Transcripts Kept Secret for 60 Years Bolster Defense of Oppenheimer’s Loyalty

At the height of the McCarthy era, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the government’s top atomic physicist, came under suspicion as a Soviet spy.

After 19 days of secret hearings in April and May of 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance. The action brought his career to a humiliating close, and Oppenheimer, until then a hero of American science, lived out his life a broken man.

But now, hundreds of newly declassified pages from the hearings suggest that Oppenheimer was anything but disloyal.