By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, and I’m just back from the farmers’ market, where I bought green beans and okra. And yes, I bought a lemon square ($4.50) to sweeten that early morning walk in the Naval Heritage Park.
Last night, Susan and I saw Oppenheimer — the movie. The theater was packed with aging boomers who remember J. Robert Oppenheimer’s gift to their overseas, khaki-wearing fathers. In this case, that gift was life when “Little Boy” successfully detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
I was aware of Oppenheimer’s gift as a boy, but became fascinated with the complex professor when I met Priscilla McMillan in 1972. In those days Priscilla and her husband, George, lived at Coffin Point Plantation. George was a fabulous conversationalist, but Priscilla came with a hard-to-top pedigree.
After graduating from Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe colleges, Priscilla Johnson joined the staff of a newly elected Senator from Massachusetts — John F Kennedy.
“I didn’t love him, he was mesmerizing but he was someone I knew.”
Thereafter, she moved to Moscow, working as a journalist. And it was in a Moscow hotel (in 1959) where she spent four hours interviewing a young defector named Lee Harvey Oswald.
When we first met, Priscilla was still working on Marina and Lee — a book that told the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s marriage to Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin) and their subsequent life in the United States.
After Marina and Lee was published in 1977, Priscilla turned her attention to J. Robert Oppenheimer and thus began years of research into this complex man and those who brought him down. All of which came to fruition when Priscilla published “The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer” in 2005 — just after American Prometheus was published by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
And so, last night, I sat with Susan watching this slim, clever-talking, well-dressed college professor as he rounded up the physicists who would turn his theory into hardware. I was impressed by the characters who were recruited, then exiled to the barren hills of New Mexico, but all the while I knew that the betrayals were coming.
As I watched, it was Priscilla, and her telling of this story, that was running in my head. A story that apparently began with a disagreement (with Edward Teller) about the feasibility of the Hydrogen Bomb. A simmering disagreement that came to a head in a secret meeting after the war when Oppenheimer recommended against the building of the Hydrogen Bomb.
About the same time Oppenheimer was on a one-man crusade to get the proliferating, ever growing bombs, and the control of all nuclear weapons into the United Nations or some similar international agency.
“As the times became more anti-communist and McCarthyism settled in, people with whom he had crossed swords remembered that back in the 1930s, Oppenheimer had had a fellow-traveling past. He had never been a party member, or so he claimed, but many of those around him had been — his brother, his wife, many of his friends. Could it be that Oppenheimer’s advice against building the H-bomb came from old pro-Soviet feelings?” Priscilla wrote.
In 1954, a coalition of his enemies, led by Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, conspired to strip Oppenheimer of his top secret security clearance. And the second half of the movie does focus on the hearing that took place in a narrow hallway, jammed with grim-faced men, led by a prosecutor on a mission to disgrace this man.
This secret trial lacked the presumption of innocence and every procedural safeguard we afford the accused in our legal system. And it was reiterated, repeatedly reiterated on the record, that there were no presumptions, or rules, or constitutional rights attached to these hastily convened proceedings. Soon it became clear that the hallway hearing was an ambush designed to push the elegant, egotistical, argumentative professor off the national stage and into early retirement.
I was 26 years old and Susan was 24 when we met Priscilla and George McMillan and sat in their book-lined living room overlooking the offshore sandbars in St. Helena Sound.
We were drawn to these people and their talk of Jack Kennedy, Robert Oppenheimer, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray — George would soon publish the definitive biography of Martin Luther King’s assassin.
In those days we did not have Netflix and its dramatizations of Selma, Dallas and Los Alamos. We had, in that small room, something better. Much better.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
