page_title: Edward Condon
section_title: 1950s
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Condon / Career / Attacks / 1950s
caption_attribution_description: President Harry S. Truman is shown at his desk at the White House signing a proclamation declaring a national emergency.
context_page_description: Edward Uhler Condon was a distinguished American nuclear physicist, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, and a participant in the development of radar and nuclear weapons during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project. The Franck–Condon principle and the Slater–Condon rules are co-named after him.
  He was the director of the National Bureau of Standards from 1945 to 1951. In 1946, Condon was president of the American Physical Society, and in 1953 was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  During the McCarthy period, when efforts were being made to root out communist sympathizers in the United States, Edward Condon was a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee on the grounds that he was a 'follower' of a 'new revolutionary movement', quantum mechanics; Condon defended himself with a famous commitment to physics and science.
  Condon became widely known in 1968 as principal author of the Condon Report, an official review funded by the United States Air Force that concluded that unidentified flying objects have prosaic explanations. The lunar crater Condon is named for him.
context_section_description: With his record finally cleared in 1951, Condon left government to become head of research and development for the Corning Glass Works. He said his $14,000 annual government salary was his reason for the move. President Truman issued a statement of praise: "You have served in a most critical position with continued and loyal attention to your duties as director, and by reason of your standing among scientists and the supervision you have given to the bureau's activities, you have made of it a more important agency than it has ever been before". Two Republican Congressmen asserted that Condon was being investigated as a security risk and was leaving "under fire", a charge the Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer denied.
  On December 27, 1951, Condon was elected to head the AAAS in 1953. In September 1952, Condon, in testimony before a Congressional committee, had his first opportunity to deny under oath all charges of disloyalty that had been made against him. The HUAC concluded in its annual report for 1952 that Condon was unsuited for a security clearance because of his "propensity for associating with persons disloyal or of questionable loyalty and his contempt for necessary security regulations". On December 30, 1952, Condon assumed the presidency of the AAAS at its annual meeting, where, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "The tremendous ovation by his fellow members accompanying his induction was a further affirmation of their faith in his loyalty and integrity".
  Five months later Condon's clearance was revoked as was standard when someone left government service. He was granted a security clearance once more on July 12, 1954. It was announced on October 19 and then suspended by Secretary of the Navy Charles S. Thomas on October 21. Vice President Nixon took credit for the suspension, and the Atomic Scientists of Chicago charged "political abuse of the national security system", though Secretary Thomas denied Nixon had played a role. Condon withdrew his application for clearance and in December resigned from Corning because the company was seeking government research contracts and he lacked the clearance necessary for participating in military research. After citing the security reviews he had passed over the years, he said: "I am unwilling to continue a potentially indefinite series of reviews and re-reviews". Corning had paid Condon's clearance-related legal expenses while he worked there.
  In 1958, Condon wrote that his decision reflected his belief that the Eisenhower administration "was committed by policy to the persecution of scientists, or, at the very least, to a callous indifference toward what others were doing to attack and discredit them. I decided the situation was hopeless, and that I had done all that could be reasonably expected of me in having resisted these forces for seven long years".
  Years later, Carl Sagan reported how Condon described one encounter with a loyalty review board. A board member stated his concern: "Dr. Condon, it says here that you have been at the forefront of a revolutionary movement in physics called...quantum mechanics. It strikes this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary movement...you could be at the forefront of another". Condon said he replied: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws...." and continued with a catalog of scientists from earlier centuries, including the Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell. He once said privately: "I join every organization that seems to have noble goals. I don't ask whether it contains Communists".
caption: President Harry S. Truman (here, signing a proclamation declaring a national emergency and authorizing U.S. entry into the Korean War) nominated Condon as NBS director in 1945
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