Oppenheimer was just another intellectual fellow traveler. Like the Cambridge spies in England, being pro-Soviet was acceptable during the 30s and 40s because the Soviet Union was our ally against the Nazis. However, once the war was over and the U.S. saw the route which the Soviet Union was taking, things changed.
Had it been my decision to make he would never have gotten his security clearance in the first place. Every important person in his life, including the women with whom he was intimately involved were members of the Communist Party.
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When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast".[59] Years later, he claimed that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement".[60] He was a subscriber to the People's World,[61] a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the communist movement".[62] From 1937 to 1942, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which was later identified by fellow members Haakon Chevalier[63][64] and Gordon Griffiths as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.[65]"
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Oppenheimer's party membership, or lack thereof, has been debated. Almost all historians agree he had strong left-wing views during this time and interacted with party members, but it is disputed whether he was officially a member of the party. At his 1954 security clearance hearings, he denied being a member of the Communist Party but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of communism's goals but is not willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist Party apparatus.[67]
In August 1943, he volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that George Eltenton, whom he did not know, had solicited three men at Los Alamos for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union. When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that the only person who had approached him was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature, who had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house.[68] Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, thought Oppenheimer too important to the project to be ousted over this suspicious behavior. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District:"
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Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations. He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June 1943 to visit Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment.[76] Tatlock committed suicide on January 4, 1944, leaving Oppenheimer deeply grieved.[77]
Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the 1930s or 1940s, including his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie,[78] Kitty,[79] Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn,[80] and several of his graduate students at Berkeley.[81]"
