by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Robert was still dividing his time between Berkeley and Caltech, spending the late spring every year in Pasadena, where he stayed with his good friends Richard and Ruth Tolman. The Tolmans had built a whitewashed Spanish-style house near the campus, and in the backyard were a lush garden and a one-bedroom guest house which Robert occupied whenever he was in town. Robert had met the Tolmans in the spring of 1929, and that summer the couple had visited the Oppenheimer ranch in New Mexico. Robert would later describe the friendship as “very close.” He admired Tolman’s “wisdom and broad interests, broad in physics and broad throughout.” But he also admired Tolman’s “extremely intelligent and quite lovely wife.” Ruth was then a clinical psychologist completing her graduate training. For Oppenheimer, the Tolmans “made a sweet island in the Southern California horror.” In the evenings, Tolman often hosted informal dinners attended by Frank and other Oppenheimer friends like Linus Pauling, Charlie Lauritsen, Robert and Charlotte Serber, and Edwin and Ruth Uehling. Often Frank and Ruth would play the flute.
In 1936, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously to obtain Serber an appointment in the Berkeley physics department as his research assistant. The department chairman, Raymond Birge, only very reluctantly agreed to allocate Serber a salary of $1,200 a year. Over the next two years, Oppie tried repeatedly to get Serber appointed to a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. But Birge stubbornly refused, writing another colleague that “one Jew in the department was enough.”
Oppenheimer was unaware of this remark at the time, but he was not unfamiliar with the sentiment. If anything, anti-Semitism in polite society was on the rise in America during the 1920s and ’30s. Many universities had followed Harvard’s lead in the early twenties and imposed restrictive quotas on the number of Jewish students. Elite law firms and social clubs in major cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco were segregated by both race and religion. The California establishment was no different on this score from the East Coast establishment. Still, if Oppenheimer could not aspire to become, like his friend Ernest Lawrence, a part of California’s establishment, he was happy where he was. “I had decided where to make my bed,” he recalled. And it was a bed he was “content” to be in.
Indeed, never once in the 1930s did he revisit Europe, or even, aside from his summers in New Mexico and trips to the Ann Arbor summer seminar, leave California. When Harvard proposed to double his salary if he moved east, he brushed the offer aside. Twice in 1934, the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton tried to lure him away from Berkeley, but Oppenheimer was resolute: “I could be of absolutely no use at such a place. . . .” He wrote his brother: “I turned down these seductions, thinking more highly of my present jobs, where it is a little less difficult for me to believe in my usefulness, and where the good California wine consoles for the hardness of physics and the poor powers of the human mind.” He thought he “had not grown up, but had grown up a little.” His theoretical work was flourishing, in part because classes took up but five hours a week and that left him “a lot of time for physics and for a lot of other things. . . .” And then he met a woman who would change his life.
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
“In 1936 My Interests Began to Change”
Jean was Robert’s truest love. He loved her the most. He was devoted to her.
ROBERT SERBER
JEAN TATLOCK WAS ONLY TWENTY-TWO years old when Robert met her in the spring of 1936. They were introduced at a party hosted by Oppie’s landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, in the house on Shasta Road. Jean was finishing her first year at Stanford University School of Medicine, which was then located in San Francisco. That autumn, Oppenheimer recalled, he “began to court her, and we grew close to each other.”
Jean was a shapely woman with thick, dark curly hair, hazel-blue eyes with heavy black lashes and naturally red lips; some thought she looked “like an old Irish princess.” Five feet seven inches tall, she never weighed more than 128 pounds. She had but one tiny physical imperfection, a “sleeping” eyelid that drooped slightly as a result of a childhood accident. But even this barely perceptible flaw added to her allure. Her beauty captivated Robert, but so too did her shy melancholy. “Jean was very private about her despair,” a friend, Edith A. Jenkins, later wrote.
Robert knew her as the daughter of Berkeley’s eminent Chaucer scholar Professor John S. P. Tatlock, one of the few faculty members outside the physics department with whom he had a more than casual acquaintance. Over lunch at the Faculty Club, Tatlock was often dazzled by the knowledge of English literature displayed by this young physics professor. In turn, when Oppenheimer met Jean, he quickly realized that she had soaked up her father’s literary sensibilities. Jean favored the dark, morose verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She also loved the poems of John Donne—a passion that she passed on to Robert, who, years later, turned to Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” for inspiration in assigning the code name “Trinity” to the first test of an atomic bomb.
Jean owned a roadster that she often drove with the top down, singing in her fine contralto voice lyrics from Twelfth Night. A free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind, she was always the one person in the room, whatever the circumstances, who remained unforgettable. A college classmate at Vassar remembered her as “the most promising girl I ever knew, the only one of all that I saw around me in college that even then seemed touched with greatness.” Jean was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21, 1914, and she and her older brother, Hugh, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Berkeley. Her father had spent most of his career at Harvard, but after retiring, he began teaching at Berkeley. When Jean was ten, she began spending her summers on a Colorado dude ranch. A childhood friend and college classmate, Priscilla Robertson, would write in a “letter” addressed to Jean after her death, “You had a wise mother, who gentled you and never tried to break you, and yet who kept you from the dangers of your passionate kind of adolescence.”
Before she went to Vassar College in 1931, her parents allowed her a year off to travel in Europe. She stayed with a friend of her mother’s in Switzerland who was a devoted follower of Carl Jung. This family friend introduced Jean to the close-knit community of psychoanalysts centered around Freud’s former friend and rival. The Jungian school—with its emphasis on the idea of the collective human psyche—strongly appealed to the young Tatlock. By the time she left Switzerland, she was seriously interested in psychology.
At Vassar, she studied English literature and wrote for the college’s Literary Review. This daughter of an English scholar had spent much of her childhood listening to her parents reading aloud the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer. As a teenager, she had spent two full weeks at Stratford-on-Avon, seeing a performance of Shakespeare each night. Both her intellect and her stunning good looks intimidated her classmates; Jean always seemed mature beyond her years, “having gotten by nature and experience a depth that most girls don’t get until after graduation.”
She was also what would later be called, in irony, a “premature antifascist”—an early opponent of Mussolini and Hitler. When a professor gave her Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform, hoping that it might serve as a sobering antidote to her woolly-headed admiration of Russian communism, Jean confided to a friend, “I just wouldn’t want to go on living if I didn’t believe that in Russia everything is better.”
She spent 1933–34 at the University of California, Berkeley, taking premed courses, before graduating from Vassar in June 1935. A friend later wrote Tatlock: “It was this social conscience, added to your earlier contact with Jung, that made you want to be a doctor. . . .” While at Berkeley, she also found time to report and write for the Western Worker, the Pacific Coast organ of the Communist Party. A dues-paying Party member, Jean regularly attended two CP meetings a week. A year before she met Robert, Tatlock wrote Priscilla Robertson: “I find I am a complete Red when anything at all.” Her anger and passion were ea
sily aroused by the stories she encountered of social injustice and inequity. Her reporting for the Western Worker reinforced her outrage as she covered such incidents as the trial of three children arrested for selling copies of the Western Worker on the streets of San Francisco, and the trial of twenty-five lumber-mill workers accused of staging a riot in Eureka, California.
Still, like many American communists, Jean was not a very good ideologue. “I find it impossible to be an ardent Communist,” she wrote Robertson, “which means breathing, talking and acting it, all day and all night.” She aspired, moreover, to become a Freudian psychoanalyst, and at the time the Communist Party insisted that Freud and Marx were irreconcilable. This intellectual schism seems not to have fazed Tatlock, but probably had much to do with her on-again, off-again ardor for the Party. (As an adolescent, she had rebelled against the religious dogma she had been taught by the Episcopal Church; she told a girlfriend that every day she scrubbed her forehead to wipe away the spot where she had been christened. She hated any form of religious “claptrap.”) Unlike many of her Party comrades, Jean still had “a feeling for the sanctity and sense of the individual soul,” even as she expressed exasperation with those of her friends who shared an interest in psychology but scorned political action: “. . . their interest in psychoanalysis amounts to a disbelief in any other positive form of social action.” For her, psychological theory was like expert surgery, “a therapeutic method for specific disorders.”
Jean Tatlock, in sum, was a complicated woman certain to hold the interest of a physicist with an acute sense of the psychological. She was, according to a mutual friend, “worthy of Robert in every way. They had much in common.”
AFTER JEAN AND OPPIE began dating that autumn, it quickly became clear to everyone that this was a very intense relationship. “All of us were a bit envious,” one of Jean’s closest friends, Edith Arnstein Jenkins, later wrote. “I for one had admired him [Oppenheimer] from a distance. His precocity and brilliance already legend, he walked his jerky walk, feet turned out, a Jewish Pan with his blue eyes and his wild Einstein hair. And when we came to know him at the parties for Loyalist Spain, we knew how those eyes would hold one’s own, how he would listen as few others listen and punctuate his attentiveness with ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ and how when he was deep in thought he would pace so that all the young physicist-apostles who surrounded him walked the same jerky, pronated walk and punctuated their listening with ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ ”
Jean Tatlock was well aware of Oppenheimer’s eccentricities. Perhaps because she herself felt life to the bone, she could empathize with a man whose own passions were so odd. “You must remember,” she told a friend, “that he was lecturing to learned societies when he was seven, that he never had a childhood, and so is different from the rest of us.” Like Oppenheimer, she was decidedly introspective. She had, as noted, already decided to become a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.
Prior to meeting Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s students noticed that he had been seeing many women. “There were a half dozen at least,” recalled Bob Serber. But with Tatlock, things were different. Oppie kept her to himself and rarely brought her into his circle of friends in the physics department. His friends only saw them together at the irregular parties hosted by Mary Ellen Washburn. Serber recalled Tatlock as “very good-looking and quite composed in any social gathering.” Politically, Serber recognized that she was decidedly “left-wing—more so than the rest of us.” And though she was obviously “a very intelligent girl,” he could see that she had a dark side. “I don’t know whether it was a manic-depressive case or what, but she did have these terrible depressions.” And when Jean was down, so was Oppie. “He’d be depressed some days,” Serber said, “because he was having troubles with Jean.”
The relationship nevertheless survived these episodes for more than three years. “Jean was Robert’s truest love,” a friend would later say. “He loved her the most. He was devoted to her.” And so perhaps it was only natural that Jean’s activism and social conscience awakened in Robert the sense of social responsibility that had been so often discussed at the Ethical Culture School. He soon became active in numerous Popular Front causes.
“Beginning in late 1936,” Oppenheimer would explain to his interrogators in 1954, “my interests began to change. . . . I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there [an aunt and several cousins], and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”
For a time, he became particularly interested in the plight of migrant farm workers. Avram Yedidia, a neighbor of one of Oppenheimer’s students, was working for the California State Relief Administration in 1937–38, when he became acquainted with the Berkeley physicist. “He manifested deep interest in the plight of the unemployed,” Yedidia recalled, “and showered us with questions on work with migrants who came to this area from the dust bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas. . . . Our perception then—which I feel was shared by Oppenheimer—had been that our work was vital and, in the language of today, ‘relevant’ while his was esoteric and remote.”
The Depression had caused many Americans to reconsider their political outlook. Nowhere was this truer than in California. In 1930, three out of every four California voters were registered Republicans; eight years later, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a margin of two to one. In 1934, the muckraking writer Upton Sinclair nearly won the governorship with his radical platform to End Poverty in California (EPIC). That year The Nation editorialized: “If ever a revolution was due, it was due in California. Nowhere else has the battle between labor and capital been so widespread and bitter, and the casualties so large; nowhere else has there been such a flagrant denial of the personal liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. . . .” In 1938 another reformer, Culbert L. Olson, a Democrat, was elected governor with the open support of the state Communist Party. Olson had campaigned under the slogan of a “united front against fascism.”
Although the political left as a whole in California was momentarily mainstream, the California Communist Party was still a tiny minority, even on the various campuses of the University of California. In Alameda County, where Berkeley was located, the Party claimed between five hundred and six hundred members, including a hundred longshoremen working in the Oakland shipyards. California communists were generally thought to be a voice for moderation in the national Party. With only 2,500 members in 1936, the state Party grew to more than 6,000 by 1938. Nationwide the Communist Party (USA) had approximately 75,000 members in 1938, but many of these new recruits remained less than a year. All told, during the 1930s, about 250,000 Americans affiliated themselves with the CPUSA for at least a short time.
For many New Deal Democrats, no stigma was attached to those who were involved in the CPUSA and its numerous cultural and educational activities. Indeed, in some circles the Popular Front carried a certain cachet. Numerous intellectuals who never joined the Party nevertheless were willing to attend a writers’ congress sponsored by the CP, or volunteer to teach workers at a “People’s Educational Center.” So it was not particularly unusual for a young Berkeley academic like Oppenheimer to savor in this way a bit of the intellectual and political life of Depression-era California. “I liked the new sense of companionship,” he later testified, “and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.”
It was Tatlock who “opened the door” for Robert into this world of politics. Her friends became his friends. These included Communist Party members Kenneth May (a graduate student at Berkeley), John Pitman (a reporter for People’s World), Aubrey Grossman (a lawyer), Rudy Lambert and Edith Arnstein. One of Tatlock’s best friends was H
annah Peters, a German-born medical doctor whom she had met at Stanford medical school. Dr. Peters, who soon became Oppenheimer’s physician, was married to Bernard Peters (formerly, Pietrkowski), another refugee from Nazi Germany.
Born in Posen in 1910, Bernard studied electrical engineering in Munich until Hitler came to power in 1933. Though he later denied being a Communist Party member, he did attend several communist rallies as a spectator, and on one occasion he was present at an anti-Nazi demonstration in which two people were injured. Soon he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau, an early Nazi concentration camp. After three terrifying months, he was transferred to a Munich prison—and then, without explanation, released. (In another version of this story, Peters managed to escape from the prison.) He then spent several months traveling at night on a bicycle through southern Germany and across the Alps to Italy. There he found his Berlin-born girlfriend, Hannah Lilien, age twenty-two, who had fled to Padua to study medicine. In April 1934, the couple immigrated to the United States. They were married in New York on November 20, 1934, and, after Hannah received her medical degree in 1937 at Long Island Medical School in New York, they moved to the San Francisco Bay area. During a stint at Stanford University School of Medicine, Hannah worked on research projects with Dr. Thomas Addis, a friend and mentor of Jean Tatlock’s. By the time Oppenheimer met the Peterses through Jean, Bernard was working as a longshoreman.
In 1934, Peters had written a 3,000-word account of the horrors he had witnessed in Dachau. He described in sickening detail the torture and summary execution of individual prisoners. One prisoner, he reported, “died in my hands a few hours after the beating. All skin was removed from his back, his muscles were hanging down in shreds.” Peters no doubt shared his graphic account of Nazi atrocities with his friends when he arrived on the West Coast. Whether Oppenheimer read Peters’ report on Dachau or merely heard him talk about it, he must have been deeply moved by these stories. There was a note of authenticity and worldliness in Peters’ extraordinary life. Another of Oppenheimer’s graduate students, Philip Morrison, always thought Peters was “a little different from most of us, more mature, marked with a special seriousness and intensity . . . his experience went far beyond ours. . . . He had seen and felt the barbarous darkness that mantled Nazi Germany, [and] had worked among the longshoremen in San Francisco Bay.”
