by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Painted bright white inside and out, the house had a light, roomy atmosphere. A tall central hallway cut through the entire structure, running from the front door to an arched back door that led onto a slate terrace. A formal dining room led into a large L-shaped farm kitchen. Sun poured through eight windows in the living room. Across the hallway stood a second, smaller living room, called the music room. A step down from the music room was a library dominated by a massive brick fireplace. When the Oppenheimers moved in, they found nearly every room in the house lined with bookshelves. Robert had most of them torn out, leaving only one wall in the library covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Everywhere, the light-oak plank flooring creaked softly. Upstairs, the house was filled with odd nooks and crannies, hidden closets and a back staircase leading to the kitchen. A panel of numbered buzzers allowed the cook or maid to be summoned from almost any room in the house.
Soon after their arrival, Robert had an ample greenhouse built on the back of the house, near the kitchen wing. It was his birthday gift to Kitty, who filled it with dozens of varieties of orchids. The house was surrounded by acres of gardens, including a carefully manicured flower garden enclosed by four rock walls, the foundation of an ancient barn. Kitty, the trained botanist, loved gardening, and over the years she became what one friend called “an artist in the ancient magic of garden making.”
“When we first moved in,” Oppenheimer later told a reporter, “I thought I’d never get used to such a big house, but now we’ve lived in it until it has a pleasant degree of shabbiness, and I like it very much.” Robert mounted one of his father’s prize paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (Saint-Remy, 1889), in the living room, above the formal white fireplace. They hung a Derain in the dining room and a Vuillard in the music room. While the house was comfortably furnished, it never had a cluttered, lived-in look. Kitty kept everything neat. Oppie’s austere study, with its white walls unadorned by pictures, reminded one old friend of their Los Alamos home.
From Olden Manor’s back terrace, Oppenheimer could gaze south across an open field to the grounds of the Institute. Not more than a quarter mile away lay Fuld Hall, a four-story red brick building with two wings and an imposing churchlike spire. Built in 1939 at a cost of $520,000, it housed modest offices for scores of scholars, a wood-paneled library and a formal common room lined with overstuffed brown leather couches. A cafeteria and boardroom occupied the top, fourth floor. In 1947, Einstein used a corner office, Room 225, on the second floor; Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac worked in adjoining rooms on the third floor. Oppenheimer’s ground-level office, Room 113, afforded him a view of the woods and meadow. His predecessor, Frank Aydelotte, a scholar of Elizabethan literature, had hung on the walls framed prints of wistful scenes of Oxford. Oppenheimer took these down and replaced them with a blackboard that ran the length of the wall. He inherited two secretaries, Mrs. Eleanor Leary, who had previously worked with Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Mrs. Katharine Russell, an efficient young woman in her twenties. Just outside his office stood a “monstrous safe,” containing classified documents for his work as chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC). Armed guards sat twenty-four hours a day beside the locked safe.
Visitors to Fuld Hall saw a man “ablaze with power.” The phone would ring and his secretary would knock on the door and announce, “Dr. Oppenheimer, General [George C.] Marshall is on the line.” His colleagues could see that such phone calls would “electrify” him. He clearly relished the role history had assigned him and he tried hard to play the part well. While most of the Institute’s permanent scholars walked around in sports jackets— Einstein favored a rumpled sweater—Oppenheimer often wore expensive English wool suits hand-tailored for him at Langrocks, the local tailor for Princeton’s upper crust. (But he could also turn up at a party in a jacket “that looked as if it had been eaten by gerbils.”) Where many scholars got around Princeton on bicycles, Oppie drove a stunning blue Cadillac convertible. Where once he’d worn his hair long and bushy, now he had it “cut like a monk’s, skin-tight.” At forty-three, he seemed delicate, even frail. But he was in fact quite strong and energetic. “He was very thin, nervous, jittery,” Freeman Dyson recalled. “He constantly moved around; he couldn’t sit still for five seconds; you had the impression of somebody who was tremendously ill at ease. He smoked all the time.”
Princeton was a world away from the free-spirited, liberal, bohemian atmosphere of Berkeley and San Francisco, not to mention the lifestyle and vistas of Los Alamos. In 1947 Princeton, a suburban town of 25,000 residents, had one stoplight, at the corner of Nassau and Witherspoon streets, and no public transportation—with the exception of the “Dinky” tram that to this day ferries hundreds of daily commuters to the railroad station at Princeton Junction. From there, bankers, lawyers and stockbrokers in pin-stripe suits boarded trains for the fifty-minute ride into Manhattan. Unlike most American small towns, Princeton possessed an august history and an elite sense of itself. But, as a longtime resident once observed, it was “a town with character but without soul.”
ROBERT’S AMBITION was to turn the Institute into a stimulating international venue for interdisciplinary scholarship. It had been founded in 1930 by Louis Bamberger and his sister, Julie Carrie Fuld, with an initial donation of $5 million. Bamberger and his sister had sold the family business, the Bamberger department store, to R. H. Macy & Co. in 1929, just before the stock market crash, for the princely sum of $11 million in cash. Enamored of the notion of building an institution of higher learning, Bamberger hired Abraham Flexner, an educator and foundation executive, to be the Institute’s first director. Flexner promised that the Institute would be neither a teaching university nor a research school: “It may be pictured as a wedge between the two—a small university in which a limited amount of teaching and a liberal amount of research are both to be found.” Flexner told the Bambergers that he wished to model the Institute after such European intellectual havens as Oxford’s All Souls College or the Collège de France in Paris—or Göttingen, Oppenheimer’s German alma mater. It would be, he said, “a Paradise for scholars.”
In 1933, Flexner made the Institute’s reputation by hiring Einstein for an annual salary of $15,000. Other scholars were paid similarly lavish salaries. Flexner wanted the very best people, and he wanted to ensure that none of his scholars would ever feel compelled to supplement their income by “writing unnecessary textbooks or engaging in other forms of hack work.” There would be “no duties, only opportunities.” Throughout the 1930s, Flexner recruited brilliant minds, mostly mathematicians like John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Hermann Weyl, Deane Montgomery, Boris Podolsky, Oswald Veblen, James Alexander and Nathan Rosen. Flexner hailed the “usefulness of useless knowledge.” But by the 1940s, the Institute was in danger of acquiring a reputation for coddling brilliant minds with forever unfulfilled potential. One scientist described it as “that magnificent place where science flourishes and never bears fruit.”
Oppenheimer was determined to change all this. In his own field of theoretical physics, he hoped to do for the Institute what he had done for Berkeley in the 1930s—turn it into a world-class center for theoretical physics. He knew the war had suspended engagement in any truly original work. But things were rapidly changing. “Today,” he told an MIT audience in the autumn of 1947, “barely two years after the end of hostilities, physics is booming.”
Early in April 1947, Abraham Pais, a bright young physicist with a temporary fellowship at the Institute, received a phone call from Berkeley, California. “This is Robert Oppenheimer,” the caller told a startled Pais. “I have just accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study, and I desperately hope that you will be there next year, so that we can begin building up theoretical physics there.” Flattered, Pais immediately put aside thoughts of joining Bohr in Denmark and agreed. He would remain at the Institute for the next sixteen years, becoming one of Oppenheimer’s long-standing confidants.
/> Pais soon had a chance to observe Oppenheimer in action. For three days in June 1947, twenty-three of the country’s leading theoretical physicists gathered at the Ram’s Head Inn, an exclusive resort on Shelter Island, at the eastern tip of Long Island. Oppenheimer had taken the lead in organizing the conference. Among others, he brought Hans Bethe, I. I. Rabi, Richard Feynman, Victor Weisskopf, Edward Teller, George Uhlenbeck, Julian Schwinger, David Bohm, Robert Marshak, Willis Lamb and Hendrik Kramers to discuss “The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.” With the end of the war, theoretical physicists were finally able to shift their attention back to fundamental issues. One of Oppenheimer’s doctoral students, Willis Lamb, gave the first of the conference’s many remarkable presentations, outlining what would soon become known as the “Lamb shift,” which in turn became a key step to a new theory of quantum electrodynamics. (Lamb would win a Nobel Prize in 1955 for his work on this topic.) Similarly, Rabi gave a groundbreaking talk on nuclear magnetic resonance.
Although Karl Darrow, secretary of the Physical Society, officially chaired the conference, Oppenheimer dominated it. “As the conference went on,” Darrow noted in his diary, “the ascendancy of Oppenheimer became more evident—the analysis (often caustic) of nearly every argument, that magnificent English never marred by hesitation or groping for words (I never heard ‘catharsis’ used in a discourse on [physics], or the clever word ‘mesoniferous’ which is probably Oppenheimer’s invention), the dry humor, the perpetually-recurring comment that one idea or another (including some of his own) was certainly wrong, and the respect with which he was heard.” Similarly, Pais was struck by Oppenheimer’s “priestly style” when speaking before an audience. “It was as if he were aiming at initiating his audience into Nature’s divine mysteries.”
On the third and last day, Oppenheimer led a discussion of the paradoxical behavior of mesons, a topic he had explored with Robert Serber prior to the war. Pais later remembered Oppenheimer’s “masterful” performance, interrupting at all the right moments with leading questions, summarizing the discussion and stimulating others to think of solutions. “I was sitting next to Marshak,” Pais later wrote, “during this discussion and can still remember how he suddenly got all red in the face. He got up and said, ‘Maybe there are two kinds of mesons. One kind is copiously produced, then disintegrates into a different kind which absorbs only weakly.’ ” In Pais’ view, Oppenheimer thus midwifed Marshak’s innovative two-meson hypothesis, a breakthrough which later won the British physicist Cecil F. Powell a Nobel in 1950. The Shelter Island conference also helped Feynman and Schwinger to work out “renormalization theory,” an elegant new way to calculate the interactions of an electron with its own or another electromagnetic field. Once again, if Oppenheimer himself was not the author of such discoveries, many of his peers saw him as their great facilitator.
Not everyone applauded Oppenheimer’s performance. David Bohm recalled thinking that Oppie was talking too much. “He was very fluent with his words,” Bohm said, “but there wasn’t much behind what he was saying to back up that much talking.” Bohm thought his mentor had begun to lose his insightfulness, perhaps simply because he hadn’t been doing anything of any substance in physics for many years. “He [Oppenheimer] didn’t sympathize with what I was doing in physics,” Bohm recalled. “I wanted to question fundamentals, and he felt that one should work on using the present theory, exploiting it and trying to work out its consequences.” Earlier in their relationship, Bohm had had tremendous regard for Oppenheimer. But over time he found himself agreeing with another friend who had worked with Oppenheimer, Milton Plesset, who expressed the view that Oppie was “not capable of genuine originality, but that he is very good at comprehending other people’s ideas and seeing their implications.”
Leaving Shelter Island, Oppenheimer hired a private seaplane to fly him to Boston, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree at Harvard. Victor Weisskopf and several other physicists returning to Cambridge accepted his invitation to join him on the plane. Halfway there, they ran into a storm and the pilot decided to land at a Navy base in New London, Connecticut. Civilian aircraft were forbidden to use this airdrome, and as they taxied up to the dock, the pilot could see an angry Navy captain yelling at him. Oppenheimer told the pilot, “Let me handle this.” As he stepped off the plane, he announced, “My name is Oppenheimer.” The Navy officer gasped and then asked, “Are you the Oppenheimer?” Without missing a beat, Oppie replied, “I am an Oppenheimer.” Bowled over to be in the presence of the famous physicist, the officer went out of his way to serve Oppenheimer and his friends tea and cookies and then sent them on their way to Boston aboard a Navy bus.
THE MOST FAMOUS physicist in the United States was not doing much physics—this, despite the fact that Oppenheimer had persuaded the Institute’s trustees to give him an unprecedented dual appointment as both director and “Professor of Physics.” In the fall of 1946, Oppie had found the time to coauthor a paper with Hans Bethe, published in Physical Review, on electron scattering. That year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics—but the Nobel committee evidently hesitated to give the award to someone whose name was so closely associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the next four years, he published three more short physics papers and one paper on biophysics. But after 1950, he never published another scientific paper. “He didn’t have Sitzfleisch,” said Murray Gell-Mann, a visiting physicist at the Institute in 1951. “Perseverance, the Germans call it Sitzfleisch, ‘sitting flesh,’ when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn’t have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.”
At Los Alamos, he had supervised thousands and spent millions; now he presided over an institution with just one hundred people and a budget of $825,000. Los Alamos was completely dependent on the federal government; but the Institute’s trustees specifically forbade the director to solicit federal funds. The Institute was a singularly independent place. It had no official relationship with its neighbor, Princeton University. By 1948, some 180 scholars were affiliated with one of two “schools,” Mathematics or Historical Studies. The Institute housed no laboratories, no cyclotrons and no more complicated apparatus than a blackboard. No courses were taught, and there were no students—only scholars. Most were mathematicians, some were physicists, and there were a few economists and humanists. The Institute was, in fact, so heavily weighted toward mathematics that some thought Oppenheimer’s arrival signaled a decision by the trustees that henceforth the Institute would be devoted to mathematics/physics and nothing else.
Indeed, Oppenheimer’s first appointments made it seem as if his only priority was to transform the Institute into a major center for theoretical physics. He brought with him as temporary members five research physicists from Berkeley. After coaxing Pais to stay on, he recruited another promising young English physicist, Freeman Dyson, to become a permanent member of the Institute. He persuaded Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Hideki Yukawa, George Uhlenbeck, George Placzek, Sinitiro Tomonaga and several other young physicists to spend occasional summers or sabbaticals at the Institute. In 1949, he recruited Chen Ning Yang, a brilliant twenty-seven-year-old who would win the 1957 Nobel in physics with T. D. Lee, another Chinese-born physicist Oppenheimer brought to the Institute. “This is an unreal place,” Pais wrote in his diary in February 1948. “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out of the window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer. . . .” It was a concentration of scientific talent like no other in the world . . . except, of course, Los Alamos.
In June 1946, well before Oppenheimer’s arrival at the Institute, Johnny von Neumann had begun to build a high-speed computer in the boiler room basement of Fuld Hall. Nothing so practical had ever existed at the Institute. And n
othing so expensive. The trustees initially gave von Neumann $100,000 to get started. And then, in a rare departure from Institute policy, he was allowed to obtain additional funding from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the U.S. Army, the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1947, a small brick building was constructed a few hundred yards away from Fuld Hall to house the computer von Neumann envisioned.
The whole idea of building a machine was rather controversial among scholars who thought their job was to think. “There was never anything that we needed a lot of computing for,” complained one mathematician, Deane Montgomery. Oppenheimer himself was of two minds about von Neumann’s computer. Like many others, he thought the Institute should not be turned into a laboratory funded by defense dollars. But this was different. von Neumann was building a machine that would revolutionize research. And so he supported the project. Von Neumann agreed not to patent his machine, which soon became the model for a generation of commercial computers.
Oppenheimer and von Neumann formally unveiled the Institute computer in June 1952. At the time, it was the fastest electronic brain in the world—and its mere existence launched the computer revolution of the late twentieth century. But when the machine was surpassed by better, faster computers in the late 1950s, the permanent members of the Institute met in Oppenheimer’s living room and voted to close the computer project altogether. They also passed a motion never to bring another such piece of equipment onto the grounds of the Institute.
In 1948, Oppie recruited the classicist Harold F. Cherniss, an old Berkeley friend and the country’s leading scholar on Plato and Aristotle. That same year, he persuaded the trustees to establish a $120,000 “Director’s Fund,” which gave him personal discretion to bring in short-term scholars. Using this discretionary money, he brought his childhood friend Francis Fergusson to the Institute. Fergusson used the fellowship to write his book The Idea of a Theatre. At the instigation of Ruth Tolman, Oppie appointed an advisory committee on psychological scholarship. Once or twice a year, Ruth herself came to the Institute with her brother-in-law Edward Tolman, George Miller, Paul Meehl, Ernest Hilgard and Jerome Bruner. (Ed Tolman and Hilgard had both been members with Oppenheimer of Siegfried Bernfeld’s monthly study group which had met in San Francisco during the years 1938–42.) Gathering in Oppenheimer’s office, these eminent psychologists would brief him on the “deep questions” in their field and otherwise “keep him in the picture.” Oppenheimer soon gave short-term appointments to Miller, Bruner and David Levy, a noted child psychologist. Oppenheimer loved to talk about things psychological. Bruner found him “brilliant, discursive in his interests, lavishly intolerant, ready to pursue any topic anywhere, extraordinarily lovable. . . . We talked about most anything, but psychology and the philosophy of physics were irresistible.”
