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4) "We have regretfully concluded that Dr. Oppenheimer has been less than candid in his testimony before this board . . .
"There can be no tampering with the national security, which in times of peril must be absolute, and without concessions for reasons of admiration, gratitude, reward, sympathy or charity. Any doubts whatsoever must be resolved in favor of the national security. The material and evidence presented to this board leave reasonable doubts with respect to the individual concerned. We, therefore, do not recommend reinstatement of clearance."
Conduct, Character & Association. The majority report was a stunning blow to Oppenheimer, even though its impact was muffled by certification of his personal loyalty. When his clearance was quietly picked up last December under terms of President Eisenhower's executive order redefining security, it was Oppenheimer who first released the text of the Administration's charges to the press (TIME, April 19), along with a lengthy and eloquent accounting of his own personal life that he believed would explain his past errors. He had gone into the hearings before the Gray board flanked by four attorneys and all the character support his friends could muster. Now on the very points of "conduct, character and association," the Gray board rejected him.
As a starting point, the board examined the old charges that Oppenheimer had been in intimate contact wih Communist leaders through his wife, his brother and his sister-in-law—all onetime party members—in the six years before he took over the direction of the atomic bomb project in 1943. It found most of these charges true, agreed with Oppenheimer's own description of himself as a onetime "active fellow traveler."
The board, however, was willing to excuse these past connections. The reasons: 1) as soon as Oppenheimer took over the Manhattan Project, he accepted the fact "that current involvement with Communist activities was incompatible with service to the Government," and 2) "the board had before it eloquent and convincing testimony of Dr. Oppenheimer's deep devotion to his country in recent years, and a multitude of evidence with respect to active service in all sorts of governmental undertakings to which he was repeatedly called."
Arrogance of Judgment. What the board could not excuse (and therefore made the basis for its first finding against Oppenheimer) was that "he has repeatedly exercised an arrogance of his own judgment with respect, to the loyalty and reliability of other citizens to an extent which has frustrated and at times impeded the workings of the [security] system."
In practice this seemed to mean that Oppenheimer had continued to see and advise certain friends whom he knew to have highly suspicious Communist backgrounds. (And presumably in places where the FBI found it difficult to monitor his conversations.) Most notorious of these friends is Haakon Chevalier, a specialist in French literature, who knew the Oppenheimers intimately before the war at the University of California.