American Prometheus (6 page)

STARTING OUT IN THE SOUTH, Robert and Smith gradually made their way across to the mesas of New Mexico. In Albuquerque, they stayed with Fergusson and his family. Robert enjoyed their company and the visit cemented a lifelong friendship. Fergusson introduced Robert to another Albuquerque boy their age, Paul Horgan, an equally precocious boy who later had a successful career as a writer. Horgan happened also to be bound for Harvard, as was Fergusson. Robert liked Horgan and found himself mesmerized by the dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty of Horgan’s sister Rosemary. Frank Oppenheimer said that his brother later confided in him that he had been strongly attracted to Rosemary.

When they got to Cambridge and continued to hang out together, Horgan quipped that they were “this great troika” of “polymaths.” But New Mexico had brought out new attitudes and interests in Robert. In Albuquerque, Horgan’s first impressions of Robert were particularly vivid: “. . . he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits. . . . he had this lovely social quality that permitted him to enter into the moment very strongly, wherever it was and whenever it was.”

From Albuquerque, Smith took Robert—and his two friends Paul and Francis—twenty-five miles northeast of Santa Fe to a dude ranch called Los Pinos, run by a twenty-eight-year-old Katherine Chaves Page. This charming and yet imperious young woman would become a lifelong friend. But first there was an infatuation—Robert was intensely attracted to Katherine, who was then newly married. The previous year she had been desperately ill and, seemingly on her deathbed, she had married an Anglo, Winthrop Page, a man her father’s age. And then she hadn’t died. Page, a businessman in Chicago, rarely spent any time in the Pecos.

The Chaveses were an aristocratic hidalgo family with deep roots in the Spanish Southwest. Katherine’s father, Don Amado Chaves, had built the handsome ranch house near the village of Cowles with a majestic view of the Pecos River looking north to the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Katherine was the “reigning princess” of this realm, and, to his delight, Robert found himself to be her “favorite” courtier. She became, according to Fergusson, “his very good friend. . . . He would bring her flowers all the time and he would flatter her to death whenever he saw her.”

That summer, Katherine taught Robert horseback-riding and soon had him exploring the surrounding pristine wilderness on rides that sometimes lasted five or six days. Smith was astonished by the boy’s stamina and gritty resilience on horseback. Despite his lingering ill-health and fragile appearance, Robert clearly relished the physical challenges of horseback-riding as much as he had enjoyed skirting the edge of danger in his sailboat. One day they were riding back from Colorado and Robert insisted he wanted to take a snow-laden trail over the highest pass in the mountains. Smith was certain that trail could easily expose them to death by freezing—but Robert was dead set on going anyway. Smith proposed they toss a coin to decide the issue. “Thank God I won,” Smith recalled. “I don’t know how I’d have got out of it if I hadn’t.” He thought such foolhardiness on Robert’s part bordered on the suicidal. In all his dealings with Robert, Smith sensed that this was a boy who wouldn’t allow the prospect of death to “keep him from doing something he much wanted to do.”

Smith had known Robert since he was fourteen, and the boy had always been physically delicate and somehow emotionally vulnerable. But now, seeing him in the rugged mountains, camping out in spartan conditions, Smith began to wonder whether Robert’s persistent colitis might be psychosomatic. It occurred to him that these episodes invariably came on when Robert heard someone making “disparaging” remarks about Jews. Smith thought he had developed the habit of “kicking an intolerable fact under the rug.” It was a psychological mechanism, Smith thought, that “when it was carried to its most dangerous, got him into trouble.”

Smith was also well caught up on the latest Freudian theories of child development, and he concluded from Robert’s relaxed campfire conversations that the boy had pronounced oedipal issues. “I never heard a murmur of criticism on Robert’s part of [his] mother,” Smith recalled. “He was certainly critical enough of [his] father.”

As an adult, Robert clearly loved his father, deferred to him and indeed, until his father’s death, went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate him, introduce him to his friends and generally make room for him in his life. But Smith sensed that as a particularly shy and sensitive child, Robert was profoundly mortified by his father’s sometimes maladroit affability. Robert told Smith one night around the campfire about the icehouse incident at Camp Koenig—which of course had been prompted by his father’s overreaction to his letter home about the sex talk at camp. As an adolescent, he had become increasingly self-conscious about his father’s garment business, which he no doubt saw as a traditional Jewish trade. Smith later recalled that once on that 1922 Western trip, he had turned to Robert as they were packing up and asked him to fold a jacket for his suitcase. “He looked at me sharply,” Smith recalled, “and said, ‘Oh yes. The tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?’ ”

Such outbursts aside, Smith thought Robert grew emotionally in stature and confidence during their time together on the Los Pinos ranch. He knew Katherine Page could take a great deal of credit for this. Her friendship was extremely important to Robert. The fact that Katherine and her aristocratic hidalgo friends could accept this insecure New York Jewish boy in their midst was somehow a watershed event in Robert’s inner life. To be sure, he knew he was accepted inside the forgiving womb of the Ethical Culture community in New York. But here was approbation from people he liked outside his own world. “For the first time in his life,” Smith thought, “. . . [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought after.” It was a feeling Robert cherished, and in the years ahead he would learn to cultivate the social skills required to call up such admiration on demand.

One day he, Katherine and a few others from Los Pinos took packhorses out and, starting from the village of Frijoles west of the Rio Grande, they rode south and ascended the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau, which rises to a height of over 10,000 feet. They rode through the Valle Grande, a canyon inside the Jemez Caldera, a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles wide. Turning northeast, they then rode four miles and came upon another canyon which took its Spanish name from the cottonwood trees that bordered a stream trickling through the valley: Los Alamos. At the time, the only human habitation for many miles consisted of a spartan boys’ school, the Los Alamos Ranch School.

Los Alamos, the physicist Emilio Segré would later write when he saw it, was “beautiful and savage country.” Patches of grazing meadows broke up dense pine and juniper forests. The ranch school stood atop a two-mile-long mesa bounded on the north and south by steep canyons. When Robert first visited the school in 1922, there were only some twenty-five boys enrolled, most of them the sons of newly affluent Detroit automobile manufacturers. They wore shorts throughout the year and slept on unheated sleeping porches. Each boy was responsible for tending a horse, and pack trips into the nearby Jemez mountains were frequent. Robert admired the setting—so obviously a contrast to his Ethical Culture environment—and in years to come would repeatedly find his way back to this desolate mesa.

Robert came away from that summer love-struck with the stark desert/mountain beauty of New Mexico. When, some months later, he heard that Smith was planning another trip to “Hopi country,” Robert wrote him: “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos . . . spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”

CHAPTER TWO

“His Separate Prison”

The notion that I was traveling down a clear track would be
wrong.

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

IN SEPTEMBER 1922, Robert Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard. Although the university awarded him a fellowship, he didn’t accept it “because I could get along well without the money.” In lieu of the scholarship, Harvard gave him a volume of Galileo’s early writings. He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River. At nineteen, Robert was an oddly handsome young man. Every feature of his body was of an extreme. His fine pale skin was drawn taut across high cheekbones. His eyes were the brightest pale blue, but his eyebrows were glossy black. He wore his coarse, kinky black hair long on top, but short at the sides—so he seemed even taller than his lanky five feet, ten-inch frame. He weighed so little—never more than 130 pounds—that he gave an impression of flimsiness. His straight Roman nose, thin lips and large, almost pointed ears accentuated an image of exaggerated delicacy. He spoke in fully grammatical sentences with the kind of ornate European politeness his mother had taught him. But as he talked, his long, thin hands made his gestures seem somehow contorted. His appearance was mesmerizing, and slightly bizarre.

His behavior in Cambridge over the next three years did nothing to soften the impression his appearance gave of a studious, socially inept and immature young man. As surely as New Mexico had opened up Robert’s personality, Cambridge drove him back to his former introversion. At Harvard his intellect thrived, but his social development floundered; or so it seemed to those who knew him. Harvard was an intellectual bazaar filled with delights for the mind. But it offered Robert none of the careful guidance and devoted nurturing of his Ethical Culture experience. He was on his own, and so he retreated into the security his powerful intellect assured. He seemed incapable of not flaunting his eccentricities. His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a “black and tan”—a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup. Most of his classmates thought him diffident. Fortunately, both Francis Fergusson and Paul Horgan were also at Harvard that year, so he had at least two soul mates. But he made very few new friends. One was Jeffries Wyman, a Boston Brahmin who was beginning graduate studies in biology. “He [Robert] found social adjustment very difficult,” Wyman recalled, “and I think he was often very unhappy. I suppose he was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well. . . . We were good friends, and he had some other friends, but there was something that he lacked . . . because our contacts were largely, I should say wholly, on an intellectual basis.”

Introverted and intellectual, Robert was already reading such dark-spirited writers as Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. His favorite Shakespearean character was Hamlet. Horgan recalled years later that “Robert had bouts of melancholy, deep, deep depressions as a youngster. He would seem to be incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time. That happened while I was staying with him once or twice, and I was very distressed, had no idea what was causing it.”

Sometimes Robert’s flair for the intellectual went beyond the merely ostentatious. Wyman recalled a hot spring day when Oppenheimer walked into his room and said, “What intolerable heat. I have been spending all afternoon lying on my bed reading Jeans’
Dynamical Theory of Gases.
What else can one do in weather like this?” (Forty years later, Oppenheimer still had in his possession a weathered and salt-encrusted copy of James Hopwood Jeans’ book
Electricity and Magnetism.
)

In the spring of Robert’s freshman year, he formed a friendship with Frederick Bernheim, a pre-med student who had graduated from the Ethical Culture School a year after him. They shared an interest in science, and with Fergusson about to leave for England on a Rhodes Scholarship, Robert soon anointed Bernheim as his new best friend. Unlike most college-age men—who tend to have many acquaintances and few deep friendships— Robert’s friendships were few and intense.

In September 1923, at the beginning of their sophomore year, he and Bernheim decided to share adjacent rooms in an old house at 60 Mount Auburn Street, close to the offices of the
Harvard Crimson.
Robert decorated his room with an oriental rug, oil paintings and etchings he brought from home, and insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar. Bernheim was more amused than annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities: “He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way, because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that. I had visions of him suddenly bursting forth as a great physicist, and here I was just trying to get through Harvard.”

Bernheim thought Robert was something of a hypochondriac. “He went to bed with an electric pad every night, and one day it started to smoke.” Robert woke up and ran to the bathroom with the burning pad. He then went back to sleep, unaware that the pad was still burning. Bernheim recalled having to put the thing out before it burned the house down. Living with Robert was always “a little bit of a strain,” Bernheim noted, “because you had to more or less adjust to his standards or moods—he was really the dominant one.” Difficult or not, Bernheim roomed with Robert for their two remaining years at Harvard and credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research.

Only one other Harvard student dropped by their Mt. Auburn Street quarters with any regularity. William Clouser Boyd had met Robert in chemistry class one day and took an instant liking to him. “We had lots of interests in common aside from science,” he recalled. They both tried to write poetry, sometimes in French, and short stories imitative of Chekhov. Robert always called him “Clowser,” purposely misspelling his middle name. “Clowser” often joined Robert and Fred Bernheim on occasional weekend expeditions to Cape Ann, an hour’s drive northeast of Boston. Robert didn’t yet know how to drive, so the boys would go in Bernheim’s Willys Overland and spend the night at an inn in Folly Cove outside of Gloucester where the food was particularly good. Boyd would finish Harvard in three years, and, like Robert, he worked hard to do it. But while Robert obviously spent many long hours in his room studying, Boyd remembers that “he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it.” He thought Robert could run circles around him intellectually. “He had a very quick mind. For instance, when someone would propose a problem, he would give two or three wrong answers, followed by the right one, before I could think of a single answer.”