Edward Condon - Director of NIST

Director of NIST

President Harry S. Truman nominated Condon to be director of the National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST) in 1945. He was confirmed by the Senate without opposition and served until 1951. He was also president of the American Physical Society in 1946. On May 29, 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter intended for President Truman that named several senior government officials as part of a Soviet network. It described Condon as "nothing more or less than an espionage agent in disguise." Decades later Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it "baseless corridor talk". The Truman administration ignored Hoover's charges.

Over the next decade, Condon's security clearance status was repeatedly questioned, reviewed, and re-established. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), furnished information to the Washington Times-Herald that denigrated his loyalty in two articles published in March 1947. Thomas had several reasons to make a prominent case of Condon. He had no sympathy for the scientific community's international spirit in the first place and could use the ongoing controversy to argue for an increase in his committee's appropriation, to bolster opposition to the Condon-supported McMahon Act, and to attract favorable coverage during election season. The Department of Commerce cleared Condon of disloyalty charges on February 24, 1948. A HUAC report dated March 2, 1948 said that "It appears that Dr. Condon is one of the weakest links in our atomic security". Condon responded: "If it is true that I am one of the weakest links in atomic security that is very gratifying and the country can feel absolutely safe for I am completely reliable, loyal, conscientious and devoted to the interests of my country, as my whole life and career clearly reveal".

Those who defended him included Albert Einstein and Harold Urey. The entire physics department of Harvard and numerous professional organizations wrote Truman on Condon's behalf. The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists held a dinner on April 12, 1948, to demonstrate support, with nine Nobel Prize winners among the sponsors. The National Academy of Sciences, by contrast, considered only a statement criticizing HUAC's procedures rather than defending Condon. Despite widespread support among its members (275 to 35), the National Academy of Sciences' leadership did not release a statement, and instead opted to speak privately with Rep. Thomas. On July 15, 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission granted Condon a security clearance, allowing him to access classified information at NIST.

In September 1948, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), President Truman, with Condon sitting nearby on the dais, denounced Rep. Thomas and HUAC on the grounds that vital scientific research "may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification". He called HUAC's activities "the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country".

Condon opposed any cooperation with Congressional attempts to identify security risks within the scientific community. In June 1949, in a sharply critical letter to Oppenheimer, who had provided information to HUAC about a colleague, he wrote: "I have lost a good deal of sleep trying to figure out how you could have talked this way about a man whom you have known for so long, and of whom you know so well what a good physicist and good citizen he is." In July 1949, he testified before a Senate subcommittee that was considering rules governing the operation of Senate committees. He criticized Thomas and the HUAC for holding closed hearings and then leaking information that denigrated his loyalty and that of other scientists. He said that the committee denied his and his colleagues' requests for public hearings so they could respond.