---
title: "J. Robert Oppenheimer"
chunk: 13/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:07:13.473219+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
Teller's testimony outraged the scientific community, and he was virtually ostracized from academic science. Ernest Lawrence refused to testify, pleading an attack of ulcerative colitis, but an interview in which Lawrence condemned Oppenheimer was submitted in evidence.
Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi said that the suspension of the security clearance was unnecessary: "he is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period." But Groves testified that, under the stricter security criteria in effect in 1954, he "would not clear Dr. Oppenheimer today".
At the conclusion of the hearings, the board revoked Oppenheimer's clearance by a 2–1 vote. It unanimously cleared him of disloyalty, but a majority found that 20 of the 24 charges were either true or substantially true and that Oppenheimer would represent a security risk. Then on June 29, 1954, the AEC upheld the findings of the Personnel Security Board, by a 4–1 decision, with Strauss writing the majority opinion. In that opinion, he stressed Oppenheimer's "defects of character", "falsehoods, evasions and misrepresentations", and past associations with Communists and people close to Communists as the primary reasons for his determination. He did not comment on Oppenheimer's loyalty.
During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified on the left-wing activities of ten of his colleagues and previous acquaintances, mostly in reference to activities in the late 1930s. These ten people's activities were already public knowledge through prior hearings and activities (such as Addis, Chevelier, Lambert, May, Pitman, and I. Folkoff) or already known to the FBI. Some believe that had his clearance not been stripped, he might have been remembered as someone who "named names" to save his own reputation, but as it happened, most in the scientific community saw him as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific work from academia into the military. Wernher von Braun told a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."
In a seminar at The Wilson Center in 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union, though Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him. Further, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union. For their part, Jerrold and Leona Schecter conclude that based on The Merkulov Letter, Oppenheimer must have been only a "facilitator", not a spy in the strict sense (although he would fall under that legal category in the U.S.).
On December 16, 2022, United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm vacated the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Her statement said, "In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer's security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission's own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed." Granholm's decision has drawn criticism.

== Final years ==