American Prometheus (20 page)
A young professor of French literature named Haakon Chevalier had been attending parties hosted by the Washburns since the 1920s. The Serbers came to these parties, as did a beautiful young medical student named Jean Tatlock. It was only natural that Oppie, a bachelor living downstairs, dropped by for these social occasions. He was always gracious and usually charmed everyone. But one evening, while he was discoursing at length about a particular poem, the guests heard John Washburn, by now deep in his cups, mutter, “Never since the Greek tragedies has there been heard the unrelieved pomposity of a Robert Oppenheimer.”
“We were not political at all in any overt way,” recalled Melba Phillips. Oppie once remarked to Leo Nedelsky, “I know three people who are interested in politics. Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” But after January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, politics began to intrude into Oppenheimer’s life. By April of that year, German Jewish professors were being summarily dismissed from their jobs. A year later, in the spring of 1934, Oppenheimer received a circular letter soliciting funds to support German physicists as they attempted to emigrate from Nazi Germany. He immediately agreed to earmark for this purpose three percent of his salary (about $100 a year) for two years. Ironically, one of the refugees who may have been assisted by this fund was Robert’s former professor in Göttingen, Dr. James Franck. When Hitler first came to power, Franck, who had won two Iron Crosses during World War I, was one of the few Jewish physicists permitted to keep his post. But a year later he was forced into exile when he refused to dismiss other Jews from their jobs. By 1935, he was teaching physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Similarly, Max Born was forced to flee Göttingen in 1933 and ended up teaching in England.
The news from Germany was certainly grim. But by 1934, it would have been difficult for anyone to ignore the political turmoil right in Berkeley’s backyard. Almost five years of depression had impoverished millions of ordinary citizens. Early that year, labor strife turned violent. In late January, 3,000 lettuce pickers in the Imperial Valley went on strike. Acting on behalf of employers, police arrested hundreds of workers. The strike was quickly broken, and wages fell from 20 cents to 15 cents an hour. Then, on May 9, 1934, more than 12,000 longshoremen set up picket lines at ports up and down the West Coast. By the end of June, the dock strike had virtually strangled the economies of California, Oregon and Washington. Early in July, authorities attempted to open the port of San Francisco; police lobbed tear gas bombs at thousands of longshoremen and a riot ensued. After four days of running skirmishes, several policemen fired into a crowd; three men were wounded and two of them died. July 5, 1934, became known as “Bloody Thursday.” That same day, the Republican governor ordered the California National Guard to seize control of the streets.
Eleven days later, on July 16, San Francisco labor unions called a general strike. For four days the city was paralyzed. Federal mediators at last stepped in, and by July 30 the largest strike in the history of the West Coast ended. The longshoremen returned to work having achieved almost none of their wage demands, but it was clear to all that the unions had achieved a major political victory. The strike had garnered popular sympathy for the longshoremen’s plight and greatly strengthened the union movement. On August 28, 1934, in a sign that the political atmosphere had shifted significantly to the left, the radical writer Upton Sinclair stunned the California establishment by decisively winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Although Sinclair lost the general election—partly as a result of intense slander and fear-mongering on the part of the Republicans—California politics would never be the same.
Such dramatic events could not go unnoticed by Oppenheimer or his students. Berkeley itself was split between critics and supporters of the strike. When the longshoremen initially walked out on May 9, 1934, a conservative member of the physics faculty, Leonard Loeb, recruited “Cal” (University of California, Berkeley) football players to act as strikebreakers. Significantly, Oppenheimer later invited some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, to come along with him to a longshoremen’s rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. “We were sitting up high in a balcony,” recalled Serber, “and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, ‘Strike! Strike! Strike!’ ” Afterwards, Oppie went to the apartment of a friend, Estelle Caen, where he was introduced to Harry Bridges, the charismatic longshoreman union leader.
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1935, Frank Oppenheimer returned from two years of study at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and accepted a tuition scholarship to complete his graduate work at Caltech. Robert’s old friend Charles Lauritsen agreed to serve as Frank’s thesis adviser. Frank immediately plunged into research on beta ray spectroscopy, a topic he had already studied at Cavendish. “It was very nice to be a beginning graduate student knowing what you wanted to do,” Frank recalled.
Robert was still dividing his time between Berkeley and Caltech, spending the late spring every year in Pasadena, where he stayed with his good friends Richard and Ruth Tolman. The Tolmans had built a whitewashed Spanish-style house near the campus, and in the backyard were a lush garden and a one-bedroom guest house which Robert occupied whenever he was in town. Robert had met the Tolmans in the spring of 1929, and that summer the couple had visited the Oppenheimer ranch in New Mexico. Robert would later describe the friendship as “very close.” He admired Tolman’s “wisdom and broad interests, broad in physics and broad throughout.” But he also admired Tolman’s “extremely intelligent and quite lovely wife.” Ruth was then a clinical psychologist completing her graduate training. For Oppenheimer, the Tolmans “made a sweet island in the Southern California horror.” In the evenings, Tolman often hosted informal dinners attended by Frank and other Oppenheimer friends like Linus Pauling, Charlie Lauritsen, Robert and Charlotte Serber, and Edwin and Ruth Uehling. Often Frank and Ruth would play the flute.
In 1936, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously to obtain Serber an appointment in the Berkeley physics department as his research assistant. The department chairman, Raymond Birge, only very reluctantly agreed to allocate Serber a salary of $1,200 a year. Over the next two years, Oppie tried repeatedly to get Serber appointed to a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. But Birge stubbornly refused, writing another colleague that “one Jew in the department was enough.”
Oppenheimer was unaware of this remark at the time, but he was not unfamiliar with the sentiment. If anything, anti-Semitism in polite society was on the rise in America during the 1920s and ’30s. Many universities had followed Harvard’s lead in the early twenties and imposed restrictive quotas on the number of Jewish students. Elite law firms and social clubs in major cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco were segregated by both race and religion. The California establishment was no different on this score from the East Coast establishment. Still, if Oppenheimer could not aspire to become, like his friend Ernest Lawrence, a part of California’s establishment, he was happy where he was. “I had decided where to make my bed,” he recalled. And it was a bed he was “content” to be in.
Indeed, never once in the 1930s did he revisit Europe, or even, aside from his summers in New Mexico and trips to the Ann Arbor summer seminar, leave California. When Harvard proposed to double his salary if he moved east, he brushed the offer aside. Twice in 1934, the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton tried to lure him away from Berkeley, but Oppenheimer was resolute: “I could be of absolutely no use at such a place. . . .” He wrote his brother: “I turned down these seductions, thinking more highly of my present jobs, where it is a little less difficult for me to believe in my usefulness, and where the good California wine consoles for the hardness of physics and the poor powers of the human mind.” He thought he “had not grown up, but had grown up a little.” His theoretical work was flourishing, in part because classes took up but five hours a week and that left him “a lot of time for physics and for a lot of other things. . . .” And then he met a woman who would change his life.
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
“In 1936 My Interests Began to Change”
Jean was Robert’s truest love. He loved her the most. He
was devoted to her.
ROBERT SERBER
JEAN TATLOCK WAS ONLY TWENTY-TWO years old when Robert met her in the spring of 1936. They were introduced at a party hosted by Oppie’s landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, in the house on Shasta Road. Jean was finishing her first year at Stanford University School of Medicine, which was then located in San Francisco. That autumn, Oppenheimer recalled, he “began to court her, and we grew close to each other.”
Jean was a shapely woman with thick, dark curly hair, hazel-blue eyes with heavy black lashes and naturally red lips; some thought she looked “like an old Irish princess.” Five feet seven inches tall, she never weighed more than 128 pounds. She had but one tiny physical imperfection, a “sleeping” eyelid that drooped slightly as a result of a childhood accident. But even this barely perceptible flaw added to her allure. Her beauty captivated Robert, but so too did her shy melancholy. “Jean was very private about her despair,” a friend, Edith A. Jenkins, later wrote.
Robert knew her as the daughter of Berkeley’s eminent Chaucer scholar Professor John S. P. Tatlock, one of the few faculty members outside the physics department with whom he had a more than casual acquaintance. Over lunch at the Faculty Club, Tatlock was often dazzled by the knowledge of English literature displayed by this young physics professor. In turn, when Oppenheimer met Jean, he quickly realized that she had soaked up her father’s literary sensibilities. Jean favored the dark, morose verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She also loved the poems of John Donne—a passion that she passed on to Robert, who, years later, turned to Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” for inspiration in assigning the code name “Trinity” to the first test of an atomic bomb.
Jean owned a roadster that she often drove with the top down, singing in her fine contralto voice lyrics from
Twelfth Night.
A free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind, she was always the one person in the room, whatever the circumstances, who remained unforgettable. A college classmate at Vassar remembered her as “the most promising girl I ever knew, the only one of all that I saw around me in college that even then seemed touched with greatness.” Jean was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21, 1914, and she and her older brother, Hugh, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Berkeley. Her father had spent most of his career at Harvard, but after retiring, he began teaching at Berkeley. When Jean was ten, she began spending her summers on a Colorado dude ranch. A childhood friend and college classmate, Priscilla Robertson, would write in a “letter” addressed to Jean after her death, “You had a wise mother, who gentled you and never tried to break you, and yet who kept you from the dangers of your passionate kind of adolescence.”
Before she went to Vassar College in 1931, her parents allowed her a year off to travel in Europe. She stayed with a friend of her mother’s in Switzerland who was a devoted follower of Carl Jung. This family friend introduced Jean to the close-knit community of psychoanalysts centered around Freud’s former friend and rival. The Jungian school—with its emphasis on the idea of the collective human psyche—strongly appealed to the young Tatlock. By the time she left Switzerland, she was seriously interested in psychology.
At Vassar, she studied English literature and wrote for the college’s
Literary Review.
This daughter of an English scholar had spent much of her childhood listening to her parents reading aloud the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer. As a teenager, she had spent two full weeks at Stratford-on-Avon, seeing a performance of Shakespeare each night. Both her intellect and her stunning good looks intimidated her classmates; Jean always seemed mature beyond her years, “having gotten by nature and experience a depth that most girls don’t get until after graduation.”
She was also what would later be called, in irony, a “premature antifascist”—an early opponent of Mussolini and Hitler. When a professor gave her Max Eastman’s
Artists in Uniform,
hoping that it might serve as a sobering antidote to her woolly-headed admiration of Russian communism, Jean confided to a friend, “I just wouldn’t want to go on living if I didn’t believe that in Russia everything is better.”
She spent 1933–34 at the University of California, Berkeley, taking premed courses, before graduating from Vassar in June 1935. A friend later wrote Tatlock: “It was this social conscience, added to your earlier contact with Jung, that made you want to be a doctor. . . .” While at Berkeley, she also found time to report and write for the
Western Worker,
the Pacific Coast organ of the Communist Party. A dues-paying Party member, Jean regularly attended two CP meetings a week. A year before she met Robert, Tatlock wrote Priscilla Robertson: “I find I am a complete Red when anything at all.” Her anger and passion were easily aroused by the stories she encountered of social injustice and inequity. Her reporting for the
Western Worker
reinforced her outrage as she covered such incidents as the trial of three children arrested for selling copies of the
Western Worker
on the streets of San Francisco, and the trial of twenty-five lumber-mill workers accused of staging a riot in Eureka, California.
