A team of Washington lawyers is considering whether to sue the Department of Energy in an effort to restore the reputation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atom Bomb, whose security clearance was stripped from him in 1954.

“We believe his security clearance should be symbolically restored and the 1954 verdict nullified,” said coauthor of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Kai Bird. He said Arnold and Porter attorneys, who are working without a fee, are weighing whether to sue the Department, the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, or pursue a congressional resolution.

“He was certainly innocent of the charge of being a security risk,” said co-author Martin Sherwin.

“I think it’s a good case, since we can prove as fact that the government illegally wiretapped Oppenheimer’s lawyer” as well as committed “a whole string” of due process violations, including witness tampering.

Government prosecutor Roger Robb, he said, met with Edward Teller, member of the Manhattan Project, the secret American nuclear weapons program, the night before his testimony and told him things he knew would upset him to strengthen his testimony against Oppenheimer.

The circumstances surrounding Arnold and Porter taking on this case was first reported in the Washington Post March 2.

Mr. Bird said the pro bono case only happened because of their book. After the WilmerHale law firm first took the case, Mr. Bird said he received an email from one of their attorneys declining to proceed. That decision, he said, was due to another WilmerHale attorney, C. Boyden Gray, whose father had been chairman of the hearing board in 1954. A WilmerHale representative could not be reached by press time.

Arnold and Porter took the case on a pro bono basis and a nonprofit, Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, will be the plaintiff. A call to partner Jeff Smith was relayed to firm spokeswoman Patricia O’Connell, who said, “No comment.” Mr. Bird said a grandson of Oppenheimer might eventually join the suit.

Historian Harvey Klehr told the Sun he disagreed with Messrs. Bird and Sherwin’s claim that Oppenheimer had not been a member of the Communist party. Both Mr. Klehr and historian Ronald Radosh, however, both said they did not agree with authors of another Oppenheimer book, Jerrold and Leona Schecter, that the physicist was a Soviet spy. For one thing, had he been a spy, Mr. Klehr said, the Russians would have obtained more information on the secret American nuclear weapons program than they did.

Mr. Bird said Oppenheimer was not a communist but a “liberal leftist” who never “submitted to party discipline.” AEC chairman Lewis Strauss was out to ruin Oppenheimer, he said, because he criticized the hydrogen bomb.

Oppenheimer had contributed money to the Spanish Civil War Republicans through the Communist Party, but there was no evidence he joined the party, Mr. Bird said.

Mr. Radosh said the action was “silly” and Mr. Klehr said he was “puzzled” by the idea of trying to rescind the verdict, since Oppenheimer wasn’t convicted of anything. He said removing the clearance was “certainly mean-spirited and vindictive” since it was about to expire anyway.

Mr. Bird said overturning the verdict would remind politicians that their actions would always be judged in the “eyes of history.”

Mr. Bird said the removal of his security clearance “virtually forced Oppenheimer to retire from public life.” He said a decade later McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, later explored whether it could be restored, but it was decided such a decision would come at too high a political price. President Kennedy, however, was so unimpressed by the evidence, he awarded Oppenheimer the $50,000 Fermi Prize.

It was “insane to deny security clearance to the person most responsible in the world for inventing the atomic bomb,” Victor Navasky of the Nation said, saying the hearing took place among a time of “political hysteria.”

Mr. Klehr said Oppenheimer was probably not much of a security risk since he was always watched so closely.