Pandora's Keepers (15 page)

Szilard usually knew exactly where he wanted to go but was often so annoyed by his tails that he deliberately tried to trick them. Other times he took pity on the agents and invited them along for a taxi ride or a cup of coffee. “Why can’t you be a good American?” a security agent once asked him, half exasperated, half begging. “Like who?” “Well, like me.” “
Ugh
. No,” said a smiling Szilard.
24

When the surveillance turned up nothing, Groves ordered Szilard’s phone tapped and his mail opened. He had the power to dismiss Szilard from the project and at one point took a step in that direction by threatening to make him take “an indefinite leave of absence without pay.” Groves told a security officer that “the investigation of Szilard should continue despite the barrenness of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and until we know for certain that he is 100% reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.”
25

But Szilard was irrepressible. That—and his talents as a physicist—made him a favorite of Compton, despite their very different backgrounds and temperaments, and when Groves pressured Compton to fire Szilard, Compton protected him, even writing to officials in Washington in praise of his efforts:

Szilard was the first in this country, perhaps anywhere, to advocate trying to secure a chain fission reaction using unseparated [uranium]. He has perhaps given more concentrated thought on the development of this project than has any other individual. As an experienced physicist and engineer and a man of unusual originality, his thoughts have been of great value in determining the direction of our work. He has likewise been from the beginning actively concerned with the more far-reaching problems of organization and civil and military uses of the process. Even though not all of his ideas are practical, I consider him one of the most valuable members of our organization.

Compton also noted Szilard’s early efforts to keep fission secrets from the Nazis, and his vocal advocacy of a bomb program. Compton concluded his assessment by characterizing Szilard as “an independent individualist, vitally and I believe unselfishly concerned with the effective progress of our program.”
26

Szilard was not alone: another maverick had joined the Manhattan Project by 1942. Nearly every physicist involved in the project knew of him because he was the kind of man one talked about, the sort of character that makes a novelist’s fingers itch. Mood-swept and arrogant, yet insecure. A brilliant and charismatic man, a genuine heavyweight of personality, he was a gifted theoretical physicist at Berkeley named Robert Oppenheimer. Famed for his genius, Oppenheimer was the object of admiration and jealousy by colleagues.

The grandson of German Jewish immigrants, Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904. He grew up in a large apartment at Eighty-eighth Street and Riverside Drive alongside the Hudson. A van Gogh painting graced the family dining room, and they summered at a comfortable cottage on Long Island Sound. Oppenheimer stood apart from other youths in more ways than just his family’s wealth. He collected minerals, read poetry, and studied languages as well as a great deal of science. Although tremendously gifted intellectually, Oppenheimer was weighted down by his mother’s demanding expectations and his Jewishness—both of which he carried as a personal burden. “He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be president of the B’nai B’rith or the Knights of Columbus,” said I. I. Rabi, who came to know Oppenheimer well. “Perhaps he really wanted to be both, simultaneously.”
27

Oppenheimer’s outlook grew out of his education at the elite Ethical Culture School facing Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The progressive school imparted a liberal ethos to its students that stressed ethical values over moral laws. The result was a pragmatism leavened by selflessness—doing “the noble thing,” as it was known at the school. Oppenheimer learned well; he was valedictorian of his class.
28

To toughen him up and round him out, Oppenheimer’s parents had one of his teachers, Herbert Smith, take him out West during the summer before he entered Harvard College.
29
For several weeks during June and July 1922, Oppenheimer and his teacher roamed the southern Rockies together on horseback. The trip opened a whole new world to Oppenheimer. For starters, he learned to appreciate the breathtaking beauty of the West. He also learned that he could stand on his own feet, that he could do what he thought ought to be done, that he did not need to lean on anyone for approval. It was the discovery of an internal grit and stamina that gave him much needed self-confidence.

The high point of the summer was a pack trip in the mountains and volcanic mesas of northern New Mexico. On one of these mesas, Oppenheimer and Smith came upon a cluster of rustic cabins shaded in cottonwood trees: the elite Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. Oppenheimer loved the extraordinary light and breathtaking vistas of the high desert, the fragrant juniper cedars and piñon pines, the wild-flowers colored a palette of muted browns, reds, and yellows. It made an indelible impression on him. He would return two decades later for a very different reason.

Oppenheimer entered Harvard that fall with an astonishing appetite for work. Typical was this note he wrote: “I am now going regularly to 10 courses, & doing my research, & I have started to learn Chinese.”
30
He spent hours alone in his dorm room overlooking the Charles River, surrounded by oils, etchings, and a samovar, subsisting on chocolate-covered raisins. He found studying easy but socializing difficult. “He was often very unhappy,” a roommate recalled. “He was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well with the human environment. There was something that he lacked, perhaps some more personal and deep emotional contact with people.”
31
Exhibiting symptoms of a manic-depressive, he alternated between periods of furious study and severe depression that led to periodic sessions with a psychiatrist, which continued for several years after Harvard.
32
He struck his friends with the pathos of a sensitive and thoughtful young man, lacking in self-knowledge, constantly struggling with a major repression or conflict that he could neither dislodge nor resolve.

Oppenheimer started out at Harvard in chemistry but was soon drawn to the physics underlying it. The study of nature’s harmony and order touched a deep chord in Oppenheimer, appealing to the philosopher and poet in him. After graduating summa cum laude in just three years, he applied for postgraduate work under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge. His Harvard mentor, the future Nobel laureate Percy Bridgman, wrote a letter about him to Rutherford that was perceptive and prophetic. Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation,” Bridgman wrote, and “his problems have in many cases shown a high degree of originality in treatment and much mathematical power.” He conceded that “it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe that he will be a very unusual success.”
33

Rutherford was unimpressed with Oppenheimer’s credentials and rejected his application. Oppenheimer next wrote to J. J. Thomson, another renowned experimentalist at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and put him to work in a corner of the laboratory. “I am having a pretty bad time,” he wrote to a high school friend in November 1925. “The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything.” When Max Born visited the Cavendish in the summer of 1926 and suggested that Oppenheimer pursue graduate studies at the University of Göttingen, a center for theoretical physics, Oppenheimer readily accepted the plan. It was at Göttingen that Oppenheimer first became aware of the problems perplexing European physicists. At that time, Born, Heisenberg, and Pascual Jordan were all in Göttingen, formulating the theory of quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer profited a great deal from his association with such prominent European physicists.

In 1929 he returned home to take up a prestigious joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Before Oppenheimer, American theoretical physics did not inspire high blood pressure in the seminar rooms of Europe. There were a few adept experimentalists, such as Lawrence, Compton, and Rabi, but most universities had no theoretical physicists as such. At the University of Hamburg in the late 1920s, the
Physical Review
, the research journal of the American Physical Society, was considered to be of such scientific insignificance that copies of the monthly magazine were permitted to pile up for a year before being unwrapped for use in the library.

Young Professor Oppenheimer cut a very dramatic figure. He was six feet tall, slightly stooped, with a mobile, expressive face and a body as thin as the wisps from the cigarettes he constantly smoked. His gestures and temperament were much closer to the coffeehouses of Europe than to anything American. He led an almost prototypical ivory tower existence. “I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country,” he later said. “I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like
Time
or
Harper’s
. I had no radio, no telephone. The first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936.”
34
He learned of the Wall Street crash from Ernest Lawrence six months after it happened. “Tell me,” Oppenheimer once said to a student, “what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?”
35
To his brother, Frank, he wrote, “I need physics more than friends.”
36

An inherited income allowed Oppenheimer to live far better than most during the Depression. His first residence was an apartment on Shasta Road built into the wall of a steep canyon in the hills above campus. The furniture was simple, and a few lovely Navajo rugs covered the floors. “I have a little house up on the hill,” he wrote Frank, “with a view of the cities [of Oakland and San Francisco] and of the most beautiful harbor in the world. There is a sleeping porch; and I sleep under the stars.”
37
His second residence was an elegant house on the crest of Eagle Hill Road that he bought with a check the afternoon he toured it. “I do not have much time for diversions, but I ride about once a week,” he wrote in another letter to Frank. “There are good horses, and lovely country among the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. From time to time I take out the Chrysler, and scare one of my friends out of all sanity by wheeling corners at seventy.”
38

At Berkeley, Oppenheimer wore gray suits, blue shirts, and blue ties. He was finely cultivated, ever poised and graceful. As a host, he had impeccable manners, made potent martinis (icing them first), cooked gourmet meals, and told droll stories. Spouses of colleagues received red roses; dates received gardenias—both found him irresistible. It was his intellect, however, that impressed people most. He had a mind that could penetrate to the heart of things, that could grasp the essential nature of a physical phenomenon, a book, even a person. Many of those who encountered Oppenheimer considered him the fastest thinker they had ever met—a true genius. In scientific conversation he always assumed that others knew as much as he did. This seldom being the case, and few persons being willing to admit their ignorance, his partner often felt at a distinct disadvantage.

Yet there was a flaw in his genius. He was brutally intolerant of anyone he considered slow or foolish. Those who struck him as intolerably stupid were denounced to their faces. It was called the “blue-glare treatment” in Berkeley circles: when aroused, Oppenheimer’s eyes seemed to turn a vivid blue, his voice dropped way down, and his caustic tongue erupted. “He could be devastating if he chose,” said one who witnessed the blue-glare treatment, “and sometimes he chose to be so at the wrong time.”
39
His cutting tongue wounded people where they were most sensitive. “Robert could make people feel they were fools,” a fellow physicist recalled.
40
Oppenheimer acknowledged his behavior in a letter to his brother, Frank, but added that “it is not easy—at least it is not easy for me—to be quite free of the desire to browbeat somebody or something.”
41
He called the behavior “beastliness.” Those at the receiving end of his cutting tongue put it differently: “He was very snooty,” said one.
42
Many victims of Oppenheimer’s tongue-lashings nursed a lingering resentment that would be repaid in later years.

Oppenheimer grew into a teaching legend at Berkeley, but he was hardly one at first. He didn’t speak loud enough, he didn’t face his class, and he scrawled equations at random all over the blackboard while lacing his delivery with obscure references to classics of literature and philosophy. Although desperately eager to reach his pupils, he was too impatient. He lectured to the most advanced students in the class, leaving all the others lost. Frequently he would make big jumps in the presentation of some theory and then turn toward the class, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and say offhandedly, “I hope I’m not being too pedestrian.”
43
He applied his sharp tongue freely to students who were doing their best to keep up. Many took his course one year and then again the next in order to understand what it was all about. They would work in pairs, one taking notes and the other one listening.