by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Los Alamos always had an unusually high percentage of single men and women, and naturally, the Army had little success in keeping the sexes apart. Robert Wilson, the youngest of the lab’s group leaders, was chairman of the Town Council when the military police ordered the closing of one of the women’s dormitories and the dismissal of its female residents. A tearful group of young women, supported by a determined group of bachelors, appeared before the Council to appeal the decision. Wilson later recalled what happened: “It seems that the girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the basic needs of our young men, and at a price. All understandable to the Army until disease reared its ugly head, hence their interference.” In the event, the Town Council decided that the number of girls plying their trade was few; health measures were taken and the dormitory was kept open.
EVERY FEW WEEkS, residents of The Hill were permitted to spend an afternoon in Santa Fe, shopping. Some would also take the occasion to drop by the bar at La Fonda for a drink. Oppenheimer frequently spent the night in Dorothy McKibbin’s beautiful, thick-walled adobe home on the Old Santa Fe Trail. In 1936, McKibbin had spent $10,000 to build a classic Hispanic ranch house on an acre and a half of land just south of Santa Fe. With its carved Spanish doors and wraparound porch, the house looked as if it had been there for many decades. Dorothy filled it with local antique furniture and Navajo rugs. As the project’s “gatekeeper,” she held a “Q” (top-level) security badge, and so Oppenheimer frequently used her home to hold sensitive meetings in Santa Fe. McKibbin loved playing “den mother” on these occasions—but she also treasured the many quiet evenings she spent alone with Oppenheimer, cooking his favorite dinner of steak and asparagus, while he mixed “the best dry martinis you ever had.” For Oppenheimer, McKibbin’s home was a refuge from the constant surveillance he lived with on The Hill. “Dorothy loved Robert Oppenheimer,” David Hawkins later said. “He was her special one, and she, his.”
WHILE MOST Los Alamos spouses adapted reasonably well to the stark climate, isolation and rhythms of the mesa, Kitty increasingly felt trapped. She wanted desperately what Los Alamos could give her husband—but as a bright woman with ambitions to be a botanist, she felt stymied professionally. After a year of doing blood counts for Dr. Hempelmann, she quit. She also felt isolated socially. If she was in a good mood, she could be charming and warm with friends or strangers. But everyone sensed she had a sharp edge. Often she seemed tense and unhappy. At social gatherings she could make small talk, but, as one friend put it, “She wanted to make big talk.” Joseph Rotblat, a young Polish physicist, saw her occasionally at parties or in the Oppenheimer home for dinner. “She seemed to be very much aloof,” Rotblat said, “a haughty person.”
Oppenheimer’s secretary, Priscilla Greene Duffield, had an ideal perch from which to observe Kitty. “She was a very intense, very intelligent, very vital kind of person,” Duffield recalled. But she also thought Kitty was “very difficult to handle.” Pat Sherr, a neighbor and the wife of another physicist, felt overwhelmed by Kitty’s meteoric personality. “She was outwardly very gay and exuded some warmth,” recalled Sherr. “I later realized that it wasn’t any real warmth for people, but it was part of her terrible need for attention, for affection.”
Like Robert, Kitty tended to shower people with gifts. When Sherr complained one day about the kerosene stove in her cabin, Kitty gave her an old electric stove. “She would give me gifts and envelop me totally,” Sherr said. Other women found her abrupt manner to verge on insulting. But so, too, did many men, even though Kitty seemed to prefer the company of men. “She’s also one of the very few people I’ve heard men—and very nice men—call a bitch,” recalled Duffield. But it was also clear to Duffield that her boss trusted Kitty and turned to her for advice about all manner of issues. “He would give her judgment as much weight as that of anyone whose advice he chose to ask,” she said. Kitty never hesitated to interrupt her husband, but, recalled one close friend, “It never seemed to bother him.”
EARLY IN 1945, Priscilla Greene Duffield had a baby and Oppenheimer suddenly needed a new secretary. Groves offered him in turn several seasoned secretaries, but Oppenheimer rejected them all, until one day he told Groves that he wanted Anne T. Wilson, a pretty blond, blue-eyed twenty-year-old whom he had met in Groves’ office in Washington. “He [Oppenheimer] stopped at my desk—which was right outside the general’s door—and we made conversation,” Wilson said of Oppenheimer. “I was just practically dumbstruck because here was this legendary character and part of his legend was that all women fell on their faces in front of him.”
Flattered, Wilson agreed to move out to Los Alamos. Before she went, however, John Lansdale, Groves’ counterintelligence chief, approached her with an offer: He would pay her $200 a month if she sent him just one letter each month reporting on what she saw in Oppenheimer’s office. Shocked, Wilson flatly refused. “I told him,” she later said, “ ‘Lansdale, I want you just to pretend you never even mentioned such a thing to me.’ ” Groves had assured her, she said, that once she moved out to Los Alamos, her loyalties were to be to Oppenheimer. But, perhaps not surprisingly, she learned after the war that Groves had ordered that she be placed under surveillance whenever she left Los Alamos—after working in his office, he believed, Anne Wilson knew too much to be left unwatched.
Upon arriving in Los Alamos, Wilson learned that Oppenheimer was sick in bed with chickenpox, accompanied by a 104-degree fever. “Our thin, ascetic Director,” wrote the wife of another physicist, “looked like a 15th century portrait of a saint with his fever-stricken eyes peering out from a face checkered with red patches and covered by a straggling beard.” Soon after he recovered, Wilson was invited over to the Oppenheimer home for drinks. Her host served her one, and then another, of his famous martinis, and since she was not yet acclimated to the altitude, the powerful concoction quickly went to her head. Wilson remembered having to be escorted back to her room in the nurses’ quarters.
Anne Wilson was fascinated by her charismatic new boss and deeply admired him. But at twenty, she was not attracted romantically to Oppenheimer, a married man twice her age in 1945. Still, Anne was a beautiful young woman, smart and sassy—and people began to talk on The Hill about the director’s new secretary. Several weeks after her arrival, Anne began receiving a single rose in a vase, delivered every three days from a florist in Santa Fe. The mysterious roses came without a card. “I was totally baffled, so I went around in my childlike way, saying, ‘I’ve got a secret lover. Who is sending all these gorgeous roses?’ I never found out. But finally, one person said to me, ‘There is only one person who would do that, and that’s Robert.’ Well, I said it’s ridiculous.”
As might happen in any small town, rumors soon began circulating that Oppenheimer was having an affair with Wilson. She said it never happened: “I have to tell you that I was too young to appreciate him. Maybe I thought a forty-year-old man was ancient.” Inevitably, Kitty heard the rumors, and one day she confronted Wilson and asked her point-blank if she had designs on Robert. Annie was thunderstruck. “She could not have misread my astonishment,” Wilson recalled.
In the years that followed Anne got married, Kitty relaxed, and an enduring friendship developed between the two women. If Robert was attracted to Anne, the anonymous single red rose was a subtle gesture not out of character. He was not the kind of man who initiated sexual conquests. As Wilson herself observed, women “gravitated” to Oppenheimer: “He really was a man of women,” Wilson said. “I could see that and I heard plenty of that.” But at the same time, the man himself was still painfully shy and even unworldly. “He was enormously empathetic,” Wilson said. “This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean, it felt almost that he could read their minds—many women have said this to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, ‘The only one who would understand was Robert.’ He had a really almost saintly empathy for people.” And if he was attracted to other women, he was still
devoted to his marriage. “They were terribly close,” Hempelmann said of Kitty and Robert. “He would come home in the evenings whenever he could. I think she was proud of him, but I think she would have liked to have been more in the center of things.”
THE SECURITY NET that enveloped Robert naturally also included his wife. Soon Kitty found herself being gently interrogated by Colonel Lansdale. A skillful and empathetic interviewer, Lansdale quickly decided that Kitty could provide him key insights into her husband. “Her background was not good,” he later testified. “For that reason I took as many occasions as I could to talk to Mrs. Oppenheimer.” When she served him a martini, he wryly noted that she was not the kind to serve tea. “Mrs. Oppenheimer impressed me as a strong woman with strong convictions. She impressed me as the type of person who could have been, and I could see she certainly was, a communist. It requires a very strong person to be a real communist.” And yet, in the course of their meandering conversations, Lansdale realized that Kitty’s ultimate loyalty was to her husband. He also sensed that while she was politely playing her part, she “hated me and everything I stood for.”
The rambling interrogation turned into a dance. “As we say in the lingo,” Lansdale later said, “she was trying to rope me, just as I was trying to rope her. . . . I felt she’d go to any lengths for what she believed in. The tactic I fell back on was to try to show her I was a person of balance, honestly wanting to evaluate Oppenheimer’s position. That’s why our talks ran on so long.
“I was sure she’d been a communist and not sure her abstract opinions had ever changed much. . . . She didn’t care how much I knew of what she’d done before she met Oppenheimer or how it looked to me. Gradually I began to see that nothing in her past and nothing in her other husband’s meant anything to her compared with him. I became convinced that in him she had an attachment stronger than communism, that his future meant more to her than communism. She was trying to sell me on the idea he was her life, and she did sell me.” Later, Lansdale reported his conclusions to Groves: “Dr. Oppenheimer was the most important thing in her life. . . . her strength of will was a powerful influence in keeping Dr. Oppenheimer away from what we would regard as dangerous associations.”
INSIDE THE BARBED WIRE, Kitty sometimes felt as if she were living under a microscope. The Army commissary often had foods and goods available on the outside only with a ration card. The theater showed two movies a week for only 15 cents a show. Medical care was free. So many young couples had babies—some eighty births were recorded the first year, and about ten a month thereafter—that the small seven-room hospital was labeled “RFD,” for “rural free delivery.” When General Groves complained about all the new babies, Oppenheimer wryly observed that the duties of a scientific director did not include birth control. And that was also true for the Oppenheimers. By then, Kitty was pregnant again. On December 7, 1944, she gave birth in the Los Alamos barracks hospital to a daughter, Katherine, whom they nicknamed “Tyke.” A sign was posted over the crib saying “Oppenheimer,” and for several days people filed by to take a peek at the boss’s baby girl.
Four months later, Kitty announced she “just had to go home to see her parents.” Whether because of postpartum depression, or the excess of martinis in the Oppenheimer home, or the state of her marriage, Kitty was on the verge of an emotional collapse. “Kitty had begun to break down, drinking a lot,” recalled Pat Sherr. Kitty and Robert were also having problems with their two-year-old son. Like any toddler, Peter was a handful. And according to Sherr, Kitty “was very, very impatient with him.” Sherr, a trained psychologist, thought Kitty “had absolutely no intuitive understanding of the children.” Kitty had always been mercurial. Her sister-in-law, Jackie Oppenheimer, observed that Kitty “would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of the maid.” Upon her return, Kitty would bring an enormous present for Peter. “She must have felt so guilty and unhappy,” said Jackie, “the poor woman.”
IN APRIL 1945, Kitty left for Pittsburgh, taking Peter with her. But she decided to leave her four-month-old baby girl in the care of her friend Pat Sherr, who had recently had a miscarriage. The Los Alamos pediatrician Dr. Henry Barnett suggested that it would be good for Sherr to care for a child. Thus “Tyke”—or Toni, as they later called her—was moved into Sherr’s home. Kitty and young Peter were gone for three and a half months, until July 1945. Robert, of course, was working long hours, so he came by only twice a week to visit his baby daughter.
The strain on Robert over these incredibly intense two years was taking its toll. Physically, that toll was obvious: His coughing was incessant and his weight was down to 115 pounds, skin-and-bones for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall. His energy level never flagged, but he seemed to be literally disappearing little by little, day after day. The psychological toll was, if anything, harsher—albeit less obvious. Robert had spent a lifetime dealing with and managing his mental stresses. Nevertheless, “Tyke’s” birth and Kitty’s departure left him unusually vulnerable.
“It was all very strange,” remembered Sherr. “He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby. She might as well have been God knows where, but he never asked to see her.”
“Finally, one day I said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to see your daughter, she’s growing beautifully?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ ”
Two months went by, and then during one of Robert’s visits he said to Sherr, “You seem to have grown to love Tyke very much.” Sherr responded matter-of-factly, “Well, I love children, and when you take care of a baby, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, it becomes a part of your life.”
Sherr was stunned when Oppenheimer then asked, “Would you like to adopt her?”
“Of course not,” she replied, “she has two perfectly good parents.” When she asked why he would say such a thing, Robert replied, “Because I can’t love her.”
Sherr reassured him, saying that such feelings were not unusual for a parent who has been separated from a child, and that over time he would become “attached” to the baby.
“No, I’m not an attached kind of person,” Oppenheimer said. When Sherr asked if he had discussed this with Kitty, Robert said, “No, no, no. I was feeling you out first because I thought it was important for this child to have a loving home. And you have given her this.”
Sherr was embarrassed and upset by the conversation. It struck her that, however outlandish the suggestion, it was nevertheless motivated by genuine emotion. “It seemed to me that he was a man of great conscience; for him to be able to say this to me. . . . Now here was a person who was conscious of his feelings—and at the same time feeling guilt about the feeling—and wanting somehow or other to give his child the fair deal that he felt he couldn’t give her.”
When Kitty finally returned to Los Alamos in July 1945, she characteristically showered Sherr with gifts. Kitty found Los Alamos in a state of high tension; the men were working longer hours, and their wives felt more isolated than ever. Kitty took to inviting small groups of women over for daily cocktails. Jackie Oppenheimer, who visited Los Alamos in 1945, remembered one such event. “It was known that we didn’t get on too well,” Jackie said, “and she seemed determined that we should be seen together. On one occasion, she asked me to cocktails—this was four o’clock in the afternoon. When I arrived, there was Kitty and just four or five other women—drinking companions—and we just sat there with little conversation, drinking. It was awful and I never went again.”
At the time, Pat Sherr did not think Kitty was an alcoholic. “She drank somewhat,” Sherr recalled. “Come four o’clock, she would have her drink and continue on, but she didn’t have slurred speech.” Kitty’s drinking would definitely become an issue later in her life, but according to another close friend, Dr. Hempelmann, “She certainly didn’t drink more than anybody else did out at Los Alamos.” Alcohol flowed freely on the mesa, and as the months rolled by, some people
felt oppressed by the small town’s isolation. “At first, it was lots of fun,” Hempelmann recalled, “but as things wore on and everybody got tired and tense and irritable, it wasn’t so good. Everybody was living in each other’s pockets. You’d play with the same people that you worked with. And a friend would ask you out to dinner, and you didn’t have anything else to do, but you just didn’t want to go. So they would know. If they drove by your house, they would see that your car was still there. Everybody knew everything about everybody else.”
ASIDE FROM the periodic afternoon excursions in Santa Fe, one of the few permitted escapes from Los Alamos was dinner at Miss Edith Warner’s adobe house at Otowi—the “place where the water makes noise”—on the Rio Grande, about twenty miles down the winding road. Oppie first met Miss Warner while on a pack trip from Frijoles Canyon with Frank and Jackie; one of their horses had run off and Oppie had given chase. He ended up at Miss Warner’s “tea house.” “We had tea and chocolate cake and talk,” Oppenheimer later wrote; “it was my first unforgettable meeting.” Wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots with spurs, Robert looked, thought Miss Warner, like the “slim and wiry hero of a Western movie.”
