American Prometheus (38 page)

McKibbin may have had no idea what Oppenheimer was doing, but she nevertheless soon became the “gatekeeper to Los Alamos.” From her unmarked office she greeted hundreds of scientists and their families bound for The Hill. Some days she fielded a hundred phone calls and issued dozens of passes. She would come to know everyone and everything about the new community—but it took her a year to figure out that they were building an atomic bomb. McKibbin and Oppenheimer were to become lifelong friends. Robert called her by her nickname, “Dink,” and quickly learned to rely on her good judgment and her ability to get things done.

At thirty-nine, Oppenheimer seemed not to have aged in twenty years. He still had long, very black and crinkly hair that stood nearly straight up. “He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,” McKibbin said, “very clear blue.” They reminded her of the pale, icy blue color of gentians, a wildflower that grew on the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The eyes were mesmerizing. They were large and round and guarded by heavy eyelashes and thick, black eyebrows. “He always looked at the person he was talking to; he always gave everything he could to the person he was talking to.” He still spoke very softly, and though he could talk with great erudition about almost anything, he could still seem charmingly boyish. “When he was impressed with something,” McKibbin later recalled, “he’d say ‘Gee’ and it was just lovely to hear him say ‘Gee.’ ” Robert’s collection of admirers was growing exponentially at Los Alamos.

BY THE END of the month, Robert, Kitty and Peter moved up to The Hill and settled into their new home—a rustic one-story log-and-stone house built in 1929 for May Connell, the sister of the Ranch School’s director and an artist who served as a matron for the Ranch School boys. “Master’s Cottage #2” sat at the end of “Bathtub Row”—named with impeccable logic because it and five other log homes from the Ranch School period were the only houses on the mesa equipped with bathtubs. Located on a quiet unpaved street in the middle of the new community, the Oppenheimer home was partially shielded by shrubbery and boasted a small garden. With two tiny bedrooms and a study, the house was modest compared to One Eagle Hill. Because the schoolmasters had taken all their meals in the school cafeteria, the house lacked a kitchen, a drawback soon rectified at Kitty’s insistence. But its living room was pleasant, with high ceilings, a stone fireplace and an enormous plate-glass window overlooking the garden. It would be their home until the end of 1945.

That first spring in 1943 was something of an unexpected nightmare for most of the new residents. With the melting of the snows, mud was everywhere and everyone’s shoes were constantly caked with it. On some days the mud engulfed car tires in a quicksand-like grip. By April, the population of scientists had risen to thirty. Most of the new arrivals were boarded in tin-roofed plywood barracks. In the one concession to aesthetics, Oppenheimer persuaded the Army’s engineers to lay out the housing so as to follow the natural contours of the land.

Hans Bethe was disheartened by what he saw. “I was rather shocked,” he said. “I was shocked by the isolation, and I was shocked by the shoddy buildings . . . everybody was always afraid that a fire might break out and the whole project might burn down.” Still, Bethe had to admit that the setting was “absolutely beautiful. . . . Mountains behind us, desert in front of us, mountains again on the other side. It was late winter, and in April there’s still snow on the mountains, so it was lovely to look at. But clearly, we were very far from anything, very far from anybody. We learned to live with it.”

The breathtaking scenery compensated in part for the utilitarian ugliness of the town. “We could gaze beyond the town, fenced in by steel wire,” wrote Bernice Brode, the wife of physicist Robert Brode, “and watch the seasons come and go—the aspens turning gold in the fall against the dark evergreens; blizzards piling up snow in winter; the pale green of spring buds; and the dry desert wind whistling through the pines in summer. It was surely a touch of genius to establish our strange town on the mesa top, although many sensible people sensibly said that Los Alamos was a city that never should have been.” When Oppenheimer spoke of the mesa’s beauty during a recruiting trip to the University of Chicago, an urbane Leo Szilard was heard to exclaim, “Nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”

Everyone had to change lifelong habits. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer had refused to schedule a class before 11:00 a.m., so he could socialize late into the evening; at Los Alamos, he was invariably on his way to the Technical Area by 7:30 a.m. The Tech Area—known simply as the “T”—was surrounded by a 9½-foot-high -foot-high woven wire fence, topped by two strands of barbed wire. Military police guarding the gate inspected everyone’s colored badges. A white badge designated a physicist or other scientist who had the right to roam freely throughout the “T.” On occasion, Oppenheimer absent-mindedly forgot about the all-too-visible armed guards stationed everywhere. One day he drove up to Los Alamos’ main gate and, without even slowing down, whizzed through. The astonished MP shouted a warning and then fired a shot at the car’s tires. Oppenheimer stopped, backed up the car and, after murmuring an apology, drove off. Understandably worried about Oppenheimer’s safety, Groves wrote to him in July 1943 requesting that he refrain from driving an automobile for more than a few miles—and, for good measure, “refrain from flying in airplanes.”

Like everyone else, Oppenheimer worked six days a week, taking off Sunday. But even on workdays he usually wore casual clothes, reverting to his New Mexico wardrobe of jeans or khaki pants with a blue tieless workshirt. His colleagues followed suit. “I don’t recall seeing a shined pair of shoes during working hours,” wrote Bernice Brode. As Oppie walked to the “T,” his colleagues often fell in behind him and listened quietly as he softly murmured his thoughts of the morning. “There goes the mother hen and all the little chickens,” observed one Los Alamos resident. “His porkpie hat, his pipe, and something about his eyes gave him a certain aura,” recalled a twenty-three-year-old WAC who worked the telephone switchboard. “He never needed to show off or shout. . . . He could have demanded Priority One with his telephone calls but never did. He never really needed to be as kind as he was.”

The director’s studied informality endeared him to many who might otherwise have felt intimidated in his presence. Ed Doty, a young technician with the Army’s Special Engineer Detachment (SED), wrote his parents after the war about how “several times Dr. Oppenheimer has called for something or other . . . and every time, when I would answer the phone with ‘Doty,’ the voice at the other end would say, ‘This is Oppy.’ ” His informality contrasted sharply with the manner of General Groves, who “demanded attention, demanded respect.” Oppie, on the other hand, got attention and respect naturally.

From the beginning, Oppenheimer and Groves had agreed that everyone’s salaries were to be pegged according to each recruit’s previous job. This resulted in wide disparities since a relatively young man recruited from private industry might well be paid much more than an older, tenured professor. To compensate for this inequality, Oppenheimer decreed that rents would be pro-rated according to salary. When the young physicist Harold Agnew challenged Oppenheimer to explain why a plumber could earn nearly three times the pay of a college graduate, Oppie replied that the plumbers had no idea of the laboratory’s importance to the war effort, whereas the scientists did—and that, explained Oppenheimer, justified the pay difference. The scientists, at least, were not working for the money. Oppenheimer himself had been six months in Los Alamos when his secretary reminded him one day that he had not yet received a salary check.

Everyone put in long hours. The laboratory was open day and night and Oppenheimer encouraged people to set their own schedules. He refused to allow time clocks to be installed, and a siren was introduced only in October 1944, when one of General Groves’ efficiency experts complained about the laxness in regular work hours. “The work was terribly demanding,” Bethe recalled. The leader of the Theoretical Division thought that as science his work was “much less difficult than many things I have done at other times.” But the deadlines were highly stressful. “I had the feeling, and this came in my dreams,” Bethe said, “that I was behind a terribly heavy cart which I had to push up a hill.” Scientists accustomed to working with limited resources and virtually no deadlines now had to adjust to a world of unlimited resources and exacting deadlines.

Bethe worked in Oppenheimer’s headquarters, the T-Building (“T” for “Theoretical”), a drab two-story green structure that quickly became the spiritual center of The Hill. Nearby sat Dick Feynman, who was as gregarious as Bethe was serious. “For me,” Bethe recalled, “Feynman sort of materialized from Princeton. I hadn’t known about him, but Oppenheimer had. He was very lively from the beginning, but he didn’t start insulting me until about two months after he came.” The thirty-seven-year-old Bethe liked to have someone around who was willing to argue with him, and the twentyfive-year-old Feynman loved to argue. When the two of them were together, everyone in their building could hear Feynman yelling, “No, no, you’re crazy,” or “That’s nuts!” Bethe would then quietly explain why he was right. Feynman would calm down for a few minutes and then erupt again with “That’s impossible, you’re mad!” Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman “The Mosquito” and Bethe “The Battleship.”

“OPPENHEIMER AT LOS ALAMOS,” Bethe said, “was very different from the Oppenheimer I had known. For one thing, the Oppenheimer before the war was somewhat hesitant, diffident. The Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was a decisive executive.” Bethe was hard-pressed to explain the transformation. The man of “pure science” he knew at Berkeley had been entirely focused on exploring the “deep secrets of nature.” Oppenheimer had not been remotely interested in anything like an industrial enterprise—and yet at Los Alamos he was directing an industrial enterprise. “It was a different problem, a different attitude,” Bethe said, “and he completely changed to fit the new role.”

He rarely gave orders, and instead managed to communicate his desires, as the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled, “very easily and naturally, with just his eyes, his two hands, and a half-lighted pipe.” Bethe remembered that Oppie “never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in all of us, like a good host with his guests.” Robert Wilson felt similarly: “In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself. Although normally a slow reader, when he handed me a letter I would glance at it and hand it back prepared to discuss the nuances of it minutely.” He also admitted that in retrospect there was a certain amount of “self-delusion” in these feelings. “Once out of his presence the bright things that had been said were difficult to reconstruct or remember. No matter, the tone had been established. I would know how to invent what it was that had to be done.”

Oppenheimer’s frail, ascetic physique only accentuated his charismatic authority. “The power of his personality is the stronger because of the fragility of his person,” John Mason Brown observed some years later. “When he speaks he seems to grow, since the largeness of his mind so affirms itself that the smallness of his body is forgotten.”

He had always had a knack for anticipating the next question to be faced in solving any theoretical physics problem. But now he surprised his colleagues with his seemingly instantaneous comprehension of any facet of engineering. “He could read a paper—I saw this many times,” recalled Lee Dubridge, “and you know, it’d be fifteen or twenty typed pages, and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s look this over and we’ll talk about it.’ Oppie would then flip through the pages in about five minutes and then he’d brief everybody on exactly the important points. . . . He had a remarkable ability to absorb things so rapidly. . . . I don’t think there was anything around the lab of any significance that Oppie wasn’t fully familiar with and knew what was going on.” Even when there was disagreement, Oppenheimer had an instinct for preempting arguments. David Hawkins, the Berkeley philosophy student Oppenheimer had recruited to serve as his personal assistant, had many opportunities to observe his boss in action: “One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some of them superiors in terms of their scientific record. . . .”

It helped that Oppenheimer could turn on—and off—his personal charm. Those who knew him from Berkeley understood that this was a man with a remarkable flair for drawing others into his orbit. And those, like Dorothy McKibbin, who met him for the first time in New Mexico invariably found themselves eager to please him. “He made you do the impossible, ” McKibbin recalled. One day, she was called from Santa Fe to the Site and asked if she would help to alleviate the ongoing housing crisis by taking over a lodge ten miles up the road and turning it into housing for a hundred employees. McKibbin resisted. “Well,” she protested, “I’ve never run a hotel before.” At that moment the door of Oppenheimer’s office opened and he stuck his head out and said, “Dorothy, I wish you would.” He then withdrew his head and closed the door. McKibbin said, “I will.”

“I think he had no great reluctance about using people,” recalled John Manley. “If he found that people were useful to him, why it was just natural to him to use them.” But Manley thought many people, himself included, enjoyed being used by Robert because he did it so adroitly. “I think that he really realized that the other person knew that this was going on; it was like a ballet, each one knowing the part and the role he’s playing, and there wasn’t any subterfuge in it.”

He listened to and often accepted the advice of others. When Hans Bethe suggested everyone would benefit from a weekly open-ended colloquium, Oppenheimer immediately agreed. When Groves first learned of it, he tried to stop it, but Oppenheimer insisted that such a free exchange of ideas among the “white badge” scientists was essential. “The background of our work is so complicated,” Oppie wrote Enrico Fermi, “and information in the past has been so highly compartmentalized, that it seems that we shall have a good deal to gain from a leisurely and thorough discussion.”