American Prometheus (71 page)

He and Jackie found the whole experience surreal. Jackie had not lost her righteous anger. As she sat in the House Committee anteroom waiting to testify, she looked out the window and was startled by the contrast between Capitol Hill’s marble government buildings, surrounded by manicured grounds, and the rows of tumbledown houses occupied by the city’s Negro population. The children were barefoot and dressed in rags. “They all looked rachitic and most seemed undernourished. All they had to play with was junk they found in the street. As I sat there reading and listening and looking out the window, I found myself alternately worrying what the Committee was going to try to do to me and getting madder and madder at the fact that I had been called down here so that some fellow could question
me
about being Un American.”

Afterwards Frank told reporters that they had joined the Party in 1937 “seeking an answer to the problems of unemployment and want in the wealthiest and most productive country in the world.”

But they had left the Party in 1940, disillusioned. He had no knowledge, he said, of atomic espionage, either in Los Alamos or in Berkeley’s Rad Lab: “I knew of no Communist activity, nobody ever approached me to get information and I gave none, and I worked very hard and I believe I made a valuable contribution.” Barely an hour later, Frank learned from reporters that his resignation as an assistant professor of physics had been accepted by the University of Minnesota. He had lied two years earlier, and from the perspective of the university that was reason enough for his dismissal from academic life. He had literally been three months away from being awarded tenure, but in a final meeting with the president of the university, it was made clear that he was finished. Frank left the president’s office in tears.

Frank was devastated. The full import of what had happened only hit him when he tried to go back to Berkeley. Naïvely, he had thought Lawrence would provide him haven, and he was shocked when Ernest turned him down.

Dear Lawrence,

What is going on? Thirty months ago you put your arms around me and wished me well. Told me to come back and work whenever I wanted to. Now you say I am no longer welcome. Who has changed, you or I? Have I betrayed my country or your lab? Of course not. I have done nothing. . . . You do not agree with my politics, but you never have . . . so I think that you must be losing your head to the point where anybody who disagrees with you about anything is not to be tolerated. . . . I am really amazed and sore because of your action.

Sincerely,
Frank

A year earlier, Frank and Jackie had bought an 800-acre cattle ranch near Pagosa Springs, high in the Colorado mountains. They had planned to use it as a summer vacation home. In the autumn of 1949, to the surprise of many of their friends, they retreated to this spartan internal exile. “No one has offered me a job,” Frank wrote Bernard Peters, “and so we are definitely planning to spend the winter here. My Christ, but it is beautiful. I think only if you have been here does staying seem to make any sense.” The ranch was perched at an altitude of 8,000 feet, and the winters were unbearably cold. “Jackie would sit in the cabin,” recalled Philip Morrison, “with binoculars and watch cows ready to give birth in the snow. They’d have to run out to keep the newborn calves from freezing.”

For the next decade, Robert Oppenheimer’s likable and brilliant younger brother eked out a living as a working rancher. They were twenty miles from the nearest town. As if to remind them of their status, FBI agents periodically showed up to question their neighbors. Occasionally they’d visit the Oppenheimer ranch and ask Frank to talk about other people in the CP. Once an agent specifically told him, “Don’t you want to get a job in a university? If you do, you have to cooperate with us.” Frank always turned them away. In 1950, Frank wrote: “Finally, after all these years, I have gotten wise to the fact that the FBI isn’t trying to investigate me, it is trying to poison the atmosphere in which I live. It is trying to punish me for being left wing by turning my friends, my neighbors, my colleagues against me and make them suspicious of me.”

Robert visited the ranch almost every summer. And while Frank had resigned himself to his situation, Robert chafed at the thought that his brother was living this kind of life. “I really felt like a rancher,” Frank said, “and was a rancher. But he didn’t believe I could be a rancher and was very anxious for me to get back into the academic world, although there wasn’t anything he could do about it.” Over the next year, Frank received tentative job offers to teach physics abroad in Brazil, Mexico, India and England— but the Department of State steadfastly refused to issue him a passport. And there were no job offers in America; he had been blacklisted. Within a few years, Frank felt compelled to sell one of his Van Goghs
—First Steps
(
After
Millet
)—for $40,000.

In his frustration over his brother’s fate, Robert talked with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard overseer Grenville Clark and other legal scholars about what the Institute might be able to do by way of organizing an intellectual critique of the Truman Administration’s loyalty and security programs that were supporting the sort of treatment Frank and Oppie’s students were getting. He told Clark that he thought the Presidential Loyalty order, the AEC’s security clearance procedures and HUAC’s investigations “all lead in many individual cases to unwarranted hardship and make for an abrogation of the freedoms of inquiry, opinion and speech.” Soon afterwards, Oppenheimer recruited his old friend Dr. Max Radin, dean of Berkeley’s Law School, to come to the Institute for the academic year 1949–50 and write an essay on California’s loyalty oath controversy.

THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, Oppenheimer was convinced that his phones were wiretapped. One day in 1948, a Los Alamos colleague, the physicist Ralph Lapp, came to Oppie’s Princeton office to discuss his (Lapp’s) educational work on arms control issues. Lapp was startled when Oppenheimer suddenly rose and took him outside, muttering as they went, “Even the walls have ears.” He was aware that he was under scrutiny. “He was always conscious of being followed,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelmann, his physician friend from Los Alamos and now a frequent visitor to Olden Manor. “He gave us the sense that he thought people were actually trailing him.”

His phones had been monitored at Los Alamos, and his Berkeley home was wiretapped by the FBI throughout 1946–47. When he moved to Princeton, the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, field office was instructed to monitor his activities—but a decision was made that electronic surveillance was not warranted. Every effort would be made, however, “to develop confidential discreet sources close to Oppenheimer.” By 1949, the bureau had recruited at least one confidential informant, a woman acquainted with Oppenheimer socially and through her university job. In the spring of 1949, the Newark office informed J. Edgar Hoover, “No additional information has been obtained or developed concerning Dr. Oppenheimer that would indicate he is disloyal.” Years later, Oppenheimer claimed wryly that, “The government paid far more to tap my telephone than they ever paid me at Los Alamos.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“I Am Sure That Is Why She
Threw Things at Him”

His family relationships seemed to be so terrible. And yet
you never would have known it from Robert.

PRISCILLA DUFFIELD

WHILE FRANK AND JACKIE STRUGGLED to turn their Colorado spread into a working cattle ranch, Robert presided over his intellectual fiefdom in Princeton. The directorship did not absorb all his energy. He spent about a third of his time on Institute business, a third on physics or other intellectual pursuits, and a third traveling, giving speeches and attending classified meetings in Washington. One day his old friend Harold Cherniss chided him, “The time has come, Robert, for you to give up the political life and return to physics.” When Robert stood silent, seeming to weigh this advice, Cherniss pressed him: “Are you like the man who has a tiger by the tail?” To this Robert finally replied, “Yes.”

It was sometimes a relief to be on the road, away from Princeton—and his wife. To readers of
Life, Time
and other popular magazines, Robert’s family life may have seemed idyllic. Photographs depicted a pipe-smoking father reading a book to his two young children as his pretty wife looked over his shoulder and the family’s German shepherd, Buddy, lay at his feet. “He is warmly affectionate,” wrote a reporter for a cover story on Oppenheimer for
Life
magazine, “with his wife and children (who are well fed and very fond of him), and attentively polite to everybody. . . .” According to
Life,
Oppenheimer walked home each evening at 6:30 p.m. to play with the children. Each Sunday, they took Peter and Toni out to hunt for four-leaf clovers. “Mrs. Oppenheimer, whose thinking is also direct, keeps her children from cluttering the house with four-leaf clovers by making them eat all they find right on the spot.”

But those who knew the Oppenheimers well realized that life at Olden Manor was difficult. “His family relationships seemed to be so terrible,” said his former Los Alamos secretary Priscilla Duffield, who became a Princeton neighbor. “And yet you never would have known it from Robert.”

Oppenheimer’s home life was painfully complicated. Robert relied on Kitty for a great deal in his life. “She was Robert’s greatest confidante and adviser,” Verna Hobson said. “He told her everything. . . . He leaned on her tremendously.” He took his Institute work home with him and she often became involved in his decisions. “She loved him very much and he loved her very much,” Hobson insisted. But she and other close friends in Princeton knew Kitty had a relentless intensity that drained anyone near her: “What a strange person she was; all that fury and soreness and intelligence and wit. She had a constant state of the hives. She was just tensed up all the time.”

Hobson got to know both Robert and Kitty as few others ever did. She and her husband, Wilder Hobson, met the Oppenheimers in 1952 at a New Year’s Eve dinner hosted by their mutual friend, the novelist John O’Hara. Soon afterwards, Hobson went to work for Robert—and she stayed with him for the next thirteen years. “He was an extraordinarily demanding person to work for and Kitty demanded just as much from his secretaries, so it was like working for two demanding bosses who took you right into their lives and expected you to be at their home half the time.”

Kitty, a creature of habit, presided every Monday afternoon over a gathering of women at Olden Manor; they would sit around gossiping, some drinking all afternoon. Kitty called it her “Club.” The wife of a Princeton University physicist labeled these women Kitty’s “crew of birds with broken wings. . . . Kitty had a ring of damaged women around her, all of them somewhat alcoholic.” Kitty had drunk her fair share of martinis at Los Alamos. But now her drinking sometimes led to horrendous scenes. Hobson, who drank only in moderation, recalled, “She would get drunk sometimes to the point of falling down and not making much sense. Sometimes she passed out. But so many times I have seen her pull herself together when you didn’t believe she possibly could.”

Pat Sherr, Kitty’s friend from Los Alamos—and the woman who had taken care of Toni as an infant for three months—was one of her regular drinking companions. The Sherrs had moved to Princeton in 1946, and soon after the Oppenheimers moved into Olden Manor, Kitty made a habit of dropping by Pat’s home two or three times a week. Kitty was clearly lonely. “She would arrive at eleven in the morning,” recalled Sherr, “and wouldn’t leave until four in the afternoon,” after having consumed a lot of Sherr’s scotch. But one day Pat announced she just couldn’t afford to replace the liquor. “Oh, how stupid of me,” Kitty said. “I’ll bring my own bottle and you’ll just keep it aside for me.”

Kitty’s friendships were at once intense and ephemeral. She would latch onto someone and bare her soul in a torrent of intimacy. Sherr saw her do this repeatedly. She’d tell her new friend absolutely everything about herself—including her sex life. “I mean, she just had to talk about this sort of thing all the time,” recalled Sherr. She could be a good friend, but she was always conscious of being a good friend. And inevitably, at some point, she would turn on her friend and publicly denigrate her. “Kitty had a certain need to hurt people,” Hobson said.

Kitty had always been accident-prone, and her drinking contributed to a string of such episodes. In Princeton, she regularly had minor auto accidents. Almost every night she fell asleep in bed smoking. Her bedding was full of cigarette holes. One night she awoke startled—the room was on fire; but she put it out with a fire extinguisher that she or Robert had wisely placed in the bedroom. Oddly enough, Robert rarely intervened. He instead reacted to his wife’s self-destructive behavior with stoic resignation. “He knew of Kitty’s traits,” observed Frank Oppenheimer, “but was unwilling to admit them—again perhaps because he couldn’t admit failure.”

On one occasion, Abraham Pais was talking with Oppenheimer in his office when the two men saw Kitty walking, clearly tipsy, across the lawn from Olden Manor. As she approached the door to his office, Robert turned to Pais and said, “Don’t go away.” It was moments like these, Pais later wrote, “when I hurt for him.” In his pity for Robert, Pais nevertheless could not understand why his friend tolerated such a woman. “Quite independently from her drinking,” Pais wrote, “I have found Kitty the most despicable female I have ever known, because of her cruelty.”

Hobson saw past Kitty’s failings and she understood why Robert loved her. He accepted her for who she was and knew she would never really change her ways. Robert once confided to Hobson that, prior to Princeton, he had consulted a psychiatrist about Kitty. In an extraordinary admission, he said he had been advised to check her into an institution, at least for a time. This he could not do. Instead, he would be Kitty’s “doctor, nurse and psychiatrist.” He told Hobson that he had taken this decision “with his eyes open and that he accepted the consequences of it.”