Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (53 page)

‘Because of Joe’s insistence,’ Kitty remembers, ‘I was finally permitted to join the Party, but not until I had done a number of tasks which were extremely painful to me, such as selling the
Daily Worker
on the street and passing out leaflets at the steel mill.’

Clearly, this was no life for a princess. ‘As time went on,’ she later said, ‘although Joe and I continued to be very much in love, the poverty became more and more depressing to me.’ Finally, in June 1936, after less than three years of marriage, ‘I told Joe that I could no longer live under such conditions and that I was separating from him.’

She moved to England, where her parents were then living, and became a student at a school of dress design. For some months she heard nothing from Dallett, but then discovered that her mother had been intercepting his letters. After writing to him asking him to take her back, she found out that he was coming to Europe, having volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In March 1937, she was briefly reunited with Dallett, when she met him, together with his Communist Party colleague Steve Nelson, in Paris. After a few days there, Dallett and Nelson continued to
Spain, while Kitty returned to London. Seven months later, leading a battalion in an offensive against the fascist-held town of Fuentes del Ebro, Dallett was shot and killed by machine-gun fire. At that time Nelson was in Paris, where he was joined by Kitty, who had hoped to go from there to Spain to reunite with her husband. It was Nelson who told her the news about Dallett’s death. ‘She literally collapsed and hung on to me,’ Nelson later recalled. ‘I became a substitute for Joe, in a sense. She hugged me and cried, and I couldn’t maintain my composure.’

When she returned to the States, Kitty agreed to the publication of Joe’s letters to her under the title
Letters from Spain
. After living with Nelson and his wife in New York City for a few months, Kitty moved to Philadelphia, where she met and married Richard Harrison. By coincidence, while she was living and studying there, she met Robert and Charlotte Serber. In his autobiography Robert Serber describes how, after leaving Berkeley in September 1938 for the job at the University of Illinois, he and Charlotte went back to Philadelphia to spend some time with their respective parents before he started at Urbana. At the home of Charlotte’s parents, Robert remembers, ‘we met a very attractive girl, Kitty Puening, a biology student’. She and Charlotte’s father, it seemed, moved in the same social and political circles. The next time Serber met Kitty was at that fateful garden party held by the Lauritsens in Pasadena in the summer of 1939.

Even after their move to Urbana, the Serbers continued to spend their summers in the west, dividing their time between Berkeley, Pasadena and Perro Caliente. In the summer of 1940, when they arrived at Berkeley, Oppenheimer was just about to leave for New Mexico, where they, together with Frank and Jackie, were due to join him later. Oppenheimer told Serber that he had invited Richard and Kitty Harrison, but that Richard could not make it. ‘Kitty might come alone,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘You could bring her with you. I’ll leave it up to you. But if you do it might have serious consequences.’ As Oppenheimer had clearly hoped they would, the Serbers brought Kitty along with them. A day or two after they arrived, Serber recalls, Oppenheimer and Kitty rode out to Los Pinos to stay overnight as guests of Katherine Page. The next day, after they had returned, Katherine, ‘looking very aristocratic on her bay horse, came trotting up to the ranch house and presented Kitty with her nightgown, which had been found under Oppie’s pillow. The rest of us made no comment.’

That afternoon Kitty and Jackie went riding, ‘and when they returned, Jackie, who was on the lead horse, had a stiff neck from conversing over her shoulder.’ Jackie formed a deep and lasting dislike of Kitty, whom in her forthright way she described as ‘a bitch’. ‘Kitty was a schemer,’ Jackie said. ‘She was a phoney. All her political convictions were phoney, all her
ideas were borrowed. Honestly, she’s one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life.’ It is a view that is echoed by Abraham Pais, who knew both Oppenheimers well in their later years. Kitty, Pais once said, is ‘the most despicable female I have ever known’. Serber, on the other hand, was devoted to her.

As Oppenheimer had predicted to Serber, bringing Kitty to Perro Caliente had ‘serious consequences’. By the end of the summer, Kitty was pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child. Richard Harrison, who presumably knew that his wife was having an affair with Oppenheimer and that his marriage to Kitty stood no chance of working, agreed that a quick divorce was in the interests of everyone concerned. After Kitty had spent the required six weeks living in Reno, she was able to obtain a divorce, and the day the divorce came through – 1 November 1940 – she and Oppenheimer were married. Soon after the wedding, Oppenheimer and Kitty moved into a large rented house at 10 Kenilworth Court, Berkeley, which became the social centre not only of Oppenheimer’s group of graduate students, but also of left-wing Berkeley political life.

Oppenheimer’s remark to Bethe that ‘we can have no truck with the Communists’ – whatever it
did
mean – certainly did not mean that he was prepared to turn his back on the people whose solidarity in political sympathies and activities he had so cherished since 1936. As he himself made clear, and as was perhaps inevitable, his personal and social life was intertwined with his political campaigning in a way that made it difficult, if not impossible, to extricate himself from that political life, even had he wanted to. His colleagues who were Communist Party members were also his family, his friends and his students. A party given by him and Kitty at Kenilworth Court, therefore, would have been, to the FBI and to every other observer, indistinguishable from a social gathering of communists.

Oppenheimer’s marriage to Kitty extended his social circle to include not only the ‘parlour pinks’ with whom he had previously mixed – the communist professors, lecturers and students who formed the ‘units’ that he and his brother had joined – but also high-level communist officials and organisers, the kind of people whom, especially during the ‘Red Scare’ of 1940 onwards, the American security services kept closely within their sights. This is not because Kitty’s commitment to anything one might call communist ideology was any stronger than his – if anything, it was a good deal weaker – but rather because she was the widow of Joe Dallett, a martyr to the Loyalist cause in Spain and a Communist Party hero.

One of these high-level communists was Steve Nelson. Since Kitty had lived with him and his wife in 1938, she and Nelson had had no contact with each other. In the meantime, Nelson had risen within the ranks of the Communist Party, having been identified as an up-and-coming leader.

Nelson’s real name was Stefan Mesarosh. He was born in Croatia and
spoke English with a heavy Croatian accent. He came to the US in 1920, aged seventeen, and became a US citizen five years later. In the intervening period he had joined the Communist Party. In 1929, he became a full-time functionary of the Party and was sent to the International Lenin School in Moscow to be trained in espionage techniques. During his two-year training period he was sent on clandestine missions to Germany, Switzerland, France, India and China. After serving in Spain and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was sent to southern California, where his job was to ferret out party infiltrators and to steal the files of organisations hostile to the American Communist Party.

In 1939, Nelson was transferred to San Francisco to become chairman of the local branch of the Party. The following year, after the passing of the Smith and Voorhis Acts, he went ‘underground’, ready to lead the local Party in secret in the event that (as then looked likely) the organisation became illegal. He spent much of this time living under an assumed name in a cabin in Redwood City, California.

It was while he was living thus, in the autumn of 1940, that Nelson met Oppenheimer, of whom he had previously never heard. They met at a fund-raising party in Berkeley, in aid of refugees from the Spanish Civil War (which had ended in defeat for the Loyalists in April 1939). Oppenheimer was the featured speaker at this party and in his speech he said that the fascist victory in Spain had led directly to the outbreak of war in Europe. After he had given his speech, Oppenheimer approached Nelson and said: ‘I’m going to marry a friend of yours, Steve.’ When he explained what he meant, Nelson exclaimed ‘Kitty Dallett!’, whereupon Kitty appeared and the two old comrades hugged. Subsequently, Nelson and his wife visited the Oppenheimers at their home in Kenilworth Court.

Another person whom the FBI were extremely interested in was William Schneiderman, district organiser of the Californian branch of the Party and a man whose political activities were a cause for concern at the very highest level of American government. On 18 May 1940, J. Edgar Hoover had written to the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to tell him that a ‘confidential source’ (that is, a wire tap) had heard Schneiderman tell a party meeting in San Francisco that the Communist Party intended to use its influence in the relevant workers’ unions to delay production in aircraft factories, chemical plants and shipyards. This was enough to ensure that wherever Schneiderman went, an FBI agent followed. On 1 December 1940, this led the FBI to Chevalier’s house, where Schneiderman addressed a meeting of communists and communist sympathisers, explaining to them the latest changes in the party line. The FBI agents keeping surveillance outside the house made a record of the registration plates of all the cars parked outside, one of which they later discovered belonged to Oppenheimer.

Chevalier did not know Schneiderman well and neither did Oppenheimer. Asked about this meeting in 1946 by the FBI, Oppenheimer denied all knowledge of it; asked again in 1950, he said he now remembered it since his wife had refreshed his memory. In his security hearing in 1954 he remembered it in some detail, recalling that about twenty people were present, including Thomas Addis and Isaac Folkoff, the Communist Party treasurer to whom he continued to give regular payments of between $100 and $150 a month. He also remembered that the purpose of the meeting was to ‘to acquaint the interested gentry with the present line or the then line of the Communist Party’.

By the same means with which they heard Schneiderman’s plans for delaying factory production, the FBI heard Folkoff refer to Oppenheimer as ‘the big shot’. This, together with Oppenheimer’s presence at a meeting at which Schneiderman presented the Communist Party line, was sufficient cause for the FBI to start treating Oppenheimer as a potentially dangerous subversive and, on 28 March 1941, it opened what was to become over the years a massive file on Oppenheimer. On the same day, Oppenheimer’s name was added to a list drawn up by the FBI of ‘persons to be considered for custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency’. A short while later, Oppenheimer wrote to Willie Fowler in Pasadena, saying that he might not be able to make it to Washington for the forthcoming April conference on elementary particles. ‘I may be out of a job by then,’ he wrote, ‘because UC is going to be investigated next week for radicalism and the story is that the committee members are no gentlemen and that they don’t like me. We’ll do the best we can.’

As it happened, the investigation into radicalism at Berkeley presented Oppenheimer with few problems. The fact remained, however, that in maintaining contact with and lending financial support to the Communist Party, Oppenheimer was, as he well knew, playing with fire. In case he needed reminding of this fact, a demonstration of it close to home was given in the summer of 1941 with respect to his brother. Frank had finished his PhD at Caltech in the summer of 1939 and had then, no doubt through Robert’s help, got a job at Stanford, working with Felix Bloch. After just two years, however, Stanford let Frank know that they would not be renewing his contract; he was out of work. One contributing factor here was that Frank and Bloch did not get on with one another, but it was also made clear to Frank that his Communist Party membership and his political activities were barriers to keeping his job. At about this time Frank and Jackie left the Party, but the damage his membership had done to his career was by no means over.

On 12 May 1941, just seven months into her marriage to Oppenheimer, Kitty gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named Peter. By this time of the year they were in Pasadena, from where they wrote to the Chevaliers
inviting them to meet the new arrival. Thus it was that Chevalier was with Oppenheimer in Pasadena on 22 June 1941, when they heard the news that Nazi Germany had broken its pact with the Soviet Union and had begun an invasion of Russia. ‘It was on our way to the beach that we heard over the radio of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,’ Chevalier remembered, ‘and as we drove, both shocked and terribly excited by the news, we heard the whole of Churchill’s speech denouncing Hitler and welcoming the Soviet Union as an ally, pledging Great Britain’s full cooperation in a united war effort.’

That night, Chevalier recalls, ‘we sat up with Opje and Kitty till the small hours, listening to the news broadcasts and trying to analyse the significance of this latest Nazi move’. Apparently blind to the irony of what he is describing, Chevalier remarks: ‘Hitler had destroyed at one stroke the dangerous fiction, so prevalent in liberal and political circles, that fascism and communism were but two different versions of the same totalitarian philosophy. The communist and democratic forces were now allies committed to fighting their common fascist enemy.’

The entry of the Soviet Union into the war came as something of a relief to many American communists, since it brought them back on to the same side as their countrymen. The US had not yet actually entered the conflict, but preparations for war were going on everywhere. In a letter to the Uehlings written just a few days after Peter was born and about a month before the Nazi attack on Russia, Oppenheimer, again warmly thanking the Uehlings for their hospitality the previous summer (‘even now a year later I want to thank you for it again’), wrote disconsolately: ‘I think we’ll go to war.’ At this time the imminence of war was something from which he felt detached and which he saw as inimical to the development of his subject. ‘I expect,’ he told the Uehlings, ‘unless there is a drastic change in policy on the part of the research boards, that physics in our sense will just about stop by next year.’