hankered for a combat assignment and a promotion to general, especially after overseeing construction of the Pentagon, a job that had pedestrian satisfactions. It was time, he thought, for some excitement.28
It was, but not through combat. Groves was picked to guarantee careful military oversight of the bomb project. Vannevar Bush wanted an army man to place a firm hand on it. Fermi had not run his pile yet, and in the fall of 1942 the bomb program generally remained a small part of the massive mobilization effort the United States had undertaken to that point. But there was promise, and, if someone tough and competent could be found to lead the enterprise, its promise might be fulfilled. Groves’s military superiors had Groves in mind from the start. When he first met Groves on the afternoon of his appointment, Bush was not sure the generals had made the right choice. Groves, who weighed nearly 300 pounds (he had a taste for chocolate creams, a supply of which he kept in his office safe), came on strong, even to the patrician Bush. He was prudish (having been raised by a father who was a Presbyterian army chaplain of abstemious habits), brusque to the point of rudeness, overbearing, and contemptuous of sentiment. ‘I’m afraid he may have trouble with the scientists,’ Bush anxiously told an officer after the meeting. To Harvey Bundy, the special assistant to Secretary