Berkeley loyalty oath tested politics, fear—not loyalty

I greatly enjoyed David Jackson’s article on Pief Panofsky and the University of California (UC) loyalty oath of 1950 (Physics Today, January 2009, page 41 ). It reminded me of my own brush with that oath. In June 1950, at age 24, I arrived in Los Alamos on the heels of my adviser John Wheeler for a planned stint of a year or two working at the laboratory. I soon discovered that all lab employees were required to sign the same oath as UC faculty members because the Los Alamos lab was administered by the university. The requirement created hardly a ripple in the lab. It is my recollection that only 2 of some 3000 staff members declined to sign it. One was John Manley, then a senior physicist. I was the other.

Director Norris Bradbury called me into his office and said something like, “Ken, I completely understand your misgivings, and I share them. But there’s nothing I can do. If you don’t sign, I have to dismiss you.” I grumbled but crumpled. I signed the oath, arguing to myself that the chance to work with Wheeler and other notable physicists at the lab trumped the principle I was trying to stand up for. Manley did not sign. He left Los Alamos to become chair of the physics department at the University of Washington. And he became my hero. Much later, in the 1990s, his widow, Kathy Manley, punctured that hero balloon. When I told her how much I had admired her late husband for his principled action, she said, “Oh, he had already accepted the job in Washington. He didn’t have to sign.” Nevertheless, I like to think that his opposition to the oath played some role in his decision. Ultimately, when the oath was ancient history, he returned to Los Alamos.

My own self-esteem was rescued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which in 1971 generously offered me the opportunity to refuse to sign a loyalty oath and this time mean it. Massachusetts was then one of the few states with a McCarthy-era oath requirement still on the books. When I had accepted a job at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I didn’t know about the requirement. I was confronted with it when I arrived. That fall three people at the institution declined to sign, and all three of us were willing to lose our jobs if it came to that. We went before a judge who seemed sympathetic and perhaps even a bit embarrassed by the law he was being asked to administer. He remanded our case to some indefinite future time. We did not lose our jobs. So far as I know, our case is still “active,” residing at the back of some file drawer at the Massachusetts Superior Court.