food. so earnest said i'll wait for them to come alongside and then my highlight players are going to lob hand grenades down the open hatches and the other members of the crew are going to machine gun the germans on deck. >> military and intelligence historian nicholas reynolds an hemingway the spy, sunday night at 8:30, part of american history tv this weekend on c-span3. history bookshelf features popular american history writers of the past decade in arizona american history tv every saturday at noon eastern. this weekend on history bookshelf, they discuss brotherhood of the bond, the tangled lives and loyalties of earnest lawrence and edward teller. it tells the story of the making of the atomic bombs which were dropped on japan at the end of world war ii. it's about an hour.

he was the man that deserves more credit than he received for organizing the atomic bomb project. but everybody in the historical literature talks about august 1939. that would have been nothing had there not been earnest lawrence to get things rolling. his operation at oak ridge was the operation that separated the u 235 from the 38. if there was not a lawrence, there would have been no atomic bomb on the schedule. and he is the sourcer's apprentice of the story. he is the man that built the great idea that he was sort of the pure scientist. he wanted to push forward the fran tears of mileage. that same machine will be modified and used to instead separate the uranium for the bomb that is dropped on hiroshima, hence, the unintended

consequences. lawrence is in the context of oppenheimer and teller. oppenheimer steals the show. the man who at berkeley whether he was teaching here took sand script so that he could read the hindu classics in the original. a man who is very much worldly, almost exactly the opposite, in fact, of lawrence who was the meat and potatoes man. next slide, please. so the book is about all three

men. what i told friends is the atomic gildamesh. it is epic in scope and ambition. next slide, please. one figure that i didn't expect to be major figure is oppenheimer's brother who is eight years younger, frank. it was said that his face was that of an overgrown fire boy but terribly wise and innocent. the dappled sunlight seemed invoktive of that. frank and robert, frank was always laboring in his older brother's shadow.

they were not only world as part in what they did but also their personalities. oppenheimer is adolescent. he had seen psychiatrists for depression and once contemplated suicide. he wrote frank that he found earnest unbelievable vitality and love of life. his friends most endearing trait. his interest was so primarily active and instrumental and mine just the opposite. the two men quickly became close friends. while still bachelors living at the faculty club, lawrence and oppenheimer double dated together, spending thanks givings ato sem ti and going horse back riding on weekends around the berkeley hills. next one, please.

you have oppenheimer with his lean at the camera sort of a scance, almost enigmatic as it were. and you have lawrence looking straight on into the camera. there he is. nothing hidden. and just from the book as well. oppenheimer originally thought earnest was an english saddle. until he realized growing up in south dakota, actually lawrence was from canton, south dakota. lawrence looked upon horses as draft animals. for ernest, it was a way of distancing him from his roots. next one, please. >> since it all started in berkeley in 1929, both men were here. although from the beginning both men had different visions of what psychics would be at berkeley. lawrence believed that experimentalist was come from around the world to use his

psycho trons and they did. he described berkeley as a mecca and a paradise of psychics. but to oppenheimer, it was a desert where a theorist like him could make a mark. he had no competition basically in the theoretical section of the psychics department at berkeley. next one, please. one nice thing about writing a biography is you get to go to where people live and bother their neighbors and camp out on the lawn and take pictures and what have you. this is where oppenheimer lived when he was a bachelor. he enjoyed his life there very much. is land lady lived upstairs. that was maryellen washburn. she was active in causes here in berkeley. she visited parties at the house for the spanish loyalists for california farmworkers. it was because of those parties or through the parties that oppenheimer met a number of his later political frindz. it was in a sense that is at this house and at those parties that he became introduced to the people who politicized him and

by some definition to civilized him. he enjoyed life greatly there. he, in fact had, gone out and bought an alarm clock so he would make sure he attended his classes in time. his flat became the scene of parties fueled by the host trade mark 4-1 frozen martinis served in glasses dripped in lime juice and honey. those who would become the top physicist of their generation drunk and crouched on all fours playing a version of tidly winks on the geometric patterns of open penheime oppenheimer's navajo rug. one thing i always wanted to collect as an artifact is the hat. i did get to know peter oppenheimer who lives in santa

fe. and when i was there visiting one time, i just happened to ask peter, i looked at the papers of your father at the library of congress. do you have anything here? do you have any artifacts or papers? he said there are a couple of boxes down stairs. so i prevailed upon him to bring the boxes upstairs. i was hoping patter heart that it might be the hat that was oppenheimer's tax records. which were somewhat interesting in themselves. there was no hat. but there was -- the next slide, please. the rug. that this is the rug and they were going place to place whether they traveled. and he remembered this was his plane on the pattern of it. next slide, please.

after the session at cal tech, he would take a select number of friends, graduate students, friends like lawrence, for example. he would retreat to the sanctuary. six acres in the pecos mountains east of santa fe. it is a primitive site. there's no electricity. the only running water is the creek that goes behind it. this is where he retreated after the bomb was dropped. he wrote a series of soul searching letters from this cab cabin. this is my wife and a friend who drove this up there. peter let us in and i think it's probably basically unchanged from what it was in the 1940s. there indian prints still on the wall. beater did live there with his wife for a brief time. it essentially left the way it had been. the name hot dog comes from what oppenheimer said when he found out that land and cabin were available on a long term lease from the forest service.

next slide, please. this was taken on may 5th just last year. it was snowing that day. back at berkeley, here is lawrence at the controls of the psycho tron. this i think was the 17 inch or the 37 inch. there is a chemist that was at the lab in early days by the name of martin kayman who died just about two wookz ago. cayman is one of the pioneers. he wrote in the memoir to which i would recommend called radiant science, dark politics. but cayman wrote about the early rad tlab way. in the early days, they closed a single knife switch. this simple act is smbz accompanied by a sparking, crash and blowing out of lights. plunging the campus even adjacent neighborhoods into sudden darkness. hazards abounded. the popular method of locating

vacuum leaks by directing a jet of natural gas over the seeming wax was likened by the boys to a race between explosion and sufficient indication. they are sparking the floor was wo wooden. it was soaked with transformer oil and there would be daily fires so that the boys as lawrence called them would have hand heldextinguishers. lewis was hunched over the controls pressing on to higher voltages and more tightly focused beams for as long as the current flowed. i think this next series of three pictures shows the growth of lawrence's empire at berkeley. the first psycho tron is some four inches. the diameter of the pole face to the magnet was about so. then the psycho tron was part of the accelerator, of course. the 11 inches and then the 27

inches. this is the 60 inch. lawrence was able to fund his fizz beings research for the boys by going to philanthropic foundations like the macy's and rockefeller foundation which were interested in psycho tron in radio ice yoe taupes as cancer, either through the knew tron beam radiation from the psycho tron itself or through the radio ice yoe taupe that's would hopefully isolate various organs and act as magic bullets and kill the tumor that they are in. but there has always been a debate among the psychics community as to how much lawrence actually oversold this possibility of magic bullets and the cancer cure. i think it's fair to say that in the 1930s, the late 30s there was hope that this might be the case. there might be a medical application of this technology as it was then. lawrence was accused of selling snake oil by harold yurry. but i think in fact it was

legitimate back then. but it certainly did fund the research, the physicists did. this was the 60 inch medical psycho tron. and the next picture is of the 184 inch. the giant psycho tron. this is the one that he, again, thought was going to be the breakthrough in terms of research being psychics just the understanding better than natural world instead of variation of this machine will be used to separate u2 35 from u2-38. next picture, please. well, general groves, there is a recent book out called racing to the bomb. it's a biography of groves. groves is the person who is head of the manhattan project who chose robert oppenheimer to lead the laboratory. it was major surprise to everybody, probably including oppenheimer himself that gross

would choose a theorist rather than a experimentalists to fabricate the atomic bomb. there were colleagues of oppenheimer, louie alvarez said he couldn't even administer a hot dog stand. so the idea of picking somebody with no experience that was other worldly, who was a theorist to be the leader of this laboratory was entirely unlikely. lawrence probably thought he was the most likely one and, in fact, the story is told that lawrence and arthur compton went to groves and told groves that if and when oppenheimer doesn't work out, we expect you'll come to us an we'll run the laboratory. in the case of groves, groves knew the important thing was if you could find somebody like open e oppenheimer, he called the greatest bunch of prima donnas ever assembled in one place that that was the important thing. groves could administer the laboratory himself. the important thing is to find

somebody who had the charisma and the attraction that oppenheimer did. next slide, please. this is the mobilization of the lab after pearl harbor and as lewis had said that it was security consistent of a law student who was chosen by lawrence and equipped with a 410 shotgun and put at the base of psycho tron hill and told to stop anybody he didn't recognize. i just came from livermore, the 50th anniversary today. i have a new appreciation of how much that world has changed. how much that world is over. lawrence was the man who organized the effort at oak ridge. as i said to separate the uranium. next slide, please. oppenheimer, this is his badge at los alamos. director april 1943. he entered -- he tells people now that he entered history as

the one who drove over to einstein'sre hme they wrote the letter. he sort of drops out of the saga after that until you get to los alamos. it's, i think, probably true that teller expected oppenheimer to choose him to head the theory division at the lab. and teller was greatly disappointed when oppenheimer chose hans beta instead. he had a sense who have could administer and who could work with other people. teller, as he mentioned, was never very good at team work. and team work was essential at los alamos. as well, teller -- in fact, teller was so miffed when he was not chosen to head t division that he refused to go to the weekly meetings of the group and oppenheimer would meet with him one hour a week just to hear his ideas. teller also refused to do the calculations assigned to him in

t division. these were the calculations on the hydrodynamics of implosion. so those calculations were given instead to the british mission. and that included the next slide, please klaus fuchs. he was under the code name of rest. next slide, please. groves would say in 1954 that he believed from within two weeks of the time the project began that the russians were the real enemy. and the way i interpret that is that the russians were the real threat whether it came to espionage, not that they were the real enemy above the germans or japanese. he was right about. that the russian has an early on. it was a primary target. it was known by the code name enormous, as a matter of fact, to the nkpd.

groves realized that the soviet was try to get the super to the bomb. he was very intent upon foilg that and developing a counter intelligence agency and effort as part of the manhattan project. he had heads of counter intelligence on the west coast and east coast on the middle. boris pash was the ranking expert at the fourth army. he has his own interesting personal history that i won't get into in detail. but he was born in san francisco. he actually went to russia and fought in the white armies in the russian civil war. when the white armies were defeated, he came back to california. his father was the senior bishop of the russian orthodox church. he had no practical experience except that he organized a volleyball camp when he was in russia. so he became the head coach of hollywood high school. but he was also in the army reserve. and after pearl harbor, he is chosen to go to the master

counter spy, the spy catcher. and that was, in fact, his true calling. pash believed that oppenheimer was a soeflt agent and he operated on that assumption throughout the war until groves transferred him to overseas. next slide, please. this is part of the counter intelligence operation that pash and groves organized in san francisco in the bay area. this actually initially was in san francisco. this is a store front office on market street. they were known as the universal subscription company. these are actually officers trained at the counter intelligence school at oak ridge. they were all officers but they wear plain clothes for this occasion. when the army found out that real action was not in san francisco but across the bay in berkeley and the east bay, they moved it over to oakland so they

could save toll charges on the telephone. and they also renamed themselves, the universal adjustment company. somebody apparently one time came by and knocked on the door and wanted to get an insurance adjustor and had to be run out. but this was the secret operation run out of oakland. next one, please? the army had a listening post. this is, as i remember in just east of campus, there was actually an army counter intelligence corps officer who lived with his family upstairs. in the back room is where the other agents were. this is before tape recorders and recording conversations. they had the disk that's recorded conversations. the army had a division of labor with the fbi, army recorded conversations of the scientists who worked on the project and under suspicion. the fbi under two secret operations, two secret programs recorded the conversations and installed bugs as well as

wiretaps in the homes and offices of individuals who were known or suspected communists. the fbi actually had two programs, one was called -- they loved acronyms. one was common turn apparatus and that was to wiretap and bug high ranking members of the party here in the bay area and actual think is a national program. and the other program was called sinrad. and sinrad's focus was, as you might imagine, upon oppenheimer and the scientist that's worked with oppenheimer. but this was the army listening post. the fbi alistening post was there. this was the soviet consulate. when i took this picture a few years ago, i was told it belonged so sinonom.

i don't know who owns it now. that's where the russians had their base on west coast. and this man here was the chief target of the army and fbi counter intelligence. he introduced himself as mr. brown. his neighboring is gregory kheifeis. the russian has a great love of mythological code names. san francisco was babylon. new york was tire. washington, d.c., was karthage. if you remember your mythology, the boatman who ferried the soles across the river sticks to haiti. he had to find people that were sympathetic to the soviet cause and might be recruited. there was a recruitment effort or believed to be a recruitment effort between mr. brown and his

successor. the poor individual in the mid sl martin cayman. he will later receive the award from the department of energy. but this picture basically end his career. he is fired after this picture is taken in 1944 because of his association with kheifeis. this is true that this is a recruitment effort. but he had invited cayman to come and meet his successor. he invited him to have dinner with him at burnstein's fish grotto. when the inti sahrativitation w they picked up the word from the wiretap and their wiretap. they knew about the rendezvous whether they got there, there was parentally a whole group of agents milling around in front from the fbi, from the army, and even the office of naval intelligence. it was almost a fistfight one of

the agents told me who was going to go an sit next to the three. but they went in, had dinner. there were agented all around them. they were able to -- the algted were able to record the conversation. just fragments of which were picked up by the recorder. oak ridge was heard and tennessee was heard. but there is no reason to believe that cayman gave any real information to the russians. just the fact that this was a recruitment effort. it was enough for the army to say that was the end of cayman and he was fired. unable to get a job for years afterwards, unable to travel overseas to scientific conferences. they wouldn't give him a passport all because of this ill-fated dinner at bernstein's fish boat. ernest lawrence was a straight arrow, he didn't realize it but he was also a target of soviet espionage. he was an honorary member of the

soviet academy of sciences in 1942. we know from intercepted and decrypted soviet messages sent from between moscow and san francisco consulate that the russians believed that lawrence was a progressive professor. and they also believed in one message that the radiation laboratory was located in sacramento. if you knew anything about lawrence's politics, you know he was in no way a progressive professor. in fact, they were disabboud of that by other contacts they had, people in berkeley who said probably the least likely person to pass secrets on to the soviet union is lawrence. next slide, please. so the real target for the soviets early on by 1942 was actually robert oppenheimer. because not only oppenheimer's own political background but because of his associations, his friends and his family.

next slide. kitty oppenheimer had been married before to joe dalet. dalet was killed fighting in spain in 1937. kitty -- i shall not tell the rest of the story later. next slide, please. before robert married kitty, he was -- his girlfriend was jean tatlock. he met her at the house on shasta road. jean had been a member of the party. jean is one of the people introduced robert to other members of the party, party recruit irz. active in the spanish loyalist cause as well. but she is the one who according to oppenheimer's graduate students, really had the most civilized influence as well as politicizing influence on oppenheimer. causing to be interested in poetry and especially the poetry of john dunn.

next. frank oppenheimer who was a member of the party, he joined when he was a graduate student down in cal tech. a graduate student in psychics. he had joined the rank and file of the party. he had a party identification name, false name of frank paulsen. next slide, please. jackie, his wife, had been a student at berkeley. member of the young communist league when here. when they moved to pasadena and frank was working on his doctorate, she was working for the western worker which was the west coast version of the people's daily. next slide, please. a particular friend was a french professor here at berkeley. we know now from documents that have surfaced very recently and they include the unpublished

memoir that in 1937 and 1938, robert and probably six other individuals that he would later name in a letter joined and formed a secret underground unit, a closed unit of the so-called professional section of the party. it was not an espionage section in any way. essentially, it was a discussion group. that is the way robert always described it. but in, fact, it was as haakan would say, something more than that. it was affiliated directly with the party. and membership and its ranks was itself secret. next slide, please. and steve nelson, kitty was on her way to spain to rendezvous with her husband. she got as far as paris and told by steve nelson that joe had been killed.

they were social friends through the early part of the war. and steve nelson was its head of the communist party in the east bay. next slide, please. he bugged nelson's home and office. picks up a conversation that is between joe, unidentified other than joe, but joe says in a korgs of korgs that he was a member of the party starting in 1938. that he had two sisters, one of whom was a teacher in new york. between joe and steve nelson and in the course of their conversation, joe comes there to say that he has information. he is working on the project. he has information that is -- he figures will be of value to the comrades. and he relays this information with the hope that joe will pass it along to the right