Sometimes a fact can be so plain that it’s overlooked, so obvious as to be devious. Herbert Aptheker’s conspicuous silence about C. L. R. James, for example, took me 40 years to notice. (To my knowledge, no one else had noticed it before or since). The absence of any mention by the passionately anti-communist Ayn Rand about the cerebral Communist “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer is a silence that neither she nor any Objectivist writer felt comfortable addressing afterward.
From reading Jennifer Burns’s 2009 The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, I’ve learned that in 1946, basking in the success of her novel The Fountainhead, Oscar-winning film producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) tasked her to write screenplays, one of them titled Top Secret:
Rand began a careful investigation of the Los Alamos [New Mexico atomic bomb] project, even securing an extensive audience with the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. The film was never produced, but Rand’s encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.[1]
Burns didn’t source this assertion. (I wish I had picked up Burns’s book when it came out.) I was therefore pleased to find a 2023 essay by Ayn Rand Institute archivist, Brandon Lisi:
To understand atomic science, she read Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, the lengthy and scientifically challenging official government report on the bomb’s development, written by the chairman of Princeton University’s physics department, Henry DeWolf Smyth. She also consulted with a technical advisor, a young physicist from the California Institute of Technology. To understand the human story, she sought interviews with key figures, including J. Robert Oppenheimer.[2]
Drawing upon interviews in the Rand archives, Lisi says Oppenheimer “seemed apprehensive and suspicious” of her motivation. The atmosphere lightened once she assured him she only wanted to “show that the atom bomb was a great achievement of the human mind, and that it can be done only by free minds.”
After an hour, they scheduled another meeting.[3] In short, they had hit it off.
Given Oppenheimer’s influence on Rand’s creation of Atlas Shrugged’s Dr.
Robert Stadler, it’s worth noting that in “a series of notes written in the summer of 1946, she considered whether Oppenheimer could properly be described as the type of creator who works for his own destruction.” That is,
. . . he is so sure of what is right and that he is capable of deciding it, while others are not, that he must force it on those inferior others, for their own good. In such an attitude, there is the natural impatience of the intelligent man who can’t bear to see things done wrong, when they can be done right and he knows how to do it.
Oppenheimer arguably embodied her ideal, the superior man living in harmony with his values, reason above all. And so it was a cruel irony for Rand to be conversing with Oppenheimer: in the previous decade, he had given aid and comfort to global Stalinism from whose Russian homeland she fled in 1926 after it had impoverished her family.
When he wasn’t formulating quantum physics equations, he was promoting Communism; when Rand wasn’t turning out screenplays, she was fighting Communist cultural influence, in the first place Oppie’s Tinsel Town comrades, even testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 20, 1947.[4]
A Communist from a family of Communists, married to a Communist, Oppenheimer deployed his scientific genius to bend history’s course toward Communism, an effort masked by the immediate goal of defeating the Third Reich. Unbeknownst to both of them, he now sat across from a witness to and survivor of the Communist brutality which he had served, wittingly or unwittingly.
The evidence was not even hinted at, let alone delivered, in the Pulitzer-
winning life of Oppenheimer that inspired the screenplay of Christopher Nolan’s multiple-Oscar-winning film.[5] For the evidence I had to turn to the dean of American Communist historiography, Harvey Klehr, and his longtime collaborator, John Earl Haynes:
Even before the evidence from the Russian archives, proof that Oppenheimer had been a Communist did not emerge from his enemies or from unreliable witnesses or ambivalent phrases in sketchy documents. Several of his friends, acquaintances, and graduate students—all of whom remained left-wingers—wrote memoirs or gave interviews in which they detailed Oppie’s membership in the Communist Party. . . . Haakon Chevalier—a professor of French literature—said that he and Oppenheimer had been members of “a ‘closed unit’ of the Communist Party” at the University of California at Berkeley. . . . In 1964, Chevalier had written to Robert to inform his one-time intimate that in a forthcoming memoir called Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, he was going to confirm they had both been Communists. Oppenheimer responded angrily, threatening a lawsuit, and in the published version Chevalier called their unit a Marxist discussion group. Chevalier’s widow allowed Herken to read her private journal and memoir, in which she confirmed that both her husband and Oppenheimer had been members of a closed CPUSA unit and noted, “Oppie’s [Oppenheimer’s] membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed.”[6]
In July 1940 Albert Einstein, who had urged President Roosevelt to take nuclear power seriously in the face of Nazi aggression, was denied security clearance needed to work on the Manhattan Project because of his leftist politics.[7] By contrast, Oppie was cleared and survived every effort to remove him from this most sensitive of governmental posts.
In December 1943 [Klehr and Haynes continue], FBI listening devices picked up a conversation between Steve Nelson[8], the party’s leader in the Bay Area, and Bernadette Doyle, its organizational secretary. In that conversation, Nelson and Doyle spoke of both Robert and his brother Frank as CPUSA members, but Nelson noted that Robert had become inactive. As late as 1945, a bug at a meeting of the North Oakland Communist Club overheard one official state that Oppenheimer was a party member and another call him “one of our men.”
It’s important to know, say Klehr and Haynes, that “[m]any Communists never held party cards. Those belonging to professional groups were treated differently from regular Communists. Most important, they were exempted from the work required of most recruits—selling the Daily Worker, manning picket lines, attending rallies, etc.,—because doing so would have revealed their identities.
. . . just because Oppenheimer did not pay regular dues did not mean he was not a Communist. In August 1939, a senior CPUSA official gave a report to the Communist International in Moscow on the organizational status of the American party. He presented three levels of membership. The first was made up of “enrolled” members. These were people who had joined the CPUSA and were carried on its membership rolls. Next came “registered” members. These were persons who had newly registered or reregistered with a local party unit. Finally, the smallest number represented “dues-paying” members. So whether you paid dues, annually registered with a local party unit, or had enrolled in the party in the previous few years, you were a Communist in the eyes of the CPUSA. The party regarded all three definitions as signifying membership with different degrees of current participation.
For Bird and Sherwin, the accusation of disloyalty against Oppenheimer was nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. The Roosevelt loyalist who they took Oppie to be, however, could not have written anti-FDR tracts in 1940 or “actively supported the Soviet invasion of Finland,” but he had done both.
The Vassiliev Notebooks, however, obviate the need to sift through what
some will try to discredit as circumstantial evidence.
These are copies and summaries of documents from the KGB archive that we discussed extensively in our 2009 book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. The notebooks document that prior to 1943, the GRU, or Soviet Military Intelligence, was leading the effort to recruit scientists on the West Coast and fruitlessly tried to recruit Oppenheimer as an active agent passing secrets. By the end of 1943, the KGB took over the effort. Several messages sent between Moscow and San Francisco urged recruitment of Oppenheimer, in which he was described as a secret or undeclared member of the CPUSA. In February 1944, the KGB’s Moscow Center prepared a report that listed Oppenheimer, who had been given the code name “Chester,” as a prime target for recruitment. Moscow Center identified Oppenheimer as a “secret member of the fellowcountryman org.,” the term used to describe the CPUSA. But it warned that because Oppenheimer was “kept under special security . . . the fellowcountryman organization received orders from its center to break off relations with ‘Ch[ester]’ to avoid his exposure.”
From 1944 to 1945 the KGB tried to use Oppenheimer’s secret party membership “as a lever to recruit him as a spy, and various efforts to use different Communist acquaintances to cultivate him,” but the latter bore no fruit. The KGB’s San Francisco station chief reported that “his efforts to contact Oppenheimer and his brother Frank had fallen apart after Isaac Folkoff, a Communist Party liaison with the KGB, told him that ‘due to their special military work, the [party’s] connection with them was suspended.’”
Clouds of suspicion continued to hover; they increased before Oppie departed for Los Alamos in the winter of 1942-1943. Chevalier, the Red literature professor, passed on a suggestion from George Eltenton, a chemist friend: Oppie should, he said,
transmit scientific information to an acquaintance Eltenton had in the Soviet consulate. We see this in the movie, in a scene set in a kitchen. Both Chevalier and Oppenheimer later agreed that the latter had angrily rejected the overture. But Oppenheimer did not report the recruitment effort to security officials until six months later. While naming Eltenton as someone to watch as a potential spy, Robert initially withheld both his own name and Chevalier’s. This initial interview is depicted in the movie . . . and comes off as just as awkward as it likely was. In later interviews with Army security, Oppenheimer finally admitted he had been approached, but he continued to refuse to name Chevalier or anyone else who might have been involved. Not until December 1943, in response to a direct order from Groves, did he name Chevalier (which we do not see).[9]
Why the lack of transparency if by the mid-1940s—that is, by the time Rand interviewed him—he had severed his Party ties and was no longer even a Communist sympathizer? Klehr and Haynes suggest that
. . . one of the major contributing factors to his loss of security access was his own unwillingness to provide a candid and honest account of his earlier Communist ties and why he had put them aside. If he continued to lie about such matters, how could he now be trusted?
A rhetorical question. As Dr. Fred Schwarz’s 1961 book had it, you can trust Communists to be Communists. (You still can.) Aptheker once told me how he remembered an aspect of America’s climate of opinion in the early 1940s: “we [Communists] were, if you will, ‘fashionable.’” By the decade’s latter half, it had simply become at least inconvenient to be associated with them; fibbing about one’s past association posed no special ethical issue.[10]
Oppenheimer had survived governmental scrutiny; it was a small matter to survive Rand’s, had she been inclined to exercise it. He was at first wary of her, but not she of him who had, as a member of the CPUSA, actively supported the regime that persecuted her and her family. But what explains the silence on her part? Its ironic dimension merited mention in the Objectivist archivist’s account, but it got none.
“Justice,” John Galt preached, “is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature . . .”[11] Perhaps Oppenheimer the Soviet asset (“formally recruited” or not[12]) faked his so well she couldn’t penetrate the façade. In the ensuing years she chose to let that sleeping dog lie rather than share with her growing audience what it was like to realize she had interviewed the American Communist movement’s most consequential veteran. For her image, however, there was no upside to publicizing her innocent (not willful) blindness.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Burns, Ayn Rand: The Goddess of the Market, Oxford University
Press, 2009, 107. For a brief discussion of the positive influence that her 1944 anti-collectivist essay had on a certain biblicist, see my “When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism,” April 24, 2023 on this site.
[2] Brandon Lisi, “Rand and Oppenheimer: The Atomic Bomb Movie That Wasn’t,” New Ideal, Ayn Rand Institute, August 2, 2023.
[3] Other interviewees included Major General Leslie Groves, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, Nobelist Dr. Frederick Reines Nobel, and Kitty, Mrs. Oppenheimer.
[4] Elan Journo, “Why Rand Was Right to Testify Against Hollywood Communism,” New Ideal, Ayn Rand Institute, July 24, 2019.
[5] Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Knopf, 2005.
[6] Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, “Oppenheimer Was a Communist,” Commentary, September 2023. I owe my awareness of this article to Hugh Murray.
[7] “Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project: Here’s why you think he did,” Business Standard, July 18, 2023.
[8] On Nelson’s espionage for Stalin, see Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 2000, 230-231; Athan Theoharis, Chasing SpiesIvan R. Dee Publishing, 2002, 49-50; and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Basic Books, 1999, 111. The director of an espionage network will compartmentalize the information its members have, but common sense suggests that these two West Coast Reds, Oppie and Nelson, enjoyed more than a nodding acquaintance.
[9] Klehr and Haynes, “Oppenheimer Was a Communist.” Emphasis added.
[10] “It is not his beliefs, right or wrong, it is not his heresies, which disqualify the Communist party teacher but his declaration of intention, as evidenced by official statements of his party, to practice educational fraud.” Or, a fortiori, to engage in espionage. Sidney Hook, “Heresy, Yes—But Conspiracy, No,” The New York Times, July 9, 1950. For Hook’s 1952 letter to Herbert Aptheker, to which Hook was replying, see The Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War, ed. Edward S. Shapiro, 211-215. See also Anthony Flood, “Is Herbert Aptheker a Historian? Can a Communist Tell the Truth?,” Frontpage, December 16, 2016; and Harvey Klehr, “Herbert the Red,” The Weekly Standard, November 30, 2015.
[11] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Random House, 1957, 1019.
[12] Jerrold Schecter, Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken, Hayden Peake, “Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion,” Cold War International History Project, The Wilson Center, no date.