by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Nat wasn’t the only woman in Oppenheimer’s life. In the spring of 1928, he had met Helen Campbell at a Pasadena party. Though she was already engaged to a Berkeley physics instructor, Samuel K. Allison, Helen found herself strongly attracted to Oppenheimer. He took her out to dinner and they had a few walks together. When Oppenheimer returned to Berkeley in 1929, they resumed their friendship. By then Helen was a married woman, and she watched with some amusement as she observed “young wives falling for Robert, charmed by his conversation, gifts of flowers, etc.” She realized that he “had an eye for women and that his attentions to her should not be taken too seriously.” She thought he “liked to talk to slightly discontented women and seemed specially sensitive to lesbianism.” He possessed plenty of charisma.
“Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women,” Robert wrote to his brother in 1929, “and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women, any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
When Frank wrote him to complain about his problems with “the jeunes filles Newyorkaises,” Robert replied, “I should say that you were wrong to let the creatures worry you . . . you should not associate with them unless it is for you a genuine pleasure; and that you should have truck only with those girls who not only pleased you, but who were pleased, and who put you at your ease. The obligation is always on the girl for making a go of conversation: if she does not accept the obligation, nothing you can do will make the negotiations pleasant.” Obviously, relations with the opposite sex were still a matter of uneasy negotiations for Robert, let alone his seventeen-year-old brother.
To most of his friends, Robert was a maddening bundle of contradictions. Harold F. Cherniss was getting his doctorate in Berkeley’s Classical Greek Department when he first met Oppenheimer in 1929. Cherniss had just married a childhood friend of Oppenheimer’s, Ruth Meyer, who also had known Robert at the Ethical Culture School. Cherniss was immediately taken by Oppenheimer: “His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female. Almost everybody.” But he admitted that “the longer I was acquainted with him, the more intimately I was acquainted with him, the less I knew about him.” A keen observer of people, Cherniss sensed a disconnect in Robert. Here was a man, he thought, who was “very sharp intellectually.” People thought him complicated simply because he was interested in so many things, and knew so much. But on an emotional level, “he wanted to be a simple person, simple in the good sense of the word.” Robert “wanted friends very much,” Cherniss said. And yet, despite his tremendous personal charm, “he didn’t quite know how to make friends.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“The Nim Nim Boys”
Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
IN THE SPRING OF 1930, Julius and Ella Oppenheimer came out to visit their son in Pasadena. The stock market crash of the previous autumn had plunged the nation into a deep economic depression, but Julius had fortuitously decided to retire in 1928, selling his interest in Rothfeld, Stern and Co. He had also sold both the Riverside Drive apartment and their Bay Shore summer home, moving with Ella into a smaller apartment on Park Avenue. The Oppenheimer family fortune was unscathed. Robert immediately introduced his parents to his closest friends, Richard and Ruth Tolman. The elder Oppenheimers had what Julius called a “delightful” dinner, and several teas, with the Tolmans, and Ruth later took them to Los Angeles to hear a Tchaikovsky concert. Observing that “[Robert’s] reconstructed Chrysler emitted all sorts of groans,” Julius decided to buy him a new Chrysler despite his son’s “severe protests.” “Now, that brother has it,” Julius subsequently wrote his son Frank, “he is most delighted with it, and he has reduced his speed about 50% from what he used to drive, so we hope no further accidents will occur.” Robert named his new car the Gamaliel, the Hebrew name of a number of prominent ancient rabbis. As an adolescent, he had tried to hide his Jewish ancestry; it was a measure of his newly developed confidence and maturity that he now felt comfortable advertising it.
Around this time, Frank wrote him to complain that the brother he had known had “completely vanished.” Robert had written back in protest that this could not be so. Nevertheless, Robert realized that during his two-year absence in Europe, Frank—eight years his junior—must have done some growing up. “For purposes of recognition it will suffice for you to know that I am six feet tall, have black hair, blue eyes and at present a split lip, and that I answer to the call of Robert.”
He then went on to try to answer a question posed by his younger brother: “How far is it wise to respond to a mood?” Robert’s answer suggests that his fascination with the psychological was still acute: “. . . my own conviction is that one should use moods, but not be greatly deflected by them; thus one should try to use the gay times to do those things one wants to do which require gaiety, and the sober moods for the work one wants, and the low moods for giving oneself hell.”
MORE THAN MOST PROFESSORS, Oppenheimer included his students in his social life. “We did everything together,” said Edwin Uehling. On Sunday mornings, Oppenheimer frequently dropped by the Uehlings’ apartment to have breakfast and listen to a broadcast of the New York Symphony. Every Monday evening, Oppenheimer and Lawrence led a colloquium on physics open to all graduate students from both Berkeley and Stanford. They dubbed it the “Monday Evening Journal Club,” in part because the focus of discussion was usually a recently published article in Nature magazine or Physical Review.
For a short time, Robert dated his doctoral student Melba Phillips, and one evening he drove her out to Grizzly Peak, in the Berkeley hills, with a fine view of San Francisco Bay in the distance. After wrapping a blanket around Phillips, Oppenheimer announced, “I’ll be back presently. I’m going for a walk.” He came back shortly and briefly leaned in toward the car window and said, “Melba, I think I’ll walk on down to the house, why don’t you bring the car down?” Melba, however, had dozed off and didn’t hear him. When she awoke, she waited patiently for Oppie to return, but finally, after two hours had gone by with no sign of him, she hailed a passing policeman and said, “My escort went for a walk hours ago and he hasn’t returned.” Fearing the worst, police combed the bushes for Oppenheimer’s body. Phillips eventually drove herself home in Oppie’s car, and the police went to his quarters in the Faculty Club—where they roused a sleepy Oppenheimer from his bed. Apologizing, he explained to the police that he had forgotten all about Miss Phillips: “I’m awfully erratic, you know. I just walked and walked—and I was home and I went to bed. I’m so sorry.” A reporter on the police beat heard the story, and the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle ran a short story on the front page headlined “Forgetful Prof Parks Girl, Takes Self Home.” It was Oppenheimer’s first exposure to the press. Newspapers around the world picked up on the story. Frank Oppenheimer happened to read it in a paper in Cambridge, England. Naturally, both Oppie and Melba were embarrassed, and, somewhat defensively, he explained to friends that he had told Melba he was going to walk home, but that she must have dozed off and hadn’t heard him.
In 1934, Oppenheimer moved into an apartment on the lower level of a small house at 2665 Shasta Road, perched on one of the steep switchbacks in the Berkeley Hills. Often he invited students over for a simple dinner of “eggs à la Oppie,” invariably laced with Mexican chilies and washed down with red wine. On occasion he would subject his guests to his potent martini, shaken with elaborate ceremony and poured into chilled glasses. Sometimes he dipped the rims of the martini glasses in lime juice and honey. Winter or summer, he always kept the windows wide open, which meant that in winter his guests
would crowd around the large fireplace that dominated the dark-paneled living-room draped with Indian rugs from New Mexico. His father had given him a small Picasso lithograph which he hung on the wall. If everyone seemed tired of physics, the conversation might turn to art or literature—or he would suggest a movie. The little redwood house enjoyed a view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. Oppie called it “the most beautiful harbor in the world.” From the road above, the house was almost entirely concealed by a grove of eucalyptus, pine and acacia. He told his brother, Frank, that he usually slept on the porch “under the Yaqui and the stars, and imagine I am on the porch at Perro Caliente. ”
In these years, Oppie’s professional garb was always a gray suit, a blue denim shirt and clunky, round-toed black shoes, worn but well-polished. But away from the university he changed out of this academic uniform into a blue workshirt and faded blue jeans held up by a broad leather belt with a Mexican silver buckle. His long bony fingers were now stained a deep yellow from nicotine.
Consciously or not, some of Oppie’s students began imitating his quirks and eccentricities. They came to be called the “nim nim boys,” because they mimicked his “nim nim” humming. Almost all of these budding young physicists began chain-smoking Chesterfields, Oppie’s brand, and, like Oppie, flicked their lighters whenever anyone took out a cigarette. “They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations,” recalled Robert Serber. Isidor Rabi observed, “He [Oppenheimer] was like a spider with this communication web all around him. I was once in Berkeley and said to a couple of his students, ‘I see you have your genius costumes on.’ By the next day, Oppenheimer knew that I had said that.” It was a cult or mystique that some found annoying. “We weren’t supposed to like Tchaikovsky,” Edwin Uehling reported, “because Oppenheimer never liked Tchaikovsky.”
His students were constantly reminded that, unlike most physicists, he read books far outside his field. “He read a good deal of French poetry,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “He read almost everything [novels and poetry] that came out.” Cherniss saw him reading the classical Greek poets, but also such contemporary novelists as Ernest Hemingway. He particularly liked Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Even during the Depression, Oppie’s circumstances were decidedly flush. To begin with, by October 1931, when he was promoted to associate professor, he had an annual salary of $3,000 and his father continued to provide him with additional funds. Although Julius hadn’t had enough money from the sale of the firm to set up the independent foundation he wanted to establish, there was enough for a trust fund, “so that Robert will never have to give up his research.”
Like his father, Robert was instinctively generous, and he never hesitated to share with his students his fine taste in food and wine. At Berkeley, after leading a late-afternoon seminar, he often invited a roomful of students to join him for dinner at Jack’s Restaurant, one of San Francisco’s most pleasant eating establishments. Prior to 1933, Prohibition was still the law of the land, but Oppenheimer, said one old friend, “knew all the best restaurants and speakeasies in San Francisco.” In those years, one still had to take the ferry from Berkeley to San Francisco, and often (after 1933), while waiting at the ferry terminal, everyone would have a quick drink at one of the bars that now lined the wharf. Once they had made their way to Jack’s at 615 Sacramento Street, Oppie chose the wines and guided his students in their selections from the menu. He always picked up the check. “The world of good food and good wines and gracious living was far from the experience of many,” said one of his students. “Oppenheimer introduced us to an unfamiliar way of life. . . . We acquired something of his tastes.” Once a week or so Oppie dropped by Leo Nedelsky’s house, where a number of his students rented rooms, including J. Franklin Carlson and Melba Phillips. Almost every night at 10:00, tea and cake were served and everyone sat around playing tiddlywinks and discussing anything and everything. Most people left by midnight, but sometimes the conversation would last until two or three in the morning.
One night late in the spring semester, 1932, Oppie announced that Frank Carlson—who suffered from occasional bouts of depression—needed help in finishing his thesis. “Frank has done this work,” Oppenheimer said, “and now it’s got to be written up.” In response, Oppie’s other students pitched in and formed what amounted to a sort of little factory: “Frank [Carlson] wrote,” Phillips recalled, “Leo [Nedelsky] edited . . . I proofread and wrote all the equations in the thesis.” Carlson got his thesis accepted that June and served as Oppenheimer’s research associate for the academic year 1932–33.
Each spring, after Berkeley’s semester ended in April, Oppie’s students would follow him 375 miles south to Caltech in Pasadena, where he taught the spring quarter. They thought nothing of giving up the leases on their Berkeley area apartments and moving into garden cottages in Pasadena for $25 a month. Additionally, in the summer some of them even followed him for a few weeks to the University of Michigan’s summer physics seminar in Ann Arbor.
In the summer of 1931, Oppie’s former teacher in Zurich, Wolfgang Pauli, showed up at the Ann Arbor seminar. On one occasion, Pauli kept interrupting Oppie’s presentation until finally another eminent physicist, H. A. Kramers, shouted, “Shut up, Pauli, and let us hear what Oppenheimer has to say. You can explain how wrong it is afterward.” Such sharp-tongued banter only enhanced the aura of free-wheeling brilliance that surrounded Oppenheimer.
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1931 Ella Oppenheimer fell ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. On October 6, 1931, Julius cabled Robert: “Mother critically ill. Not expected to live . . .” Robert rushed home and sat vigil at his mother’s bedside. He found her “terribly low, almost beyond hope.” He wrote Ernest Lawrence: “I have been able to talk to her a little; she is tired and sad, but without desperation; she is unbelievably sweet.” Ten days later, he was reporting that the end was approaching: “She is comatose, now; and death is very near. We cannot help feeling now a little grateful that she should not have to suffer more. . . . The last thing she said to me was ‘Yes—California.’ ”
Toward the end, Herbert Smith came to the Oppenheimer home to comfort his former student. After several hours of desultory conversation, Robert looked up and said, “I’m the loneliest man in the world.” Ella died on October 17, 1931, age sixty-two. Robert was twenty-seven years old. When a family friend tried to console him by saying, “You know, Robert, your mother loved you very much,” he muttered softly in reply, “Yes, I know. Maybe she loved me too much.”
A grief-stricken Julius continued to reside in New York City, but soon he was visiting his son in California on a regular basis. Father and son grew even closer. Indeed, Robert’s students and colleagues at Berkeley were rather taken by the manner in which he made room in his life for his father. During the winter of 1932, father and son shared a cottage in Pasadena, where Robert was teaching that term. Robert had lunch with his father every day and took him one evening a week to an elite dinner club that met at Caltech; Robert used the German word Stammtisch (a table reserved for regular guests) for these dinners, where a designated speaker gave a presentation, followed by vigorous discussion. Julius was enormously pleased to be included in these events and wrote Frank: “They are very good fun. . . . I am meeting lots of Robert’s friends and yet I believe that I have not interfered with his activities. He is always busy and has had a couple of short talks with Einstein.” Twice a week, Julius played bridge with Ruth Uehling, and they became good friends. “Nobody could make a woman feel more important than the way he [Julius] could,” recalled Ruth later. “He was terribly proud of his son. . . . He couldn’t understand how he had produced Robert.” Julius also talked passionately about the art world, and when Ruth visited him in New York in the summer of 1936, he proudly showed her his collection of paintings. “He made me sit all day before the beautiful Van Gogh with a blazing sun, to see,” she recalled, “how the light changed it.”
Among other friends, Robert introduced his
father to Arthur W. Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley. Ryder was a Hoover Republican and a sharp-tongued iconoclast. He was “fascinated” by Oppenheimer, and Robert, for his part, thought Ryder the quintessential intellectual. His father agreed: “He is an astounding person,” Julius said, “a remarkable combination of austereness thru which peeps the gentlest kind of soul.” Robert later credited Ryder with giving him a renewed “feeling for the place of ethics.” Here was a scholar, he said, who “felt and thought and talked as a stoic.” He regarded Ryder as one of those rare people who “have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary.”
Robert felt himself drawn to both Ryder and the ancient language that was his friend’s vocation. Soon Ryder was giving Oppenheimer private tutorials in Sanskrit each Thursday evening. “I am learning Sanskrit,” Robert wrote Frank, “enjoying it very much, and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught.” While most of his friends saw this new obsession as slightly odd, Harold Cherniss—who had introduced Oppie to Ryder— thought it made perfect sense. “He liked things that were difficult,” Cherniss said. “And since almost everything was easy for him, the things that really would attract his attention were essentially the difficult.” Besides, Oppie had a “taste for the mystical, the cryptic.”
With his facility for languages, it wasn’t long before Robert was reading the Bhagavad-Gita. “It is very easy and quite marvelous,” he wrote Frank. He told friends that this ancient Hindu text—“The Lord’s Song”—was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” Ryder gave him a pink-covered copy of the book which found its way onto the bookshelf closest to his desk. Oppie took to passing out copies of the Gita as gifts to his friends.
