Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Kitty returned to America the twenty-seven-year-old widow of a CP war hero. The American Communist Party made sure that his sacrifice would be remembered. Party chief Earl Browder wrote that Dallet had joined those who had given “themselves completely to the task of stopping fascism.” One of the Party’s few genuine Ivy League communists, Dallet had become a martyr of the working class. With Kitty’s permission, in 1938 the Party published Letters from Spain, a collection of Joe’s letters to his wife.

  Kitty spent a couple of months with the Nelsons in their cramped apartment in New York City. She saw some of Joe’s old friends, all of whom were Party members. Kitty herself later told government investigators that she had at some point met as acquaintances such well-known Communist Party officials as Earl Browder, John Gates, Gus Hall, John Steuben and John Williamson. But she said she had ceased to be a member of the Party when she left Youngstown in June 1936 and stopped paying Party dues. “She seemed to be in a very unsettled state,” Margaret Nelson recalled. “I was under the impression that she was under a great emotional strain.” Other friends testify that Kitty remained deeply affected by Dallet’s death for a long time.

  And then, in early 1938, she visited a friend in Philadelphia and decided to stay, enrolling in the University of Pennsylvania for the spring semester. She studied chemistry, math and biology and seemed ready, finally, to get her college degree. Sometime that spring or summer, she ran into a British-born doctor, Richard Stewart Harrison, whom she had known as a teenager. Harrison, a tall, handsome man with piercing blue eyes, had practiced medicine in England, and was then finishing an internship to become licensed in the United States. Older and apolitical, Harrison seemed to offer Kitty something she now desperately wanted: stability. Making another of her impetuous decisions, Kitty married Harrison on November 23, 1938. This marriage, she later said, was “singularly unsuccessful from the start.” She told a friend that it was “an impossible marriage” and that she “was ready to leave him long before she did.” Harrison soon left for Pasadena, where he had a residency lined up. Kitty stayed in Philadelphia and in June 1939 obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree, with honors in botany. Two weeks later, she agreed to follow Harrison to California and maintain the pretense of a stable marriage because, she said, “of his conviction that a divorce might ruin a rising young doctor.”

  At twenty-nine, Kitty finally seemed ready to take charge of her own life. Although seemingly locked into a dead-end marriage, she now was determined to get on with her own career. Her main interest was botany, and that summer she won a research fellowship to begin graduate studies at the University of California’s Los Angeles campus. Her ambition was to earn a doctorate and, perhaps, a professorship in botanical studies.

  In August 1939, she and Harrison attended the garden party in Pasadena where she met Oppenheimer. Kitty began her graduate studies at UCLA that autumn, but she did not forget the tall young man with such bright blue eyes. Sometime over the next few months they met again and began to date—and, though Kitty was still married, they made no effort to conceal the affair. They were frequently seen driving in Robert’s Chrysler coupe. “He would ride up [near my office] with this cute young girl,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelman, a physician who taught at Berkeley. “She was very attractive. She was tiny, skinny as a rail, just like he was. They’d give each other a fond kiss and go their separate ways. Robert always had that porkpie hat on.”

  In the spring of 1940, Oppenheimer—rather audaciously—invited Richard Harrison and Kitty to spend some time that summer at Perro Caliente. At the last moment, Dr. Harrison later told the FBI, he decided he could not go, but encouraged Kitty to go anyway. As it happened, Bob and Charlotte Serber had been invited by Oppie to come to the ranch at the same time and when they drove into Berkeley from Urbana, Illinois—where Serber had been teaching—Oppie explained that he had invited the Harrisons but Richard couldn’t make it. “Kitty might come alone,” he said. “You could bring her with you. I’ll leave it up to you. But if you do it might have serious consequences.” Kitty went with the Serbers eagerly—and stayed a full two months on the ranch.

  Just a day or two after her arrival, Kitty and Robert—she always insisted on calling him Robert—rode horses to Katherine Page’s dude ranch at Los Pinos. They spent the night and then rode back the next morning. They were followed a few hours later by Page—the woman whom young Oppenheimer had been so infatuated with in the summer of 1922—who mischievously presented Kitty with her nightgown, which she explained had been found under Robert’s pillow at Los Pinos.

  At the end of the summer, Oppenheimer phoned Dr. Harrison to tell him that his wife was pregnant. The two men agreed that the thing to do was for Harrison to divorce Kitty so that Oppenheimer could marry her. It was all very civilized. Harrison told the FBI that “he and the Oppenheimers were still on good terms and that he realized that they all had modern views concerning sex.”

  Even though Bob Serber was a witness to the passionate affair of that summer of 1940, he was still astonished in October when he heard from Oppie that he was marrying. When told the news, he wasn’t sure if Oppenheimer had said his prospective bride was Jean or Kitty. It could have been either. Oppenheimer had walked off with another man’s wife—and some of his friends were genuinely scandalized. Oppie was not a womanizer, but he was the kind of man who was strongly attracted to women who were attracted to him. Kitty had been irresistible.

  One evening that autumn of 1940, Robert happened to share a platform with Steve Nelson at a Berkeley fundraiser on behalf of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Newly arrived in San Francisco, Nelson had never heard of Oppenheimer. As the featured speaker, Oppenheimer said the fascist victory in Spain had led directly to the outbreak of general war in Europe. He argued that those like Nelson who had served in Spain had fought a delaying action.

  Afterwards, Oppenheimer approached Nelson, and with a broad smile said, “I’m going to marry a friend of yours, Steve.” Nelson couldn’t think who that could be. So Robert explained, “I’m going to marry Kitty.”

  “Kitty Dallet!” Nelson exclaimed. He had lost touch with her since her stay with him and Margaret in New York. “She’s back there, sitting in the hall,” Oppenheimer said, and he motioned to her to come up. The two old friends hugged and agreed to get together. Soon afterwards, the Nelsons came to the Oppenheimers’ for a picnic dinner. Sometime that autumn, Kitty moved to Reno, Nevada, for the required residency of six weeks, and there, on November 1, 1940, she obtained a divorce decree. That very day she married Robert in Virginia City, Nevada. A court janitor and a local clerk signed the marriage certificate as witnesses. By the time the newlyweds returned to Berkeley, Kitty was wearing a maternity dress.

  At the end of November, Margaret Nelson phoned Kitty to say that she had just given birth to a daughter, and that they had named the child Josie, in honor of Joe Dallet. Kitty immediately invited the Nelsons to visit and use the spare bedroom in their new house. Over the next couple of years, the Nelsons visited the Oppenheimer household on numerous occasions, although the visits gradually grew less frequent. In later years, their children would play together. “I also saw Robert at Berkeley now and then,” Nelson wrote in his memoirs, “because I was responsible for working with people from the university, getting them to conduct classes and discussions.” They also had one-on-one meetings. An FBI wiretap, for instance, shows that Oppenheimer met with Nelson on Sunday, October 5, 1941, apparently to pass him a check for $100, earmarked as a donation for striking farm workers. But the relationship went far beyond political transactions. When Josie Nelson turned two in November 1942, Oppenheimer surprised her mother by turning up on their doorstep, bearing a gift for the child. Margaret was “astounded” and touched by this typical act of kindness. “With all of his brilliance,” she thought, “there were very strong human qualities.”

  Though pregnant, Kitty continued her biology studies and insisted to her friends that she still intended to make a professional ca
reer for herself as a botanist. “Kitty was very excited about the fact that she was going back to school,” Maggie Nelson said. “She was very much taken up with that.” But despite their common interest in science, Kitty and Robert were temperamentally poles apart. “He was gentle, mild,” recalled one friend who knew them both. “She was strident, assertive, aggressive. But that’s often what makes a good marriage, the opposites.”

  Most of Robert’s relatives were put off by Kitty. Plain-spoken Jackie Oppenheimer always thought she was “a bitch” and resented the way she thought Kitty cut Robert off from his friends. Decades later she vented her animosity: “She could not stand sharing Robert with anyone,” recalled Jackie. “Kitty was a schemer. If Kitty wanted anything, she would always get it. . . . She was a phony. All her political convictions were phony, all her ideas were borrowed. Honestly, she’s one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life.”

  Kitty certainly had a sharp tongue and easily antagonized some of Robert’s friends, but some thought her “very smart.” Chevalier considered her intelligence more intuitive than astute or profound. And as their friend Bob Serber recalled, “Everybody was talking about Kitty being a communist.” But it was also true that she had a stabilizing influence on Robert’s life. “Her career,” Serber said, “was advancing Robert’s career, which was the overwhelming, controlling influence on her from then on.”

  SOON AFTER THEIR HASTY WEDDING, Oppie and Kitty rented a large house at 10 Kenilworth Court, north of the campus. After selling his aging Chrysler coupe, he presented his bride with a new Cadillac; they nicknamed it “Bombsight.” Kitty persuaded her husband to dress in a style more suited to his station in life. And so he began for the first time to wear tweed jackets and more expensive suits. But he kept his brown porkpie hat. “A certain stuffiness overcame me,” he later confessed of married life. At this point in their marriage, Kitty was an excellent cook, and so they entertained frequently, inviting close friends like the Serbers, the Chevaliers and other Berkeley colleagues. Their liquor cabinet was always well stocked. One evening Maggie Nelson recalled a discussion in which Kitty confessed that “their bill for liquor was even higher than their bill for food.”

  One evening early in 1941, John Edsall, Robert’s friend from his Harvard and Cambridge years, dropped by for dinner. Now a professor of chemistry, Edsall hadn’t seen Robert in over a decade. He was startled by the change. The introspective boy he had known in Cambridge and Corsica was now a figure of commanding personality. “I felt that he obviously was a far stronger person,” Edsall recalled, “that the inner crises that he had been through in those earlier years he had obviously worked out and achieved a great deal of inner resolution of them. I felt a sense of confidence and authority, although still tension and [a] lack of inner ease in some respects . . . he could reach and see intuitively things that most people would be able to follow only very slowly and hesitatingly, if at all. This was not only in physics, but in other things as well.”

  By then, Robert was about to become a father. Their child was born on May 12, 1941, in Pasadena, where Oppenheimer was on his regular spring teaching schedule at Caltech. They christened the boy Peter—but Robert impishly nicknamed him “Pronto.” Kitty told some of her friends, tongue in cheek, that the eight-pound baby was premature. It had been a difficult pregnancy for Kitty, and that spring Oppenheimer himself was suffering from a case of infectious mononucleosis. By June, however, they had both recovered their health enough to invite the Chevaliers to visit them. They arrived in mid-June and spent a week catching up with their old friends. Haakon had recently befriended the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and spent the days sitting in Oppie’s garden working on a translation of Dalí’s book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.

  A few weeks later, Oppie and Kitty approached the Chevaliers to ask an enormous favor. Kitty badly needed a rest, Robert explained. Would the Chevaliers take two-month-old Peter, along with his German nanny, while he and Kitty escaped to Perro Caliente for a month? Haakon saw the request as a confirmation of his own feeling that Oppie was his closest, most intimate friend. “Deeply flattered,” the Chevaliers promptly agreed and kept Peter for not one but two full months, until Kitty and Oppenheimer returned for the fall semester. This rather unusual arrangement, however, may have had long-term consequences for mother and child. Kitty never properly bonded with Peter. Even a year later, friends noticed that it was always Robert who took them into the baby’s room and showed him off with obvious pride and delight. “Kitty seemed quite uninterested,” said this old friend.

  Robert felt reinvigorated almost as soon as he arrived at Perro Caliente. That first week he and Kitty found the energy to nail new shingles on the cabin’s roof. They went for long rides in the mountains. One day Kitty showed her spunk by cantering her horse in a meadow while standing up in the saddle. Robert was pleased when in late July he ran into his old friend Hans Bethe, the Cornell physicist he had first met in Göttingen, and persuaded him to visit them at the ranch. Unfortunately, soon afterwards Robert was trampled by a horse he was trying to corral for Bethe to ride and had to have X rays taken at the hospital in Santa Fe. In more ways than one, it was a memorable visit.

  Upon their return, the Oppenheimers retrieved baby Peter and moved into a newly purchased home at Number One, Eagle Hill, in the hills overlooking Berkeley. Earlier that summer, Robert had briskly toured the house once and then immediately agreed to pay the full asking price of $22,500— plus another $5,300 for two adjoining lots. A Spanish-style, one-story villa with whitewashed walls and a red-tiled roof, their new home stood on a knoll surrounded on three sides by a steep wooded canyon. They had a stunning view of the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. The large living room had redwood floors, twelve-foot-high beamed ceilings and windows on three sides. An image of a ferocious lion was carved into a massive stone fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined each end of the living room. French doors opened onto a lovely garden framed by live oak trees. The house came with a well-equipped kitchen and a separate apartment over the garage for guests. It was already partially furnished, and Barbara Chevalier helped Kitty with some of the interior decorating. Everyone thought it a charming, well-designed structure. Oppenheimer called it home for nearly a decade.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “We Were Pulling the New Deal to the Left”

  I had had about enough of the Spanish cause, and there were other and more pressing crises in the world.

  ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

  ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1939, Luis W. Alvarez—a promising young physicist who worked closely with Ernest Lawrence— was sitting in a barber’s chair, reading the San Francisco Chronicle. Suddenly, he read a wire service story reporting that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had successfully demonstrated that the uranium nucleus could be split into two or more parts. They had achieved fission by bombarding uranium, one of the heaviest of the elements, with neutrons. Stunned by this development, Alvarez “stopped the barber in mid-snip, and ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word.” When he told Oppenheimer the news, his reply was, “That’s impossible.” Oppenheimer then went to the blackboard and proceeded to prove mathematically that fission couldn’t happen. Someone must have made a mistake.

  But the next day, Alvarez successfully repeated the experiment in his laboratory. “I invited Robert over to see the very small natural alpha-particle pulses on our oscilloscope and the tall, spiking fission pulses, twenty-five times larger. In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked. . . .”

  Writing his Caltech colleague Willie Fowler a few days later, Oppie remarked, “The U business is unbelievable. We first saw it in the papers, wired for more dope, and have had a lot of reports since. . . . Many points are still unclear:
where are the short lived high energy betas one would expect? . . . In how many ways does the U come apart. At random, as one might guess, or only in certain ways? . . . It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way.” Here was a significant discovery, and he could hardly contain his excitement. At the same time, he also saw its deadly implications. “So I think it really not too improbable that a ten cm [centimeter] cube of uranium deuteride (one should have something to slow the neutrons without capturing them) might very well blow itself to hell,” he wrote his old friend George Uhlenbeck.

  Coincidentally, that same week, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student named Joseph Weinberg found his way to Room 219 in LeConte Hall and knocked on the door. Cocky and opinionated, Weinberg had been sent packing in mid-year by his physics professor at Wisconsin, Gregory Breit, who told him that Berkeley was one of the few places in the world where “a person as crazy as you could be acceptable.” He belonged with Oppenheimer, Breit had said, ignoring Weinberg’s protests that Oppenheimer’s papers in Physical Review were the only articles that he couldn’t understand.

  “There was a tremendous hubbub behind the door,” Weinberg recalled, “so I knocked very loudly and after a moment somebody sprang out with a great puff of smoke and noise as the door opened and closed again.”

  “What the hell do you want?” the man asked Weinberg.