109 East Palace (61 page)

Teller never understood how he came to be as much of a casualty of the hearings as Oppenheimer himself, and never got over the cruel “exile” he was subjected to for years afterward. In late June 1954, about a week after the transcripts of the hearings were published by the Government Printing Office, Teller had gone to Los Alamos to attend a meeting. When he walked into Fuller Lodge, old friends turned their back on him or coldly attacked him for his testimony. Teller found it staggering that so many of his fellow physicists regarded him, and not Oppenheimer, as the true villain. His wife, Mici, was so upset by the rough treatment that she spent the rest of the day in their room and became ill. Dorothy reported on the visit to Oppenheimer with grim satisfaction. “Edward and his family arrived Sunday, and his reception has been and is being chill,” she wrote. “I do not want to see him, and if I have to, I am sure my wide mouth will open. I have taken his photograph down from these walls and placed it in the closet with dirty rags, and empty bottles, until I can return it to the Hill.” Teller did not set foot in Los Alamos again for nine years.

Years later, when asked to compare Oppenheimer and Teller during an interview with an Albuquerque television station, Dorothy was unequivocal as usual. “Why, that’s a charming question,” she said, her eyes taking on a mischievous gleam. “You can’t compare their character any more than you can compare an orchid to a dandelion…. An orchid is more finely designed, and built, and delicate, and subtle, and aromatic. And a dandelion is something you kick up with the heel of your shoe if it’s going to take over your grass.”

In May 1963, Oppenheimer returned to the Hill for the last time to give a memorial address for Niels Bohr. The ordeal of the past decade had aged him well beyond his years. He was frail and worn out. The violent, rasping cough that had persisted on and off since his bout with tuberculosis had worsened, and his doctors advised against making the long trip to New Mexico. Oppenheimer went anyway, explaining that it was something he had to do. He stayed with Dorothy, and as they drove up the broad, flat state highway to Los Alamos, they laughed about the days when the road had been formidable, and Miss Warner’s their cherished sanctuary. The little teahouse was long gone, and Dorothy had written to tell him of Edith’s death in the spring of 1951. Miss Warner had been forced to relocate when the new bridge was completed a year after the war ended, and many of the old laboratory staff had gone down to Otowi to help make the adobe bricks for her new house. Afterward, Tilano had complained that he had been forced to redo most of them because “physicists did not know how to make mud bricks.”

Dorothy, distressed by Oppie’s fragile state, tried to keep him amused with such tales as they approached the mesa, which was now home to the country’s leading nuclear research laboratory and a sprawling suburban community with a population of 15,000, more than a third of them children. The old East Gate was now a relic, the Guard Tower preserved as a reminder of dangerous times, and the new front entrance resembled nothing more than a turnpike toll barrier, as passes had not been required since the AEC opened the site to the public in 1957. Standing apart from the modern stores, restaurants, and office buildings, Fuller Lodge remained as one of the few symbols of preatomic times, before Oppenheimer and his physicists brought momentous changes to the mountain. That night, addressing the huge crowd that jammed the Civic Auditorium, Norris Bradbury introduced Oppenheimer as “Mr. Los Alamos.” He went on to credit him with building the bomb laboratory through “sheer force of personality and character” until he realized his words were being drowned out by the growing swell of applause. It grew louder and louder, spreading across the hall in waves, until a moment later the crowd were on their feet giving a standing ovation to their battered hero.

A month later, on June 28, 1963, Dorothy closed the wrought-iron gate in front of 109 East Palace for the last time. At the age of sixty-five, after suffering a mild heart attack, she decided it was finally time to relinquish her post. The closing of the office coincided with Dorothy’s twentieth anniversary as the “front man” for Los Alamos and as the beloved link between the laboratory and the outside world. Unbeknownst to her, the gate to 109 had been replaced with a duplicate, and the original taken to the Hill for safekeeping, later to become part of a permanent museum exhibit telling her story and of the legend that was wartime Los Alamos.

In a brief ceremony attended by the remaining members of Oppenheimer’s old staff, Norris Bradbury explained that it was only fitting that the office be closed by the same woman who had first opened it in March 1943, for to all those displaced scientists who had passed through it on their way to the secret city on the Hill, Dorothy McKibbin and 109 East Palace were synonymous. He then took wire cutters and removed the sign identifying the office—the old wooden board had long ago been discarded—to reveal a bronze plaque commemorating the historic building:

109 EAST PALACE
1943 SANTA FE OFFICE 1963
LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC
LABORATORY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO
MADE THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB
PASSED THROUGH THIS PORTAL TO
THEIR SECRET MISSION AT LOS ALAMOS
THEIR CREATION IN 27
MONTHS OF THE WEAPONS THAT ENDED
WORLD WAR II WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST
SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF ALL TIME.

Not long afterward, Oppenheimer’s health started to fail. The physicist, who was never without a cigarette or pipe, heard confirmation of what he had probably known for some time. “He called me up in the summer of ’66 from Princeton and said he had cancer of the throat,” recalled Dorothy. He told her doctors were using cobalt to treat the tumor, and they discussed it in clinical terms. Later, when he underwent radiation, he told her about the electrons from the betatron. It had always been his way to talk like that, without too much fuss or show of sentimentality. Oppenheimer had lost all his fight years ago, and he faded fast. He died on February 18, 1967. He was sixty-two. More than six hundred people attended his memorial services at Princeton and listened to the eulogies by Hans Bethe, Henry DeWolf Smyth, and George Kennan. Afterward, Kitty took his ashes to St. John and scattered them over the ocean near their house.

The next few years visited a great deal of tragedy upon a family Dorothy thought had already suffered enough. Kitty rapidly deteriorated and lasted only another five years. The harrowing years of investigations, subpoenas, and hearings proved too much for her. She had suffered from painful stomach ailments for years, and had a diseased pancreas, which required medication. Her drinking had never abetted, and after too many rounds she became difficult and erratic. “She was always a brittle person, and eventually she just broke,” said Priscilla Greene Duffield, who remembered that Kitty, in a fit of depression, once asked Dorothy to buy her a gun. Kitty had never been without a man in her life, and it was somehow fitting that she ended up with Oppenheimer’s most faithful student, Bob Serber, who was estranged from his wife, Charlotte. In the spring of 1972, Kitty bought a new sailboat, a fifty-two-foot ketch named
Moonraker
, and she and Serber planned an extended transpacific trip beginning in the Caribbean, passing through Panama, and sailing on to Japan via the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti. Their trip was cut short, however, when Kitty, the ship’s captain and navigator, came down with a severe intestinal infection. On October 17, she entered the hospital in Cristobal, at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, and died ten days later of an embolism. Like Oppie, she was just sixty-two at the time of her death. In his memoir, Serber noted that the name of Kitty’s boat had two meanings: the topmost sail on a full-rigged ship, or “someone touched with madness.”

The Oppenheimers’ twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Toni, took Kitty’s ashes back to St. John and scattered them in the sea, in the same place they had bid good-bye to her father. The Oppenheimers’ two children did not have an easy time coming of age in the midst of such turmoil, and it left indelible scars. Toni, the apple of her father’s eye, grew up to be a beautiful but troubled girl. After her mother’s death, she remained on St. John, left her husband, and filed for divorce. She later remarried, but it did not last. In January 1977, three months after the breakup of her second marriage, she committed suicide. Her body was found hanging by the neck in one of the bedrooms of the house her father had built on St. John, along with several notes. As there was no phone at Perro Caliente, Dorothy drove up to the ranch in a heavy snowstorm to break the news to Peter.

Peter was always Dorothy’s favorite. She treated him as a second son and tried to lavish the love and attention on him she knew his distracted parents did not always have time to give him. Peter had doted on his father and at the height of the trial had angrily scrawled on his classroom blackboard:

The American Government is unfair to Acuse [sic] Certain People that I know of being unfair to them. Since this is true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the US Government, should go to HELL.

Yours truly, Certain People

His problems were compounded when, as a moody teenager, he began having real conflict with his mother. Although he was aware of the problems, Oppenheimer sided with Kitty, causing a serious breach that never completely healed. In the spring of 1958, in retaliation for Peter’s poor marks and failure to gain entrance to Princeton, Oppenheimer refused to allow him to accompany the family on a grand tour of Israel, Greece, and Belgium. Before that summer term was over, Peter had dropped out of the prestigious George School in Pennslyvania and escaped out west, staying at Franks ranch in Colorado and visiting Dorothy in Santa Fe. In late July, Dorothy wrote to Oppie, knowing now much he regretted Kitty’s failures as a mother and that he blamed himself for any pain they might have caused their son. “Yesterday into this office walked Frank and Pete,” she wrote. “I could not take my eyes off Pete. He is truly beautiful. Made me think of paintings by Renaissance masters. The cut of his face, his color, his eyes, his lovely shy and grave manner. I thought of you and Kitty, and of what you have created.”

Peter eventually settled in Santa Fe, and Dorothy helped find him carpentry work and recommended him to all her friends. When it came time for him to be married, it was only natural that he asked that it be at her adobe farmhouse, with the yellow roses blooming in the courtyard. Nothing could have pleased her more. When Peter’s oldest daughter was born, he named her Dorothy, he said, in honor of the woman he admired for her “tremendous good cheer, courage and good will.”

In the last years of her life, Dorothy set out to write a book. After several cataract operations, she was hampered by failing eyesight and knew she could not tackle the project on her own. She called on a close friend, Dorothy Hughes, who was a noted local author, and the two agreed to collaborate on the project. Dorothy had accumulated boxes of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and photographs about the atomic bomb project, and over a period of two years she sorted through the material, reading aloud relevant bits, while Hughes taped her remarks. Dorothy had high hopes for the manuscript, entitled “Under a Piñon Tree: The Story of Los Alamos,” but after close friends advised her to scrap the rather dry, impersonal compilation of clippings in favor of a more personal account, she abandoned the project. It was never published.

Dorothy, who had not expected to live to see thirty, died on December 17, 1985, five days after her eighty-eighth birthday. She was asleep when the end came. She had already slipped away, wandering into the hills with a man in a porkpie hat, shrouded in the alkaline mist that reduces all desert shapes to ghosts.

At her memorial service, her old friend Peggy Pond Church read a poem she dedicated to Dorothy.

She yields her hair to the wind;
she yields her face to the sun;
her love, like the evening star,
shines clear for everyone.
Love is a light for her.
Love is a warming fire.
The hungry, the sad, the cold
she heals of their long desire.
Men have gone down to death
wearing her love like a rose,
and the tears that her own heart sheds
only her own heart knows.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

Dorothy McKibbin’s recollections of Los Alamos were taken from the following sources:

MANUSCRIPTS AND LETTERS

Manuscript of a brief reminiscence by Dorothy McKibbin, “The Santa Fe Office: 109 East Palace Avenue,” 1946. It was printed with permission by
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory News
and reprinted in 1963. In 1946, the manuscript was reshaped and edited into chapter form by Jane Wilson and Charlotte Serber, and compiled along with eight other women’s tales into a book. The book never found a publisher, and thirty years later, Jane Wilson gave it to the Los Alamos Historical Museum. In 1987, the Los Alamos Historical Society (LAHS) published the collection of short essays in
Standing By and Making Do: The Women of Wartime Los Alamos
. I chose to quote from the original manuscript, before Dorothy McKibbin’s words were edited by numerous parties over the years.

Text of a speech written by Dorothy McKibbin, November 23,1959; courtesy of LAHS.

Unpublished manuscript, Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin and Dorothy Bell Hughes, “Under a Piñon Tree: The Story of Los Alamos,” Santa Fe, NM, circa 1993. Reprinted with permission from Kevin McKibbin.

Letters written by Dorothy McKibbin, as well as those written to her by J. Robert Oppenheimer; courtesy of the J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission from Kevin McKibbin.

The poem by Peggy Pond Church is courtesy of Peggy Pond Church Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico. Permission to reprint poem, courtesy of Kathleen D. Church.

PUBLISHED INTERVIEWS

Documentary:
The Woman Who Kept a Secret
, interview by Hal Rhodes; edited and produced by Dale Sonnenberg; Albuquerque, NM; KNME-TV, 1982.