by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Robert was so enraptured by his Sanskrit studies that when, in the autumn of 1933, his father bought him yet another Chrysler, he named it the Garuda, after the giant bird god in Hindu mythology that ferries Vishnu across the sky. The Gita—which constitutes the heart of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata—is told in the form of a dialogue between the incarnate god Krishna and a human hero, Prince Arjuna. About to lead his troops into mortal combat, Arjuna refuses to engage in a war against friends and relatives. Lord Krishna replies, in essence, that Arjuna must fulfill his destiny as a warrior to fight and kill.6
Ever since his emotional crisis of 1926, Robert had been trying to achieve some kind of inner equilibrium. Discipline and work had always been his guiding principles, but now he self-consciously elevated these traits to a philosophy of life. In the spring of 1932, Robert wrote his brother a long letter explaining why. The fact that discipline, he argued, “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation . . . and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.” And only through discipline is it possible “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.”
Like many Western intellectuals enthralled with Eastern philosophies, Oppenheimer the scientist found solace in their mysticism. He knew, moreover, that he was not alone; he knew that some of the poets he admired most, like W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, had themselves dipped into the Mahabharata. “Therefore,” he concluded in his letter to the twenty-year-old Frank, “I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.”
In his late twenties, Oppenheimer already seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment; he wished, in other words, to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet detached from it. He was not seeking to escape to a purely spiritual realm. He was not seeking religion. What he sought was peace of mind. The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses. One of his favorite Sanskrit texts was the Meghaduta, a poem that discusses the geography of love from the laps of naked women to the soaring mountains of the Himalayas. “The Meghaduta I read with Ryder,” he wrote Frank, “with delight, some ease, and great enchantment. . . .” Yet another of his favorite parts of the Gita, the Satakatrayam, contains these fatalistic lines:
Vanquish enemies at arms . . .
Gain mastery of the sciences
And varied arts . . .
You may do all this, but karma’s force
Alone prevents what is not destined
And compels what is to be.
Unlike the Upanishads, the Gita celebrates a life of action and engagement with the world. As such, it was compatible with Oppenheimer’s Ethical Culture upbringing; but there also were important differences. The Gita’s notions of karma, destiny and earthly duty would seem to be at odds with the humanitarianism of the Ethical Culture Society. Dr. Adler had disparaged the teaching of any inexorable “laws of history.” Ethical Culture stressed instead the role of individual human will. There was nothing fatalistic about John Lovejoy Elliott’s social work in the immigrant ghettos of lower Manhattan. So perhaps the attraction Oppenheimer felt to the fatalism of the Gita was at least partly stimulated by a late-blooming rebellion against what he had been taught as a youth. Isidor Rabi thought so. Rabi’s wife, Helen Newmark, had been a classmate of Robert’s at the Ethical Culture School, and Rabi later recalled, “From conversations with him I have the impression that his own regard for the school was not affectionate. Too great a dose of ethical culture can often sour the budding intellectual who would prefer a more profound approach to human relations and man’s place in the universe.”
Rabi speculated that young Oppenheimer’s Ethical Culture heritage may have become an immobilizing burden. It is impossible to know the full results of one’s actions, and sometimes even good intentions lead to horrific outcomes. Robert was acutely attuned to the ethical, and yet endowed with ambition and an expansive, curious intelligence. Like many intellectuals aware of the complexities of life, perhaps he sometimes felt paralyzed to the point of inaction. Oppenheimer later reflected upon precisely this dilemma: “I may, as we all have to, make a decision and act or I may think about my motives and my peculiarities and my virtues and my faults and try to decide why I am doing what I am. Each of these has its place in our life, but clearly the one forecloses the other.” At the Ethical Culture School, Felix Adler had subjected himself to “constant self-analysis and self-evaluation by the same high standards and objectives that he set for others.” But as Oppenheimer approached his thirties, he became increasingly uncomfortable with this relentless introspection. As the historian James Hijiya has suggested, the Gita provided an answer to this psychological dilemma: celebrate work, duty and discipline—and worry little as to the consequences. Oppenheimer was acutely attuned to the consequences of his actions, but, like Arjuna, he was also driven to do his duty. So duty (and ambition) overrode his doubts—though doubt remained, in the form of an ever-present awareness of human fallibility.
IN JUNE 1934, Oppenheimer returned to the University of Michigan summer school session on physics and lectured on his latest critique of the Dirac equation. The lecture so impressed Robert Serber, then a young postdoctoral fellow, that he decided on the spot to switch his research fellowship from Princeton to Berkeley. A week or two after Serber drove into Berkeley, Oppie invited him to a movie house, where they saw Night Must Fall, a thriller starring Robert Montgomery. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
The son of a politically well-connected Philadelphia lawyer, Serber grew up in a decidedly left-wing political culture. His father was Russian-born, and both parents were Jewish. When Serber was twelve, his mother died. Not long afterward, his father remarried; his new wife was Frances Leof, a muralist and potter who later, according to FBI documents, joined the Communist Party. Robert Serber quickly became a part of the extended Leof family, centered around the household of his stepmother’s uncle, a charismatic Philadelphia doctor, Morris V. Leof, and his wife, Jenny. The Leof household was run as a political and artistic salon; regular visitors included the playwright Clifford Odets, the left-wing journalist I. F. Stone, and the poet Jean Roisman, who later married the left-liberal trial lawyer Leonard Boudin. Young Robert Serber soon became captivated by the charms of Charlotte Leof, the younger of Morris and Jenny’s two daughters. In 1933, he and Charlotte married in a civil ceremony shortly after her graduation from the University of Pennsylvania. Charlotte took her politics straight from her radical father, and throughout the 1930s she was a fervent activist on behalf of a variety of left-wing causes. Not surprisingly, given all these family associations, Serber’s own political leanings were certainly to the left, although the FBI concluded years later that “no definite evidence is known of Robert Serber’s Communist membership.”
At Berkeley, Serber studied theoretical physics with Oppenheimer, and in the course of a few years he published a dozen papers, including seven that he coauthored with his mentor. The papers dealt with such topics as cosmic ray particles, the disintegration of high-energy protons, nuclear photoeffects at high energy levels and stellar nuclear cores. Oppie told Lawrence that Serber was “one of the few really first rate theoretical men that he worked with.”
They were also the closest of fri
ends. In the summer of 1935, Oppie invited the Serbers to visit him in New Mexico. But Serber was completely unprepared for the conditions at Perro Caliente. When they arrived, after driving on unpaved roads for hours, the Serbers found Frank Oppenheimer, Melba Phillips and Ed McMillan already there. Oppie greeted them nonchalantly and suggested that because the cabin was already full, perhaps they ought to take two horses and ride north eighty miles to Taos. That meant a three-day ride across the Jicoria Pass at 12,500 feet. Serber had never been on a horse! Following Oppie’s instructions, the Serbers saddled up, packing only a change of socks and underwear, a toothbrush, a box of chocolate graham crackers, a pint of whiskey and a bag of oats to feed the horses. Three days later, with muscles aching and leg skin rubbed raw by so many hours in the saddle, the Serbers arrived in Taos. After a night in the inn at Ranchos de Taos, they rode back to meet Oppenheimer. Along the way, Charlotte twice fell off her horse and arrived with her jacket splattered with blood.
Life at Perro Caliente was rough. At nearly 9,000 feet, the thin air left many visitors wheezing. “For the first few days there,” Serber later wrote, “any physical task left one gasping for breath.” Five years after the Oppenheimer brothers had first taken a lease out on the ranch, the cabin was still sparsely furnished, with simple wooden chairs, a sofa in front of the fireplace, a Navajo rug on the floor. Frank had run a pipe from a spring above the cabin, so now there was running water. But that was it. Serber soon realized that for Oppie the ranch was merely a place to sleep in between long, grueling rides into the wilderness. He recounts that once, on a night ride with his host in a thunderstorm, they came to a fork in the trail. Oppie said, “That way it’s seven miles home, but this way it’s only a little longer, and it’s much more beautiful!”
Despite the hardships, the Serbers spent a part of each summer from 1935 to 1941 at Perro Caliente. Oppenheimer had many other visitors to the ranch. Once he ran into the German-born physicist Hans Bethe hiking in the region and persuaded him to stop by. Other physicists, among them Ernest Lawrence, George Placzek, Walter Elsasser and Victor Weisskopf, all spent a few days there. All his visitors were surprised by how much their seemingly fragile friend clearly relished the spartan conditions.
On occasion, Robert’s expeditions verged on the truly calamitous. Once he and three friends—George and Else Uhlenbeck and Roger Lewis— camped overnight at Lake Katherine below the east side of a peak called Santa Fe Baldy. Owing to the high altitude, Robert and the two other men suddenly came down with symptoms of altitude sickness. They made it through a freezing night in sleeping bags and woke up the next morning to discover that two of the horses had run off. Robert nevertheless persuaded the men to climb North Truchas Peak, the highest peak, at 13,024 feet, in the southern Sangre de Cristo range. They scaled the summit in a thunderstorm and then had to walk back sopping wet, all the way to Los Pinos, where Katherine Page served them all stiff drinks. The next morning, the two horses that had deserted them reappeared and Else laughed at the sight of Oppenheimer, clad in pink pajamas, chasing them back into the corral.
UNTIL ABOUT 1934, Oppenheimer displayed little interest in current events or politics. He was not so much ignorant as he was indifferent, and he certainly was not politically active. But later—at a time when he wished to highlight his political naïveté—he cultivated the myth that he was oblivious to politics and practical affairs: he claimed that he owned neither a radio nor a telephone and that he never read a newspaper or magazine. And he liked to tell the story that he first heard about the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, months after the event. He said he never cast a vote until the 1936 presidential election. “To many of my friends,” he testified in 1954, “my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me for being too much of a highbrow. I was interested in man and his experience; I was deeply interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society.” Years later, Robert Serber observed that this self-portrait of Oppenheimer as “an unworldly, withdrawn un-esthetic person who didn’t know what was going on—all [this was] exactly the opposite of what he was really like.”
At Berkeley, Oppenheimer surrounded himself with friends and colleagues who took an intense interest in political and social issues. From the autumn of 1931, his landlady at 2665 Shasta Road was Mary Ellen Washburn, a tall, commanding woman who wore colorful, full-length batik dresses and loved to socialize. Her husband, John Washburn, was an accountant who may also have taught economics at the university. Their home was a longstanding social hub for Berkeley’s intellectuals—and, like Mary Ellen herself, many of these people had strong sympathies with the political left. The FBI would later conclude that Mary Ellen was an “active member of the Communist Party in Alameda County.”
A young professor of French literature named Haakon Chevalier had been attending parties hosted by the Washburns since the 1920s. The Serbers came to these parties, as did a beautiful young medical student named Jean Tatlock. It was only natural that Oppie, a bachelor living downstairs, dropped by for these social occasions. He was always gracious and usually charmed everyone. But one evening, while he was discoursing at length about a particular poem, the guests heard John Washburn, by now deep in his cups, mutter, “Never since the Greek tragedies has there been heard the unrelieved pomposity of a Robert Oppenheimer.”
“We were not political at all in any overt way,” recalled Melba Phillips. Oppie once remarked to Leo Nedelsky, “I know three people who are interested in politics. Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” But after January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, politics began to intrude into Oppenheimer’s life. By April of that year, German Jewish professors were being summarily dismissed from their jobs. A year later, in the spring of 1934, Oppenheimer received a circular letter soliciting funds to support German physicists as they attempted to emigrate from Nazi Germany. He immediately agreed to earmark for this purpose three percent of his salary (about $100 a year) for two years. Ironically, one of the refugees who may have been assisted by this fund was Robert’s former professor in Göttingen, Dr. James Franck. When Hitler first came to power, Franck, who had won two Iron Crosses during World War I, was one of the few Jewish physicists permitted to keep his post. But a year later he was forced into exile when he refused to dismiss other Jews from their jobs. By 1935, he was teaching physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Similarly, Max Born was forced to flee Göttingen in 1933 and ended up teaching in England.
The news from Germany was certainly grim. But by 1934, it would have been difficult for anyone to ignore the political turmoil right in Berkeley’s backyard. Almost five years of depression had impoverished millions of ordinary citizens. Early that year, labor strife turned violent. In late January, 3,000 lettuce pickers in the Imperial Valley went on strike. Acting on behalf of employers, police arrested hundreds of workers. The strike was quickly broken, and wages fell from 20 cents to 15 cents an hour. Then, on May 9, 1934, more than 12,000 longshoremen set up picket lines at ports up and down the West Coast. By the end of June, the dock strike had virtually strangled the economies of California, Oregon and Washington. Early in July, authorities attempted to open the port of San Francisco; police lobbed tear gas bombs at thousands of longshoremen and a riot ensued. After four days of running skirmishes, several policemen fired into a crowd; three men were wounded and two of them died. July 5, 1934, became known as “Bloody Thursday.” That same day, the Republican governor ordered the California National Guard to seize control of the streets.
Eleven days later, on July 16, San Francisco labor unions called a general strike. For four days the city was paralyzed. Federal mediators at last stepped in, and by July 30 the largest strike in the history of the West Coast ended. The longshoremen returned to work having achieved almost none of their wage demands, but it was clear to all that the unions had achieved a major political victory. The strike had garnered popular sympathy for the longs
horemen’s plight and greatly strengthened the union movement. On August 28, 1934, in a sign that the political atmosphere had shifted significantly to the left, the radical writer Upton Sinclair stunned the California establishment by decisively winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Although Sinclair lost the general election—partly as a result of intense slander and fear-mongering on the part of the Republicans—California politics would never be the same.
Such dramatic events could not go unnoticed by Oppenheimer or his students. Berkeley itself was split between critics and supporters of the strike. When the longshoremen initially walked out on May 9, 1934, a conservative member of the physics faculty, Leonard Loeb, recruited “Cal” (University of California, Berkeley) football players to act as strikebreakers. Significantly, Oppenheimer later invited some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, to come along with him to a longshoremen’s rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. “We were sitting up high in a balcony,” recalled Serber, “and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, ‘Strike! Strike! Strike!’ ” Afterwards, Oppie went to the apartment of a friend, Estelle Caen, where he was introduced to Harry Bridges, the charismatic longshoreman union leader.
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1935, Frank Oppenheimer returned from two years of study at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and accepted a tuition scholarship to complete his graduate work at Caltech. Robert’s old friend Charles Lauritsen agreed to serve as Frank’s thesis adviser. Frank immediately plunged into research on beta ray spectroscopy, a topic he had already studied at Cavendish. “It was very nice to be a beginning graduate student knowing what you wanted to do,” Frank recalled.
